"What is the Job of a Director?" by Joe Harmston

This is the first part in an exciting series of articles written by Joe answering "What is the Job of a Director?"

In 1993 I found myself directing the Greek actor Kostas Karas.  He described the business of rehearsal as ‘Making the Icons’.  It is the most eloquent description of what we - actors, directors, designers and so on - are doing when we take a writer’s work and put it on the stage.  We are making the icons; creating the pictures which are sufficiently potent with meaning to aid the communication of the writer’s ideas to the audience.  Hence the title of this book.

What I hope to do in the pages which follow is to examine some of the ways in which we do this.  This is a highly personal account; I make no apology for being utterly subjective throughout.  The work of every theatre practitioner is unique.  We all are subject to thousands of influences; some conscious, others less so.  We all steal ideas, images, techniques, phrases and anecdotes and make them our own.  Yet however much our work may be indebted to that of others we cannot help coin it anew.  Thus my thoughts as a director can only ever be just that: my thoughts. In other words, this book in no way purports to be a how to manual.  There can be no such thing.  And even if there could, I would not have the temerity to write it.  No, the thoughts which follow are, I hope, a springboard for the reader to interrogate and clarify their own preconceptions and ideas about what the business of directing plays is about.

‘Yes, but what do you actually DO?’ is a question every director will have been asked with disturbing regularity by people outside the business.  (When it comes from inside the business a director has cause to be worried.)  There is still an uncertainty about the difference between a director.

Director is, it seems to me, a deeply misleading title for what I try to do in the rehearsal room and auditorium, since it suggests something autocratic, dictatorial and remote.  We do not imagine a Police Officer ‘directing’ traffic to have any creative connection with the vehicles which follow her instructions.  There is a common misconception that stage directing is the business of telling people what to do; of deciding on entrances, exits and places to stand (here we are in the business of avoiding collisions like the Police Officer).  Our job does involve all this but in a manner utterly unconnected with directing traffic and, in the case of good directors, to a very minor degree.

As an Assistant Director (of which more later), I had the privilege of watching a huge number of experienced directors practicing their craft.  Some were effortlessly brilliant.  Some were not.  Some revelled in demonstrating how well prepared they were on day one and then revealed not one new idea as the weeks wore on.  Some barely seemed to have picked up the play at the read-through and then elucidated the text with easy familiarity as rehearsal unfolded.  Some took notes on reams of A4 and then delivered them for ten minutes; others entered run-throughs armed with a slip of paper you would be hard pressed to get a telephone number on and then gave notes for two hours.  Some were strong on text; others were great on images.  Some lost interest when we got to the Technical rehearsal; others felt that was when they finally had something to do!  All brought something unique to the process.   

From most I took away a moment which seemed to demonstrate sublimely the art of directing.  Frank Hauser told me that there are only three phrases you need as a director:  ‘You know that thing you’re doing in scene two? Well, do more of it.’ ‘You know that thing you’re doing in scene two? Well, do less of it.’ ‘You know that thing you’re doing in scene two? Well, don’t.’   Now this will seem glib.  Surely there is more to directing than that?  Perhaps not.  The truth is that all good directors, I would suggest, strive for a state of play where the simplicity of these notes is all that is required.  Frank’s three phrases are predicated on the understanding that your actors can act.   (Obvious, one would think, but not all directors believe this and sadly they are sometimes right.)  If good actors, working on a good play, in a positive rehearsal room have worked hard with you over two weeks’ of rehearsal, this sort of note should have a great effect.  It is a note which respects the actor’s craft.  It says, "I don’t know how you do ‘that thing’ and it is none of my business, but do it more/less or don’t."

