Directing - a Handbook for Emerging Theatre Directors

Rob Swain

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781408156629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theaterregie und& Theaterproduktion

The theatre director is one of the most critical roles in a successful drama company, yet there are no formal qualifications required for entry into this profession. This practical guide for emerging theatre directors answers all the key questions from the very beginning of your career to key stages as you establish your credentials and get professionally recognized. It analyzes the director's role through relationships with the actors, author, designer, production manager and creative teams and provides vital advice for "on-the-job" situations where professional experience is invaluable. The book also provides an overview of the many approaches to acting methodology without focusing on any in particular to allow the director to develop their own unique methods of working with any actor's style. Each chapter includes these key features:
* Introduces important theories, identifies practitioners and provides key reading to provide an overview of historic and current practice. * Interviews with leading practitioners and emerging directors. * Suggested exercises to develop the director's own approach and practical skills.

1
I’m a theatre director

This chapter is intended for someone who is considering a career as a theatre director who may have directed one or two pieces, but perhaps without the attention of professional peers. It therefore covers some fundamental information and considerations that may be helpful in developing your thinking and practice before reaching the stage where you invite other directors and professionals to your productions. Chapter Seven, the final chapter, is aimed at those who are ready to engage fully with the industry and to commit to a sustained level of work as a director.

With nearly 800 members of widely varying levels of experience, the Young Vic Genesis Directors’ Network allows directors to network with each other, find out about workshops, explore assisting and directing opportunities, and promote their work. The criteria for becoming a member are UK residency and a commitment to being a professional director; the only bar is being a student in full-time education, as this limits availability. This acknowledges that directors come from a wide range of backgrounds and will have to forge their own individual paths to establish a career as a director. In an intensely competitive field the key qualifications for success are desire, determination, a knowledge of current theatre-making, a well-articulated sense of the theatre you wish to make and an ever-growing circle of collaborators. Then hopefully the work speaks for itself, and you.

Some directors are ex-stage managers or technicians, such as Howard Davies and Jonathan Church; many are actors, such as Michael Grandage and Samuel West; some, such as Kerry Michael, come from music and live art backgrounds rather than theatre. One of the commonest routes is through university – not necessarily following a theatre-related degree. The National Student Drama Festival is held every spring in Scarborough; it not only showcases the best student productions from around the country, but also offers advice and workshops for student directors, and can provide a valuable bridge between university and professional work. Other directors begin with little practical experience in theatre but with the desire to mount one particular production, and then find they want to do it again. Although the section below outlines training opportunities, there are no training requirements for directors, and in the end there is no substitute for working with the best group of collaborators it is possible to bring together, putting on a piece of work and inviting your peers to see it. Many people say, ‘I want to be a theatre director’; fewer people say, ‘I am a theatre director’; but the only real difference between them is that the latter group of people have actually gone and done it – after that it is simply about becoming a better director, or as Samuel Beckett said, learning to ‘fail better’.

Director training

In 1986 the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation funded a report into the lack of training for directors: A Better Direction, written by Kenneth Rea, was followed by The Training of Theatre Directors by Andrew McKinnon in 1996. Since then, a number of drama schools have launched director training programmes, and RADA and LAMDA, Bristol Old Vic and Drama Centre have long-established programmes. Some of the programmes are three-year BAs and some are one-year MAs. They all offer the opportunity to gain an understanding of directing by participating in and observing classes being taught in the schools’ acting courses, as well as the opportunity to assist on productions and take classes which focus on directing. Some of the courses, such as Drama Centre’s, also cover directing for film and TV, and offer secondments to theatre or film companies; some, such as RADA’s, offer well-publicised productions at the end of the programme.

There are also a growing number of university-based directing programmes, providing different combinations of theoretical and practical work and varying levels of production opportunity. There is now a wide choice of training programmes for directors, easily researched through a web search: the courses at drama schools can be searched via the Conference of Drama Schools (CDS) website. However, all of these programmes have different focuses: some will be best suited for studying directing as an academic subject; some will be more vocationally orientated and better suited for practising as a professional director. Anyone researching these courses will wish to identify those that most closely match their knowledge and skills requirements, but it is also worthwhile trying to discover the ‘graduate destinations’ – the actual work that the courses’ graduates are now doing.

