Getting Directions

A Fly-on-the-Wall Guide for Emerging Theatre Directors

Russ Hope

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781780011936
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theaterregie und& Theaterproduktion

The theatre rehearsal room is a sacred place. What goes on there is mysterious, alchemical and closely guarded. So how are aspiring theatre directors supposed to learn their craft?

In Getting Directions, Russ Hope gives us the benefit of unprecedented, fly-on-the-wall access to eight rehearsal rooms. He has shadowed some of the UK's most exciting young directors at each step of the way, on productions as diverse as Shakespeare at the Globe, Greek tragedy at the Gate, Tennessee Williams at the Young Vic, panto at the Lyric Hammersmith, and a touring Dickens dramatisation.

Describing each of these rehearsal periods from first concept to first night in revealing and often remarkable detail, Hope gets under the skin of the professional director, and reveals the decisions they must make on a daily basis: How best to arrive at a concept and communicate this to a design team? Which games and exercises really help to unlock the text for actors? And what should you do if everything is falling apart during the tech?

Getting Directions will equip emerging directors with a practical handbook, not bogged down with theories or precepts, that lifts the lid on what it means to be a director. The result is both a portrait and a masterclass from a generation of theatre practitioners, essential reading for anyone who wants to follow in their footsteps, or to understand what directing really entails.

' An incisive kaleidoscope of rehearsal-room practice which is a useful tool for directors to borrow from and a fascinating insight for the curious. ' Dominic Cooke, from his Foreword

Troilus and Cressida

by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s Globe

Matthew Dunster directs, writes, teaches and acts – and probably in that order. He has directed new work (Mogadishu, Royal Exchange, Manchester; Love the Sinner, National Theatre; The Frontline, Shakespeare’s Globe), large-scale Elizabethan productions (Macbeth, Royal Exchange; Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Globe) and worked on adaptations that push notions of theatricality (Saturday Night Sunday Morning and 1984, Royal Exchange; The Farenheit Twins, Barbican). As a writer, his plays include Children’s Children (Almeida Theatre) and You Can See the Hills (Young Vic). He teaches drama to many different groups of people, and is an associate artist of the Young Vic.

‘Directing isn’t about playing loads of games... it’s about detail, and detail is about craft. It’s taken me a long time to get to a place where I’m comfortable in my process, and where the cast are respectful but we can have fun. Getting there takes guile, graft and the help and guidance of others.’

Matthew Dunster

Paul Stocker (Troilus), Matthew Kelly (Pandarus) and Laura Pyper (Cressida)

Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare

Opened at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, on 22 July 2009.

Creative

Director Matthew Dunster

Designer Anna Fleischle

Composer Olly Fox

Choreographer Aline David

Cast

Ulysses Jamie Ballard

Paris Ben Bishop

Andromache Olivia Chaney

Hector Christopher Colquhoun

Agamemnon Matthew Flynn

Achilles Trystan Gravelle

Menelaus/Alexander Richard Hansell

Thersites Paul Hunter

Aeneas Fraser James

Pandarus Matthew Kelly

Priam/Calchas Séamus O’Neill

Cressida Laura Pyper

Helen/Cassandra Ania Sowinski

Nestor John Stahl

Troilus Paul Stocker

Diomedes/Helenus Jay Taylor

Patroclus Beru Tessema

Ajax Chinna Wodu

Musicians Joe Townsend, Jon Banks, Ian East, Phil Hopkins and Genevieve Wilkins

To: the cast of Troilus and Cressida

Date: 23 May 2009

Subject: Welcome

▶ 1 Attachment [Troilus_rehearsal_draft.doc]

Hello Cast,

I just wanted to send a note with the rehearsal script (see attached).

I have worked with some of you before, and I think the work

I have done editing the script will feel pretty tame to you guys.

To those new to the way I work – don't worry about any ideas contained in the stage directions: they are first ideas and not prescriptive. Your ideas will always be better than mine and I look forward to hearing them.

