Abstract
The dominant creative force in today’s theatre is the director. No longer just an organiser, the director is now considered an artist in his or her own right. Critics write of ‘Brook’s Lear’, of Tlanchon’s Tartuffe’, ascribing to the director the role of author. It is a distinguishing feature of directors’ theatre that here the director claims the authorial function even though he has not written the original play. Where he is working with a classic text, he will rearrange, cut and rewrite to fit his production concept. Many contemporary directors dispense with the writer completely: outstanding examples are the image-dramas of Tadeusz Kantor and of Robert Wilson, some of which contain almost no written text at all. Even in less extreme examples, such as the work of Roger Planchon and of Peter Stein, the director’s contribution is the equivalent of that of an author, amounting to the development of a new stage idiom — he assumes the function of ‘scenic writer’.
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Notes
Edward Braun, The Director and the Stage (London: Methuen, 1982) pp. 14
Roger Planchon, preface to L’Avare (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1986) p. 7.
Jonathan Miller, Subsequent Performances (London: Faber, 1986) p. 70.
André Antoine, ‘Causerie sur le théâtre’ (1903) repr. in Directors on Directing, ed. Toby Cole and Helen Crich Chinoy (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963) pp. 94
Cited in Lawson Carter, Zola and the Theatre (New Haven: Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963) p. 87.
Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) pp. 113–4.
Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the Theatre (London: Heinemann, 1911) pp. 180–1.
Carl Weber, ‘Brecht as Director’, Drama Review, T37 (Fall, 1967) 105.
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© 1988 David Bradby and David Williams
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Bradby, D., Williams, D. (1988). The Rise of the Director. In: Directors’ Theatre. Modern Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19478-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19478-0_1
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