The Director and Directing: Craft, Process and Aesthetic in Contemporary Theatre [1st ed.] 978-1-137-40766-5;978-1-137-40767-2

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xii
Introduction: The Director (Adam J. Ledger)....Pages 1-38
The Director and Stanislavski (Adam J. Ledger)....Pages 39-68
The Director and the Actor (Adam J. Ledger)....Pages 69-105
‘In the Room’: The Director and Rehearsal (Adam J. Ledger)....Pages 107-148
‘Making Something from Within’: The Director and Devising (Adam J. Ledger)....Pages 149-193
Design and the Director (Adam J. Ledger)....Pages 195-242
Conclusion(s): The Director and Choice (Adam J. Ledger)....Pages 243-248
Back Matter ....Pages 249-275

Citation preview

Adam J. Ledger

The Director and Directing Craft, Process and Aesthetic in Contemporary Theatre

The Director and Directing

Adam J. Ledger

The Director and Directing Craft, Process and Aesthetic in Contemporary Theatre

Adam J. Ledger Reader in Theatre and Performance University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-40766-5 ISBN 978-1-137-40767-2  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40767-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932120 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Peter Schiazza Photography This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom

For JD and JL-D ‘art … makes us who we are’

Acknowledgements

The University of Birmingham granted me a period of research leave for writing, as well as funding to allow me to see a lot of theatre, to spend time in rehearsal, to meet directors and to travel. My colleagues at the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, and our School and College have been supportive and collegiate as ever. Particular thanks to Dr. Paul Geary, who read and offered feedback on draft material for two chapters; to Dr. Ruth Gilligan for her keen eye; to Jess Parfitt for her understanding; and to Dr. Rose Whyman, who suggested our trip to Moscow. Thanks, too, for the constructive and detailed comments on the draft manuscript from the publisher’s peer reviewer. I have also been able to share draft material at conferences, particularly the Theatre and Performance Research Association (UK) and the British Theatre in the Twenty-first Century conference (Paris), and at the University of Surrey. Thanks to Professor Peter Boenisch, who invited me to share research at the University of Kent. A short section of material on Katie Mitchell and Simon Stephens in Chapter 2 previously appeared in a special edition of the journal Contemporary Theatre Review and is reproduced here with permission. I am grateful for the author’s permission to use the epigraph above, which comes from G. Gabrielle Starr’s Feeling Beauty, a book I use throughout. Special thanks to those directors who have generously allowed me ‘in the room’, especially Katie Mitchell, or had conversations with me. Carrie Cracknell provided the cover image and offered to revise some of vii

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Acknowledgements

the script materials from her production of The Deep Blue Sea (National Theatre), which appears as an example in Chapter 4. Thanks to those directors and organisations who have read and offered suggestions and clarifications to the parts in which their work appears. Palgrave Macmillan have been patient whilst this book came to fruition: particular thanks to Vicky Bates for answering my many questions, to Tomas René, to Paula Kennedy and the production team. Thanks to Tanya Izzard for creating the very thorough index. Thanks too to the several photographers and theatre organisations who supplied images of directors in action. My family have been patient and supportive, particularly as the work of writing a book on theatre seems to involve a great deal of time away on trains.

Contents

1 Introduction: The Director 1 2 The Director and Stanislavski 39 3 The Director and the Actor 69 4 ‘In the Room’: The Director and Rehearsal 107 5 ‘Making Something from Within’: The Director and Devising 149 6 Design and the Director 195 7 Conclusion(s): The Director and Choice 243 Bibliography 249 Index 261

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 6.1

Boris Yukhananov, Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, Moscow (Photo Olympia Orlova) 2 Yukio Ninagawa (Photo The Ninagawa Production Company) 3 Valentine Catzéflis and Declan Donnellan in rehearsal for Périclès, Prince de Tyr (2018) (Photo Patrick Baldwin) 54 Iphigenia at Aulis (Photo Ivan Kyncl/ArenaPAL) 60 Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw in rehearsal for Mother Courage (National Theatre, 2009) (Photo Anthony Luvera) 70 Thomas Ostermeier in rehearsal for La Mouette [The Seagull] (Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, 2016) (Photo Jérémie Cuvillier) 84 Rehearsal for Say It With Flowers (Photo Becky Paris/ Hampstead Theatre) 133 Ivo van Hove in rehearsal for The Fountainhead (Photo Jan Versweyveld) 137 Simon McBurney in The Encounter, Edinburgh International Festival (Photo Robbie Jack) 168 Mia Theil Have in rehearsal for Out of Blixen (Photo Stephano Regueros Savvides) 172 Simon McBurney in The Encounter, Edinburgh International Festival (Photo Robbie Jack) 177 Mia Theil Have in Out of Blixen, Coronet Theatre, London, 2017 (Photo Dan Fearon) 183 Scenes from a Marriage (Photo Jan Versweyveld) 212

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 7.1

Marc Labrèche in Needles and Opium, Barbican Theatre, London (Photo Tristram Kenton) 224 Opus No. 7 (Photo Dmitry Krymov Lab/Natalia Cheban) 227 Opus No. 7 (Photo Dmitry Krymov Lab/Andrew Freeburg) 229 Ivo van Hove in rehearsal for The Fountainhead (Photo Jan Versweyveld) 245

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Director

Introduction Anecdotes At the curtain call for Yukio Ninagawa’s production of Macbeth (on tour to London’s Barbican Theatre in October 2017), the image of the director appeared. Ninagawa had died in 2016, but through the inclusion of his photograph the company visibly and publicly acknowledged that he was still its leader and that this production should be understood overwhelmingly as Ninagawa’s work.1 The image, depicting the deceased director in front of Macbeth’s backdrop of the sun, made palpable both his presence in, and ownership of a production that had outlived him. In Moscow, in November 2017, Boris Yukhananov, the artistic director of the Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, was working with a large group of young people as part of his ‘Golden Ass’ project, in a former industrial unit appropriated for rehearsal2 (see Fig. 1.1). Yukhananov was in full flow, addressing the group with the help of a radio microphone. This was no directorial declamation, but, like the image of Ninagawa, still an authoritative presence offering a pedagogical rhetoric about the personal and professional spheres of the theatre-maker’s life. Yukhananov reflected upon the different dramatic ‘worlds’ at play in the group’s encounter with the Orpheus and Eurydice story, the latest exploration of the mythic to appear in Yukhananov’s work, despite its usually contemporary, even brutalist chic. But on this occasion, Yukhananov elaborated upon his © The Author(s) 2019 A. J. Ledger, The Director and Directing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40767-2_1

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Fig. 1.1  Boris Yukhananov, Stanislavsky Electrotheatre, Moscow (Photo Olympia Orlova)

preferences and more personal intellectual ‘worlds’. This casually delivered yet lengthy amplified address (part of the evening’s work scheduled from 4 p.m. to midnight) recalled Eugenio Barba’s ‘oral improvisations’, delivered at the outset of a new performance project at Odin Teatret as a kind of extended discourse of the imagination, which, as in Yukhananov’s case, shapes a territory or sphere of thought that enfolds the practice.3 In Yukhananov’s case, directing seems to concern a collective mindset or an ethics of work in which the artist must be personally invested. But my colleagues in Russia also referred to him as an ‘aristocratic director’, implying an authoritative individual in the lineage of Stanislavski through to Anatoly Vasiliev.4 Yet Yukhananov clearly relished his extended theatrical family—he knew each of them by name and, on a previous evening, had asked after the welfare of an absentee. And in displaying Ninagawa’s image, his company revealed how it also felt him to be part of a family still and wished to present him as such to an audience (see Fig. 1.2).

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Fig. 1.2  Yukio Ninagawa (Photo The Ninagawa Production Company)

Both these directors, despite their different theatrical cultures and their entirely different working practices, are placed inside a creative and operative tension. They are both part of, but always separate from their ensembles. They position themselves as instigators and arbiters of their actors’ choices, yet ultimately embrace the absolute authorship of their respective productions. This book, then, seeks to centralise and consider the craft behind that authorship, both in the sense of creative process and artistic vision.

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Director? Historically, the director emerges as an artistic force via four strands: as a progression from the ‘stage manager’ (or, in the early modern period, the ‘keeper of the book’); as a figure distinct from the writer; as a controlling force for emergent stage technologies (gas lighting in the 1860s, electric some twenty years later, and now digital multimedia); and as a theatre theoretician or pedagogue in her/his own right. In The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing, Maria Shevtsova and Christopher Innes suggest that, in Western European terms at least, the director as an individuated figure can be clearly detected in the nineteenth-century actor-manager; we can certainly see directorial tendencies in figures such as Henry Irving (1838–1905) and, especially given his concern with acting, David Garrick (1717–1779). It is interesting to note the contemporary re-emergence of the actor-manager, as in the case of Kevin Spacey at London’s Old Vic (2003–2015), and Kenneth Branagh’s company.5 In his Contemporary Mise en Scène (2013), Patrice Pavis points out that the rise of theatrical naturalism is a key factor in determining the emergence of the modern director. This theatre practitioner had a clear task, that of integrating the ‘world’ of the play with its highly credible, realist presentation and, crucially, the apparently quotidian behaviour of the actor. Modern acting practices called for a new praxis of acting too, most famously introduced by Konstantin Stanislavski of course, a figure also able to shift the role of actor-manager to actor-director, and onwards to pedagogue and theoretician. For Pavis, it is the director who elaborates the scenographic circumstances of the production, in which the actors are better able to function credibly. In the call for a detailed mise en scène that could house a new, naturalistic acting style, Pavis writes that in André Antoine’s (1858–1943) naturalism (following Émile Zola, 1840–1902), ‘the milieu determines the identity and the movement of the actor, and not vice versa. The materiality of the performance is thus subject to the interpretation of the work by the director’.6 The imperative to make meaning is, here, embodied in actors’ behaviour within a hyper-accurate, detailed stage setting; this particularly recalls Stanislavski’s early productions, the photos of which are startling in their realism, almost denying their theatrical origins.7 But faced with inexperienced actors and working prior to the emergence of his ‘system’ of acting and

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rehearsal, Stanislavski initially tended to dictate moves, interpretation and even intonation.8 The renewed relationship to the playtext as the root of this photorealist world paradoxically both reinstates it as the primary theatrical material, but also empowers directorial interpretation; the text must be analysed, questioned and digested as both the repository of meaning and the definitive source of the actors’ actions, within the director’s schema. The contemporary iterations of Stanislavski’s ‘system’ foreground how text might be treated through various director’s idiosyncratic methods. In the work of Katie Mitchell especially, the playwright’s words are fundamental, yet rewrought via a definitive process, and shaped too with a firmly scenographic hand. Shevtsova and Innes trace the emergence of the director forwards through naturalism, the era of Gordon Craig, and Bertolt Brecht’s theatricality and theoretical influence. Amid these new movements, the legacy of Stanislavski develops, on the one hand, with the Russian ‘school’ of Lev Dodin and Vasiliev and, on the other, through the lineage of Jerzy Grotowski, Barba and the new companies of Eastern Europe. This is not just a pedagogical tradition, but forward-moving lineages of praxis that combine training, theatre-making and the sociocultural aspect of what it is to be an actor in the ‘group’ tradition. In response to the modern concern with the actor’s training and performance process, Helen Krich Chinoy sees the director’s role shift to that of ‘the producer-instructor, who located the heart of theater [sic] in the actor’.9 As will be seen, one contemporary director who continues to fit this definition is Declan Donnellan. To these strands above, I would add two more artistic forces that the director may embody: the director of electronic and digitised technologies, which shape contemporary scenographies, and the contemporary theatre-maker not harnessed to the dramatic text. For Hans-Thies Lehmann, the apparently ‘postdramatic’ tendencies of contemporary performance still suggest a politics and aesthetic of theatre-making where ‘a directors’ theatre […] is arguably a precondition for the postdramatic disposition (even if whole collectives take on the direction)’.10 This links to an aspect I will explore in Chapter 5 (on devising), that of a directing force, need or tendency, even if not necessarily centred on ‘the director’. Yet Lehmann still ascribes the events and imagery of the postdramatic to the singular and visionary individual; Robert Lepage also falls into this category (Chapter 6, on design).

