ABSTRACT
This book has been difficult to write. As a working director and playwright, I can no longer feel - as I might have done forty or fifty years ago - that I am writing, for all my contemporaries and colleagues, a handbook that we would all recognise and assent to. On the contrary, with almost every sentence I have written, I have been aware that there are directors whose work I respect who would probably disagree with me profoundly. It is the purpose of the opening two chapters of this book to make something of the background of these disagreements clear, so that my readers, whether professional or not, will understand the parameters of any arguments they might have with what I have written.
