Insightful, in-depth and evocative, this book is a collection of conversations with nine of the most innovative theatre directors of our time in Europe and North America: Eugenio Barba Lev Dodin Declan Donnellan Elizabeth LeCompte Robert LePage Simon McBurney Katie Mitchell Peter Sellars Max Stafford-Clark. All these directors have developed their own highly individual theatre language and have been influential, nationally and internationally, across a wide range of theatre practices. The length, depth and scope of the discussions distinguishes this collection from others, each director...

The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw is an indispensable guide to one of the most influential and important dramatists of the theater. The volume offers a broad-ranging study of Shaw with essays by a team of leading scholars. The Companion covers all aspects of Shaw's drama, focusing both on the political and theatrical context, while the extensive illustrations showcase productions from the Shaw Festival in Canada. In addition to situating Shaw's work in its own time, the Companion demonstrates its continuing relevance, and applies some of the newest critical approaches.

This detailed study evaluates the particular qualities which typify Strehler's work: the lyrical realism which has become the hallmark of his mature style and his gift of interpretation and production.

This is an assessment of the work and influence as a director of Jacques Copeau (1879 1949), who has long been regarded as one of the fathers of twentieth-century French theatre. Along with Antoine and his own pupils Dullin and Jouvet, Copeau is known to have been instrumental in restoring the traditional values of theatre at the same time as seeking, through training and experiment, a vital contemporary function. The work of Brook's company and research centre in Paris today is, for example, in direct descent from that of Copeau. John Rudlin examines the course of Copeau's directorial...

Andre Antoine, founder of the Theatre Libre in 1887, was one of the initiators of the modern theatre. This full-length study of Antoine's work in English for more than sixty years is notable for its attention to the variousness of Antoine's remarkable career. It explores the power and some of the inherent contradictions of Antoine's stage realism, his creation of a repertory theatre noted for its ensemble playing, and his innovatory work in directing Shakespeare and the French classics. In the final section, Antoine's encounters, c.1918, with the new medium of film are discussed. The book...

First published in 1981, Michael Patterson's was the first book in any language to be devoted to the work of Germany's leading theatre director. Peter Stein's thoughtful and critical approach to a variety of dramatic texts from Irish comedy to German classics, where his reputation largely rests has resulted in a range of different acting and formal styles and some major textual adaptations. The rehearsing, performance and reception of these are thoroughly and vividly recreated here from interviews and archives and in the first-hand account of the workings of the theatre Stein made his own,...

Peter Brook is regarded as one of the most important and influential directors today. In this fascinating study, Albert Hunt and Geoffrey Reeves chronicle Brook's development beginning with his earliest productions and concluding with some of his most recent and innovative work. The book also focuses on Brook outside the theater including the film version of his Mahabharata and work for the opera house. The book will be of interest to theater practitioners, students and scholars as well as to the general reader. It includes a chronology of Brook's theater career and is illustrated with rare...

A revised and updated version of Modern British Drama, 1890-1990, is the first one-volume analysis of English playwriting over the twentieth century. Through detailed discussions of major dramatists and plays, Christopher Innes traces the evolution of modernism from Bernard Shaw to the present as well as theatrical developments over the period. The text includes information on the social and political environment surrounding the plays, first productions and critical reception, and chronology and illustrations from key performances, lists of playwrights and works, and selective bibliographies....

Robert Wilson, the leading American avant-garde theatre director, revolutionised the stage by making visual communication more important than words. His productions cut across the boundaries that traditionally have defined theatre, dance, opera and the visual arts to create a total work of art. This book, the first comprehensive study of Wilson, traces the evolution of the director's astonishing career as well as his complex relationship to language and his visual rhetoric. It explains how he renovated the stage and describes in detail major productions such as: Deafman Glance, Einstein on...