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.

This volume assesses the contributions of André Antoine, Konstantin Stanislavski and Michel Saint-Denis, whose work has influenced theatre and training for over a century. These directors pioneered Naturalism and refined Realism as they experimented with theatrical form including non-Realism. Antoine and Stanislavski's theatre direction proved foundational to the creation of the director's role and artistic vision, and their influential ideas progressively developed through the stylized theatre of Saint-Denis to the innovative contemporary theatre direction of Max Stafford-Clark, Declan Donnellan and Katie Mitchell.

This volume offers a compelling account of Jean-Louis Barrault, Ariane Mnouchkine and Peter Stein, who not only won international recognition as directors whose repertoires ranged from classical Greek to Shakespeare to the avant-garde, but also succeeded as leaders of their own companies. The ensembles they nurtured and kept afloat despite setbacks represent the artistic vision of each: the Compagnie Madeleine Renaud–Jean-Louis Barrault, the Théâtre du Soleil and the Schaubühne. Selected landmark productions illuminate the achievements of these 3 directors and their companies.

This volume foregrounds Pina Bausch, Romeo Castellucci and Jan Fabre as 3 leading directors who have each left an indelible mark on post-war European theatre. Combining in-depth discussions of the artists' poetics with detailed case studies of several famous and lesser-known key works, the authors featured in this volume trace a range of foundational aesthetic strategies that are central to the directors' work: the dynamics of repetition vis-à-vis fragmentation, the continued significance of language in experimental theatre and dance, the tension between theatricality and the performative reality of the stage, and the equal importance attached to text, image and body. This volume develops a vivid picture of how European stage directors have continued to redefine their own position and role throughout the latter half of the 20th century.

This volume surveys and assesses the contributions of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht to theatre-making, which richly exemplify the range of ways that directors address dramatic material, theatrical space and their audiences. Their directorial work marks an unmistakeable interest in developing the political potential of theatre in the early 20th century, although each director offered more to their actors, collaborators and spectators than simply the staging of politics and the political.