ABSTRACT
The demon of self-sufficiency undoubtedly caused many directors to give in to temptation of totalism, which as the authors have seen with Strehler, could never be anything but relative. Consequently, the director, who had become organiser of meaning, overall master who aspired to put into play in the staged work all – or almost all – the existing or possible readings of a text, as Daniel Mesguich tried to do, realised that, by dint of wanting to embrace all, everything diffracted or faded. On the other hand, the decade of the 1980s clearly represents a turning point with respect to the awareness of limits of director and perhaps also the end of an obsession with power. Moreover, in a certain way, realising the vanity of any claim to totality, majority of directors, having acquired legitimacy and status, returned to what some had never given up: to uncertainty, to necessity of collective thought and, it must be said, to certain humility.