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The Director and Directing: Aims and Definitions The Director and Directing: Craft, Process and Aesthetic in Contemporary Theatre assesses how the director can be conceived as a figure who operates as a creative artist in her/his own right. I am interested in craft, how the director works with the actor, the skill of rehearsal and design, and the detail of creative choice that is involved in making any work of performance. Rather than unpacking an understanding of a director’s work through an analysis of her/his performances only, or to assume that a production somehow exists as an object of study isolated from its means of production, I want to spend time considering how a particular director created the work in the first place, and what can be seen of their craft ‘inside’, as it were, the resultant performance. Whilst there may be some precedents to viewing the director as an ‘artist’, this can often isolate the director as a cultural icon, rather than as someone right at the heart of the theatre-making process. Whilst Peter M. Boenisch’s recent, revisionist and welcome theorisation of the Regie tradition examines a previous generation of directors and some contemporary figures, no monograph has considered contemporary directors as a group.11 Boenisch’s other recent book on a single director, Thomas Ostermeier, likewise sets a fine example of the need for scholarship to get behind the scenes of a production, to reveal process. This is joined by Benjamin Fowler’s work on Katie Mitchell and, almost simultaneously, two books on Ivo van Hove.12 Elsewhere, scholarly treatment of directors has frequently been in the form of edited collections that discuss directors each through a single chapter, or books of interviews, or burgeoning book series and encyclopaedias.13 Alongside this kind of material, there are director’s own books and a great number of practical directing handbooks or manuals, often North American in origin; and Avra Sidiropoulou’s Directions for Directing has attempted a synthetisation of practical approaches, drawn from a number of practitioners’ work.14 Edited volumes that individuate directors can, regardless of their useful focus and primary material, rather fudge definitions of the director. Because of their stress on the multimodal nature of the director’s work, refracted through particular case studies or interviews, a plethora of ‘director as’ similes appears in order to provide some kind of purchase on the director’s praxis. For example, Susan Letzler Cole offers a long list, including director as ‘Midwife’, ‘Ideal Parent’ and ‘Harrower/Gardner’, but ultimately finds that ‘metaphors in themselves are provisional: they

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posit connections, and the very act of positing a connection implies that there are other connections’.15 This taxonomy seeks to define the nature of directing through conceptual purposes, which omits any real indication of the inherent multiplicity and exactitude of the work needed to achieve results. Sheer volume of directors included in a publication does not necessarily offer depth of coverage or examine a range of directorial perspectives. Although discussing an earlier generation of directors, Helen Manfull’s discussion of women directors offers a comparatively rare, overarching and interwoven discussion, yet there is little reason to contribute to the sheer coverage in current and forthcoming publications here, even if I could match them in the impressive number of surnames within their covers.16 My aim is to take a select group of resolutely contemporary directors and, in a way, flip an extant model by discussing these directors’ work across a set of chapters, looking at their practices from a range of perspectives. The work of Mitchell, for instance, appears in both Chapters 2 and 4 (on rehearsal) and Ivo van Hove and Wilson in Chapter 3 (on the actor). Equally, I avoid categorising directors as ‘types’ in relation to modes of working, like Shevtsova and Innes (‘directors of theatricality’; ‘epic theatre directors’; ‘directors of ensemble theatre’); whilst a sometimes necessary academic marshalling, this suggests directors harness their work only to theatrical genres or models of theatre practice.17 For me, it is a question of considering the actuality of work a director undertakes and bearing this in mind across a reasonable set of examples. As with Maria M. Delgado and Dan Rebellato’s Contemporary European Theatre Directors (2010), the directors I discuss also exemplify the ­contemporary trend of the international director, although I add some US figures and some less well-known names.18 In many cases, a further determining factor in selection is that I have often met and spoken to the directors I include. In contrast to the dialogue-based approach of Barbara Simonsen’s fine The Art of Rehearsal, when discussing rehearsal another very real and practical limit to selection arises simply from which directors have allowed me, as I put it, ‘in the room’ (Chapter 4).19 Brain In the recent ‘cognitive turn’ to the theorisation of performance, the role and craft of the director have been curiously neglected. The only

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mention of the director in Gabriele Sofia’s Theatre and Cognitive Science (2017) rightly ponders that: the question arises as to whether such new methodological prospects might also be of benefit to the study of the director’s work. Does one of the fundamental tasks of the director not involve the analysis of his/ her own first person experience so that s/he may organise the spectator’s experience? […] It is therefore possible to imagine that the same cognitive functions that characterise the spectator’s experience could, in some way, also condition the director’s work.20

To put it bluntly, yes. Not to include the director in contemporaneous neurological theorisations of theatre-making does seem a rather obvious, perhaps surprising gap. Sofia suggests too that the director has often been considered a ‛thinker’ or ‘disembodied creator’, and instead posits an ‘embodied theatrology’; that is, an account of performance-making should acknowledge the primarily subjective experience of events and their environment.21 In this book, I attempt a new theorisation, that of the insights of neuroaesthetics, a selective choice within an emergent and eclectic theoretical field. The work of Semir Zeki has been seminal in the emergence of neuroaesthetics, as well as his fundamental precept that the brain wishes always to acquire knowledge. Zeki suggests that since the brain produces art (in its broadest sense), this must be a form of knowledge of and in the world. Crucially, neuroaesthetics determines that the brain processes and responds to art in the same way as percepts it encounters in actual life, since neurological process are the same for both. For Zeki, the study of art can therefore lead to a better understanding of the brain and neurological process. He thus posits that artists are ‘in a sense, lay neurologists who unknowingly study the brain with techniques unique to them’.22 In evolutionary terms, humans have developed, over time, the ability to ‘artify’ experiences, that is, to render them as consciously special aesthetic objects, in order to share knowledge as artistic creations.23 Neuroaesthetics has usefully dealt with other types of performance (especially dance), music and literature and, alongside an older treatment of the embodiment and enunciation of text in David Cole’s Acting as Reading (1992), thus helps here to demonstrate how aesthetic appreciation concerns judgement, both in the appreciation of art and its making.

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As well as neuroaesthetics, I also draw on selective areas of creativity theory. Barnaby Nelson and David Rawlings note that creativity research has been diverse, and that it incorporates, amongst other areas, ‘personality, affective and motivational approaches’.24 I am most interested in harnessing a useful, if succinct, mapping of creative process; that is, how we might understand how Nelson and Rawlings categorisations, and thus neuroaesthetic percepts, are made manifest. Neglect Shevtsova and Innes are right to conclude that directors of the new Eastern Europe are ripe for discussion; this is not the book to do that (though I do discuss the work of Polish director Krzysztof Warlikowski). I would also add that the work of Black and Asian directors needs closer and particular scrutiny.25 I am sometimes painfully aware how the burgeoning, if still-emergent, contemporary scholarship on directing (that is, compared to acting) still excludes those who may identify as BAME artists, and do not excuse myself from that increasingly obvious lack in our collective academic practice. The fact that the National Theatre of Wales appointed Kully Thiarai as artistic director in 2017, only the second woman to lead a national theatre company and the first Asian, is a fact both to be celebrated and to give us pause. Similarly, although Kwame Kwei-Armah succeeded the highly regarded David Lan at London’s Young Vic in 2018, as was pointed out in the press he was at the time one of only four Black or Asian artistic directors in the UK.26 In my scholarship elsewhere, I have been better able to include, and sometimes challenge, cultural perspectives.27 Still, I have a particular interest in the work of female directors—not least because Katie Mitchell has been unfailingly generous in her support of my curiosities—and, whilst things are improving and several artistic directors are women, I have written before on what remains an underrepresentation in the sector.28 (I decided also that a male director should not appear on the cover of this book.)

The Director Since the creative intent and imperatives of the director as a major artist will be central to this study, albeit always as a figure necessarily working in collaboration with others, how the director and her/his practice might

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be defined needs further discussion now. Although old, Cole and Krich Chinoy’s Directors on Directing (first published in 1966) offers a primary example of the value of directors’ own writings. It emphasises the overriding, essentially harmonising aesthetic that the director brought to bear on the theatrical process and outcome. In its introduction, Krich Chinoy argues that the emergent director’s task was to create ‘a relatively harmonious illusory world’.29 Even if Naturalism introduced new forms of the play, as well as psychophysical acting processes resolutely allied to the textual, dramatic ‘worlds’ created by them, for Krich Chinoy there existed a decisive figure, ‘a producer-autocrat’, who relegated the playwright to ‘a mere stimulus for his imagination’.30 Here, the (typically male) director keeps any notions of writer-director hierarchy firmly under control. If, much later, Pavis would suggest that a difference between mise en scène and performance is that the former interprets, whereas the latter is the formal action of a production, in these earlier periods the mise en scène was the director’s establishment of performance, but apparently without much regard for the writer’s own imagination as encapsulated in the play. Given its specifically European focus, in introducing their volume Delgado and Rebellato note the cultural upheaval of the Europe of the late 1960s and the changing sociopolitical circumstances of the director’s work. Directors became figures who increasingly created theatre not just on aesthetic terms, but in the context of their cultural or political intentions, and how world views might inform artistic choice. If some directors became cultural engineers, they also sought to create their own production circumstances, as opposed to directing plays ‘for the subsidised seats of European high culture’.31 Furthering the pull away from institutional norms, the later twentieth-century theatre laboratory emerged too, defined most clearly by Grotowski’s Teatr Laboratorium, Barba’s Odin Teatret, the Living Theatre and, later, The Performing Garage (now The Wooster Group) in the USA; a further example is the collective ethos of Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil in Paris (the exact contemporary of Odin Teatret). This movement also harnessed sociopolitical awareness to alternative practices of actor and performer training, typically inside a group culture.32 As Delgado and Rebellato suggest, directors embraced their newfound authorial ‘stamp’ beyond text; this is the theatricality of Roger Planchon’s écriture scénique, where, crucially, the director could—and was expected to—do something with the text through the material means

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of staging.33 Schneider and Cody also note the modern and contemporary ‘opening out and boundary shifting of theatrical methodologies and aesthetic practices’, and ally directing in the modern era to the visual.34 For Schneider and Cody, thus the ‘mark of the individual eye, the signature of an individual visual guide’ is the distinguishing, authorial feature of the modern and, as we have seen, contemporary director’s artistry.35 Indeed, many directors have an identifiable oeuvre, highlighting aesthetic tendencies within which each production sits: Peter Brook is an earlier example, but Ostermeier, Donnellan, Simon McBurney and Mitchell are obvious examples in this book, as are ensembles such as Steppenwolf. Mitchell has also realised a large body of work through her ‘live cinema’ technique (though there is a precedent in the Wooster Group’s work), and the use of projected close-ups of actors appears in van Hove’s direction, for example, Roman Tragedies (2007).36 Especially in the British press, the term auteur has thus on occasion become casually reductive, typically used as a wearisome shorthand to suggest the perception of a heavy-handed pasting of a ‘concept’ onto a play, as if (and this too goes unchallenged in the press) the latter were the sole repository of theatrical meaning and its articulation.37 Even if Delgado and Rebellato rightly draw attention to how various auteurs are ‘interviewed and debated, championed and reviled’, it remains the bold, directorial signature that so clearly defines them.38 Thank goodness Boenisch rejects such binaries as text and performance, as well as theory and practice, instead invoking the holism of thea. For Boenisch, thea enfolds doing and seeing, playing and thinking as a praxis of the ‘theatral’. Linking thea to his treatment of Regie, Boenisch draws on Helmar Schramm’s ‘magic triangle’ of theatrality, which is ‘a force field constituted by the three relating forces of movement (kinesis), meaning (semiosis) and perception (aisthesis)’.39 Boenisch is thus concerned with the relational systems in which they [directors’ works] are placed and from which they emerge, in order to arrive at a fuller understanding of some principal aesthetic-political operations that characterise Regie as a process and function of theatral mediation and dialectic sublation.40

