ABSTRACT
Over twenty years have passed since David Bradby and David Williams’s Directors’ Theatre (1988) provided a guide to the new generation of directors that emerged from the tumult of the late 1960s to revolutionise the European stage. Inspired by the cultural revolt of 1968 and the political visions it conjured, these directors worked to create new collective structures of theatrical production, took their work beyond the subsidised seats of European high culture to the streets and factories, warehouses and hangars, and disrupted the elitist divisions between art and popular culture so entrenched in European cultural traditions. They were culturally and politically eclectic, refusing the distinctions between art and entertainment, between the elite and the popular. Roger Planchon, oscillating between film and theatre, was typical of this wave, his politics less doctrinaire than Bertolt Brecht’s, his method less formal than Vsevelod Meyerhold’s, his results more successful than Antonin Artaud’s. For directors such as Planchon, Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Stein and Joan Littlewood, theatre was a wholly collective activity in which people, meanings and sensations would mingle and collide and find something none of them could have experienced apart.
