Getting Directions E-Book

Russ Hope

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

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. CHAPTERS: - Matthew Dunster, Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare - Steve Marmion, Dick Whittington and his Cat by Joel Horwood, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Steve Marmion - Natalie Abrahami, A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare - Nikolai Foster, Great Expectations by Tanika Gupta after Charles Dickens - Carrie Cracknell, Electra by Nick Payne after Sophocles - Joe Hill-Gibbins, The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams - OperaUpClose, Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte - Action Hero, Frontman by Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse '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 'A useful weapon in the armoury of any aspiring director and of great interest to anyone who would like to know more about what goes on in the rehearsal rooms in the modern theatre' British Theatre Guide

Leseprobe

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

Russ Hope

Foreword by Dominic Cooke

Contents

Epigraph

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: On a Lighting Gantry

1. Matthew Dunster

Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare

2. Steve Marmion

Dick Whittington and his Cat

by Joel Horwood, Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and Steve Marmion

3. Natalie Abrahami

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

by William Shakespeare

4. Nikolai Foster

Great Expectations

by Tanika Gupta after Charles Dickens

5. Carrie Cracknell

Electra by Nick Payne after Sophocles

6. Joe Hill-Gibbins

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

7. OperaUpClose

Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte

8. Action Hero

Frontman

by Gemma Paintin and James Stenhouse

Epilogue: Asking Better Questions

‘You know a conjuror gets no credit when once he has explained his trick, and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.’

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet)

‘I hold that the opposite is true.’

Russ Hope

Foreword

Dominic Cooke

Of all theatre arts, directing is the most mysterious. Rehearsal rooms are, by necessity, private places. Privacy is essential to allow directors and actors to take risks, free from the self-consciousness that creeps in when an audience is present. What takes place between actor and director in the rehearsal process is informed as much by the particulars of their relationship as it is by the text and experience they bring to their work. Much of the process is unconscious and therefore hard to explain to a third party. Some of the success of a production is down to alchemy – the magic that can happen when a group of individuals gather around a particular play at a particular time. This is one of the reasons why directing practice is so hard to communicate.

Books have been written by directors about their craft. Some of these are articulate and persuasive. Recently, Katie Mitchell and Mike Alfreds have anatomised their practices in two fascinating books, and I have heard young directors referring to these as influences on their own working methods.

However, no matter how structured a director’s process may seem, when it comes to the meeting between actor and director in the rehearsal room, the skilful director will adapt their approach to meet the particular needs of the actor and scene they are working on. Pragmatism is an essential tool for any director and the way that a process is applied is as significant as the process itself. The personality, passion and obsessions of each director play a crucial role in bringing a text to life. Therefore, there are as many directing processes as there are directors, and each director’s experience of a particular production is unique. This is one of the reasons that theatre flourishes – there is no ‘correct’ way of doing it. Directing is an art not a science.

This book reveals some of the diverse approaches to directing being used by young directors today. Russ Hope gives us unprecedented access to the rehearsal rooms and thinking of some of our most interesting young directors. Each director has a unique approach to their work, a particular set of values and a singular challenge in the play and space they are animating. Getting Directions documents this with a judicious mix of cold objectivity, sympathy and wit. The result is an incisive kaleidoscope of rehearsal-room practice which is a useful tool for directors to borrow from and a fascinating insight for the curious. I hope it interests and informs you as much as it did me.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted first and foremost to every director, artistic director, actor, stage manager, company manager, designer, marketer, usher and intern who let me into their rehearsal rooms and into the unfinished thoughts in their heads; their untidy first versions and ground plans not yet beautiful successes or heroic failures.

I am especially grateful for the freedom each director gave me to write and to prod as I saw fit. I remain amazed that they could be so engaged and interested in something peripheral to the sizeable task of making a theatre production.

Thanks also to Mark Shenton for the pep talk; to Andy Dickson at the Guardian for posting me a padded envelope stuffed with studies and raw interview tapes; to Rob Icke, Caroline Steinbeis and Steven Atkinson, whose interviews added to the general swirl; Louis Theroux, whose interview persona (the buffoonish Machiavelli) I stole wholesale; to my editor Matt for his guidance and his patience; to my partner Louise for guidance and patience of a different kind; and finally to the actor who hugged me, high on endorphins, having survived her first preview performance. ‘Thank you for all you did,’ she said, and I looked down at the bottle of complimentary beer in my hand then at my laptop, which lay sapping the theatre’s Wi-Fi as it beamed the day’s notes into cyberspace, and felt acutely aware that, whilst the company proved itself each day in rehearsals and now onstage, I had yet to show my hand.

‘I’m not sure I did anything,’ I said.

‘Yes you did,’ she said. ‘You were here.’

Introduction

On a Lighting Gantry

It is 2005 and I am crouching in a lighting gantry, hoping I cannot be heard, hoping to remain unnoticed. I am in the studio theatre at the university I attend where, twenty feet below, the director Peter Brook is rehearsing with the actor Bruce Myers ahead of a workshop performance of a new piece.