Contexts are, of course, important and influential, but mine is a complementary, but quite different orientation than Boenisch. I am most interested in the craft of production, the artistic choices inside ‘operations’

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as defined by the actuality of rehearsal, and the artistry of particular aesthetics. Whilst ‘theatricality’, in its worst sense, might point to fakery and illusion, the ‘theatral’ further suggests a ‘magic play’ of the senses and the sensible and, in terms of my focus here, a shift towards the aesthetics of the spectators’ experience.41 This anticipates my invocation of Erika Fischer-Lichte’s ‘autopoietic loop’ shortly, whereby the meaning (the semiosis) of the event of theatre occurs as a constant, cyclical process within the shared energies of performers and audience. To draw together Boenisch and Fischer-Lichte’s ideas, the thea of performance appears an occurrence of the real, which moves beyond the apparent antithesis of high-handed auteur and the respectful director-as-interpreter of the intact playscript. Indeed, Christine White constructively equates ‘auteurship’ with the collaboratively created visual and acoustic ‘offer’ of a production, suggesting that ‘the prominence given to the director as sole ‘auteur’ of a piece of work, has become diminished. The members of the scenographic team are now more legitimately described as the ‘auteurs’ of a production’.42 Still, progress and outcomes are overseen by the director, yet a director, as so often with the examples in this book, who relies on often long-standing teams of creatives. International As Delgado and Rebellato put it, ‘directing is […] both a function and a profession, a brand and a process, an encounter and a market force’.43 The productions of these ‘directors-as-brand’ shift around major cities, a feature certainly seen in Continental Europe, which might be perceived as a theatrical milieu of big shows, directed by big names, circulating in a network of theatrical collaborations.44 Some directors can clearly be perceived as a ‘brand’; it is beyond question that audiences may well attend a production significantly because of the reputation of its director, seeking out her/his work as exciting sociocultural expression. As Delgado and Rebellato suggest, broader sociopolitical ramifications arise since a director’s work can draw attention to itself as both local and international, personal and societal. Festivals and gatherings are also curated to bring the best work together and include the Festival d’Automne (Paris), the Berliner Theatertreffen and the Festival d’Avignon, which both maintain a ‘branding’ and couch

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their collected theatrical wares as ‘European’. A set of venues overtly celebrate their internationalism, such as the Odéon Théâtre de L’Europe, the Barbican Theatre, London and the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Directors too travel: Brook long ago left Great Britain for Paris and Donnellan works prolifically in Russia and France. Donnellan’s company, Cheek by Jowl has toured to cities worldwide; less successfully, the Wooster Group collaborated with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) on Troilus and Cressida (2012). Mitchell has increasingly worked in Germany, to where she also ‘exports’ her ‘creatives’ in order to keep a sort of loose, travelling ensemble. Ostermeier and Mitchell have also worked for the Netherlands’ Toneelgroep Amsterdam (TGA; latterly renamed International Theatre Amsterdam), a group which tours internationally, including, more recently, to Australia and South America. Ivo van Hove has become well established in the UK, directing at the National Theatre and in the West End, but had a prior reputation in the USA. Finally, the Australian director Simon Stone works regularly in Europe, and I begin Chapter 6 with his Young Vic, London, production of Yerma (2016). In sum, for Delgado and Rebellato the director and her/his work comprise ‘a construct that itself articulates wider debates around the intersections between theatre, nation, state and the broader structures through which geographical, political and cultural spaces intersect or collide’.45 This possibly defines a new, institutionalised norm, in contrast to the smaller, artist-led work of the independent sector. Time and Money Near the end of his study of mise en scène, Pavis discusses how other socio-economic factors have impacted upon theatrical production, most obviously funding in the form of state subsidy through grants. As Pavis points out, there has been a serious reduction in state support in Europe and, whatever other strictures may have been in place, its ‘near-disappearance in the former Eastern Bloc’.46 Not least because of shared economic conditions, older distinctions between ‘East’ and ‘West’ are not always useful and especially since directors who were born or trained in the ‘former East’ work in the geographical West, or vice versa, including, in Germany, Ostermeier.47 Some theatres enjoy significant business and private sponsorship of course: for example, on the wall of London’s bastion of new writing, the

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Royal Court Theatre, a large plaque lists the many trusts, organisations and individuals that have allowed its important work to continue (there are also ‘American Friends’, who fund particular productions). In some contrast, Michael Grandage’s first season in London’s overtly commercial West End (2012–2013) was bolstered by several stars, ‘bankable’ names in a season that included two Shakespearian productions and less well-known plays.48 Since 2011, the significant and very damaging withdrawal of subsidy in the UK by Arts Council England (ACE), itself a victim of government cuts, has forced many well-known, developed and important independent theatre companies to close. Those remaining flagship organisations, designated ‘National Portfolio Organisations’, must regularly reapply for funds, rather than, as before, receive on-going ‘core’ funding. On the other hand, the introduction of the Grants for the Arts scheme (latterly National Lottery Project grants) by ACE has enabled many smaller groups and specific initiatives to flourish, not least, as I mention again in Chapter 5, the development of new work in several, separately funded, smaller phases. Given the difficulty theatre-makers face, Pavis’s particular criticism centres on the amount of money directed to what he calls (following Pierre-Etienne Heymann) the ‘luxury’ events of the major international festivals above. Pavis is particularly critical of the Avignon Festival and what he sees as a type of mise en scène that is ostentatiously financed.49 Pavis’s criticism is commercial, even industrial, when he suggests that theatre depended more and more on the laws of the market and on the economic conditions of the time. Theatre institutions, which artists could not hope to escape, constitute an enormous stock exchange of artistes, with their market value floated and their talent quantified. They made projections on career plans, they turned to industrial espionage to discover these talented young people, to place them where their visibility would be greatest.50

Although the financial simile may be strained, what Pavis critiques can certainly be seen in the major theatres of several European countries. This also brings to mind the developmental art centres of artists such as Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage.51 But Pavis speaks of ‘high end’ directing, not the realities of many directors and these ‘luxuries’ are, to some extent, balanced by state-subsidised institutions such as regional

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theatres. And all directors have to negotiate, pitch and develop projects, regardless of their ‘industrial’ status; I have sat in rehearsals with some major directors and seen how several spend their lunch hours on the ’phone or Skype, discussing potential productions, just as less high-profile artists have to piece together a project. For any director, work opportunities have always to be created. Nevertheless, Pavis is correct to identify, like Delgado and Rebellato, the globalisation and commodification of at least some directors. What should not be assumed, however, is that high finance brings ideal working circumstances or career security. To temper commercial considerations, director Di Trevis sees the role of the director in biographical, personal terms, starting her highly practical and personal account by stating that ‘the best directing will always be about who you are, not what you do’.52 For Trevis, personal resources do not just underpin artistic imperatives but vocational considerations too; she goes on clearly to divide the delicate nature of directing from the professional personality of the director, and advises ‘you are the sensitive self who directs, and you are the much tougher cookie, the director. You have to develop a set of skills for directing and another for being a director’.53 Although, for Trevis, directing is a matter of natural aptitude or talent, there are skills to be learnt or nurtured in order to survive in the industry and, as she makes clear throughout her book, artistic sensibilities need to be nourished. As well as the key aspects of play directing, Trevis thus discusses the dogged, practical work that is required of directors when launching and maintaining a career, and the kind of preparation, intellectual and practical strategies for maintaining both. Actor For Trevis, who was originally an actor, the related aspects of ‘directing’ and ‘the director’ are linked by the actor, who are ‘the bricks with which theatre is built’.54 Trevis actively seeks out actors’ company socially as well as professionally.55 Perhaps her earlier work as an actor explains this orientation, different to that of Mitchell who suggests that a professional distance is maintained.56 How directors position themselves towards the actor, or prioritise their working methods in terms of acting process, clearly comprise a key directorial consideration. Whilst Chapter 2 focusses on selected directors who root their work in Stanislavski and Chapter 3 develops a consideration of the director–actor relationship, some introduction is useful

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here. Like Trevis, Mitchell begins her own book by stating that directing is a craft that requires the honing of skills, which she consciously learnt. Much of directing is, for Mitchell, to enable the construction of ‘an imaginary world for the actors to inhabit’, regardless of the genre or aesthetic of the production (and Mitchell is strong at the realisation of both).57 Similarly Mike Alfreds’s book begins with a fairly detailed account of his prolific career and professional development, but his subsequent account of directing is absolutely centred on the actor, a figure he also wishes to see as part of an ensemble; like Trevis, Alfreds states plainly that ‘actors are the ones who make theatre happen, who turn ideas into experience’.58 As directors, Mitchell, Alfreds and Donnellan each define themselves more particularly as arbiters of acting technique: simply put, if an actor works with any of these three directors, then s/he has to work in a certain way. As Chapter 2 explores, these directors have systematic approaches to achieve the dual function of dramatic analysis and psychophysical engagement with a dramatic situation and, in turn, the realisation of the materiality of the play. In some contrast, my subsequent chapter sees the actor as also the theatrically material body. If there is a difference in Mitchell and Alfreds’ approaches, it is that Mitchell analyses the play in order to construct an imaginative ‘world’ in which actors can operate and arrive at a behavioural response, whilst Alfreds is at pains to create a detailed rehearsal methodology in order that actors have highly developed, primarily physical strategies in order to engage with the play itself. Whilst Mitchell clearly has certain directorial aesthetics (not least her use of video, her affinities with certain periods), Alfreds concludes his book by asserting ‘theatre is not about directorial concepts. Directors should create the circumstances in which actors can flourish’.59 Donnellan also suggests something of the director–philosopher, since his book presents not only a directing approach rooted in acting process, but a psychological view of how the human being functions. If Mitchell is an analyst of human behaviour as subsequently rendered by the body, Donnellan suggests an alternative way of perceiving the world, in which his actors ‘see’ the machinations of the play’s characters and are affected by them. For Donnellan, the sheer faith in the actor can be seen in Nick Ormerod’s open and uncluttered sets (Chapter 6), conceived, like Alfreds, as if to get out of the way of the actors’ élan. Nevertheless, each of these foregoing directors positions her/himself as an artist with a faith

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in the rigour of a process centred in the actor and acting, but it is also faith that places each in a tutor-like position. Space ‘Scenography’ suggests the practice and scholarly interest in what broadly can be conceived as the non-human aspects to theatre production. As the theatre event is developed and refined, its theatrical construct is achieved through scenographic teams, a group in which, interestingly, White explicitly includes the director.60 Charles Even claims in fact that ‘the ultimate purpose of directing is one of design, putting all the pieces of a production (actors included) together’.61 Even’s view usefully embraces the totalising artistic nature of directing, but excludes a consideration of process, during which the collaborative directorial eye is cast over scenic design, lighting, costume and sound. Some directors have also moved to site-based work or installations (Deborah Warner; Mitchell); reflecting the growth in immersive work, I will draw from Josephine Machon’s recent scholarship, and particularly her consideration of space, when discussing van Hove’s scenographies. But directing is no easy assemblage; how the director works collaboratively to forge design as a theatrical Gestus, some elements of which are in place long before rehearsal starts, informs my discussion in Chapter 6. By design or scenography in that chapter, I really mean scenic design; that is, the set or constructed performance space. The burgeoning technology now available to designers and directors means that aspects such as computer-controlled lighting and the notable use of highly engineered video projection are key contemporary directorial aesthetics. Rather than a digitised return to the flat, painted backdrop of nineteenth-century theatre, a period when ‘classical rules of art […] prevailed, rather than rules of theatricality’, video projection and lighting, often imbued with sound, creates richly fluid, immersive scenographies and highly theatrical performance worlds.62 A case in point is the RSC’s The Tempest (2016), where Intel and Imaginarium Studios collaborated with the RSC to produce a high-tech, holographic production. The aesthetic possibilities of technology are increasingly at the fingertips of the director in rehearsal too: to take just one example, McBurney created Measure for Measure in 2004 and 2006 with a great deal of technology in the rehearsal room from the outset; as Alison Oddey explains, ‘McBurney thinks of objects on stage as

