In Theatre Is More Beautiful than War, Marvin Carlson sets out to “give some idea of the richness and variety” of the German Regietheater (director's theatre) (xiv). It is no surprise that Carlson—one of the foremost theatre historians of our time—has little difficulty accomplishing this task. In nine immensely readable chapters, he surveys the careers of the Regisseure who have most notably shaped the director-driven theatre that has largely defined the German-speaking stage for the past half century. From Peter Stein's legendary post-1968 experiments with collective theatre, through the irreverent, postdramatic productions Frank Castorf unleashed on reunited Berlin in the 1990s, Carlson's text offers the most sweeping account of the Regietheater available to date in English. Carlson bookends his study with a quick glance at the origins of the Regietheater and a pithy concluding discussion of the sustainability of this rich but expensive approach to theatre making.

Carlson cleanly divides his study into three parts of three chapters each. Rather than center on particular movements, periods, or theatres, each chapter focuses on the career of a single director. This structure makes the book a useful reference on contemporary German directors, but also limits the potential for comparing directors or examining the relations between them. Carlson groups directors along ostensible generational lines, presenting Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, and Claus Peymann as “The Old Masters,” Andrea Breth, Frank Castorf, and Christoph Marthaler as “The Successors,” and Michael Thalheimer, Thomas Ostermeier, and Stefan Pucher as “The Next Generation.” While giving some productions considerably more attention than others, Carlson offers a chronological treatment of nearly every director's stagings. The material presented is based both on Carlson's own viewing experiences and (more often) on reviews in newspapers and the journal Theater Heute—Carlson's favored source for this study. This methodology permits Carlson both to outline each director's critical reception throughout his or her respective career, and to identify the distinctive characteristics of his or her respective style.

The lack of any principle of exclusion for the productions he discusses, however, leaves Carlson little space for in-depth analyses of particular stagings. For example, he notes that Peter Stein's December 1974 production of Summerfolk “took Stein's work in a new direction” because it involved a turn to realism and psychological motivation (13). We also learn that critics and audiences “widely considered” Summerfolk to be one of Stein's “most powerful and innovative” productions (14). But Carlson presents almost no detail about Stein's direction itself. As a result, readers are left wondering what it was about Summerfolk that led to this “new direction”—and wondering as well precisely how the production was staged. Nevertheless, Carlson's method deftly situates readers within critical and popular debates around particular directors, almost all of whom are still creating the most talked about work on the German-speaking stage.

Carlson's study certainly revolves around the careers of individual directors, but he carefully and repeatedly notes that despite the “distinctive styles” of leading German directors, “such a style can not be the work of the director alone” (151). One of the strengths of Carlson's text is the attention it pays to the “close and long-lasting” ties in the German theatre among directors, stage designers, actors, playwrights, and dramaturges (117). Carlson devotes considerable space to vivid collaborations between directors and designers, such as that between Christoph Marthaler and Anna Viebrock (Chapter 6). Further, his discussion of the fruitful relationships between leading directors and playwrights such as Claus Peymann and Thomas Bernhardt (Chapter 3), or more recently, Thomas Ostermeier and Royal Court dramatists Mark Ravenhill and Sarah Kane (Chapter 8), helps trouble easy stereotypes of Regietheater as hostile to playwriting.

It is difficult to disagree with Carlson's assertion that the directors on which he focuses are at—or, at least, near—the top of any German theatregoer's “list of the most influential and innovative stage directors” of the past half century (xiv). Nonetheless, one cannot ignore that Carlson includes only one East German director, Frank Castorf, on his list. For a book with the subtitle German Stage Directing in the Late Twentieth Century to neglect the work of East German directors such as Jürgen Gosch, Heiner Müller, and Einer Schleef is striking and at least warrants justification. While not as glaring an omission, the short shrift Christoph Schlingensief receives from Carlson will surprise many readers, especially because Schlingensief has recently become one of the most internationally known names in German theatre and performance.

Considering how rich and varied the material on which this study of a half century of German theatre draws, Carlson's aim of giving “some idea” of Germany's vibrant Regietheater is ultimately quite modest for such an accomplished scholar. Carlson mostly refrains from grappling with larger aesthetic and political questions raised by the Regietheater: Of what significance is it today for a theatre to emphasize a director's vision over a playwright's demands? How has the Regietheater altered or, at the very least, challenged expectations of what the social function of theatre should be? And perhaps most important: What should be made of the striking lack of diversity among those directors most prominently associated with the Regietheater? Except for Andrea Breth, all of the directors Carlson discusses are white men. The racial, ethnic, and gender homogeneity of Carlson's examples is, of course, not his fault; this lack of diversity is a reflection of the Regietheater itself (although the same cannot be said for many leading independent performance groups in Germany, such as Gob Squad, Rimini Protokoll, and She She Pop). Rather surprisingly, Carlson does not attend to Regietheater's homogeneity in any rigorous way. I am surely not alone in wishing to see one of the world's most distinguished theatre scholars weigh in on this issue. Nevertheless, taken together with Katrin Sieg's phenomenal body of work on gender and ethnicity in contemporary German theatre, and recent English translations of more aesthetically oriented studies by Hans-Thies Lehmann and Erika Fischer-Lichte, Carlson's survey of Regietheater goes a long way toward filling a significant gap in English-language theatre studies.