ABSTRACT
This term is used to describe director-dominated theatre, a phenomenon particularly prominent in France in the postwar period. During the twentieth century, the role of the director in French theatre has achieved extremely high status. Although during the last century and even at the beginning of this one, the theatre director, or in those days the ‘producer’, was considered to be little more than an orchestrator of actors and scenes, the situation today is very different, with directors wielding considerable creative input as well as financial power, especially in the public theatre. The role of director today has been influenced by several traditions. Prewar theatre in France saw the rise of Copeau and the Cartel directors (including Dullin, Jouvet, Pitoëff and Dasté), who believed in the importance of the director as an interpreter of the author’s text, helping the actors to develop their role as part of the production. Copeau and others wielded additional influence thanks to the theatre schools they ran. The second influence to affect the role of the director in France is that of the more avant-garde, revolutionary approach which began with Artaud and his Theatre of Cruelty. In his wake, theatre came to rely less on text and more on a complex web of sign systems based on the visual and the active as much as the aural. French theatre and its directors began to experiment with non-textbased theatre, and the boundaries to which theatre could be pushed. As a result, text was no longer the only source of theatrical creation: the directors became central to the coordination of experimentation with stage, movement and visual imagery, and added their own artistic input. The arrival of Brecht on the French theatre scene after the war was also an important influence. Planchon was especially noted for his interest in experimenting with Brechtian theatre.