In addition to these full-length courses, there is also a growing number of short courses and one-off workshops, many led by prominent directors, being offered by theatres that support emerging directors, particularly the Young Vic, the Old Vic and the Directors Guild of Great Britain.

Many directors have effectively constructed their own training programmes, while still trying to earn a living and put on work, by attending talks and workshops by directors, writers, actors and designers they admire. Katie Mitchell and Emma Rice are prime examples of directors who identified directors and companies whose work they wanted to learn more about, so went to Russia and Poland to meet and work with them. In the UK it is possible to simply write to directors and either to ask to meet them and talk about their work, or to observe some of their work: they may say no, but many directors are extremely helpful to emerging directors who clearly have a serious interest in their work.

The rest of this chapter indicates what it might be useful to learn about while trying to construct a career. In the end there is no substitute for doing it, and it is perfectly possible to direct work without any of this knowledge, but it might offer a historic and current context for developing your own work, aesthetics and ethos.

Seeing work

Recently I heard of a director who went to see a show at a leading fringe theatre and happened to see the artistic director in the bar afterwards, so decided to introduce himself. The artistic director was very friendly and she began to ask the director about the directors’, writers’ and actors’ work he had seen lately and enjoyed. But when the conversation went on to designers and lighting designers, the director realised that he had not really noted who had designed or lit the productions he admired, and could not voice an informed opinion about designers’ or lighting designers’ work.

Keeping notes on people whose work you see will not only build up a database of possible future collaborators, but also help identify and articulate your own tastes and work; discussing in some detail the work you have seen is often the first way in which other directors, or those who might be able to help you, or be interviewing you, will try to find out about your ideas and work.

As a director rather than an interested theatregoer, it is worthwhile going to productions you would not naturally choose to see. As part of building up a knowledge of the breadth of theatre-making it is worth-while making a point of seeing work by those who are considered to be influential in their field; for example, seeing a piece by director Rupert Goold or playwright Simon Stephens if you’ve not seen their work; going to at least one big West End musical, a scratch night at BAC or a production in a found space, if these types of theatre lie outside your current knowledge and tastes. As well as building up lists of the productions, build up lists of key directors, writers, actors, designers and theatre companies who are influencing how theatre is being made.

The Stage, the Guardian and Whatsonstage websites are particularly useful in finding out not only what is on, but what is going to be on. For £165 a year, a subscription to Theatre Record offers the most detailed information on future productions across the country, as well as all the reviews of productions that receive more than one national review, and all the cast and production details of those productions. It comes out fortnightly and can also be bought issue by issue. The cheaper option is to add several of the independent theatre websites to your favourites list or RSS feeds, such as those mentioned above and others which might include Up The West End or UK Theatre Web.

Understanding the industry

It is also useful and easy to keep up to date with current debates about theatre-making through websites and blogs. The Guardian’s site includes blogs and articles by Lyn Gardner, Michael Billington and other commentators, and there are numerous independent blogs, and review or discussion websites set up by theatregoers, such as A Younger Theatre.

The above websites will give you a familiarity with the work of many of the leading theatre companies, and even companies that exist for only one production. It is useful to construct your own mental map of theatre companies in terms of their size, location, specific audiences and artistic policies, and how they relate to one another. The map might include the permanent and ever-visible companies, such as the National Theatre and the RSC; the national network of subsidised regional theatres; the national and regional touring companies; the companies creating work with, or by, young people and children; companies creating work with circus artists, digital artists, aerialists; the London, Manchester, Glasgow and Bristol fringes; those who specialise in street arts, site-specific or site-sympathetic work; companies creating work that actively involves the audience in its creation; and festivals such as Edinburgh, Latitude, HighTide and Forest Fringe. The boundaries between separate art forms are breaking down and definitions such as ‘physical theatre’ and ‘devised theatre’ seem inadequate and clumsy when describing companies who combine, say, text, movement, projection and music, and since the map constantly changes it is essential to keep up with these changes by visiting websites that discuss how theatre is made as well as those sites that review theatre.

