Great European Stage Directors Volume 6

This volume examines the work of Joan Littlewood Giorgio Strehler and Roger Planchon demonstrating 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’. It argues that in creating their major productions in the prosperous ‘glorious decades’ that followed the devastation of the Second World War they 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 traumatized continent. This study posits that for Littlewood Strehler and Planchon theatre has the capacity to create communities.