Directing Plays

Don Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781136789953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Directing Plays explores both the theory and practice of directing plays, with particular emphasis on textual interpretation. Don Taylor guides the student through the complex process of choosing a play, the working partnership of director, playwright and designer, the delicate matter of casting a play, the rehearsal process and everything which needs to happen before the production is up and running.

1
What is a Director?

Plays have been performed in public, within European culture at least, for about two-and-a-half thousand years. The first actor whose name we know, Thespis, was active in Athens in the mid sixth century BC, and the first surviving play, Aeschylus’s The Persians, dates from 472.

Who the first director was is a matter open to some argument. If we assume that we are talking about a stage organiser and interpreter of plays who is a specialist in that field and earns his living from it, not principally an actor or playwright, then we must certainly look just before or just after World War I to find him. The masculine pronoun is precise. I know of no specialist female director recorded as working regularly before 1930. The first, in England at least, was probably Joan Littlewood, in the earliest days of Theatre Workshop during the 1940s.

So if we assume that the theatre is two-and-a-half thousand years old, and directors have been around for about seventy-five, the theatre has managed quite well without them for about two thousand four hundred and twenty-five years.

Like the appearance of human beings on the planet Earth, directors arrived very late in the day. They are a new-born child in the lifetime of the theatre, barely out of the womb. There are people still living who were born before there was any such profession.

So how did the theatre survive during the 97% of its existence when directors were not around?

The answer is that most of the tasks performed today by a director were performed by the playwright or the leading actor or the stage manager, and what we think of as the director’s principal task, interpretation, was simply not an issue before the beginning of the twentieth century. There was little doubt about how plays should be done while the playwrights and actors were in charge. Early skirmishes of what was to become at times a large scale and bloody battle were heard as the nineteenth became the twentieth century, when Chekhov complained that his plays were meant to be comedies and were being played too seriously. The man who was in charge of the production of Chekhov’s plays was a leading actor, not a specialist director, but he was certainly one of the principal candidates for the title of father of the craft: Konstantin Stanislavski, of the Moscow Arts Theatre.

So how were plays staged before the craft of directing as a specialised discipline emerged?

Directing without directors

Any play can be directed by a group of actors among themselves, with or without the assistance of the playwright. In a simple or limited space, that solution is often as good as any. There is a great deal about presenting plays which actors learn through daily experience which no one else, not even the most talented or experienced director quite knows, and that knowledge of the craft from the inside can create powerful productions. But in a large or complex space, or with an unconventional play, it quickly becomes clear that an overall controlling imagination needs to be at work, and whether the choices such a space presents are resolved by the playwright, an actor, or some other person, they must be resolved.

There are many times and places during the history of western theatre when something which we would recognise as directing must have taken place. Classical Greek plays, with their dancing and singing choruses, and their spectacular effects - chariots descending from machines, and doors opening to reveal bodies on moving trucks - must have required a controlling intelligence. Tradition tells us that the playwrights themselves performed this function, writing the text and the music and organising every aspect of the production except for the actual training - and financing - of the chorus, even at times playing the leading parts themselves. Similarly, Purcell’s semi-operas, with their moving scenery, incredibly spectacular machines descending from the flies or rising from under the stage, their singing choruses and grotesque dancers, must have been very precisely directed by Betterton, the great actor-manager, who ought perhaps to be called the first great English Director too.

At every stage in theatre history plays must have been directed by some body, in a more or less sophisticated manner, but the fact is that we know very little about these processes before the twentieth century. We don’t know how playwrights and actor managers spoke to their actors, how they moved them, whether character motivations were discussed at all, nor do we know much about how the design and dressing of plays was undertaken. Perhaps the key element in modern directing is to have in the mind some overall vision of how the play will appear on the stage, but whether that happened, or whether the production of plays was a pragmatic business, built up in daily rehearsal, is also largely unknown. We guess that something like the imaginative directing process as we understand it must have taken place, but it is guesswork. For hard fact, we are almost completely in the dark.

