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From Ibsen to the ‘Visual Book’: Robert Wilson's Peer Gynt

There is little need to dwell here on the status of pre-existing texts in theatre productions, whether by Ibsen or any other dramatist, classical or contemporary. While allusion to ‘Wilson’s’ Peer Gynt (2005) may irritate literary scholars, since the play is manifestly Ibsen’s, such referred authorship can no longer be a source of contention. The specificity of the stage as an art that is anything but secondary to literature was established at the turn of the twentieth century. As is well known, this was done decisively by Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, the first in relation to dramaturgical interests and the second essentially without them for the sake of new, physically accentuated modes of performance –‘corporeal’ modes, as might be said today. Grotowski, in the second half of the twentieth century, resumed the research of his predecessors, radically altering canonical texts with a boldness equal only to that of Meyerhold. Thus his recontructions of such Polish classics as Juliusz Slowacki’s Kordian (1962) and Stanislaw Wyspianski’s Akropolis (1965) – the latter, notes Ludwik Flazsen, his literary advisor, being ‘the least faithfull to its literary origins’ of all the plays that he directed (Schechner and Wolford, 1997: 64) – were integral to his explorations of the theatre as theatre. So, too, was his work on the plasticity of the performing body, which, while playing with the Word, was moulded to it rather than at its service. These powerful moments in the history of the theatre are hardly a matter of ‘director’s theatre’, although they are certainly tied up with the emergence of the idea of the mise en scène as an orchestrated stage whole. In any case, ‘director’s theatre’ is a misleading notion since no theatre practice ‘conducted’ by a director is his or hers alone: it is a process in which all collaborators, not least actors, have a significant creative input. This phenomenon is widespread, as corroborated by the diverse entries of the recent Fifty Key Theatre Directors (Mitter and Shevtsova, 2005); and such