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sculptural elements, which include the technology of microphones, cameras or video projectors’.63 McBurney’s use of digital scenography in the devising of The Encounter (2015) appears in Chapter 5. For McBurney, directing appears to be one of initial deconstruction of the material, which has to be reassembled according to the fielding of needs as rehearsal goes along, where the only constant is spatial delimits, filled too with image, light and sound. In contrast, and often in delightfully analogue mode, Dmitry Krymov is a director not only as pedagogue but also as an adventurer in images, as Chapter 6 discusses through recourse to the ‘vernacular’. There, I also offer some account of some directors’ use of sound, a feature that I have allowed to emerge at other points in this book too; following Schneider and Cody’s emphasis on the directorial eye, and especially in the era of the digitally visual, we should also not forget the directorial ear. Event (Performance) In her book The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008), Fischer-Lichte determines the nature of performance as an active, iterative phenomenon or, more particularly, event.64 FischerLichte stresses the liveness of performance, since ‘the created event remains unique as is inevitable when actors and spectators are confronted with each other in their various tempers, moods, desires, expectations, and intellects’.65 Performance is transformative not because of the action of performance as such, but because of the unique personalities assembled in the real time of the event. In Fischer-Lichte’s terms, the director cannot control the event, but only positively shape a potential experience amid what is termed the ‘self-referential, autopoietic system’, that is (and to define autopoiesis) an event capable of sustaining itself, since ‘whatever the actors do elicits a response from the spectators, which impacts on the entire performance’.66 Of course, a performance is usually rehearsed and reasonably fixed, but what Fischer-Lichte suggests is that each time a performance is enacted it should, optimally, be revivified as an independent event, which is itself sustained as a unique phenomenon according to the transformative realities at play within the ‘autopoietic feedback loop’ at the time.67 The aesthetic of performance is thus not just what it looks or sounds like, or the gestural languages inside its scenographies, but what happens; for Fischer-Lichte, ‘materiality is not given as an artefact but occurs as

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the result of the performative generation of corporeality, spatiality, and tonality’.68 In other words, a performance or production is generated in the moment of performance itself. As will be seen shortly, this chimes absolutely with G. Gabrielle Starr’s neuroaesthetic concept of the artistic object as, also, an event.

Creative Whilst the literature on creativity per se is extensive and wide ranging, for my emphasis on process I have found it most useful to prioritise the work of Mary-Anne Mace and Tony Ward (2002) and Marion Botella et al. (2013), as both clearly build on previous studies of creative process models. Although selective, these authors provide flexible models of what, in our case, the director does in collaboration with others. First, it is worth considering Botella et al.’s particular modelling of the creative person, since it neatly reinforces what many will recognise as the ‘multivariate’ personality factors, to borrow the authors’ term, fundamental to a director. From a systems perspective, this model also centralises what others call an ‘individual innovator’s role in creativity’.69 Person Botella et al. emphasise an individual’s ability to identify key artistic ‘problems’ and how these might be ‘solved’. The ‘cognitive component’ comprises intellectual agility and the ability to make effective links between points in a process.70 Although not based on empirical analysis of data, as so often in creativity discourse, elsewhere Mike Radford begins his account by suggesting that creativity may be understood as ‘a complex process of informational processing within a given framework’.71 Although the rather uncreative sounding idea of ‘information processing’ might return us unhelpfully to outmoded notions of directorial semiotics (see, for example, Jon Whitmore’s Directing Postmodern Theater: Shaping Signification in Performance [1994]), Radford centralises personal and specifically emotional response in a creative process (most obviously the ‘framework’ of rehearsal) where, actually, ‘much of the information contained within it is simply not noticed. Only when some item of information or process is out of place, dissonant with the organization, do we perceive difficulties’.72

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Even if a key skill or personality trait of the director is, following Radford, to be able to see things that are not working, there are no ‘off the shelf’ solutions. Similarly, Mace and Ward dismiss previous studies’ reliance on the couching of creative process as one of formulating a ‘problem’ and then solving it, finding ‘the process of creativity in art making certainly involves problem-exploration behaviours, but those behaviours are directed by a constantly evolving personal aesthetic that is much more than just problem solving’.73 Rather than some kind of theatrical computer that calculates answers to problems in order to display performative data, we should consider the director as, crucially, a human artist engaged in an iterative process of responding to what is created, in order continually to craft in terms of a still emerging outcome. Whilst directing may—and often does—rely on ‘gut feelings’ as Radford puts it, directing remains a multi-skilled role within overlapping factors, in an overall creative schema.74 Thus Botella et al. reflect a synthesis of individualistic and interpersonal traits, whilst remembering that creativity is situated in a time and place: their ‘multivariate approach emphasises the environment, which offers physical and/or social stimulations’.75 The ‘conative component’ encompasses personality; referencing several other studies, Botella et al. suggest that ‘a dynamic fantasy life, aesthetic sensibility, emotional awareness, need for originality, intellectual curiosity, and a strong personal value system’ are vital to the artist, as well as being ‘tolerant of ambiguity’ and, appealingly, ‘nonconformist’.76 But this goes hand in hand with an ‘emotional component’, which includes ‘the capacity to perceive feelings’ as well as the ‘emotional environment’, clearly vital to the humanistic practice of theatre.77 Whilst process can be understood as an acute awareness of the work as it is created, how might we understand an overarching, deterministic, artistic ‘vision’? Indeed, many directors instigate not only creative processes towards a ‘vision’ and talk of ‘seeing’ a production before it has been created, but also frequently instigate the production itself. Most simply, the director, with whatever degree of collaboration, may have chosen to direct a particular project and found a means to stage it; indeed, both Nelson and Rawlings’ and Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi’s accounts of creativity reinforce that the single artist is the driver of artistic creation. In their emphasis on a phenomenological and subjective account of artists’ creative experience, the former authors show how the director (in our case) has a desire to create something because of a ‘felt lack’ of ‘an intuited artistic object’.78 The first of these

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terms especially personalises what, previously, Brook has called a ‘formless hunch’, making the ‘hunch’ more concrete since the director can already ‘intuit’ something of an outcome, however provisional, and even in its temporary absence.79 For Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, ‘vision’ cannot be determined by the individual, but the individual is still ‘catalytic’.80 These authors shift the creative milieu to a meta-creative context, such that creativity is an interactive process between the individual, their immediate working circumstances and, crucially, sociocultural context. Creativity is thus not a state, but a process, which happens between ‘the innovating person; […] the symbolic domain that the individual absorbs, works with and contributes to; […] and the social field of gatekeepers and practitioners’.81 To translate this to theatre and directing reinforces the role of the director as agent of change in rehearsal (and indeed all aspects of preparation) as a ‘domain’, which is a process of selection, yet must negotiate the ‘gatekeepers’ of theatrical taste, challenging funding arenas, normative cultural climates or artistic trends, critical reception, and commercial pressures of the contemporary moment. Process Mace and Ward argue that because their study is rooted in grounded theory and, they argue, moves on from a number of contrived laboratory studies, it does not neglect ‘real-world creative contexts’.82 The authors’ dense narrative draws on the findings of extensive interviews with visual artists to produce a creative model comprising ‘Art work conception’, ‘Idea Development’, ‘Making the Artwork and Ideas Development’ and ‘Finishing the Artwork’.83 Theatre artists will find this straightforward categorisation familiar, though I challenge such convenient, linear blocks in Chapter 5. Mace and Ward do reveal more potentially cyclical movements within each broad, seemingly step-by-step phase, stressing that ‘the process of art making is not linear and the boundaries between phases can be fuzzy’.84 They conclude that creativity evolves, rather than can be pinpointed to a ‘eureka’ moment, or step; like Botella et al. above, a director can thus be understood as a creative person working simultaneously across time and creative, practically based contexts. In their later analysis, Botella et al. offer a more complex model than Mace and Ward, which moves further away from the empiricism of ‘problem solving’. These authors’ exhaustive qualitative and quantitative

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analysis of responses from a range of artists produces a six-part model: this comprises the ‘general idea or vision’; ‘documentation/reflection’; ‘first sketches’; ‘testing forms or ideas’; ‘provisional object/draft’ and ‘final work/series’. As such, Botella et al. expand Mace and Ward’s first stage into ‘hunch’ and research or reflection, and split their final stage into two parts to allow for a draft (a term sometimes used when devising performance). Pointing again to the collaborative or situated aspects to theatre-making, Botella et al. also place environmental factors around their model, which are not so clearly articulated by Mace and Ward; thus, ‘First sketches’—perhaps exemplified by a pre-production phase—needs ‘collaborators’, and the ‘provisional object/draft’—a technical and dress rehearsal phase perhaps—requires ‘Technical experts’. All of these figures appear in the central examples to Chapters 4 and 5. Directorial vision, or catalytic effect, is not introverted or self-serving: whilst highlighting creative authority, Botella et al. reinforce how the artist may wish to create and cause change, but also to communicate.85 If we follow the above models, theatre-based processes can be seen as means to open out ideas and artistic practice to others. This positions the artist (director) as a determining creative ‘lever’, though allows for an openness of process, since ‘an attitude of ‘purposive-playfulness’’ can be adopted in the attempt to make something new for, ultimately, an audience.86 Directing also takes place in a pre-production phase, where ideas and their realisation will be envisaged and discussed, often with key collaborators such as designers. Even before rehearsal, these conversations contain speculation and decision-making, which aligns to Mace and Ward’s initial ‘Artwork conception’. As Mitchell puts it, ‘decisions about the set and furniture are also the first steps that the director makes towards arranging the actors so that the audience can see what is going on’.87 As Chapter 6 suggests, such spatial and scenographic decisions typically predate rehearsal, sometimes by many months. Pre-rehearsal decisions constitute a great deal of directorial intent, a period actually already beyond Mace and Ward’s hunch-based description of primary phases and closer to their ‘Phase 2: Idea Development’, in which ‘decision-making, problem solving, and experimentation processes are mediating variables’.88 Any notion of process must, ultimately, include some sort of end to that process, or at least an identifiable outcome, as defined by the above models. Mace and Ward propose the term ‘resolved artworks’ to suggest

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outcomes, which is attractive in its embracing, or resolving, of foregoing creative exploration, selection and determination.89 Once made, ‘exhibiting the artwork’ is the equivalent to performance, but the crucial difference between Mace and Ward’s focus on visual art and live performance is that the latter is—or, optimally, should be—‘different every night’ (to borrow Alfreds’s phrase), since its details will shift as the artwork re-performs its resolution at each performance.90 Beyond the obvious step of an opening night, Nelson and Rawlings offer one account of how the artist (director), or anyone else with key artistic responsibilities in a theatrical process for that matter, may know the work is ‘finished’, suggesting the director perceives the ‘gestalt of the object’ through ‘a sense of recognition’, and that this recognition is bodily, since ‘a sense of completion is felt on a physical level’.91 That an artistic finishing point may well invoke a satisfyingly complete ‘feeling’ is entirely recognisable to many artists, but is also imprecise; in real terms, a more objective balance of the conative and cognitive elements occur, recalling the aspects with which I started this Introduction. Catalyst If we follow the broader theorisation of creativity, that of a process and an understanding of its environment, my wider theoretical interest in aspects of neuroaesthetics is evoked; as an artist, a director makes sense of the work since, as Radford puts it, ‘creative outcomes have a resonance with our feelings, which are based upon a common degree of cultural attunement’.92 This recalls Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi’s concentric circles of person-domain-field; an artistic artefact communicates because it resonates against widening circles of influence, ‘making sense’ because of mutual interactions. Especially strong, successful personalities, or those with an oeuvre of work, can have a ‘catalytic’ affect not only on the immediate domain but on the field within which they work. Historically, notable directors have often challenged the status quo of theatre craft in order to find new modes of working; in modern times, the catalytic personality is of course Stanislavski. The majority of the contemporary directors included in this book are celebrated as catalysts of change, typically have an oeuvre of work and are known for ‘breaking form’, as Rufus Norris, artistic director of the National Theatre, once put it.93

