This chapter presents a history of directorial practice in the post-war British theatre to argue that directors have been able to assert their authority over the sector thanks to their operation at the intersections of art and finance, organisation and creativity. This analysis of the work of directing owes a great deal to Ric Knowles’s development of ‘materialist semiotics’, and to Stuart Hall’s readings of the politics of cultural production and reception. The chapter extends Knowles’s and Hall’s insights into theatre production through three parallel accounts of theatre directing in the post-war period. These focus on the managerial and administrative position of the Artistic Director (key examples include Michael Buffong, Stephen Daldry, Peter Hall, Paulette Randall); ‘auteur’ directors who create theatrical ‘performance texts’ (Joan Littlewood, Simon McBurney, Katie Mitchell, Emma Rice), and directors whose artistry is to be found in social production, the shaping of relations between people in public space (Geraldine Connor, Jenny Sealey, Lois Weaver). Through this analysis of a wide range of directorial practices, the chapter aims to concretise the multiple forces and interests that govern the theatre sector, and thereby expose the social relations that shape its creative practices, and the political interests that govern them.

As the central villain of Infinite Jest, entertainment is a persistent preoccupation in Wallace’s writing. He presents it as a locus of neoliberal power in ways that anticipated the development of tailored entertainment services well ahead of time. This chapter examines Wallace’s representation of entertainment, couching it particularly in its antagonistic relationship with attention and engagement, which his work elevated as cardinal virtues. This chapter situates Wallace’s vision of entertainment in a critical paradigm of entertainment as a form of individual and social control, and as the ultimate Jamesonian manifestation of late capitalist flattening, arguing that the anhedonia of Wallace’s characters is a direct result of the dominant forms and agendas of entertainment on display in his writing. The chapter also argues that the forms of entertainment in Wallace’s work invite and reflect the idea of absorption, which is characterized positively and negatively depending on its genesis. That is to say, the absorption of entertainment is contrasted with the absorption of boredom, and again with the absorption of attention, with widely diverse effects on the postmodern subject. Entertainment constitutes a seductive and deadening force that both unites and isolates the subjects of Wallace’s writing, the great threat to the contemporary self.

The chapter considers several directions through the field of Shakespeare and world cinema while acknowledging that no one interpretive method can do justice to the variety of filmic engagements with the dramatist’s work across the globe. Accordingly, this chapter looks at films from Africa, Brazil, Germany, India, Japan, Malaysia, Russia, Slovakia, Spain and Thailand in terms of a range of approaches the auteur approach, regional perspectives, time-bound moments of production and reception, the woman practitioner, and the place of particular plays in the adaptive process. It attends to the adaptations of auteurs such as Vishal Bhardwaj, Grigori Kozintsev and Akira Kurosawa and, at the same time, introduces readers to diverse adaptations of Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Othello and Romeo and Juliet, thereby making visible the methodological challenges and joys necessarily entailed in any encounter with world Shakespeare.