Manchester University Press - Directing scenes and senses

As European theatre directors become a familiar presence on international stages and a new generation of theatre makers absorbs their impulses, this study develops fresh perspectives on Regie, the Continental European tradition of staging playtexts. Leaving behind unhelpful clichés that pit, above all, the director against the playwright, Peter M. Boenisch stages playful encounters between Continental theatre and Continental philosophy.

The contemporary Regie work of Thomas Ostermeier, Frank Castorf, Ivo van Hove, Guy Cassiers, tg STAN, and others, here meets the works of Friedrich Schiller and Leopold Jessner, Hegelian speculative dialectics, and the critical philosophy of Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Zizek in order to explore the thinking of Regie - how to think Regie, and how Regie thinks. This partial and 'sideways look' invites a wider reconsideration of the potential of 'playing' theatre today, of its aesthetic possibilities, and its political stakes in the global neoliberal economy of the twenty-first century.

Reviews

'Among the many merits of Peter Boenisch's Directing Scenes and Senses: The Thinking of Regie is that it throws into relief these longstanding disagreements about the liberties a director should take with a play text. While building a case for why such debates are needed, Boenisch also suggests they tend to be built on a misapprehension, one exemplified by the English understanding of the German word Regietheater. Often translated as 'director's theatre', Boenisch reminds readers that Regietheater actually means something more like 'directing theatre' (p. 7). He flags this mistranslation to insist that instead of pitting the 'vision' of directors against the 'intentions' of playwrights, Regie actually indicates an aesthetic practice that mediates text and performance to create something that transcends both (p. 73). Directing Scenes and Senses is far from a dispassionate defence of Regietheater, but Boenisch's partiality makes it a compelling contribution...'
Michael Shane Boyle, Queen Mary University of London, Contemporary Theatre Review, May 2016

Preface. The dissensus of Regie: Re-thinking "directors' theatre"I. Mise en scène to mise en sens: Towards an aesthetic politics of Regie
1. Regie beyond representation: Directing the 'sensible'
2. The restless spirit of Regie: Hegel, theatrality, and the magic of speculative thinking
3. Theatre as dialectic institution: Friedrich Schiller and the liberty of play
4. The essence of the text and its actualisation: Leopold Jessner, the playwright's radical servant
II. The theatral appearing of ideas: Regie in contemporary European theatre
5. The tremor of speculative negation: On Regie, truth, and ex-position
6. Seeing what is coming: On Regie, playing, and appearing
7. The intermedial parallax: On Regie, media, and spectating
8. Theatre in the age of semiocapitalism: On Regie, realism, and political critique
Afterthought: The future of Regie?
Bibliography
Index