How Theatre Directors came into being.

1. The Emergence of the
Director

2. When was the job created?

3. The Progression Through Time
● Cave painting and hunting rituals
○ Needed the power of theatre to tell their stories
● Greek Theatre 2000 years ago
○ Shared cultural ethos
○ Chorus
● Medieval Passion Plays
○ Still religious and shared assuumptions
● Shakespeare and Moliere
○ Direction in the text
○ Wrote for a company of players
● Actor Manager

4. What constitutes our shared cultural ethos?
Divide into teams and discuss
1. Religion
2. Politics
3. Rituals
4. Media

5. The shift of a unified world
● Led to commercial theatre appeal
○ Taking out controversial topics and only presenting acceptable views.
● Rise of the Actor Manager

6. Pictorial Stage
● Sets, costumes, and lighting led the way in innovation because writers took
longer to realize the audience craved more.
● Birth of perspective drawing
○ Needed a director to tell actors where to stand.
○ Theatre of spectacle during this time

7. The Duke of Saxe-Meiningen
● His touring troupe becomes the turning point in 1874
○ Historically accurate sets and costumes
○ Intensive rehearsals
○ Disciplined ensemble acting
○ Famous for big group and chorus scenes staging
○ Had a leader in each movement group
● Europe and America see the light

8. Realism
● A rebellion against the pictorial stage
● Writing based on Science and truth
● Chekhov’s plays and direction
● Stanislavski’s method

9. What do directors do today?
● Director controls what the audience perceives.
● Director creates theatrical forms in response to the text.
● The play should inspire the director. The director is the interpreter of that
play.

10. Why the job title was created
● The search for a theatrical form that impacts universally, led to the rise of
the director.
● The director decides which risks are worth taking artistically.
○ New forms and styles
○ Re-examining old ones

11. Directing job description
● Unifies the vision of designers, actors, and producers.
● Creates impactful work and tells the story the playwright intended.

12. A Good Director is/has….
Curious
Listens
Creative
Innovative
Interpersonal skills
Authentic
Determined
Approachable
Confident
Authoritative
Organized
Researcher
Motivator
Compromiser

13. Be a Director not a Dictator
“It has been a commonplace (I first heard the formulation some years ago from
Peter Ustinov) that while the French is a playwright’s theatre, the English an
actor’s theatre, the American is a director’s theatre.” (Clurman, 3)
● What do you think?
● Point out that ”The theatre cannot live through any single organ of its being.”
(Clurman, 3)
● The director is a collaborator and seamstress of other’s ideas
● “No Part Is the Whole” (Clurman, 5)
● “It is not the director alone who gives the play direction.” (Clurman, 5)

14. Director must depend on collaborators
● How does a director depend on other collaborators?
• Playwright: Given circumstances, words, action.
• Actors: natural temperament, imagination, skill, and intuition

15. Stories of why we need theatre
In the middle ages when actors traveled from town to town performing. When
they died they weren’t buried in hallowed ground like everyone else. They used
to be buried at a crossroads with a stake through their hearts because villagers
were so frightened of their power to conjure up the spirits of their characters.
They thought the spirits would travel the roads instead. Theatre mattered to
them.

16. Stories of why we need theatre
In 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany, the first official act of
Goebbels the propaganda minister was to shut down the theatres. The Nazis
were so afraid of the power of live performance.

17. Stories of why we need theatre
In the eastern block before the fall of communism, the only place that you could
critisize the government nad get away with it was in the theatre, because it was
art. So much so that in 1989, after the Iron Curtain fell, the first President of the
Czech republic was a Playwright and political dissident named Vaclav Havel.
The theatre had become so important in a country where free speech was
outlawed that Havel had become the voice of the country.