Through visiting a few websites it is possible to get an overview of how government policy affects funding and the whole subsidised theatre ecology. From the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s site, through the Arts Council of England, the Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Wales, Arts Council of Northern Ireland sites, which list all the companies they fund, to a theatre’s individual website, it is possible to build up a picture of the whole subsidised theatre structure and how that structure is changing. From that, it is interesting to compare work that is subsidised and work that is produced commercially, or through profit sharing and the director’s overdraft or a canny independent producer. Even looking at the logos on a seasonal brochure or production flyer can reveal a lot about how a piece of theatre was financed and made.

It is also useful to begin to analyse the artistic policies of one or two theatres in more detail, to gain a better understanding of how work is made and the decisions behind individual play choices. For example, the Royal Court Theatre, the Bush, the Gate and the Lyric Hammersmith are all leading new-writing theatres in west London, but each has a distinctive engagement with new writers. The Royal Court has a strong writer development programme, mainly focused on writers under twenty-six, and an international department that engages with new writers from around the world, and this is reflected in their programming. The Bush and the Gate are both small theatres and although both often defy the physical limitations of their spaces by mounting some extraordinarily large productions, the Bush’s focus tends to be on emerging UK writers while the Gate’s is on international writers. The Lyric Hammersmith’s artistic director, Sean Holmes, mixes revivals of twentieth-century classics with new commissioned work from writers such as Simon Stephens and co-productions with companies such as Filter, who radically reimagine classics such as Chekhov’s Three Sisters with a strong emphasis on soundscapes. Similarly, it is enlightening to compare the programmes of theatres of similar size around the country. Although they are all serving large urban populations and are roughly comparable in size, the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, the Royal Exchange in Manchester and the Bristol Old Vic have very distinctive artistic policies, and it is interesting to ask to what extent these differing policies are the product of their artistic directors’ artistic vision and tastes, the profile and tastes of their local audiences, their outreach and creative learning policies, and the physical shape and sizes of their main auditoria and studios.

The Young Vic and the Old Vic often put on events where current issues affecting how directors work are discussed, and other theatres occasionally mount similar events: the above ‘what’s on’ and blog sites are good sources of information about one-off events. Improbable Theatre organises Devoted and Disgruntled, a democratic ‘open space’ forum for discussion and debate between theatre artists about whatever the artists wish to discuss. There is a large three-day event in London every January and meetings in other cities during the year plus smaller monthly meetings in London. The sites mentioned above often have details of future events such as these.

The directory Contacts, published each year in October, is regarded as a useful reference tool for anyone creating professional work. It contains the contact details for agents and personal managers, casting directors, drama schools, audition and rehearsal rooms; contacts for television, film and radio, as well as stage; scenery makers, and even vintage vehicle hire companies. It also contains the contact details for probably 80 per cent of the theatre companies in the UK, conveniently divided into categories. Although it is a photograph of a moving image, it is a really useful way of acquiring an overview of the UK’s theatre companies.

Knowledge of the ‘canon’

Of course, no one is going to consider a career as a director without some knowledge of the rich and wide range of extant plays from the Greeks to Harold Pinter. As was suggested above, as a director rather than a theatre lover it is surprising and stimulating to go to see theatre we might not have a natural taste for; and so it is worth mapping out our knowledge and ignorance of the main periods and places of the flowering of theatre, and to go sightseeing. First stop might not be single plays, but books which give an overview of the history of theatre, perhaps beginning with those which have the widest and broadest overview, such as Phyllis Hartnoll’s The Theatre: A Concise History, which covers the most significant points in theatre history from Dionysus to the first half of the twentieth century; although this is now becoming dated, it offers a general overview of two millennia of theatre-making, with fullest detail on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

From there, it might be useful to read at least one Greek tragedy, a Roman comedy, a play by a contemporary of Shakespeare – and of course a play or two by Shakespeare himself – a Jacobean or Caroline play, a Restoration comedy, a play in the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition, a play by Molière and Racine, a play by Schiller and Goethe, a nineteenth-century melodrama, a play by Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg and Brecht. I have deliberately missed out Irish dramatists, from Congreve to Shaw, and the Spanish Golden Age, but this is my reading list – the essential exercise is getting to know the geography of what is regarded as the ‘canon’ – and then to map out an individual journey through that terrain. Books with the widest sweep are very good atlases: at least you know what you don’t know.

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