Directing Scenes and Senses ─ The Thinking of Regie

Regie, the Continental European tradition of staging playtexts, in particular from the canonical dramatic repertoire, provokes as much heartfelt rejection as passionate fascination. This book leaves behind unhelpful cliches that pit, above all, the director against the playwright, or the playtext against its performance. Instead, it stages a meeting between Continental theatre and Continental philosophy in order to explore the thinking of Regie - how to think Regie, but also how Regie thinks. Taking prompts from historical as well as recent manifestations of Regie in German, Dutch and Flemish theatre, the two main parts of this study develop new perspectives on the distinct cultural history of Continental Regie and its aesthetic politics (Part I), and on topics and ideas appearing in contemporary Regie, such as 'truth', 'play', 'realism', and the roles of spectating, of media and critique (Part II).

The contemporary Regie work of Thomas Ostermeier, Frank Castorf, Ivo van Hove, Guy Cassiers, tg STAN, Andreas Kriegenburg, Michael Thalheimer and Jurgen Gosch here meets the theatral play in the works of Friedrich Schiller and Leopold Jessner, in Hegelian speculative dialectics, in the ideas of the German school of 'theatrality studies' and the critical philosophy of Jacques Ranciere and Slavoj %Zi%zek. Through this partial and playful 'sideways look' on Regie, the study invites theatre students, researchers, critics, artists and spectators alike to reconsider the wider potential of theatre today, its aesthetic possibilities, and not least the political stakes of 'playing' theatre in the global neoliberal cultural economy of the twenty-first century.

Peter M Boenisch is Co-Director of the European Theatre Research Network