I was looking for my phone, which I had misplaced during rehearsals for a student play, and as I walked across the lighting gantry, I realised that something was going on below. The piece is The Grand Inquisitor, from the chapter in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which Jesus finds himself in the Spanish Inquisition. Myers, as the high priest, interrogates an empty chair. ‘If you are God, turn these stones into bread.’ I realise that, if I can stay quiet enough, I might stow away with them to Seville.

What I didn’t know is that Peter Brook rehearses in French. It doesn’t matter that the actor and the director are English, nor that the performance will be in English. I don’t speak French. Not a word.

Brook says something to Myers. He speaks, unbroken and calm, for maybe five seconds, and Myers nods and speaks the line again: ‘If you are God, turn these stones into bread.’ Before, it was a threat. Now, there is compassion within, and almost a longing for God to return. The actor appears to hold two contradictory ideas in his mind at once, and the poetry of that struggle reaches all the way up to the lighting gantry.

To this day, I do not know what Brook said that could have had such a transformative effect.

This book reinvestigates that moment, broadcasting the feed from the security camera in that often sacred place, the rehearsal room.

Each chapter documents the creative process for a production by a theatremaker at the forefront of a generation of British theatre. The account is part rehearsal diary, part essay and contains the most candid interviews you will read on the challenges of working as a professional theatremaker. Each account follows a production from its inception through pre-rehearsal meetings, rehearsals, the tech process and preview performances to press night. The productions are: a new version of a Greek play, two different approaches to Shakespeare plays, a Great American Play, an adaptation of a British novel, a pantomime, a plotless live performance by a devising company and an opera. At the end, there is a short section that offers a collection of principles to help the emerging director find focus, decide which projects to pursue, and create work that excites them.

Getting Directions is a book about creative relationships, approaching problems, and learning good judgement. It is a book about a day job as much as a vocation, and craft as much as art. It aims to help you ask better questions (of yourself, of texts, of companies) and develop your own theories and process. What it does not promise is quick fixes, for all silver bullets turn out to be quicksilver. This is to say nothing of the crime that it would be to rob you of the bittersweetness of making your own mistakes, those frustrating, exhilarating steps on the path towards developing your own voice, with its own attendant quirks and tactics.

I can’t drive. When people ask why, I tell them I took lessons (which is true) and was doing well (which is not true). Then, one day I convinced myself that, living in London, I would have no need of a car and, in any case, wouldn’t be able to afford one (true, not true, true). Since then, I maintain, I have had no desire to drive – buses and trains are just fine, thanks (definitely not true).

The truth is: driving scared me. A car weighs a ton and can move at eighty miles an hour, yet we’ve decided to let almost anyone drive one. For all I know, someone might drive his car into something fragile and valuable like someone else. Or me. Unable to compartmentalise that fear, London’s roads – even the quiet back roads near my parents’ house – transformed into Spaghetti Junctions and mountains. The fact that I had paid attention in my lessons and knew the Highway Code meant nothing. I would have been crazy to ask my teacher to put me up for the exam, and he would have been crazy to consider it.

Driving, like any activity, requires a balance of knowledge, skill and behaviour: in this case that means knowledge of the Highway Code, the dexterity to point the car where you want it to go, and a temperament that’s neither hesitant nor gung-ho. Anything less than three out of three and you’ll be sitting at the bus stop, bursting with knowledge but utterly ineffective.

You could be reading this book for any number of reasons. Perhaps you have strong instincts but want to revisit first principles. Perhaps you excel in the abstract theory of directing but find yourself clamming up every time you’re forced to communicate your ideas. Perhaps you want to know how to get a leg up in a saturated industry. Or perhaps you are simply beginning to think about plays as more than simply ‘staged literature’, and what the screenwriter Charlie Kaufmann once called ‘the staggering possibilities of light, vibration and time’.

A Few Ground Rules

1. The chapters snip and pinch time. As most rehearsal processes share a common ancestor, I have focused on the elements of each process that seemed most remarkable or instructive. For example, one chapter might emphasise casting, or the tech period, whilst another passes quickly over those sections or omits them entirely. This is not to say that a conversation in one chapter did not happen in some version in another, or that each director did not have something to say about each part of the process.

2. When we are searching for answers, it can be tempting to focus on craft to the extent that we create a depersonalised system. The reality is that any work that is of value will be personal and idiosyncratic to its maker.

3. Part of the director’s job is to tailor process to purpose. With that in mind, this book does not claim to give the definitive account of a director’s mind or imply an unchanging process. It merely captures a particular process that worked for a particular production at a particular point in time.

4. Any comparisons I draw between individuals or processes are mine alone.

5. The gendered pronoun for a director will reflect the gender of the director in that chapter.

6. Because our focus is on directors, the protagonist of each chapter is more fleshed-out than the company. To refer to a director by name, then to ‘an actor’, ‘the actors’ or ‘the company’ could be interpreted as suggesting two sides of a conflict or a lone-wolf auteur against a crowd, but nothing could be further from the truth. I cannot overstate the contribution of actors, as individuals and as a group, to each production.

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

Shakespeares Globe

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