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Neuroaesthetics In his early article ‘Artistic Creativity and the Brain’, Zeki prioritises the visual, rooting the early discourse of neuroaesthetics in fine art and especially painting.94 As an art-making process, Zeki’s emphasis suggests directing is a process of seeing and watching, which are, of course, not quite the same thing. Neuroaesthetics has developed in its breadth and underpinning scientific evidence; in his discussion of Picasso, Zeki quotes the artist as wishing to see the ‘path followed by the brain in materializing a dream’, which, as well as increasingly possible due to the ability to scan the brain, might also nicely sum up the process of rehearsal.95 But the bringing into being of a ‘dream’ again underlines the ready acceptance of notions of ‘the director’s vision’ (recalling Schneider and Cody earlier), at the expense of other potential sensory modes, such as hearing, and bodily or kinaesthetic appreciation. As will be seen, these aspects emerge across the wider discursive landscape of neuroaesthetics, which is nevertheless a still-emergent field. And it is worth recalling for a moment the traditional location of the audience explicitly in the auditorium, a place etymologically of hearing, suggesting a little of what we might be missing in the late modernist and contemporary stress on the visual and, more lately, multimedia, notwithstanding the growth in interest around performance as an ecology of sound, of hearing and the ear.96 This has in particular led to a burgeoning practice of performance in which spectators wear headphones to experience the ‘world’ of the work via the acoustic, not least Complicité’s The Encounter (Chapter 5). In their revealing historical introduction to neuroaesthetics, Nadal et al. return to early aesthetic theory to trace the broad antecedents to those authors that I rely on here. Nadal et al. demonstrate that for David Hume, writing in the eighteenth century, aesthetic response is one of pleasure, which, whilst not necessarily a sensory experience, remains one of taste, not of reason, and which is therefore understood as immediate and instinctive.97 Yet just as Starr would point out some centuries later, even for Hume not all aesthetic response is necessarily pleasurable since, in some artworks, there exists a paradoxically aestheticised nature to unpleasant experience; in contemporary terms, consider, most simply, the ‘weepy’ movie and—often consciously far from the pleasant, beautiful or sublime—the frustrating, ugly or violent, seen for instance in live and performance art practices. Nevertheless, such an unpleasant stimulus is still crafted; that is, in our case, constructed by a director and team of creatives. During the run of Katie Mitchell’s Cleansed (National Theatre,

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London, 2016) for instance, many spectators walked out, and indeed fainted, in the face of the precisely brutal rendition of bodily mutilation on stage. As we have seen, a cornerstone of some aspects of cognitive science, and neuroaesthetics in particular, is that the brain, and thus body, reacts to stimuli as if they were real (thus explaining the aforementioned fainting). In the case of Cleansed, Mitchell and her team also had to spend some time in rehearsal figuring out how the various gruesome mutilations in the play could actually be achieved theatrically. A reaction simultaneous to that of the depicted brutality was, for me at least, some sort of ‘pleasure’ in trying to figure out how certain action was realised. Less extreme than fainting at the National Theatre, Nadal et al. further underpin their developmental survey by demonstrating how Hume’s contemporary, Edmund Burke allied response to biological reaction, offering a useful historical, physiological antecedent to what might seem a reliance on the mental in the ‘cognitive turn’. Physiological and, more accurately, psychophysical approaches, suggest the emphases of twentieth-century pioneers of acting, notably Stanislavski of course, but also the contemporary behaviourism favoured by Mitchell. For Nadal et al., whether aesthetics is understood as transcendental, as in the works of Immanuel Kant, or empiricist (concerning preferences, emotional response, or physiology), all approaches are, crucially, subjective, even given the formalist tradition of aesthetics.98 Further, and vital to an appreciation of Zeki, is an acceptance of his view that whilst artists produce hugely varied artistic outputs, they share common neurological bases to their creative processes; so too do those viewing their artworks, despite varying tastes. In short, neuroaesthetics assumes some level of neurotypicality. Zeki most fully expresses his ideas in two key books, Inner Vision (1999) and Splendours and Miseries of the Brain (2009). In the first, Zeki examines the perception of art through the anatomy and neurology of sight. He finds that ‘the brain […] is no mere passive chronicler of the external physical reality but an active participant in generating the visual image, according to its own rules and programs [sic]. This is the very role that artists have attributed to art’.99 Zeki renders an artwork as an always relational phenomenon, with which the viewer’s brain has an active relationship, not least because the brain has to generate an understanding of what it sees as a dynamic act, but also that the artist consciously generates such a dynamic relationship in the first place. In his later book, Zeki extends the formation of what, in neuroaesthetic terms,

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is deemed knowledge by examining the notion of concept formation. The notion of inherited and acquired concepts, as well as the related abstract concepts in which the general is abstracted from the particular in order to formulate knowledge, features in Chapter 4. As seen in both these key writings, Zeki’s work overwhelmingly concerns sight. Zeki notes, for instance, that the visual areas of the brain comprise orientation-selective cells, which effectively attract it to certain formal arrangements (he gives the example of straight lines in several painters’ work); I return to this in Chapter 6.100 Allied to the attraction to straight lines, the brain also finds particular attraction in contrast and symmetry; thus the eye is drawn to basic geometric configurations.101 As Leder and Tiono explain, these ‘geons’ can account for most shapes: objects or spatial arrangements tend to comprise variants on, for example, cylinders, cones and brick-like structures and, of course, the spaces they contain or create.102 On the face of it, most theatre is indeed relatively square in presentation or made up of straight lines, inside which simple geons appear. This arrangement creates a visual percept that offers a definite, aesthetically secure environment and visual patterning. Given that art making appears to follow certain rules, in turn, Zeki further isolates what he calls laws of the visual brain, including the ‘law of constancy’. Zeki argues that regardless of a changing viewpoint of the same thing, or particular challenges of certain artworks, the brain fundamentally wishes to make sense of—that is, acquire knowledge about— what it perceives.103 This leads Zeki to consider abstraction, which suggests both a style of art, and a fundamental basis to his emphasis on concepts. To offer a variation on the perception of objects, Starr frequently emphasises juxtaposition as a key to how imagery in aesthetic experience functions; this is not simply opposition, but to oblige the brain to formulate a richer percept because an element is experienced in relief to others. Leder et al. thus note Berlyne’s stress on arousal as a marker of aesthetic experience; complexity cannot be based merely on patterning (as reinforced by the authors’ later reference to Jacobsen and Hӧfel) but because, like juxtaposition, and as Zeki suggests, the brain has to do something in order to acquire knowledge.104 Whilst Zeki traces stimuli to neurological locations and demonstrates how the brain constructs concepts, Starr stresses the interaction of various parts of the brain in aesthetic experience. This especially includes

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brain systems concerning emotion and fulfilment and the default mode network; Starr helpfully explains this latter as ‘an interconnected set of brain areas that contributes to our sense of self-identity, as well as to our ability to imagine other worlds and other people’.105 Along with Zeki’s emphases, this neatly offers a neurological explanation for the primary basis of theatre and, crucially, that such neurology again operates in the same way whether encountering theatre or day-to-day experience. A central tenet to Starr’s account is that aesthetic experience produces images, but that these are modal. An image may well be just that, a kind of picture, or an emotional response; whilst what we see or hear can cause mental imagery, music, for instance (in which we might include all theatre sound, whether musical or not), can also cause bodily and even a kinaesthetic response.106 This helps to clarify the emotional pull and bodily affect of music as a different kind of ‘image’, which can, as Starr discusses, cause ‘the chills’ as a sort of ‘shiver down the spine’.107 That music can also provoke the apparently instinctual desire to move or dance can be explained neurologically too, since music directly affects the motor areas of the brain. Sometimes, movement appears unconscious through a characteristic known as ‘entrainment’, whereby the body reacts automatically to musical stimuli; even absent-mindedly tapping a foot or nodding the head along to music evidences the fundamental link between pleasurable sound and particular regions of the brain.108 As I discuss later, directors readily rely on a gamut of sounds and underscores to create not only an atmospheric or emotional aurality but, recalling how Zeki affords the status of the lay neurologist to the artist (that is, director), do so with a reasonable knowledge that it will be affective. Again, as Stephen Di Benedetto stresses, the brain responds to fictional situations, even if evidently experienced through the materiality of performance, in the same way as if what are clearly crafted or artified percepts were real-life events.109 More so than Zeki, it is Starr who includes the body in neurologically based appreciation—and, by implication, the production—of aesthetic experience; parts of my account of the actor especially position the body as a site of aesthetic knowledge. Event (Pleasure) Especially for our purposes when considering performance as a live phenomenon, two of the most engaging and relevant insights offered by Starr’s consideration of aesthetics are that artworks should be considered

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an event and, secondly, as spectator-experiencers (to coin a phrase) of aesthetic events, we seek out reward, a fundamental intention of the knowledge-seeking brain.110 The notion of ‘reward’ is an oft-invoked term in neuroaesthetics and its literature. The ‘reward circuit’ should not, though, be understood as a single entity. Without going into the more complex physiology (which is also not wholly confirmed; we should remember that the brain retains its mysteries), it is worth noting that the reward circuit is in fact several brain processes, which collaborate to make the complete ‘hedonic mechanism’, as Nadal et al. state, and relies on interactions between the cortex and subcortical areas, as well as parts of the brain that operate as regulators.111 In Starr’s theorisation, the ‘art’ of the artwork concerns its relationship and impact upon the viewer over time. Even viewing a static artwork is an event: contemplating a painting in an art gallery, for instance, is, in Starr’s terms, an event concerning the activity of viewing and responding to the painting: it does not exist solely as the flat object on the wall.112 To assign an aesthetic object a temporal element in its efficacy has an obvious connection to theatre. A performance is a highly complex aesthetic event that must of necessity be durational; shape, rhythm and other variations are aspects that a director and her/his team should address. Beauty Given her interest in beauty, Starr posits that conscious aesthetic pleasure is a form of ‘heightened’ knowing, and that artists often highlight the ‘hedonic signature of a given experience’.113 In psychology, this relates to the notion of ‘peak-shift effect’, which suggests how a percept is made overwhelming attractive by ‘shifting’ attention to it.114 Although operating within the field of visual art, Jonah Lehrer boldly claims ‘the job of an artist is to take mundane forms of reality - whether a facial expression or a bowl of fruit - and make those forms irresistible to the human brain’.115 Some artworks are, of course, overtly created and offered as art, or as consciously performative, and therefore as something that can be enjoyed as an evidently aestheticised, even hedonic, object in the broadest sense of the term. Examples of ‘peak-shift’ might be seen in the work of Robert Wilson and Robert Lepage. Such ‘deliberate hyperbole’, as Lehrer puts it following neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, implies too that both the artist and audience ‘know’ there is a self-conscious

