The Great European Stage Directors

Abstract

Creating their major productions in the prosperous ‘glorious decades’ that followed the devastation of the Second World War, Joan Littlewood, Giorgio Strehler and Roger Planchon represent a first expressly ‘European’ generation of theatre directors. Revisiting works from the classical dramatic canon by drawing on popular theatre traditions, and reaching out to spectators beyond the educated middle-class elite, they put theatre in the service of uniting a traumatised continent. For Littlewood, Strehler and Planchon, theatre has the capacity to create communities. This volume shows how these three directors take up key aesthetic prompts from earlier innovators – Stanislavski, the modernist avant-garde and not least Brecht – and thereby prepare the ground for contemporary, politically-engaged ‘directors’ theatre’.