ABSTRACT

This expanded second edition of Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ambitious and unprecedented overview of many of the key directors working in European theatre over the past 30 years.

This book is a vivid account of the vast range of work undertaken in European theatre during the last three decades, situated lucidly in its artistic, cultural, and political context. Each chapter discusses a particular director, showing the influences on their work, how it has developed over time, its reception, and the complex relation it has with its social and cultural context. The volume includes directors living and working in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Russia, Romania, the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, offering a broad and international picture of the directing landscape.

Now revised and updated, Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ideal text for both undergraduate and postgraduate directing students, as well as those researching contemporary theatre practices, providing a detailed guide to the generation of directors whose careers were forged and tempered in the changing Europe following the end of the Cold War.

chapter Chapter 1|22 pages

Ariane Mnouchkine

Activism, formalism, cosmopolitanism

chapter Chapter 2|24 pages

Patrice Chéreau

Staging the European crisis

chapter Chapter 3|17 pages

Lev Dodin

The director and cultural memory

chapter Chapter 4|17 pages

Silviu Purca˘rete

Contemporising classics

chapter Chapter 5|22 pages

Frank Castorf and The Volksbühne

Berlin’s theatre of deconstruction

chapter Chapter 6|21 pages

Daniel Mesguich

‘Unsummarisable’ mises en scène

chapter Chapter 7|20 pages

Declan Donnellan and Cheek by Jowl

‘To protect the acting’

chapter Chapter 8|21 pages

Piotr Borowski and Poland’s Studium Teatralne

Where process becomes performance

chapter Chapter 9|21 pages

Christoph Marthaler

The musicality, theatricality, and politics of postdramatic direction

chapter Chapter 10|29 pages

Jan Lauwers

Performance realities – memory, history, death

chapter Chapter 11|16 pages

Simon Mcburney

Shifting under/soaring over the boundaries of Europe

chapter Chapter 12|24 pages

Ivo Van Hove

Celebrity and reader

chapter Chapter 13|25 pages

Deborah Warner

Experiments of words, bodies, and place

chapter Chapter 14|16 pages

Romeo Castellucci

The director on this earth

chapter Chapter 15|14 pages

Kristian Frédric

Boxing with the ‘gods’

chapter Chapter 16|28 pages

Krzysztof Warlikowski

Rupturing taboos, curating publics

chapter Chapter 17|24 pages

Calixto Bieito

Staging excess in, across, 
and through Europe

chapter Chapter 18|19 pages

Rodrigo García and La Carnicería Teatro/Boucherie Théâtre

From the collective to the director

chapter Chapter 19|28 pages

Katie Mitchell

Learning from Europe

chapter Chapter 20|22 pages

Thomas Ostermeier

A ‘sociological theatre’ for the age of globalised precarity

chapter Chapter 21|18 pages

Peter Sellars

Identity, culture, and the politics of theatre in Europe

chapter Chapter 22|18 pages

The Director’s New Tasks