On directing - Mary Luckhurst

The cult of the director dominates current theatre practice. Despite the fact that the term 'director' is barely a hundred years old, the twentieth century saw an explosion of directing practices: Stanislavski, Meyerhold, Gordon Craig, Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, Peter Brook, Augusto Boal. In Britain, for many years, the text has been privileged above the visual, physical and spatial elements in theatre. The directors interviewed in the book, who include Jonathan Miller, Jatinder Verma, Lloyd Newson, Deborah Warner, Katie Mitchell, Simon McBurney, Tim Etchells, Annie Castledine and David Glass, were either part of the artistic revolution in the 1960s or have been powerfully influenced by it. Theatre and performance practices in the 1990s reveal the spread and co-existence of a multiplicity of approaches to directing.