ABSTRACT
A by-product of subsidy was the continuing rise of the director, creating a new centre for the dramatic production. In 1949 the Shakespeare Survey found that 'instead of going to see X's performance, people went to see Y's production' which led to the director's desire to create something unexpected, the director's 'interpretation'. The director's job is to realise the given script, not to reorient it or bowdlerise it. The rise of the director led inexorably to the rise of the artistic director. The thrusting post-war directors were very frequently Oxbridge men, highly educated, highly ambitious and self-confident Tony Richardson, Peter Hall, Peter Wood, William Gaskill and, later, Trevor Nunn, Richard Eyre, Nicholas Hytner and others. From the model stage and the cutout characters to a playground from which 'things emerge' indicates the radical development in approach over forty years, and it perhaps implies that directors and artistic directors are less authoritarian than their predecessors.
