This sense of cultural exchange was particularly pertinent to Borna Baletic, who ran the National Theatre of Croatia in Varazdin throughout the war “I was often in touch with my colleagues in Belgrade. The day the war started, the telephone lines weren’t cut but communication stopped. I’m still waiting for the phone to ring,” he confesses sadly. “But it’s fantastic how, here, we think more or less the same way, even though we come from different cultures. You have to clarify and reclarify to find out why you’re there and what you’re doing.”It was universally agreed that the chance to get down to basics, to discover divergent views and to discuss them late into the night was one of the most illuminating and useful aspects of the school. “I honestly got to the point where I was sitting on the floor in front of the actors, crying, and thinking, ‘What is theatre? What’s the point of it?’ When I’m in rehearsal I could never have allowed myself to reach that point, but it’s desperately important to do that. “I will see what fate tells me to do.” Playing the enigmatic artist was clearly an efficient way of evading the prying questions of the authorities in the bad old days.One of three British delegates, Sita Ramamurthy, who was born and brought up in India, was the only non-white person in the school, and encountered multiple levels of culture gap.

She runs the Asian Theatre initiative for the Leicester Playhouse and her special project in the first week was to attempt a combination of classical Greek drama (Medea) with the similarly ancient Indian traditions outlined by Bharata in his book Natya Shastra (literally, “book of dance/ drama) Her efforts were met with incomprehension. He doesn’t want to be influenced by other people’s thoughts,” he declared through an interpreter “Directors will never open up to each other In order to learn your craft, it’s not enough to talk. Maybe it is something very elusive, basic, simple – something that cannot be put into words,” he opined.But when asked what he was planning for his own practical masterclass the following day, Sturua shrugged evasively “I am a fatalist,” he said. He had never seen an uncensored version before.Another Georgian, Robert Sturua, was a mentor for Doiashoili and many of the Easterners. A smilingly grizzled, rotund and bear-like character, he was the exact opposite of the Westerners’ guru, Peter Sellars. He had watched Sellars’s masterclass and, smiling evasively, he declined to comment, other than to say that it reminded him of the Socialist times “A director is like a wolf from the Steppes – a loner.

The Georgian delegate “Doi” Doiashoili was one of four directors invited for the first week to come and work on a chosen text with British actors. When he read the translation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, sent to him by the Playhouse (he was the only one who broke the edict and turned up speaking barely a word of English), he realised for the first time what the play was about. But the Easterners were glowering, shuffling in their seats, muttering under their breath. “All my life I have been told that art is politics, everything is politics,” said an anguished Polish delegate, Jaroslaw Kilian afterwards. “I can see that Peter Sellars is a very sincere and charismatic person, but I am sick of politics.