Ever since Aeschylus supervised the presentation of his tragedies at the
Athenian festivals of the fifth century BC it is safe to assume that someone
has had overall responsibility for the rehearsal of any play that has reached
the stage. Sometimes, as in the case of Shakespeare or Racine, it would
have been the dramatist; sometimes, an actor-playwright such as Molière;
later it would have been the leading actor or some more humble function-
ary like the stage manager or the prompter. In the eighteenth century,
when the star actor achieved unprecedented heights, little attention was
paid to anything but his performance. However, there were some who
became concerned with the overall impression of the performance; by the
1830's Charles Kemble, Charles Macready and Eliza Vestris in England
and Conrad Ekhof, Friedrich Schroeder and Goethe in Germany had all
demonstrated the value of lengthy rehearsals and close attention to the
details of costume and setting. As the urge for spectacle took hold of the
nineteenth century, actor-managers such as Charles Kean and Samuel
Phelps mounted remarkable displays of scenic art, but there was hardly
the coordination of expressive means based on an interpretation of the
play-text that seems to me the fundamental requirement of theatre pro-
duction as we have come to understand it. That crucial advance was
achieved first at Meiningen, which will be the subject of my first chapter.

All the directors who follow are virtually self-selecting, though a com-
prehensive account would certainly include more: Copeau, Yeats, Tairov,
Granville Barker, Tyrone Guthrie, to name only a few whose omission I
regret. But the only comprehensive account of modern stagecraft (in
Swedish by Gösta Bergman) runs to close on six-hundred pages and even
then does not extend beyond 1925. So what follows is not intended as a
complete survey; rather, it is an attempt to describe in some detail the key
events that mark the emergence of the modern stage director in Europe,
setting them in their context and examining the theories that they exem-
plify. I have not set out to recount the entire career of every director, but
have concentrated on the areas of his work that seem best to convey his
significance. Thus, there is little on the later work of Antoine, Lugné-Poe,
Stanislavsky, Reinhardt and Piscator. With Brecht I have concentrated