Not only known for his opera Einstein on the Beach and many star-studded collaborations, the acclaimed playwright, director, and artist was recognised for his hypnotic, slow-motion style and poetic staging. To honour his legacy, we're spotlighting Bob - and other directors who've redefined what theatre can be.

Bob Wilson

Described by The New York Times as "America's or even the world's foremost vanguard 'theater artist,'" Robert Wilson was known as a painter of silence and light, someone who treated the stage like a canvas. He would carefully arrange shapes and shadows in expressive, experimental, and abstract ways. Einstein on the Beach is perhaps his prime example - a show that uses hours of repetitive music, abstract imagery, and slow movement.

It's no wonder he won an Olivier Award for Best New Opera for Einstein on the Beach, among many others.

He barely used dialogue. He slowed everything down. He made the audience wait. He didn't care if it was conventional - he cared if it was honest.

Peter Brook

One of the most original and influential theatre directors of the 20th century, Peter Brook questioned everything and rejected labels. From Shakespeare to opera to African epics, the king of the unconventional won multiple Emmy Awards and an Olivier. Brook gave meaning to empty space. He believed you didn't need anything fancyjust actors, a space, and a good idea.

His famous line? "I can take any empty space and call it a stage." Changed everything.

Brook's 1985 production of The Mahabharata lasted nine hours and was staged in a literal rock quarry. Nine hours. In a quarry. And people loved it. He was all about raw connection - stripping theatre back until only the essentials remained. His shows were never about spectacle. They were about truth, and maybe even transcendence.

Katie Mitchell

Katie Mitchell doesn't direct plays. She constructs worlds. A rule-breaker with a camera in one hand and Virginia Woolf in the other, she treats the stage like a film set - splicing together real-time video, performances, and precision stagecraft to create something completely, startlingly new.

In Waves, Mitchell and her cast used live sound effects, handheld cameras, and split-second choreography to reconstruct Woolf's stream-of-consciousness novel right before your eyes. It was like watching a film being edited live - fragile, intimate, and completely unlike anything you'd call "theatre" in the traditional sense.

Her work is feminist, cerebral, and unapologetically experimental. Audiences don't always know what hit them, but they know it was something bold. Mitchell isn't here to please. She's here to provoke.

Ariane Mnouchkine

Ariane Mnouchkine is theatre's great humanist - a director who builds theatre not just as art, but as community. Her legendary company, Theatre du Soleil, operates like a living organism. The actors cook together, build the sets, and rehearse for months in vast, converted warehouses, creating the kind of theatre most of us could only dream about.

She draws from everywhere - Japanese Noh, Indian Kathakali, Commedia dell'arte - to stage shows that are massive in scale and epic in ambition. Her Les Atrides cycle reimagined Greek tragedies as cross-cultural, mythic journeys. Her refugee dramas make politics personal and devastatingly real.

Mnouchkine isn't interested in minimalist metaphor. She wants to show you everything. Her sets are vast. Her casts are sprawling. And every second pulses with the belief that theatre can - and must - change the world.

Thomas Ostermeier

Thomas Ostermeier is theatre's punk rock provocateur. From his base at Berlin's Schaubhne, he's been shaking up the classics since the early 2000s, armed with blood, sweat, and an almost uncomfortable level of emotional honesty.

His Hamlet didn't ponder death - it screamed it, covered in dirt and fury. His Hedda Gabler was all glass, steel, and icy detachment - a clinical breakdown on stage. Ostermeier isn't just modernising Ibsen and Shakespeare - he's tearing them open and dragging their guts into the 21st century.