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aesthetic quality and can enjoy not just what the artwork is or depicts but, so to speak, the hedonistically inflected ‘how’ of its ontology.116 Yet in their fuller anatomical description, Nadal et al. warn that ‘pleasure is not the end of the story’ and that evaluation is a further process, seated in particular parts of the brain, that of the higher-level cortical area.117 For the audience—and thus director—aesthetic reaction (hopefully one of some pleasure) is not enough. It seems that the brain needs to make sense of and find a relationship to its encounters: simply put, we always inevitably judge artworks by figuring out how ‘good’ we think an aesthetic encounter is. In rehearsal, this would seem the fundamental operation of the directorial brain, as the director engages in the basic question and realisation of how to do something. Mind(s) An ability to perceive what others may be thinking, and why, is clearly crucial to the work of the director; it probably underpins all mimetic theatre. In cognitive studies, and here explicitly neuroaesthetics, this phenomenon is known as the ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) and is fundamental to human development. Starr explains that ToM has a neurological basis, since ‘two components of the default mode network, the temporoparietal junction and the medial prefrontal cortex, are involved in the theory of mind - the simulation of others’ consciousness and the imputation of inner life to them’.118 ToM is thus not just intellectual but also emotional in its theorisation of what is going on ‘inside’ another human being. Although he rejects the Platonic Ideal (since that suggests that ‘truth’ is always already external and extant outside of the brain, denying the relational aspects above), Zeki finds that ‘Art works as a territory which explores the human condition since Art has been a creative refuge for other unsatisfied ideals created by the brain through its abstractive process’.119 For Zeki, we want to make art—and, here, theatre—since it both satisfies our brain’s enquiry towards knowledge and suggests that to share that enquiry with others is fundamental. In real terms, Starr and others offer something of a neurological-anatomical explanation as to why art has an affect and matters. In all this brain-based aesthetic contemplation, two issues arise and should not go unacknowledged. One is the primarily western viewpoint that infuses neuroaesthetics. If, as Nadal et al. point out, we might assume certain mutual, biological or cognitive characteristics in other

30  A. J. LEDGER

neurotypical humans, we need also to acknowledge—though equally not view uncritically—their stance that non-Western art is ‘performed and enjoyed as an intrinsic constituent of rituals, ceremonies, celebrations, and other events, and the associated experiences might serve several functions’.120 Whilst it is true that art is ritualised in some Asian traditions for instance, this really concerns a fundamentally different world view; it cannot be dismissed via a reductionism of things ‘other’, nor avoid the fact that a large number of successful, influential artists are not white westerners. The vast majority of neuroaesthetic theory seems not to acknowledge that the art it treats is, in fact, not even western but, more precisely, usually Euro-American; here, I can at best acknowledge the Western bias of the work I have had inevitably to include, but I hope always to find a little bodily warmth, thinking always of the director as one who provides experiences beyond the aesthetics of a cool (and not very interesting sounding) ‘evaluation’ of the artistic encounter.

Position If I have adopted the ‘look of the other’, then I have tried to look with an informed eye. In Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi’s terms earlier, I am part of the directing ‘field’; I direct both in the training and academic sector as well as professionally and have consciously developed a scholarly interest in directing as a research and pedagogic activity. When discussing performance, I have also occasionally taken the liberty of using ‘we’, as above, to imply an audience; whilst I do not wish to generalise spectators’ experience, I do need some mechanism to talk about ‘us’, especially when considering choice and affect. Like Pavis, I write only about those directors’ productions I have actually seen, so, at the very least, I include myself in that audience. In this book, I also discuss rehearsal, because I see it as fundamental to directing; after all, the rehearsal room is where the director spends most of her/his time, and it is where directing as a craft in large part takes place. Nevertheless, as Gay McAuley identifies, there has been a ‘reluctance to engage seriously with rehearsal practice’.121 This is partly to do with an academic tendency to deal with performance as a finite product, scrutinised through a plethora of cultural and critical theories as a phenomenon in the world, and partly the practical difficulty of gaining access to the rehearsal room and, once there, what languages to employ in order to write about what takes place. Typically, though, rehearsal

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understandably remains in closed spaces, characterised by Letzler Cole even in her subtitle as ‘a hidden world’.122 In revealing what goes on in rehearsal, McAuley is principally interested in how it can demonstrate the collective ‘authorship’ of her chosen production, nevertheless rightly linking the historical growth in rehearsal—once a practice that rarely, if ever, took place, and certainly not in terms of a modern understanding— to the emergence and artistic leadership of the director.123 As Paul Allain identifies in his article ‘Thick Description/Thin Lines: Writing about Process in Contemporary Performance’, the issue is not simply securing access to rehearsals, but being able to spend a reasonable amount of time there.124 As Allain suggests, it is difficult for the full time academic to follow a rehearsal process from beginning to end: I managed it, almost, when following Mitchell’s production of Gertrude Stein’s almost incomprehensible texts comprising Say It With Flowers (Hampstead Theatre, London, 2013). On the other hand, only once have I been refused a request to attend rehearsal; usually, after some negotiation, it is ultimately the director’s prerogative to allow visitors inside. Usually, I have strategically observed parts of rehearsal, forming an overview of the phases of the process, as well as direct contact with actors and production staff. Alongside other commitments, I cannot typically achieve a full immersion in rehearsal as what McAuley calls a ‘participant-observer’.125 Whilst she does not deny ‘the social and cultural context’ of theatre work in her ethnographic approach, as McAuley observes the ideal state of the ethnographer ‘in the field’ is to become ‘enmeshed in the daily experiences of the people being studied and […] sufficiently distanced to make observations’.126 Whilst the potential affect of the presence of the observer has been considered elsewhere, my own presence has rarely been proactive in terms of actual rehearsal, delimiting McAuley’s term. Attendees or, as I call myself here, ‘participant-witnesses’ are not of course necessarily without an agenda—the reporting of observation is the core material of Chapter 4—which, in part, explains resistance to outsiders. As a scholar, rehearsal has often to be treated a little differently than an immersive, ethnographic approach, which is itself also not without issues; in its need to include and assess everything from within the field, an ethnographic account can come across as a sometimes fetishised narrative history in which everything must matter. In his taxonomy of the epistemology of practice as research (PaR), Robin Nelson offers another point of view, that of a model of knowledge, which demonstrates the

32  A. J. LEDGER

advantages of PaR in the proposed oscillation between ‘know-what’ and ‘know-how’.127 For Nelson, ‘know-how’ is ‘procedural knowledge’, that is, the practitioner knows how to do something as tacit, embodied knowledge; ‘know-what’ is a way of thinking about what is done as ‘informed reflexivity’.128 A third category, outside of Nelson’s model but which he discusses, is ‘know-that’, which concerns objective knowledge ‘articulated in words and numbers’.129 Like McAuley, I am not doing the practice in the rehearsal room and cannot claim direct know-how. But I can, I think, occupy a little of vicarious position. Despite his seminal work in collaboration with Ostermeier, I would particularly hesitate to call myself a ‘theatre scientist’ like Boenisch.130 My understanding is closer to the notion of practice-led research, somewhere between Nelson’s three knowledge paradigms; most specifically it is, as Boenisch further puts it in relation to his simultaneous observation of and writing with Ostermeier, a ‘practice-relevant’ position, in which I claim only what I am critically able to.131 As with Boenisch, mine is a deliberate orientation, one of attending to the minutiae of the practice, be that in rehearsal or at the event of performance, and to be led by a practice that is not mine. I am both close and distant, simultaneously inside and enjoying what Allain calls an ‘embedded perspective’, but sometimes only temporarily amid.132 As I discuss in Chapter 4, positionality, not presence, is key to the look of the other.

Notes





1. Yukio Ninagawa, 1935–2016. 2. This ran from 2015–2017 and concerned director training. Work originally stemmed from the staging of Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass and developed into what Yukhananov called the ‘open-circuited workspace’, a developmental, discursive structure. 3. This element of Barba’s practice is discussed in Eugenio Barba, On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 158. 4.  Vasiliev’s work usefully features in Christopher Innes and Maria Shevtsova, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Yukhananov trained under Anatoly Efros and Vasiliev at GITIS (the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts) and was Vasiliev’s assistant director in the early 1980s. 5.  See ‘Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’, https://en-gb.facebook. com/BranaghTheatre/; ‘The Old Vic’, https://www.kevinspacey.com/ theatre/theoldvic/ (accessed 9 April 2018).

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6. Patrice Pavis, Contemporary Mise en Scène: Staging Theatre Today (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 6, 7. 7. Vera Gottlieb, ed. and trans., Anton Chekhov at the Moscow Art Theatre: Illustrations of the Original Productions (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005). 8. See, for example, Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski: His Life in Art (London: Methuen, 1988), 76; David Magarshack, trans., The Seagull, Produced by Stanislavsky (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd., 1952). 9. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy, Directors on Directing: A Source Book of the Modern Theatre (London: Owen, 1966), 35. 10. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 52. 11. Peter M. Boenisch, Directing Scenes and Senses: The Thinking of Regie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). 12.  Peter M. Boenisch and Thomas Ostermeier, The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); Benjamin Fowler, ed., The Theatre of Katie Mitchell (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), and forthcoming monograph; Susan Bennett and Sonia Massai, eds., Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie (London: Methuen Drama, 2018); David Willinger, ed., Ivo van Hove Onstage (Abingdon and New York: Routledge). 13. For example, the series The Great European Stage Directors (Bloomsbury Methuen). That said, some projects, including this series and the forthcoming Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Directors and Directing, stress common contexts and strands of development, shifting from discrete accounts. 14. Avra Sidiropoulou, Directions for Directing (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2019). 15. Susan Letzler Cole, Directors in Rehearsal: A Hidden World (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 4, 5. 16. Helen Manfull, Taking Stage: Women Directors on Directing (London: Methuen, 1999). 17. Innes and Shevtosva, Introduction, passim. 18. A new edition of Delgado and Rebellato’s volume is forthcoming. 19.  Barbara Simonsen, ed., The Art of Rehearsal: Conversations with Contemporary Theatre Makers (London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2017). 20.  Gabriele Sofia, ‘Introduction: Towards an Embodied Theatrology?’, in Gabriele Sofia, Victor Jacono, and Clelia Falletti, eds., Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017), 59. 21. Ibid., 59. As Sofia reports, Marco de Marinis coined the term. 22. Semir Zeki, ‘Artistic Creativity and the Brain’, Science 293: 5527 (2001): 51–52 (51).

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23. Marcos Nadal, Antoni Gomila, and Alejandro Gàlvez-Pol, ‘A History for Neuroaesthetics’, in Jon O. Lauring, ed., An Introduction to Neuroaesthetics: The Neuroaesthetic Approach to Aesthetic Experience, Artistic Creativity, and Arts Appreciation (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2014), 3–49 (34). 24.  Barnaby Nelson and David Rawlings, ‘Its Own Reward: A Phenomenological Study of Artistic Creativity’, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 38 (2007): 217–255 (219). 25. I use these terms in their current UK understanding. 26. Michael Billington, ‘Kwame Kwei-Armah Named New Artistic Director of Young Vic’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ 2017/sep/26/kwame-kwei-armah-named-new-artistic-director-ofyoung-vic (accessed 7 April 2018). 27. Adam J. Ledger, Odin Teatret: Theatre in a New Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Chapter 5. 28. Adam J. Ledger, ‘Great Britain’, in Anne Fliotsos and Wendy Vierow, eds., International Women Stage Directors (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 29. Cole and Krich Chinoy, Directors, 16. 30. Ibid., 35. 31. Maria Delgado and Dan Rebellato, eds., Contemporary European Theatre Directors (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 1. 32. See Mirella Schino, Alchemists of the Stage: Theatre Laboratories of Europe (Holstebro, Malta, and Wrocław: Icarus Publishing Enterprise, 2009). 33. Delgado and Rebellato, Contemporary, 2. 34. Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody, eds., Re: direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide (London and New York, 2003), 1, 5. 35. Schneider and Cody, Re: direction, 4. 36.  See Benjamin Fowler, ‘(Re)Mediating the Modernist Novel: Katie Mitchell’s Live Cinema Work’, and Adam J. Ledger, ‘The Thrill of Doing It Live’: Devising and Performing Katie Mitchell’s International ‘Live Cinema’ Productions’, in Kara Reilly, ed., Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 37.  Although somewhat contested, the term auteur stems from cinema, denoting the director’s evident aesthetic. 38. Delgado and Rebellato, Contemporary, 2. 39. Boenisch, Directing, 10; 40. 40. Ibid., 11. 41. Boenisch and Ostermeier, Thomas Ostermeier, 3 n. 8. 42.  Christine White, ‘Methodological Practices for Directing and Designing’, in Christine White, ed., Directors and Designers (Bristol: Intellect, 2009), 137.

