When Peter Goessner's wife got a contract to teach at a university in the city of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture, and they came to Japan with their 3-year-old daughter in 1993, the Leipzig, East German-born director and actor thought it would just be "a short-term life experience," he told The Japan Times in a 2009 interview.

Three years later, though, Goessner's newly formed Uzume (Goddess of the Sea) theater company debuted there with Yukio Mishima's "My Friend Hitler." And now, after building a solid reputation in Kyushu before moving to Tokyo in 2007, Goessner is directing his first-ever work by Shakespeare — the grand and tragic "Antony and Cleopatra," which runs till Oct. 30 at Theater X in Tokyo.

When we met again recently, and I asked why he'd chosen that famously complex work to mark his company's 20th anniversary, the now 54-year-old dramatist explains, "I've always been especially interested in 'Antony and Cleopatra,' and I've always wondered why there were so few reputable productions of it worldwide (and hardly any in Japan) compared to other Shakespeare tragedies such as 'King Lear' and 'Hamlet' — so I wanted to take up the challenge."