The director as a concept

What can we actually learn from the surviving programmes, set designs, reviews and commentaries? Is it possible to reconstruct the form of the overhead and its bearer? Brno-based theatre scholar Šárka Havlíčková Kysová used the most up-to-date information about the problem and its solution, and thus also took up her Wasserbauer monograph with the unusual title The Director as Concept. < br> < br> The desire to use new methodological approaches led the author to a detailed analysis of the language of the sources and the possibilities of reading them. It has shown the director's personality in the focus of various environments and influences, which it analyses in detail using a wide range of current knowledge. From her analysis of the sources, she rightly concluded that some of the existing categories were more complicated than the speeches of contemporary codifiers might suggest. The concept of the opera director as a set of changing concepts speaks of a truly novel method, but one that conveys a remarkable picture of the atmosphere in the Czech theatre of the 1950s and 1960s.