Among all the great personalities who, early in this century, created and established the modern concept of the director in the theatre (Antoine, Lugné-Poe, Gordon Craig, Stanislavsky), Max Reinhardt (1873-1943) is often dismissed as an eclectic who took his ideas from others and dabbled in all forms of theatre for the sake of personal commercial success. While there is a grain of truth in this view, it nevertheless completely misrepresents one of the greatest personalities in the theatre of this or any other age.

Peasant women are chattering. Young aristocrats dressed in three-cornered hats and Brandenburg jackets, but with their eyes hidden behind dark glasses, slouch around a little red ochre square, where some white sheets are drying. Patrice Chereau, eighteen years old, has gotten hold of a play by Marivaux, a little-known work, The Inheritor of the Village; he sees himself labeled with a trademark that will never leave him—insolence.

The insolence of a young dandy, rich, cultivated, who gets his kicks by drawing mustaches on family portraits, say his detractors. The subversive insolence of the poet who breaks down the doors of all the prisons, including cultural ones, say his supporters. Chereau receives the attacks and the homages with a cantankerous selfassurance, with the haughty disdain of a man who knows he is going to be king.

Klaus Michael Grüber is one of Germany's most controversial theatricalist directors. He has been called elitist, esoteric, artificial, unpolitical and incomprehensible by many critics; his productions have often left the audience—in a half-filled house—thoroughly dismayed and perplexed. But Grüber has also been praised as Germany's most imaginative and original director, a man who conjures up unforgettable visions, a man who like no other director carries theatrical expression to its absolute extremes. This article intends to describe Klaus Michael Grüber's development and some of his major productions and to let a few people speak who have worked with him. Grüber himself has very seldom given public expression to his theories and methods.

Tom O'Horgan's first widespread public attention came in 1968, when he directed Hair on Broadway and won an Obie Award for directing Paul Foster's Tom Paine at La Mama. He had already been involved with the theatre most of his life: he began acting when he was four years old and he composed and staged a full-length opera, called The Doom of the Earth, when he was nine. Later, he studied music and supported himself for several years with a nightclub act—telling jokes, singing songs and accompanying himself on a harp. In the early Sixties, he performed in musical revues and began directing small productions at various lofts and theatres around New York City, including the Caffe Cino. In 1964, he directed Genet's The Maids in his own loft on Third Street, using men in the female roles as Genet had suggested.

The work of Peter Stein is so integrated with the work of the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer that an analysis of his individual style or method as a director is almost impossible. Even in speaking of “forms,” one must see how Stein has applied his creative energy at a very fundamental level—striving to create the proper conditions that would then, through the work process, give rise to new “forms,” as well as new content and style. However, a description of the development and results of the most recent project directed by Stein at the Schaubühne, together with an analysis of certain attributes that this project has in common with earlier work, may reveal a pattern definable as Peter Stein's own theatre practice.

In 1966, the Italian critics labeled Luca Ronconi a “producer of madness,” not only for the themes he chose but for the frenzied characterization typical of the acting. Later, after Orlando Furioso (1969), [see T47], they saw him as a conjurer of extraordinary medieval festivals, through a play of simultaneous scenes that bordered on the “extraordinary and magical.” But since the critical acclaim of Orlando eight years ago, Ronconi has never again wanted to take on a performance/production that could be performed all over the world, precisely in order to free himself from the label that each success brings. Even when he recreated Ariosto's poem for television, he drew on—as the medium itself demanded—an entirely new formula. It is time, then, to put aside easy definitions and to look without preconceptions at Ronconi and what he has done since Orlando Furioso.