Harold Pinter gave the greatest single note I have ever heard in a rehearsal room.  The rehearsals were for Twelve Angry Men and Peter Vaughn played the racist Juror who suddenly displays his prejudice in a wonderful aria of a speech describing a group of Hispanic boys fighting in the street.  It ends with him saying "..and then, bang, one of them is lying dead in the gutter."  Peter played the speech magnificently and finished with a dramatic gesture with his hands ‘presenting’ the imagined dead body of the boy at his feet.  Harold, who seldom takes notes except in performance and always watches the action rather than the page, watched the scene and then asked Peter quietly: "Peter, that gesture - what is that about?"  Peter responded enthusiastically: "He can see it, Harold: The scene in the street; the gang of kids; the fight.  He can see it all so clearly - it’s all there in his mind -."  Harold broke in gently:  "Yes, Peter; in his mind.  And that’s where it should stay."  It was a wonderful note given with humour, delicacy and respect.  I had been marvelling at Peter’s powerful conjuring up of the scene and I was with him all the way as he gestured the body in the gutter.  Harold recognised the gesture as the externalisation of a stage of actor’s exploration.  Peter needed to make the image concrete in order to be able to play it with conviction.  Making the gesture to ‘place’ the image was part of that.  As an actor as well as a director and writer, Harold believed that the gesture was superfluous.  Having created the image for himself, Peter could now play the moment and keep the exact placing of the image to himself.  Harold was right.  The gesture was, if you like, equivalent to a mathematician showing the workings which have taken him from a complex problem to an elegant solution.  They may help us see how he got there but in doing so they may also mask the elegant simplicity of the solution.   It also, of course, had the effect of taking his focus towards the floor instead of leaving his face open for the audience to see.  Peter understood completely, kept the image in his mind and, night after night created a chilling moment of revelation for the audience which would almost certainly have been dissipated by a specifically placed image.

In that same rehearsal room - one of the most convivial and creative I have ever been in - someone once raised a question prefaced by the phrase "the audience might think...". "Fuck the audience!" responded Harold.  The terminology might be unexpected but the thought is unquestionable.  Never second guess your audience.  To do so is to insult them.  Direct and act for yourself.  You are the only person whose views you know. The moment you let the construction "the audience will..." enter your conversation, you are separating yourself from them.  In doing so, you will inevitably underestimate their collective intelligence.  Collectively, your audience will always be more familiar with the world of the play than you in one way or another.  Trevor Nunn’s wonderful Hamlet at the Old Vic in 2004 was a remarkably fresh rendition of the text but presented the gravediggers armed with a shovel and not a spade.  I found myself sitting next to an undertaker.  The world of the scene was more familiar to him than to any actor or director and it was marred by the fact that it is impossible to dig anything, let alone a grave, with a shovel.  Never forget that your key role in rehearsal is to be the audience from day one.  You are the arbiter of believe-ability.  If you don’t believe what you are watching and listening to, no-one else will.  Some people - the undertaker for example - will know something you don’t and won’t believe something they see or hear.  You can never know what every member of every audience is going to think or feel in response to the production.  Therefore there is no point in thinking of anyone but you.  "Fuck the audience: Do I believe it?"

A positive awareness of the audience has been in danger of becoming unfashionable.  There have in recent years been, for example, productions which have decided that the subject matter was so serious or important that taking a curtain call was inappropriate.  What exactly does this say?  There are times when these last moments of an evening can be used very much within the drama.  Witness David Grindley’s use of a completely static curtain call at the end of Journey’s End:  true there was no jolly bowing but the audience was clearly and respectfully given the opportunity to show their appreciation for their evening in the theatre.  Cutting a curtain call altogether seems to be saying "Fuck the audience" in an entirely aggressive and negative way.  Who do we think we are performing for if not the audience?  Ourselves?  If this is so we are in dangerous territory.  Has the work of the rehearsal room and the performance been a self-indulgent therapy session for the company?  Are we saying the audience have simply been lucky voyeurs on a private experience and that now we are satiated they can sod off home without our ever acknowledging their presence?  We may well want the audience to feel as if they are voyeurs on a private experience during the action but surely to refuse to acknowledge their presence at all is not suspension of disbelief, it is an outright denial of belief.