From: bprofane@netcom.com (Gert Niewahr)
Subject: Re: Directing Yourself
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 92 10:47:05 GMT
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest) 

In article <9207272204.AA03613@csc.Cornell-Iowa.edu> rjones@CORNELL-IOWA.EDU ("Rick Jones") writes:

As far as emergencies go, well, yeah, it may be best to stick
yourself in the role.  But people were responding with instances
where they had cast themselves premeditatedly, despite their
protestations that it's a bad idea.  

>>>Do you see any self-directed
>shows above the semi-professional level?  No.
>
>NO??? Not often, perhaps, but I seem to recall several self-directed
> productions apiece by the likes of John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier,
> and Orson Welles.  I'll settle for being associated with such "amateurish"
>company!

Interesting point, but I don't suppose you know that Olivier was
regarded as a rather poor theatrical director.  It's true.  Read
his essay in "Directors on Directing" and you'll see that he was
totally dictatorial as a director.  "I expect my actors to do
exactly what I tell them to do and to do it quickly..."  His focus
was almost entirely technical.  After all, he absolutely abhorred
internally-realized (so-called Method) acting.  Gielgud implies
much the same beliefs in his essay in that book.  

The problem is that the self-directed pieces of all three men were,
I believe, exclusively Shakespeare.  Shakesperean dramatics, and
classical dramatics in general, is entirely declamatory.  There is
little requirement that you stay in character because you're acting
on the lines the whole time.  The shows are made to be strictly
blocked ahead of time.  What the director really does is mesh all
the technical aspects (lights, sets, costume, etc.), set up the
stage traffic patterns, and then sit back and check on line
readings.  Try directing a modern script by nailing your actors
down to a strict pattern of movement without a word about the soul
of their characters and you'll end up with a dead show.

[You folks who've had graduate-level theatre history can skip this
next part]

Why is this?  Did actor-directors necessitate declamatory theatre
or vice versa?  Is the virtually simultaneous invention of the
director and shift from declamatory to interpreted theatre a
coincidence?  The answer is yes and no, respectively.  The model of
the theatrical company that pervaded Western theatre as it rose out
of Dark Ages liturgies was one of a lead actor who was director,
producer, manager, etc. with a group of supporting actors, crude
technicians, musicians, etc.  The lead actor almost always took the
main role in a show as well as telling everyone else what to do,
which was usually to keep well upstage and not get in his way.
This model persisted into the early 20th century.  The movie "The
Dresser" is about such a classic mountebank: The main character was
based on the last of the great "actor-managers."

Anyway, so all the companies were led by these guys.  Funny, isn't
it, how the essential style of dramatic writing stayed constant
through hundreds of years?  We shifted from verse to prose dramatic
texts, but the basic style was declamatory...and basic acting was
to strut down to the footlights and blast away at the top of your
lungs.  Kean was just a better blaster than most.  Then along came
the well-made play and Ibsen, who took this new form to its
heights.  Ibsen's plays wouldn't work with static blocking.  His
characters demanded that you play between the lines.  Soon the
stage managers and lead actors were spending a lot of time out in
the seats watching the other actors work.  Now, interestingly, the
obscure Englishman (whose name escapes me) who actually took
himself out of the show to create it from beyond the footlights was
directing Shakespeare.  Nevertheless, he is generally credited to
be the first director.  The actor-manager troupes lasted for years,
but they were pretty much limited to Shakespeare.  These wonderful
new scripts by Shaw and Ibsen and Strindberg were being produced by
this new breed of masters who *didn't* tread the boards.

So the advent of interpreted drama and the well-made play could not
have occurred until the declamatory style of acting was on the
wane, and that wasn't going to really happen until someone booted
aside the actor-managers.  What really happened is that some of the
actor-managers started taking small roles so that they could
concentrate on making the productions more realistic, thus opening
the door for new, realistic scripts.  So for all that we laud the
memory of great actors like Kean, all their hamming was actually
holding back the development of truly dramatic plays.

Now, the reason this is important is that you have to look at
Olivier and Gielgud as actor-managers, not directors.  They were
coming out of that tradition and they were working exclusively with
declamatory material.  Welles, too, is most famous for his
self-directed voodoo "Much Ado," although I think he may have
directed himself in some modern scripts.

The bottom line is that Olivier and Gielgud were exceptions to the
rule, and not laudatory ones at that.  Olivier's directorial
reputation lies with his translation of Shakespeare to film and his
brilliance in maintaining the classical ambience in the new medium.

If you want to talk about instances where self-direction has worked
in the modern era, you've got to talk about the Living Theatre, the
Open Theatre, Grotowski collectivism, and that kind of thing.  I'll
admit this kind of thing can produce brilliant, innovative theatre
(although the Open Theatre progressed a lot when Chaikin took
himself out of the shows), but these groups were working with
limited scripts or none at all.  Their fundamental esthetic did
not include fealty to the vision of a playwright, and that's a
whole different dynamic.  

Modern scripts demand true directors.  They're written with that
expectation.  Ignoring this stricture is to work against the basic
premises of modern theatre.