The Rise of the Director

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’.