The Great European Stage Directors Volume 6

Book excerpt: This volume examines the work of Joan Littlewood, Giorgio Strehler and Roger Planchon, demonstrating how these 3 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.