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...