This volume examines the work of Joan Littlewood, Giorgio Strehler and Roger Planchon, demonstrating how these three 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.
List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction to the Series, Simon Shepherd (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UK) Introduction to Volume 6: A Popular Theatre for All: Western European Theatre Direction in the Mid-Twentieth Century, Peter M. Boenisch (Aarhus University, Denmark) and Clare Finburgh (Goldsmiths College, UK) Joan Littlewood 1. Joan Littlewood, Rebel With a Cause: Opening New Directions in British Theatre, Danielle Merahi (theatre director and translator, France) 2. Señora Littlewood’s Rifles: Joan Littlewood and the Leftist Tradition in British Twentieth-Century Theatre, Robert Leach (independent scholar, UK) Giorgio Strehler 3. Giorgio Strehler: The Epic Stage Director Who Betrayed Brecht, Bent Holm (independent scholar, Denmark) 4. A Theatre of/for Europe: Giorgio Strehler and the Dream of a United Continent, Margherita Laera (University of Kent, UK) Roger Planchon 5. ‘Theatre’s Beauty is its Death’: Reflections on Working with Roger Planchon, Michel Bataillon (Maison Antoine Vitez, France) 6. Approaching Brecht – Documenting Planchon: Roger Planchon’s Three Stagings of The Good Person of Szechwan, Pia Kleber (University of Toronto, Canada) Notes Bibliography Index
Clare Finburgh is Reader in European Theatre at Goldsmiths College, UK. Peter M. Boenisch is Professor of Dramaturgy at Aarhus University, Denmark.
