Terry McCabe, himself an accomplished stage director and teacher of theatre arts, here attacks what he calls the growing decadence that plagues contemporary stage directing. He argues for a radical reorganization of the director’s view of his role. It has become an article of faith in the theatre, Mr. McCabe observes, that a play is about what the director chooses to have it be about. But what right does a director have to treat a play as a found object, to be reshaped to express the director’s concerns? None whatsoever, Mr. McCabe replies. He examines anecdotally a range of work by different directors by way of offering a substantial critique of today’s leading theory of stage directing, and he offers an alternate approach. He challenges the notion that a play is the director’s vehicle for self-expression, arguing that the idea of the director as centerpiece of the theatre tends to distort plays and oppress actors. He explores what it means to direct a play when directing is properly understood as a process of self-effacement. Mis-directing the Play examines the role of the director as collaborator with actors, designers, dramaturges, and playwrights. Throughout, the book’s focus is on shedding the counterproductive myth of the director as creative auteur and urging in its place a return to first principles: the idea of the director as the interpretive artist in charge of putting the playwright’s play onstage.

Impossible Crime Detective Heinz Noonan, the “Bearded Holmes,” is ordered to East St. Louis, where a criminal mastermind has made a train with 70 passengers and crew disappear. As the search is on for the hostage, the mastermind loads a railway boxcar with a massive explosive device and abandons it on the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River between St. Louis, Missouri and East St. Lewis, Illinois. Now the mastermind wants $50 million, or the bridge and portions of both cities of St. Lewis will be destroyed. Heinz Noonan has 48 hours to find the hostages, stop the ransom payment, and disable the bomb before time runs out. Tick, tick, tick. Can he do it? Find out in The Matter of the Misdirecting Mastermind.

Miss Julie (1888), written in a fortnight, was regarded by Strindberg as his masterpiece, 'the first naturalistic tragedy of the Swedish drama'. Shocking in subject-matter, revolutionary in technique, it was fiercely attacked on publication for immorality. On Midsummer Eve, Miss Julie, the daughter of a count, sleeps with her father's valet, Jean. The subsequent conflict between sexual passion and social position, which leads to her suicide, is presented with startling modernity. The play's premiere at Strindberg's experimental theatre in Denmark in 1889 was banned by the censor and its first public production three years later in Berlin aroused such protests that it was withdrawn after one performance. Miss Julie has since become one of Strindberg's most popular and frequently performed plays. Commentary and notes by David Thomas and Jo Taylor.