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43. Delgado and Rebellato, Contemporary, 21. 44. If I may be allowed one more anecdote, I saw Mitchell’s Schaubühne Berlin production of Die Gelbe Tapete [The Yellow Wallpaper] at the Odéon Théâtre de L’Europe, Paris, travelling there and back within a day, collapsing geography as a consumer of a piece of European culture. 45. Delgado and Rebellato, ibid. 46. Pavis, Mise en Scène, 274. 47. Ostermeier grew up in Bavaria and later attended the Ernst Busch Schule in the former East Berlin. 48. See Michael Grandage Company, ‘Theatre’, http://www.michaelgrandagecompany.com/theatre/ (accessed 10 April 2018). 49. Pavis, Mise en Scène, 274. 50. Ibid., 275. 51. Lepage’s company Ex Machina develops work in Quebec at La Caserne and, latterly, Le Diamant; Wilson supports the development of new work at The Watermill Centre, Long Island. 52. Di Trevis, Being a Director: A Life in the Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), xvi. 53. Ibid., 34. 54. Ibid., 38. 55. Ibid., 38. 56. Katie Mitchell, The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 123. 57. Mitchell, Craft, 2. 58. Mike Alfreds, Different Every Night: Freeing the Actor (London: Nick Hern Books, 2009), 12, original emphasis. 59. Ibid., 344. 60.  Christine White, ed., ‘Back and Forth to Russia: Scenography as an Academic Study from Moscow 1994-St Petersburg 2004’, in White, ed., Directors and Designers, 16. 61. Charles Even, ‘Hand in Glove: The Designer as Director as Designer’, in White, ed., Directors and Designers, 25. 62. White, ‘Back and Forth’, 14. 63.  A Complicité and National Theatre Co-production. Alison Oddey, ‘The Organics of the Rehearsal Room’, in White, ed., Directors and Designers, 95. 64.  Fischer-Lichte both acknowledges and moves on from previous concepts of the event as discussed by Heidegger, Derrida and Lyotard; Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 162–163. 65. Ibid., 35. 66. Ibid., 39.

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67. Ibid., 55. 68. Ibid., 162. 69. Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Catalytic Creativity: The Case of Linus Pauling’, American Psychologist 56: 4 (2001): 337–341 (341). 70. Marion Botella, Vlad Glaveanu, Franck Zenasni, Martin Storme, Nils Myszkowski, Marion Wolff and Todd Lubart, ‘How Artists Create: Creative Process and Multivariate Factors’, Learning and Individual Differences 26 (2013): 161–170 (161), original emphasis. 71.  Mike Radford, ‘Emotion and Creativity’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38: 1 (2004): 53–64 (64). 72. Ibid., 54. 73. Mary-Anne Mace and Tony Ward, ‘Modeling the Creative Process: A Grounded Theory Analysis of Creativity in the Domain of Art Making’, Creativity Research Journal 14: 2 (2002): 179–192 (191). 74. Radford, ‘Emotion’, 62. 75. Botella et al., ‘Artists’, 162, original emphasis. 76. Ibid., 162, original emphasis. 77. Ibid. 78. Nelson and Rawlings, ‘Reward’, 221. 79. Brook’s term appears variously, but for an early verbatim example, see Daniel Labeille, ‘“The Formless Hunch”: An Interview with Peter Brook’, Modern Drama 23: 3 (1980): 221–226. 80. Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Catalytic’, 340. 81. Ibid., 337, original emphasis. 82. Mace and Ward, ‘Modeling’, 180. As the authors explain, ‘grounded theory consists of a set of systematic procedures that seek to inductively derive a theory about a particular phenomenon’ (181), such as interview transcripts that are analysed to expose recurring elements. 83. Ibid., 183. 84. Ibid., 190. 85. Botella et al., ‘Artists’, 166. 86. Nelson and Rawlings, ‘Reward’, 5. 87. Katie Mitchell, Director’s, 79. 88. Mace and Ward, ‘Modeling’, 184. 89. Ibid., 187. 90. Mace and Ward, ‘Modeling’, 187; Alfreds, Different Every Night. 91. Nelson and Rawlings, ‘Reward’, 222. 92. Radford, ‘Emotion’, 63. 93.  Rufus Norris, public discussion at the Theatre and Performance Research Association, Royal Holloway, Egham, 4 September 2014. 94. Semir Zeki, ‘Artistic Creativity and the Brain’.

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95. Ibid., 52. 96. See, for instance, Adrian Curtin, Avant-Garde Theatre Sound: Staging Sonic Modernity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), the introduction for which usefully surveys the recent scholarship of ‘the sonic turn’. 97. Nadal et al., ‘History’, 6–7. 98. Ibid., 8. 99. Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 68. 100. Ibid., 197–204. 101. Ibid., 54–55. 102.  Helmut Leder and Pablo P. L. Tinio, ‘Experimental Aesthetics’, in Lauring, Introduction, 51–69 (55–56). 103. Ibid., 52. 104. Leder and Tinio, ‘Experimental’, 58. 105. G. Gabrielle Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), xv. 106. Ibid., 9. 107. Ibid., 43–44. 108. Ibid., 88. 109. Stephen Di Benedetto, The Provocation of the Senses in Contemporary Theatre (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 6. 110. Starr, Feeling, 7–32, my emphasis. 111. Ibid., 30. 112. I do not, here, propose also to examine ‘relational aesthetics’, preferring to stay within the delimits of neuroaesthetics, which, unlike the aforementioned critical turn, has not yet, to my knowledge, been incorporated into a discussion of theatre. 113. Starr, Feeling, 15. 114. Jonah Lehrer gives the example of how chicks peck at a red dot on a fake beak as if seeking food from a real beak; if three dots are added, the chicks will peck faster. Jonah Lehrer, ‘Unlocking the Mysteries of The Artistic Mind’, Psychology Today, 1 July 2009, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/200907/unlocking-the-mysteries-the-artistic-mind (accessed 13 April 2018). 115. Ibid., n.p. 116. Ibid., n.p. 117. Nadal et al., ‘History’, 30. 118. Starr, Feeling, 60. 119. Zeki, Inner, 52. 120. Nadal et al., ‘History’, 37. 121. Gay McAuley, Not Magic but Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 3.

38  A. J. LEDGER 122. Susan Letzler Cole, Directors. 123. Ibid., 9, 4–5. 124.  Paul Allain, ‘Thick Description/Thin Lines: Writing About Process in Contemporary Performance’, Contemporary Theatre Review 26: 4 (2016): 485–495. 125. McAuley, Not Magic, 2. 126. Ibid., 5. 127. Robin Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). See also Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 37. 128. Ibid., 41, 44. 129. Ibid., 45. 130. Boenisch, Thomas Ostermeier, xiii. 131.  Peter Boenisch, ‘Looking for Ostermeier: Researching Methodologies of Theatre Direction’, https://www.facebook.com/universityofkentschoolofarts/posts/1273064652747666 (accessed 18 November 2017). 132. Paul Allain, ‘Thick Description/Thin Lines’, 494.

CHAPTER 2

The Director and Stanislavski

Introduction Despite the proliferation of theatrical practices that developed over the latter part of the twentieth century, the Stanislavski ‘system’ continues to permeate Western approaches to acting. Especially in the realist tradition as practised by key contemporary directors, the continued pervasiveness of variants of the ‘system’ dominates much of how directing is understood and realised.1 As a methodological approach, Stanislavski’s ‘system’—at once a process and philosophy of acting—remains the primary acting ‘technology’, as John Ginman puts it, for many theatre practitioners, however understood.2 Whilst he is known as a director, teacher and theorist, Stanislavski was fundamentally an actor: to link directing resolutely with Stanislavski is thus inherently to prioritise the actor; as Annelis Kuhlmann observes, the ‘director’s gaze is […] to be understood as part of the actor’s methodological training background and aesthetic practice. As for the profession of the theatre director, it also presupposes an embodied knowledge of the actor’.3 One of the director’s fundamental activities, watching, is here seen as inherently concerned with an empathetic understanding of acting, both in training and rehearsal, and its encounter with, often, the playscript. Rehearsal thus becomes the analysis and realisation of the text through the intertwined work of actor and director, via shared Stanislavskian procedures, as a directorial, aestheticised theory of mind.

© The Author(s) 2019 A. J. Ledger, The Director and Directing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40767-2_2

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‘System’ There are variations in how the ‘system’ is understood of course, largely to do with historical problems in translation and publication of Stanislavski’s key works and ideas, as well as shifts in the lineage of teaching as it developed from Stanislavski himself. Historically, this problematic dissemination has caused an erroneous split between the psychological and physical aspects of the ‘system’.4 As Ginman further observes, contemporary conceptions of acting tend to reinforce the idea that ‘human (not just stage) interaction […] [is] essentially based on strategy and manipulation’.5 Whilst some director’s derivation of the ‘system’ creates a web of fictional circumstances within which actors can behave, the formulation of such transactional, goal-orientated action assumes a resolutely psychological basis to acting. Indeed, directing often comprises the fine explication of characters’ ‘strategy and manipulation’, a concern often evident in Chapter 4. Director Directors such as Max Stafford-Clark, Alfreds, Donnellan and, most completely, Mitchell have been drawn to the Stanislavski ‘system’ in one way or another, placing this at the centre of their directorial practice. Although other directors root their methods in Stanislavski (such as James Macdonald), I have chosen to focus on these directors for this opening chapter since each has written a book on their approach, offering further articulations of personal practices. My consideration will partly rest on these writings as a means to observe both a praxis of acting and the laying out of rehearsal based on understandings of Stanislavski. This offers some consideration of how philosophies and practices of directing are expressed discursively and, in the case of the directors here, the ‘systemisation’ of their own practices. Alfreds trained originally in the USA, encountering the Americanised version of the early phase of the ‘system’ in the guise of Method Acting; Donnellan appears to have adapted some Stanislavskian methodology and, I suggest, offers a radical reversal of some procedures (Donnellan also works prolifically in Russia). Again demonstrating a personalised version of the largely psychologised inheritance of Stanislavski, StaffordClark calls his rigorous textual analysis a ‘méthode stanislavskoise’.6

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Mitchell claims a particularly accurate use of the ‘system’. Her work incorporates what can be seen as Stanislavski’s later Active Analysis; given enough rehearsal time, she uses improvisation, which gradually draws in the playwright’s text, as well as a detailed construction of the ‘world’ of the play. Mitchell is particularly concerned to develop characters’ biographies and (to use a Stanislavskian term) the ‘given circumstances’ of the dramatic situation. Recently, Mitchell has relied less on improvisation, other than as a focussed, biographical exploration; her work stresses instead the highly detailed ‘table work’ of textual analysis, which re-renders dramatic action as events and intentions, before a behaviour-based exploration in the locale of the play, typically using a complete mock-up of the set. This is not quite, as Mitchell has called it, ‘late Stanislavski’, but instead a collapse of ‘early’, text-based aspects with later Stanislavskian practices, including the Method of Physical Action.7 To draw on Starr, contemporary Stanislavskian procedures construct a ‘knowing’ that inhabits a creative tension between conscious analysis and decision-making, and a necessary subjectivity. What becomes known through aesthetic experience, either as a spectator or, here, as an actor working inside a Stanislavskian process, should not be intellectual, but ‘something “cognitive,” “sensory,” and “emotional”. It is subjective, contingent, experiential (and at the neural level computational)’.8 Neuroaesthetics articulates some shift towards the experiential here and, in terms of rehearsal, Starr’s subjectivity reinforces improvisation, bodily encounters with space and interpersonal relationships. As I will suggest, neuroaesthetics also helps to explain how directors draw on Stanislavskian procedures, or at least frame their approaches as such, in order overtly to use the body’s response itself as a percept to affect their audience. Even in its apparently holistic ‘artification’, to recall a term in the Introduction, I find that the application of the Stanislavski ‘system’ by many directors really remains one of textual analysis, albeit with varying degrees of detail. Like the history of the dissemination of Stanislavski’s ‘system’, textual scrutiny inadvertently creates a separation between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ by analysing language, only, as the basis of psychological behaviour, which, as Ginman highlights, tends to prioritise specifically goal-orientated, strategic behaviour. This was not Stanislavski’s intention and tends to reinforce, erroneously, that the ‘system’ mainly concerns analysis of text, playing not only into assumptions of