My rules on approaching anything are simple: CLARITY – STORY – DRAMATIC EFFECTIVENESS. I want it to be clear and exciting.

In getting the play down from its massive 28,500 words to around 21,000, sometimes the iambic has been ruptured. Ruptured, but never disregarded. I know how it works and have only made sacrifices where I felt it would improve the chances of a modern audience understanding the text. Where I have chopped things around, the original is always there for us to go back to. Likewise, let’s keep looking for cuts and places where our modern understanding of dramatic language can help us tell his brilliant story. Let’s collaborate with Shakespeare. He was a populist – he would want people to get it and be excited by it.

Having spent so long getting inside the play, I am convinced of its brilliance. I can't wait to take you all inside its dark heart. Every character wriggles with complexity.

Rehearsals are simple. From day two we'll do circuit training and stretches for the first 45 mins (you'll all be dicking around in togas and sandals so it's in your best interest!) and for most of the first two weeks we will read and read and read.

Everything points to a strong Homeric show full of anachronistic surprises. I can't wait.

I'm off to Croatia in about five hours so I for one will be tanned and beautiful when we meet!

Looking forward to it.

Matthew

Shakespeare’s Globe

It is an uncharacteristically warm morning on the South Bank of the Thames. An ice-cream van is parked outside the entrance to Shakespeare’s Globe, its queue snaking towards the Millennium Bridge. In front of the theatre gates, a tourist photographs her son as he gives his best ‘Alas, poor Yorick’, a Flake ’99 standing in for the skull. As the ice cream melts down his wrist, the kid accelerates his half-remembered speech: something about ‘I knew him well...’

I am at the corner of New Globe Walk and Bankside, looking at Shakespeare’s Globe, an oddity of wood and thatch sandwiched between the chrome and glass of twenty-first-century restaurants and bars. A blue plaque on the wall in front of me reminds passers-by that this institution, so quintessentially English, was the vision of an American, Sam Wanamaker, who founded the Globe Theatre Trust in 1970 and pursued the project until his death in 1993, four years before the theatre presented its first season.

In 2008, Dominic Dromgoole became the second artistic director of the Globe following Mark Rylance, an actor known for his shape-shifting, mercurial performances. Like Rylance, Dromgoole combines a classical appreciation of Shakespeare’s work with a love of the raucous; the bearpit on which the new Globe is modelled. Earlier in his career, Droomgoole served as artistic director of the Bush in West London, a prolific new-writing theatre, where he premiered work by writers including David Harrower and Conor McPherson.

As part of his first season, Droomgoole commissioned a piece from the playwright Ché Walker. The Frontline was a head-on, high-speed collision of the Globe’s legacy with the present. Set in modern-day Camden, a company of hoodies, asylum seekers and lap dancers took to the Elizabethan stage with sneakers and boom boxes to celebrate and dissect all that London is and could be.

To direct The Frontline, Dromgoole hired Matthew Dunster.

Matthew Dunster

I first meet Matthew at the Young Vic, after a matinee performance of his play You Can See the Hills, which he also directs. It is midweek and the theatre is two-thirds full. Matthew sits on the back row, his arms spread across the empty seats either side. As the house lights go down, he kicks his feet up on the seat in front. He reacts as if he doesn’t know how the story ends, laughing at the jokes and leaning in to the tension.

After The Frontline, Dominic Dromgoole invited Matthew to return to the Globe, this time to direct a play by Shakespeare. Dominic suggested Troilus and Cressida, one of the few in the canon that the theatre had yet to produce in a full-scale production, and which Matthew hadn’t read, either when Dominic suggested it or when he agreed to the job. He tells me this and he registers my surprise:

People tend not to believe me when I say that, but I wanted to do a Shakespeare play I didn’t even have a sense of. I’ve acted in some of the others or I’ve read them, but I don’t know anything about Troilus and Cressida so I can treat it as a new play, and that’s exciting. Of course, once I read it, I realised how difficult it’s going to be. I had to read the script twice before I understood a word of it.

