While this book focuses on the work of contemporary directors and the directorial principles that have become defined over the modern period, it is useful to see these in the historical context. This broad overview not only allows a sense of both aesthetic and political perspective, but also suggests the need for the functions and position of the theatre director by illustrating the varied figures who assumed less defined even if possibly similar roles in specific eras. In addition, it demonstrates a long connection between innovations in performance, challenging or pre-empting the standard stage practices of a given age, and the activities of directorial prototypes: a connection that has become one of the defining factors of the contemporary director.

Theatre practice in the Western world evolved from two main origins. Firstly: the theatre in Ancient Greece, which was passed down in adaptations through Classical Rome to the commedia dell’arte, and was reintroduced – although in a very different form – during the Renaissance. Secondly: the medieval tradition of religious plays and royal pageants. Even back then there were almost certainly influences that flowed between Europe and other traditions: the theatre of Ancient Greece may well have borrowed from Asian traditions, or contributed to them (with miniature amphitheatres still surviving, carved into the hillsides across Asia Minor), while there are striking similarities between Persian Ta’zieh performance and the medieval Mystery play. However there is so little documentation of such interchanges that – while in discussing contemporary directors the influence of the twentieth-century Chinese actor Mei Lang-fan on Meyerhold and Brecht or the two-way street of Roberto Ciulli’s ‘Silk Road’ are noted – this historical overview limits itself to the Western tradition.

The connections between politics and theatre have always been close in Germany, with its Intendant system and the dominance of court theatres during the early nineteenth century (see Chapter 1). It is also no accident that it was in Germany that the first director-impresario emerged – as distinct from the actor-managers who dominated the commercial theatres of England and to some extent North America, or the commercial impresarios (such as the Frohmans) who came to control most of the theatres across the United States.

This highly influential impresario was Max Reinhardt. Starting in Otto Brahm’s naturalistic and democratic Deutsches Theater in Berlin, he came to dominate the German stage up to the 1930s, in 1906 taking over the Deutsches Theater – where he established an acting school – while founding the Berlin Kammerspiele for experimental productions: the satire of Carl Sternheim, the expressionism of Richard Sorge, his rediscovery of Georg Büchner or Frank Wedekind’s socially explosive plays. He also founded theatres in Vienna and Salzburg, added the huge Circus Schumann building to his Berlin theatrical portfolio in 1918, extended his reach by touring Germany and Hungary every summer, establishing the Salzburg Festival with Richard Strauss in 1920, and mounting vast travelling spectacles like Sumurȗn or The Miracle (London 1911, New York 1924). In a very real sense, then, Reinhardt set the standards for productions across Germany, controlling as he did a significant and highly visible proportion of German-speaking theatre. He epitomizes the socially acceptable and commercial theatre of Germany up until the Nazi era – when his whole theatrical empire was confiscated because of his Jewish heritage – and he can be seen as the symbolic representative of commercial theatre across Europe, England and America (where in the 1930s he produced Hollywood films). Partly because of the responsibilities of managing so many venues, as well as from directing large-scale productions, Reinhardt became the model of the controlling autocrat with meticulously annotated Director’s Books covering every move and gesture of the performance, and his work as a director is dealt with in Chapter 5.

Improvisation or devising, as a collective process, raises questions about the nature of directing, its limits and responsibilities. The staging of theatre is always to some degree a group activity. Even where a director is an auteur, like Gordon Craig and Robert Wilson, or the sole performer, as with Robert Lepage’s monodramas, there are technical or dramaturgical staff who contribute to the final shape of a production. However, in an ensemble style of theatre, where it is the performers as a group who evolve the material, develop their own styles of presentation and/or structure the production, the role of the director changes. In such a context, to what extxt, to what extent does a director control or guide the process? What is the director’s function? As we shall see, there is a wide range of possible variations within the frame of improvisational theatre. Improvisation is closely related to physical theatre, and, at its extreme in Paratheatrical projects, claims to deny any directorial role. Yet even here in the examples analysed, there is always a director in some form. Any hierarchical structure contains a political position; and in theory, at least, improvisational theatre is a paradigm of democracy in so far as it projects an image of artistic equality.

Signally it is a director with an extremely marked theatrical and performative style, Roberto Ciulli (see above, pp. 143–6), who has defined a theory of improvisation. And, for the form to mirror content, this is expressed not through a manifesto or a book (like Brook’s The Empty Space), but through a series of unstructured conversations with one-time members of his acting troupe.

Vsevolod Meyerhold: commedia dell’arte to biomechanics

Meyerhold was one of the most daring experimenters of the twentieth century, exploring a breathtaking variety of ways of making theatre, and it is with him that the directorial line of theatricality begins. Like Stanislavsky, he was an actor, who had considerable success playing Konstantin Treplev in Stanislavsky’s The Seagull, and performing in the provinces as well as in St Petersburg at the theatre of the renowned actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya. Despite his acclaim as an actor, he concentrated his efforts on directing, including productions at the Mariinsky Opera. His last stage performances were during the 1916–17 season of the Aleksandrinsky Theatre, an august establishment which, like the Mariinsky, was part of the group of imperial theatres of St Petersburg. However, he continued to act by proxy in so far as, in rehearsals, he ‘demonstrated, demonstrated, demonstrated’ to the actors. His improvisation skills and capacity for ‘instantaneous inspiration’ made him an outstanding actor-demonstrator – a role of fundamental importance to his work as a director throughout his life. Meyerhold, unlike Stanislavsky, saw himself as a director, first and foremost.

Meyerhold was the stage director of the Aleksandrinsky from 1908 to 1917. His was an unlikely appointment given the theatre’s strong links with the aristocratic elite, although, in fact, its liberal managing director had brought him in to breathe new life into this Tsarist institution. It was during his Aleksandrinsky period that, under the alias of Doctor Dapertutto, Meyerhold started the theatre-studios where he trained actors, a practice he was to continue after his return to Moscow. Many of his students were to become brilliant performers in his companies; and this actor training was also fundamental to his work as a director, since it provided him and his team with a common artistic understanding.

Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the director has come to be identified as a significant creative figure in European and North American theatre. Indeed, in festival, experimental and off-Broadway theatres, as well as in countries such as Germany, it can be argued that audiences are drawn to productions more by the name of the director than by the name of the author or the title of the play itself, or even by star actors. And it is to directors that the development of modern theatre can be traced in its varying manifestations. This book is a response to the emergence of such a vital artistic force, which makes it important to understand how the interrelationships now work between the different creative elements of the theatrical art, and what the guiding principles are, or how the contemporary stylistic forms are produced.

The function and position of the contemporary, twenty-first-century theatre director emerged (as discussed in Chapter 2 of this book) from the actor-manager of the nineteenth century and the pioneering endeavours, primarily in Europe, of Ludwig Chronegk at the Meiningen and Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre. Other major figures in the first half of the twentieth century, from Max Reinhardt and Edward Gordon Craig to Bertolt Brecht, contributed, equally, to the transformations that are integral to modern directing. From these rich beginnings, numerous variations on the role of the director and how this person directs have followed, giving rise to complex interconnections of practice and thought in the making of theatre. The director has become an artistic figure in his or her own right: a figure who is not necessarily a manager or administrator, or an actor, nor one beholden to playwrights.