There are some clues. There are a few scenes in plays from the past which show the process of play-direction taking place, there is the famous row between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones about the purpose of dramatic representation, and there is the conscious recreation of the Restoration Theatre after the Civil War and Interregnum. All these moments give us some insight into the direction of plays as historical fact. It is no part of the purpose of this book to write a detailed history of directing or the emergence of the modern director. Students and interested readers will know where to consult books that will lead them to a deeper understanding of that process. But if we want to know where we are now, we have to have some idea where we have come from, and a brief examination of these primary sources from pre-twentieth century theatre is important to the understanding of a directors task at the present time.

Players and masquers

Paradoxically, we know even less about the staging of plays during the first great period of the English Theatre, from 1590-1640 than we know about the Greeks, whose theatres do at least survive physically. We know the names of the London theatres, the outdoor venues which attracted large popular audiences, The Globe, The Rose and The Red Bull, and the more sophisticated and refined first generation of indoor theatres, starting with the Blackfriars in 1608, and going on to include The Cockpit in Drury Lane, and Salisbury Court, between the eastern end of Fleet Street and the Thames. But we can’t walk into one and have a look around.

It seems likely that plays during this golden age, were even less directed, in the modern sense, than the Greek plays had been, because the architecture of the theatre that had developed from the Inn-yard, and which still retained a good deal of the Inn-yard layout when the theatres moved indoors, was very much less capable of spectacular staging effects than the Greek amphitheatre was. Hamlet’s scene with the players probably gives us as much insight as to how plays were directed in Shakespeare’s company as we are likely to get. Hamlet himself, as the author of a speech to be inserted into a preexistent play, probably stands in the position of the playwright, and perhaps gives us some indication how Shakespeare himself spoke to the actors when one of his plays was in preparation. He is concerned with the realism of the actors’ presentation, the need to hold the mirror up to nature to show virtue her own feature and scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure… He asks the players to avoid over stagey gestures, in an age when a formal language of gesture was very much part of an actor’s equipment, and he requests, with a recognisable sharp edge to his tone of voice, that the comedians should not improvise their own lines or play too many unscripted gags. Otherwise, he treats the actors with great respect, as masters of their art. Having given them a clear indication of how they should act, he defers in practice to their experience. It is significant that he says nothing at all about how his speech should be staged. He assumes that is the actors’ business. When we look at Shakespeare’s comic version of the same process, we see much the same thing. Peter Quince, the playwright, is entirely in charge, though he has to cope with a pretty monstrous ego in his leading actor, Bottom. He duly butters him up and flatters him, as directors have doubtless done since the year dot, and then gives his players the very simplest instructions as to where to make their entrances. Anything at all complicated or sophisticated, the simple stage-effects of the moon and the wall, is discussed between the whole group, and the views of the most dominant personality, Bottom, are adopted.

It seems to me that a number of things can be inferred from these two famous rehearsal scenes. The first is that the play was staged by an interaction between the playwright and the leading actor, with the playwright providing the intellectual insight, and the actor the charisma. No change there then, you might say. Certainly Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights were dealing with the first generation of great actors, the first men in the modern world who became famous for their acting. They, far more than the playwrights, were the public’s darlings, and it seems likely that when the chips were down, the great actors, who were the principal sharers and managers of the theatres, and therefore the dominant financial interest, got their way. It takes no great insight to infer that Shakespeare probably had a difficult time with the popular comedian Will Kempe, and it is perhaps not too much to suggest that the portrait of the overbearing Bottom and the harassed Peter Quince, might represent a comic picture of Shakespeare’s irritation with Burbage on a bad day. Certainly the scene contains many moments which any working director will ruefully recognise, from the actor rewriting the script to suit himself, to meaningless tantrums that have to be soothed by outrageous flattery, and ill-timed questions about beards.

But the clearest indications of the limited nature of direction in Shakespeare’s day are given by the layout of the theatre itself, that exposed platform, playing in daylight and the open air, to four galleries and a raked pit, that had developed from the architecture of the Inn-yards within which the players had first set up their portable stages.