I leave thinking this is bluster; the boasts of a director who wants the first notes I make to be that I have just met a ‘maverick’. At home, I pull my Complete Works from the shelf and flick past nine hundred pages to Troilus and Cressida.

Damn.

I have to read it twice too before I understand much of what’s going on.

A Quick History Lesson

The story of Troilus and Cressida is ancient, and has passed through many tellers. It begins seven years into the siege of Troy, when the war has reached a stalemate. The demigods of Greek mythology – Agamemnon, Ajax, Achilles, Hector, Menelaus, Paris and Helen – are siloed in their camps, breaking the monotony with skirmishes. A Trojan prince, Troilus, falls in love with a young woman, Cressida, whose father defected to the Greeks, but their love is short-lived: the Trojan generals agree to trade Cressida for one of their own, a soldier languishing in a Greek prisoner-of-war camp.

Shakespeare probably knew the story through the versions by Chaucer and Homer. But where Chaucer treats his subjects with wry humour and sympathy, Shakespeare hunts them for vanity; where Homer sees heroes, Shakespeare sees a boil to be lanced. In Shakespeare’s version, the war is a chaos fought over a ‘whore and cuckold’ from which no one will learn a damned thing. Thersites, the knowing fool, says it best: ‘Nothing [but lechery] holds fashion.’

Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida has long confounded critics, audiences and theatremakers alike. Without a protagonist, veering between comedy and tragedy, and with an ending that raises more questions than it answers, it was consigned to that drawer marked ‘problem play’ where it gathered dust for best part of three hundred years. There is some suggestion that it may not even have been performed during Shakespeare’s lifetime. In the late sixteenth century, the dramatist John Dryden tried to make sense of the play, only he didn’t ‘make sense’ of it so much as edit out the bits he didn’t understand, reordering scenes, adding and removing dialogue and killing Cressida in the play’s final third to allow Troilus to rise as a traditional revenge hero. Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida remained the favoured text until the play went out of fashion, remaining unperformed until the horrors of the First World War prompted society at large to reinvestigate the gulf between the ancient warriors they’d read about in books, and the unprecedented horror they now read about in the newspapers, or witnessed first-hand.

It could also be argued that modern audiences, schooled in the fractured narratives of contemporary cinema and the slow-burning ensemble stories of television, are simply better primed to respond to the play’s structure. Either way, Matthew isn’t interested in critical baggage. ‘People obsess over whether it’s a tragedy or a history play or a comedy,’ he says. ‘The answer seems obvious: it’s all of them. If we celebrate those complications, I think the audience will accept them.’

The Text and the Space

The Globe has an imposing character of its own. Half the audience stands, and performances happen in the open air without amplified sound. In the daytime, actor and audience share the sunlight – every face is visible – and the quality this creates is difficult to pin down, even to those who have worked in it. A magnetic field hums between the play and the space that Matthew would be ‘a fool’, he says, to ignore. A production at the Globe requires a bespoke response.

Conceiving a production, a director has two main sources of inspiration:

• The Text

• The Performance Space

Directing a production for the Globe can be a disarming experience as it robs the director of two of the main tools of contemporary theatre: recorded sound and focused light. The reason for this is an artistic policy that the theatre calls ‘original practice’. Enforced to varying degrees depending on the production, original practice ensures that the audience’s experience of the production reflects the aesthetics of Elizabethan theatre. Yes, the auditorium is fitted with a sprinkler system (after all, the original Globe burned down!), and yes, there may be video monitors backstage, but these are usually hidden from the audience.

Then there is the space, which is infamously exposing, large and open on three sides. Complicated sets tend to obscure many in the audience’s view, and are cu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: On a Lighting Gantry
• 1. Matthew Dunster
• 2. Steve Marmion
• 3. Natalie Abrahami
• 4. Nikolai Foster
• 5. Carrie Cracknell
• 6. Joe Hill-Gibbins
• 7. OperaUpClose
• 8. Action Hero
• Epilogue: Asking Better Questions
• About the Author
• Copyright Information