The director as boundary spanner

This article uses the concept of the boundary spanner to examine the ways in which theatre directors literally and metaphorically translate material originally produced in different linguistic and cultural contexts. It does so with specific reference to Peter Brook’s work in the 1940s and 1950s, when he specialized in producing French plays in London. It argues that Brook was both an astute commentator of the differences between the French and British scenes, and an effective theatre maker with a characteristic approach to making performable material resisted by newspaper critics. The article uses artefacts housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Theatre and Performance Collections, and, in particular, in the Peter Brook Collection, to reveal how the director theatrically translated plays by Anouilh, Cocteau, Roussin and Sartre in order to describe and comment on the practices of theatrical boundary spanning. This article was published open access under a CC BY-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/ .