When you work on such a stage - and I worked on one not unlike the traditional shape, at the St George’s Theatre in the mid 1970s - you are very conscious that this is a space that naturally favours the actors, and through them, the playwright. It is a simple platform for acting upon, with no permanent scenery, simple entrances, a plain and practical balcony and a curtained alcove that is very flexible in use, but provides no stimulus for the eye. The Elizabethan/Jacobean stage is an amazingly flexible theatrical instrument, as the plays of that great age, in their infinite variety of strategies for staging everything from bedroom scenes to battles, amply prove, but its drama is all in the imagination: the vivid words, the rhetorical acting, the accompanying music of lutes and recorders, the simple props, flags, swords and drums brought on stage and taken off again by the actors. There is very little opportunity for spectacle in any sense that we, or the Restoration, or the Greeks would have understood it. Pageantry, shields and flags and banners, works well in such a space, and the History plays are full of opportunities for its exploitation, but there is little further opportunity to stun the imagination of the eye rather than the mind. It is a platform whose infinite possibilities the actors must have got to know intimately, and learned how to exploit, so that any sensible playwright working with them, particularly one like Shakespeare who had been an actor himself, would have deferred to their experience again and again. It was, quite simply, an actors’ kingdom. What was there for a director to do? To tell the actors where to stand, or how to group themselves? Playing the same theatre every afternoon, the actors knew the answers to those questions far better than anyone else did.

A playwright had plenty of other considerations to occupy his time. He had to be sure that his text was fully understood, and that it told its story as well as it could in the theatre space for which it had been written. He had to ensure that what had fired his imagination, burst into flame in the imaginative space of the theatre, and this might involve his participation in movement, in what costuming there was - not much, as all actors had their own acting suits which they wore in every play - and in effects such as battles and storms. Otherwise it was up to the actors. The balance of power between the two, playwright and actor, doubtless varied, depending upon the relative fame of each. Shakespeare, Jonson and Fletcher probably had a good deal of say in what was done with their works within their own companies, at least as much as Prince Hamlet does. But Burbage and Alleyn and Will Kempe were out there in front of the public, and I suspect, as in modern theatre, in the last analysis the man on stage got his own way.

However, the public theatres were not the only place where theatrical entertainments were staged. From his accession in 1603, James I, encouraged by his Queen, Anne of Denmark, who at her brother’s court had met the young architect Inigo Jones, had delighted in the presentation of masques, courtly entertainments in which royalty and nobility themselves participated, and which were staged with incredible expense and splendour. Initially stimulated by the Florentine Intermedii of 1589, these spectacular events united poetry and action with music, singing and dancing, together with the most sumptuous and imaginative staging. Painted scenery, lighting effects, machines that raised whole mountains, with ridges big enough for actors to stand upon, from beneath a stage that appeared to be too small to contain them, chariots coming down from the heavens, sea-battles enacted - nothing could have been further from the poetic intensity and theatrical simplicity of what was being staged in the public theatres than these intellectually flimsy and sycophantic spectacles, conspicuous theatrical consumption for a Court that did not share the tastes of the majority of its subjects, and whose alienation from them would lead, forty years later, to Civil War.

There was no doubt how the Court regarded these entertainments, and the participation in them of the architectural and theatrical genius, Inigo Jones. Samuel Daniel remarked of them, the art and invention of the Architect gives the greatest grace, and is of the most importance. But Ben Jonson, brought in to work with Jones as the poet for the venture, had other ideas. For him the show furnished by the architect, however elaborate, was only the bodily part, which the poet’s invention had to animate.

The two men were powerful personalities, both supreme artists in their fields, Jonson, fiercely proud of the depth of his hard-earned Classical learning (as working-class boys usually are), Jones fresh from Italy, and fired by his studies of Palladio. They were chalk and cheese, and wanted to achieve quite different things in their masques. Jonson aspired to give moral and poetic depth to what was essentially a flimsy and unserious form. Jones wished to create ever more stunning and imaginative spectacles to amaze the eye. Jonson was at a disadvantage from the start, not only because the Masque form was probably too flimsy to bear the structure of ideas and poetry he wished to build upon it, but also because the Queen and the Court much preferred looking at Jones’s pictures to hearing, and thinking about, Jonson’s verses.

