James Roose-Evans (1927–2022)

Yeah, all of it: Grotowski, Bread & Puppet, The Living, Meyerhold, Martha Graham, Cage, Brook. Julian Beck on why the Living Theatre is so assaultive, with its "wild, daemonic energies": "If only we can make the audience feel pain at a public ceremony, this may be the route by which we enable him to find the way back to his feelings, so that he will never want to commit violence again." Julian further hopes that it will "drive people to change things." Nope. Whenever I see the Living, I feel show more so assaulted that I want to run home and bury my head in my pillow. Fear is not a change motivator. show less

A must for people who, loving books, start looking for specific books. It's one of the most "human" books about buying and selling books I've ever read. As soon as you finish reading it, you want to find a good second-hand bookshop and find that book that's still living in the back of your mind instead of on your shelves.

James Roose-Evans, one of Britain's most experienced and innovative directors, and founder of the Hampstead Theatre (which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1984), surveys the history of the avant-garde in the theatre. He traces its origins through such key figures as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Craig, Appia, Copeau, Piscator, Brecht, Grotowski and up to the most recent experiments of Peter Brook's Mahabharata. This is a second, enlarged edition of a highly successful and widely-used show more book. As James Roose-Evans himself writes: 'I am convinced that if one is a practitioner of theatre it is an essential part of one's task to see and know what is going on in all of the arts. We have much to learn from one another as well as from the lessons of history.' show less