My Thoughts on Directing for the Theatre

I started my career in lighting but quickly moved to directing, even after my training at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (then the RSAMD), I felt perplexed at the director’s job, it seemed vainly authorial, it seemed high handed and it seemed to have no professional lingua-Franca, no language to communicate with actors.

I also spent a year training and left knowing little about the process of directing in rehearsal, although I greatly enjoyed my time there and learned to become a theatre professional.

I eventually learned how to direct actors, rather than come up with a vision and impose it on them, when I became a coach, because I started to think about our accepted acting and directing practises and explore them, throwing then aside if they were useless, testing and exploding them.

I recently put on my directing hat again for Broken Bird’s superbly acted production of Closer, and it fired me up again. I am directing a Chekhov early in 2013, and Anthony Neilson’s controversial play Stitching at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow in April.

I thought it would be good to share with you some of the ways I work as a director, and via negativa, by what I do not do, and I do not like:

One) I don’t like to direct with the script in my hand.

Why? It makes me concentrate on the 7% of human communication which is verbal. As a director, I believe it is my job to direct the action of the performance. I spend a significant amount of time developing a strong practical understanding of the play script, the characters and their world, but then in rehearsal, I work by directing not the text but the complex interactions of the actors. I appreciate that this isn’t how others do it, but my concern is with the transformation of the play from page to stage, and that means leaving behind the anchor of the script.

Two) I don’t like the actors to use the actual words until the last minute but I demand that they turn up with all their lines learned already.

Yes. I believe that going over and over the scene kills it one scene at a time, as directors layer in more and more ‘significance’. I try to let the play speak for itself, let the moment to moment interaction of the actors create the performance. So while we rehearse the play, we do so without using the words.

The control-freak director demands that a play fulfills their vision, even imposing line-readings. Now, we directors are all control freaks, but we are working on the wrong level when we attempt to work at the level of lines.

Directors direct the action of the play-
Now I should explain that before I get emails telling me I am superficial. The action of the play is the psychophysical struggle of character and actor to achieve a fictional and real world goal.

The reason I demand that the actors know their lines is that so much time is wasted while lazy actors bumble around trying to learn their lines through osmosis in repetitious rehearsals.

When the actors come to rehearsal with lines learned but zero prosody inflected onto them, then when they finally use them, the lines serve the actor in the moment and not some pre-scripted tone.
Three) I don’t like to ‘get it on its feet’ as soon as possible.

I believe that this urge to get the actors acting is misplaced. First we understand the script and then we can act upon it. If we work on our feet, we will end up guessing, improvising, and making interpretations based on our ignorance, rather than our deep understanding of the play.

Yes, we sit around the table for around 16 hours for a 120 minute play, but our understanding of the play and the scenes is second to none. And rather than waste time debating nothings, we get to the core, the character’s desires and how the actor can do something like that upon the stage.

I hope my thoughts are food for thought, I am not trying to be controversial, but to explore my own practise and share it with you. And if it differs from your model of theatre making, I hope it challenges you and strengthens your way of working.

We will soon be teaching directing at ACS, for more informationclick here

COACH

Mark Westbrook – Senior Acting Coach