The theater develops from embodied declamation to multi-layered staging. The director was born, inspired by Max Reinhardt's great theatrical years in Germany and Konstantin Stanislawski in Russia.
Under the pressure of the totalitarian regimes of Stalinism and Fascism, theater artists in Spain, Russia and Germany increasingly came into conflict between resistance and adaptation. Numerous playwrights and directors went into exile.
Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett were the antipodes of the theater. As the last great poet of the Enlightenment, Brecht updated his play "The Life of Galileo Galilei", after the shock of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the revolts in Paris and Prague are creating new political awareness, leading to demonstrations and also to artistic provocations.
The theater at the end of the 20th century marginalized contemporary drama. The stage serves less and less as a tribunal for enlightenment, the new media are too fast for the theater and hardly allow current time pieces.
