The theatral situation and the socio-cultural and political issues outside the theatre have become characteristic forces driving Thomas Ostermeier's Regie ever since he came to fame by introducing British 'In-Yer-Face' playwriting to German audiences at his Baracke theatre. Ostermeier and Frank Castorf are committed to the legacy of German political theatre in the Brechtian tradition. Both consider a distinct theatral realism as a vital force to safeguard at least some political efficacy of theatre art against the all-absorbing machinery of today's global 'communicative capitalism'. Their strategies of political Regie also point towards alternative responses of theatre art to the fundamental challenges of communicative capitalism. Without an engaged, subjective perspective, there is nothing but a consumable, reproducible, reified commodity, the 'ideal' flat world of semiocapitalism. Instead of battling capitalism directly with its own dynamic forces, Ostermeier's Regie overtly questions, counters, and thereby seeks to undermine its appeal.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book talks about the theatral practice named Regie. It offers a 'truthful representation and interpretation of the work' of contemporary theatre directors and the history they draw on. Since its emergence in the nineteenth century, Regie has opened spaces for critical examination, within the 'aesthetic' realm of theatre that insists on its autonomy from the demands and imperatives of everyday life and its underlying hegemonic ideologies and discourses. Regie is a public intervention through theatre and theatral thinking, even a utopia, similar to Friedrich Schiller's intervention through his chorus and his utopia of human play and liberty. Instead of clarifying, illustrating and ascertaining unambiguous clear meaning and rather than suggesting the immediate availability of everything as commodity, the play of Regie problematises any such uniform clarity.

One can hardly imagine a more contested area in the field of theatre arts than what is often called 'directors' theatre'. Ever since the new artistic practice of Regie emerged over the course of the nineteenth century, directors and their mises en scène found themselves in the spotlight and in the firing line of audience members and critics. To trace theatre's politicity, this chapter begins by delineating some crucial, basic parameters of the formal operation of Regie and its constitutive structural dynamics and problematics. The speculative methodology of theatre theory, which was adopted, follows an explicitly Hegelian approach of speculative thinking. The chapter presents some key concepts discussed in this book. The book introduces the key concepts of Helmar Schramm and of Rudolf Munz, the most influential scholars representing the German approach of 'theatrality studies', in order to further situate Regie within what Munz calls the 'cultural fabric of theatrality'.

Adolf Winds, an early historiographer of the art of Regie, was puzzled by the absence of discussions of directing from the most influential theatre writings of the eighteenth century. Some examples of these influential theatre writings were Monsieur Diderot's essays on theatre or Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's seminal Hamburgische Dramaturgie. This chapter suggests that the advent of the director and, even more so, of Regieas a principally new technique of artistic mediation were the quintessential manifestations of this paradigm we can call the aesthetic regime. The celebrated historical realism of the Meininger, in productions such as Julius Caesar, Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein or Kleist's Hermannsschlacht, continued a new and notable engagement with history that had been a vital motor driving the new practice of Regie for some time.

This chapter explores how they exemplarily reappropriated the contested notion of the 'truth of the text', which had almost exclusively been enlisted by the opponents of Regie. The emphatic embracing of 'theatral thinking' is among the most prominent aspects of a Regie that aims for the speculative truth of text, a truth that appears only in the triangulation of the text, its concrete actualisation and the spectating public. Significantly, both Michael Thalheimer and Jürgen Gosch, two directors who represent two different generations of German Regie, both themselves frequently employed terms such as 'truth' and 'truthfulness' when discussing their work in interviews, post-performance discussions and on similar occasions. The notion of 'the truth of a playtext' makes sense only when it is thought within such a framework of ex-position, which asserts that this truth is inevitably our truth.

Regie can be considered as a form of what Hegel calls 'speculative thinking', based on a dialectic mode of thought. Considering drama and its performance as Schauspiel, as a game or as a play of sight and showing, enables to develop our understanding of Regie and grasp of its mediation. Theatre, from this perspective, designates first and foremost an art that plays with thoughts and thinking, performed in public, observed and responded to by those who watch, witness and engage. This chapter reflects on the relevance of theatre in both these senses, as theatral Schau and as public Spiel in order to further think through the aesthetic 'revolution of Regie'. It explores the idea of 'theatr(ic)ality and outlines some core Hegelian ideas which productively resonate with Regie. It explores some of the central principles that inform Hegel's mode of thinking, in order to offer a 'Hegelian understanding of post-Hegelian art'.

The Regie of Guy Cassiers and Ivo van Hove stands exemplarily for contemporary negotiations with digital technology and audio-visual media machinery that puts these means in the service of the dialectic force that is (artistic) mediation. The 'multisensual', media- and image-based Regie of Guy Cassiers achieves a similar parallax effect through different means. First and foremost, it emphasises the semiotic, symbolic and imaginary exchange between stage and spectators. Cassiers's Regie completed a transition which can be described, in Hegelian terms, as a step from 'conscious reflexivity' to 'self-consciousness'. Scenes from a Marriage, which van Hove described as a favourite among his own works and which, partly with a new cast, has remained in the company's repertoire for a decade, reveals a characteristic aspect of his Regie. Van Hove's productions make audiences aware of their involvement in the play, of their own theatral negotiations and their acts of spectating.

This chapter explores how Regie reveals through scenes and senses a historically situated 'style of thinking', associated with the post-Kantian, post-1789 Western European 'aesthetic regime of art'. It focuses on Friedrich Schiller's aesthetic theory in order to consider the central implications of his chorus model for understanding of Regie. Having doubted the efficacy of the Schaubühne as moral institution even while pragmatically canvassing for sponsorship in his 1784 lecture, by the 1790s Schiller insisted on theatre as a radically 'aesthetic institution'. Throughout his essay, he reminds us of his central value, insisting on the quality of true freedom as 'the liberty of mind in the lively play of all of its powers'. In the 1803 chorus essay, he conceives the function of the chorus as a 'wall, which tragedy builds around itself to seal itself off in purity from the real world, to preserve its ideal ground, its poetic liberty'.