ABSTRACT

In theatre history, the twentieth century is notable for the rise to pre-eminence of the director. Before that, whoever it was who arranged the actors on the stage, their exits and entrances, as well as executed all the other tasks the contemporary director is asked to do, seemed of small importance. Often, and where possible, it seems that the play was ‘directed’

by the playwright. The word ‘wright’ means ‘maker’, and certainly in ancient Greece the play was not considered ‘made’ until the performance was over. The scripts contain no stage directions (frustratingly for later producers as well as scholars) because the authors directed the performers – solo actors and chorus members alike. Indeed we know that the Choregos (financial backer) paid the author and the chorus to rehearse, sometimes for months before the performance. In the medieval period, the mystery plays seem usually to have

been under the direction of a ‘pageant master’ who was responsible for ‘bringing forth’ the plays. ‘Bringing forth’ included not only directing the actors, but also ‘bringing forth’ the wagon upon which they would perform. A well-known miniature painting, ‘The Martyrdom of St Apollonia’ from The Hours of Etienne

Chevalier by Jean Fouquet (c.1420-c.1481), depicts scaffold stages or grandstands surrounding a theatrical presentation of the martyrdom, supervised by a proto-director with stick (a sort of cross between a magician’s wand and a conductor’s baton) and book in hand. In England by the time of Henry VIII, it seems that it was possible for local town leaders to hire mystery play scripts for performance, and it is known that professional actors were hired to appear in, and almost certainly ‘bring forth’, some mystery plays. In France, the pageant-master and poet Jean Bouchet (1476-1557), wrote that he was responsible for designing the stage and scenery, as well as stands for spectators, contracting carpenters to construct them, casting and rehearsing the plays, as well as acting himself, finding and hiring doorkeepers, and making announcements to the audience. As with the Greek theatre, the playwright in Shakespeare’s

theatre was probably ultimately responsible for the staging of the play. Perhaps the best fictional portrait of a playwright-poet is Shakespeare’s Peter Quince in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who struggles to control his actors’ exuberance in order to be able to ‘make’ the play. He assembles the acting company, explains the play briefly to them, casts them and gives out the ‘parts’ to the actors. Before the twentieth century, it was common practice for the actor to be given no more than his or her own part, written out on a long scroll, with the cue (three or four words) from the previous speech to show when they begin speaking. That was all the actor was expected to attend to. Quince also arranges rehearsals, makes a props list and directs the actors, indicating where they enter and exit, correcting their pronunciation and discussing their character’s place within the story. Shakespeare probably did much the same for the King’s Men at the Globe Theatre, and later in the century we know that the French playwright and actor, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molie`re, directed his own plays because he shows himself doing so in The Impromptu of Versailles. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the responsibility

for staging a play in the theatres of Europe fell largely on the shoulders of the actor-manager. In England, David Garrick, Edmund Kean (1789-1833), and Henry Irving were among the famous actors who staged plays to ensure they themselves were squarely centre stage when they were on, with most of the lighting directed

at themselves, too. Irving would rehearse for up to six hours without a break even for lunch. He sat in the auditorium, explained what he wanted and then insisted on every intonation and every move conforming precisely to this. Patiently he went over and over a scene until it was exactly as he wanted it. He rehearsed himself (in the central role) at home, and used an ‘extra’ to stand in for him during rehearsals. The company never saw his performance until the final dress rehearsal. Everything was to change in the last quarter of the nineteenth

century, perhaps with the rise of naturalism, when audiences wanted something subtler, or at least different from, what soon became thought of as old-fashioned theatricality. Naturalism demanded an ensemble of actors whose stage rhythms and stage actions seemed ‘natural’. For this, an outside eye was required, one which was unbiased towards particular characters and which could create a true semblance of ‘real life’.