The row between them was of titanic proportions, and went on for the best part of twenty years. Finally, in 1631, when Jonson insisted his name came before Jones’s in the publication of the current masque, it became an irreparable breach. Jonson, old and ill, was cast out from the Court, and younger and more amenable poets, Aurelian Townshend and William Davenant, who would do what Jones told them, were brought in in his place.

The story represents a crucial moment in the history of the emergence of the director. The poet, who up to that time had expected to be the one who principally directed how the performance should go, found himself in competition with, and eventually defeated by, the designer. It is the first evidence we have of a fundamental disagreement among working professionals about what their production should be.

The sumptuous masques, performed to an invited aristocratic audience only, had little lasting effect upon the public theatres. As news of what was going on at Whitehall gradually filtered out, playwrights quickly borrowed those aspects of the masque they could use in their own plays, the mythological formality and some of the music, singing and dancing, but little of the conspicuous expense. The playwrights and actors made sure they stayed in control. There was little, anyway, that could be done to follow up Jones’s experiments on the open platform stage. His new forms of staging depended upon degrees of illusion, not on the simplicity allied to imagination of the traditional Elizabethan Theatre. They needed a new kind of theatre, and were eventually to find one. In the long run Jones was to have a far greater influence on the history of the theatre than Jonson, but not until after the Civil War, when both men were dead.

From our perspective, this row between two powerful geniuses, is full of pregnant implications for the gradual birth of the specialist theatre director. The masque was a collaboration between many aspects of theatre art, words, actions, music, dancing and visual spectacle, in a way the plays in the public theatre were not. All those different disciplines follow different agendas and have different priorities, and if a form of theatre were to arise which was as collaborative as masques were, then the question of who had overall control was bound to become significant. The idea of a director hadn’t been conceived yet, and it would be centuries before the conception would be brought to birth. But the necessity for his eventual existence was, in a shadowy way, implied by the twenty-year quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones.

Sir William Davenant

The extraordinary figure of Sir William Davenant is an even louder pre-echo and sharper foreshadowing of the modern director, occupying, as he did in the 1660s, very much the position the Director of the Royal National Theatre or the RSC holds today.

As plain William Davenant, son of an Oxford vintner - and even, according to local gossip, the bastard son of Shakespeare, who stayed regularly at his father’s Inn on his journeys to and from Stratford - he had made his mark very early in London as a young playwright and poet. His first play was staged when he was only twenty-one, and though it wasn’t enormously successful, it was to the taste of the Court, and he soon found himself in that circle of poets, musicians and painters clustered round Charles I and his French wife. The fashionable young poet and playwright soon became the principal provider of texts for the Court masques, by then being staged in a specially constructed masquing house, just to the south of Inigo Jones’s Banqueting house at Whitehall, which was no longer in use because it was thought the smoke from the candles required for Jones’s lighting effects was damaging the Reubens paintings on the ceiling.

Davenant worked for about five years with Jones, his principal works being the two propaganda pieces, Britannia Triumphans (1638J and Salm acida Spolia (1640). These are worthless as theatre poetry, and rare examples in English literary culture of a poet slavishly serving the political needs of a Royal patron. Britannia Triumphans is principally a justification of the King’s ship-money policy, one of the main causes of the Civil War, and contains crude caricatures of wicked Puritans, which must have pleased the Court as much as they alienated the London populace, who already loathed the King’s masques for their conspicuous expense, and the fact that they playe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Author’s Note
• 1. What is a Director?
• 2. Selecting Your Play
• 3. Preparation
• 4. Design and Designers
• 5. The Rehearsal Process
• 6. Fit-up to Opening
• 7. Conclusions
• Index