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acting as word-based psychology, but also into the British (though not exclusively so) placement of the writer and textual analysis of the writer’s work at the centre of the theatrical process and outcome.9 Although this chapter acknowledges the evolution of the ‘system’, it more particularly focusses on improved understanding in English of Stanislavski’s Method of Physical Action and Active Analysis since the mid-1990s. I draw on the work of Jean Benedetti and Bella Merlin as well as, for example, reference to the scholarship of Sharon Marie Carnicke and Rose Whyman. Usefully, Merlin has examined the application of Stanislavski in contemporary practice and has worked with two directors above (Alfreds and Stafford-Clark). On the other hand, I suggest that the growth in something of a Stanislavski ‘industry’, centred on a burgeoning collection of handbooks aimed at the undergraduate market, shifts between, at worst, a ‘pick and mix’ approach to parts of a potentially more holistic system, and a fixation of Stanislavski as a set of uncritically accepted, individuated and always-effective ‘tools’.10 Still, the directors discussed here noticeably find other means than those rooted in Stanislavski’s ‘system’ to encourage and harness the sensibility of the body, often as a second-stage, add-on process. Alfreds, for instance, draws on Michael Chekhov’s approach and uses Rudolf Laban’s methods. Mitchell has developed strategies for exploring and manifesting characters’ physical and emotional behaviour within the environmental aspects in which they operate. In her case, this reflects both Stanislavski’s practice but extends an understanding of acting into biological, cognitive and neuroscientific concerns. Starr’s call for embodied knowledge appears, then, through diverse, strategic, physical aspects to acting and physical explorations of the ‘world’ of the play.

Stanislavski As Phillip Zarrilli has pointed out, various understandings of the relationship between mind and body have been a central tenet to most twentieth-century actor training, starting with Stanislavski.11 Whyman demonstrates that Stanislavski was significantly influenced by the emergent scientific knowledge of his day, including how ‘inner’ psychological activity could be manifested ‘externally’. Whyman in fact goes further, arguing that, for Stanislavski, there exists ‘an inextricable link between the inner and spiritual and the outer mechanical expression of the actor’.12 In contemporary practice, we may well have lost a fuller

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appreciation of what ‘spiritual’ may mean, yet Stanislavski’s belief appears idealistic: ‘outer’ expression is not always, or easily, one of response in the fullest notion of contemporary psychophysical processes. It also risks a much older paradigm of the mind/body division, whereby the centre of experience is only ‘inside’ the actor such that the body then functions as a kind of machine, infallibly communicating thought and feeling.13 Indeed, Stanislavski encountered issues, as Whyman explains: Stanislavsky viewed the voice and body of the actor as their apparatus or instrument, which is underdeveloped initially, and must be trained […] by means of exercises. […] However, thinking of the actor’s voice and body as their instrument is a dichotomous way of thinking that brings about problems for Stanislavsky.14

As Whyman further demonstrates, Stanislavski’s approach, although conditioned by the scientific knowledge of the time, was not entirely consistent and shifted over time. The search for a more holistic realisation of acting, cultivated and underpinned, as here, by training, has of course driven so many practitioners since Stanislavski’s initial research. Merlin also emphasises a psychophysical basis to the ‘system’ but, in her highly practical contribution to Stanislavski studies, also suggests that Stanislavski’s work became ‘fractured’ and that her book is an attempt to pull aspects back together.15 Merlin provides a great quantity of information and approaches to formulate a thorough approach or, rather, well-equipped ‘toolkit’. But if not read and used as a whole, Merlin’s book is, paradoxically, similarly fractured, since we are invited to ‘loot the toolkit as and when necessary’.16 In making Stanislavski a box of quick fixes to be raided in order to solve a particular problem in a certain moment of acting, Merlin risks rendering Stanislavski a product-orientated set of individuated techniques. Rather than working consistently and experientially because of an understanding of what acting might be, the actor simply ‘applies’ a ‘tool’ in order to fix a problem or get a particular result. Even if Stanislavski would agree that the ‘system’ should not be ‘considered gospel’, neither is it a set of bits and pieces in rehearsal for ad hoc use.17 Merlin seems to contrast with Mitchell’s emphasis on secure process and groundwork as the basis for repeatability, or Alfreds’ insistence on immersion in the ‘world’ of the play.18 However incomplete, the directors explored here try to achieve a process rooted in an overarching praxis of acting.

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Emotion The issue of emotion has typically sat uneasily with attempts to achieve psychophysical unity, the ideal state considered to underpin much contemporary acting. Alfreds refers to his time in the USA encountering the method’s ‘emotion memory’ but, historically, Whyman refers also to William James’s influence on Stanislavski.19 Crucially, James considered emotion to have a physiological basis, rooted in physical reaction: put briefly, the Jamesian model suggests that when confronted by a particular stimulus the human body first reacts, then cognitively rationalises the experience, before, finally, experiencing an emotion.20 According to neuroaesthetics, aesthetic experience is fundamentally subjective and individual, yet mutually similar in human terms of brain function. Starr argues that emotions too are events, reinforcing her key term. These events are personal but, simply put, we all have them. Contrary to James, for Starr emotions are responses over time, not more or less instantaneous feelings.21 Glossing some pretty complex neurology (and Starr includes very technical illustrations), Starr reports that in general anatomical terms, neural activation moves from the sensory cortex forwards toward the basal ganglia (reward processes) and toward the hippocampus and amygdalae (memory and emotion […]). Activation in the orbitofrontal cortex follows, but there are interactive loops that reach between these frontal areas and the basal ganglia so that higher order, complex processes of cognition, and emotional and reward processes, may continually feed into one another.22

Here, parts of the brain deal with certain aspects, but the brain is also porous and connected in its processes. In everyday terms, what can appear as anatomical science can be more readily experienced through the fundamental processes and experiences of emotion, energy, image, aesthetic craft and the sensibility of the body. Starr’s proposal directly contrasts the Method Acting approach whereby emotion or, more particularly, emotion memory, is a function of the deliberate, pre-emptive, conscious mind. Instead, James’s idea of ‘second nature’ suggests an acting process that, to follow Starr, comprises a set of events that should become so habituated that they are not consciously thought about.23 ‘Second nature’ also usefully dilutes the potential coldness of a view of the Stanislavski ‘system’ as a set of techniques taken from a ‘toolkit’ and can further be seen as the state that

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all of the directors discussed in this chapter aspire to in their actors, especially Alfreds and Mitchell, the latter of which has especially been influenced by James. The work of Ostermeier in the next chapter also demonstrates a completeness of approach in which, unlike Mitchell, actors immediately improvise in order to create a physical basis to the action of the scene, which nevertheless results in the kind of vital behaviourism both directors aspire to. Dissemination Since the 1990s, a greater understanding of Stanislavski’s later work on the Method of Physical Action and Active Analysis has emerged, though these practices appeared in Vasili Toporkov’s earlier Stanislavski in Rehearsal.24 My own understanding is that the former approach concerns the development of a role through the construction of a score of activity, whereas the latter is a rehearsal method rooted in improvisations that slowly incorporate the script. Other than the notable exception of Ostermeier, it is curious why the application of the Stanislavski ‘system’ by many directors rests on textual analysis. The breakdown and analysis of the dramatic script is clearly by no means the complete ‘system’, either in its historical development, range, or modes of practice: these include, for example, physical aspects, the muscularity of speech and—and this is often forgotten—a sense of a production’s form or style.25 A number of scholarly investigations detail the problematic issues surrounding the articulation of the ‘system’, often caused by poor translations and the complex lineage and legacy of Stanislavski’s work, especially its journey to America and elision with Method Acting.26 It is this history that, at least in part, explains the textual and psychological emphases that still dominate. Stanislavski lived to see only two books published, An Actor Prepares (1936 in the USA) and My Life in Art (1926 in the USA). This older, classic Stanislavskian material has proven to be unreliable. An Actor Prepares has been criticised as an inaccurately translated, edited version of the Russian An Actor’s Work on Himself: Part One and Stanislavski’s own unhappiness with the English-language version has long been noted.27 An Actor Prepares is, then, actually only half a book, focussing on the psychological aspects of the ‘system’, and represents only a part of Stanislavski’s overall work and his unrealised scheme of a sequence of books.

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After years of wrangling over publication, Benedetti was able to publish a new translation of An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary, revealing the fictional Stanislavski as a less authoritarian, more playful figure (Tortsov is Stanislavski’s alter ego in his Socratic dialogue style writings) and correcting the mistakes of the Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood versions.28 Stanislavski could at least take the opportunity to rewrite My Life in Art for a Russian edition from the summer of 1924 to spring of 1926.29 Stanislavski’s fears that splitting An Actor’s Work into two parts would result in an overemphasis on a psychological approach, rooted in the deconstruction of the playtext, were to prove warranted: for many years, An Actor Prepares was the principle means that the English speaker could learn anything about Stanislavski’s training and rehearsal methodologies. Additionally, two members of the Moscow Arts Theatre, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, had emigrated to the West and had begun teaching.30 Boleslavsky had played Belyaev in Stanislavski’s 1909 production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. In this experimental production, external action was kept to an absolute minimum and actors attempted to ‘radiate’ feelings. The teachings of both Ouspenskaya and Boleslavsky could only represent Stanislavski’s early work on the ‘system’, which especially explored affective memory (commonly termed ‘emotion memory’), as discussed in Chapter 9 of An Actor Prepares.31 Translation and publication issues aside, terminology also nuances the understanding of acting: for example, Benedetti suggests that ‘objective’ is better rendered as ‘Task’, closer to the Russian zadacha, meaning a current problem and implying a more immediate engagement by the actor (and character) with the matter at hand.32 ‘Objective’ can suggest a destination perhaps intellectually determined and still to be reached. Benedetti also points out that the older translations of Stanislavski’s texts by Reynolds Hapgood use ‘units’ regardless of whether Stanislavski is discussing an ‘Episode’ (a large section of action) or a ‘Bit’, a small sequence of action within a scene.33 Nevertheless, familiar terminology such as ‘objectives’ and ‘units’ quickly pervades Alfreds and Stafford-Clark’s accounts. Historically, there has been a reductive muddling of Stanislavski’s work with Lee Strasberg’s emphasis on emotion memory, where the actor ‘recalls’ personal emotion and attempts to utilise this in the portrayal of her/his character. On the other hand, Stanislavski had moved on from what is more correctly called ‘affective memory’ to consider that

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the premise of his later work concerned immediate action and a discovery through doing, not feeling. As Benedetti explains, in the Method of Physical Action and Active Analysis, ‘emotions are states which are produced by activity, which are the result of a process’, recalling both the Jamesian model and Starr’s neuroaesthetic emphasis on events.34 Through Boleslavsky’s American Laboratory Theatre, where Strasberg was a student for a short period, there is a historical link to Method Acting, so often negatively discussed as rooted only in emotion memory (see, in contrast, David Krasner’ Method Acting Reconsidered 35). One Group Theatre member, Stella Adler, travelled to Paris in 1934 and worked privately with Stanislavski, encountering the latest foci of the ‘system’. On her return to the USA, Strasberg refused to change his own emphases.36 Whilst this is not the place for a developed historical discussion of the infamous technique, it is worth noting Alfreds’s own, later, explicit rejection of emotion memory.37 From the late 1920s, Stanislavski’s health declined and, in his final phase of work, he gathered together students and actors, forming not only a new Opera-Dramatic Studio, but also a cast to work on Molière’s Tartuffe. It is the work undertaken here that came to be known as the Method of Physical Action. It is not insignificant that Stanislavski chose to develop his new ideas on a classical French play, far removed from the realist-naturalist writing with which he is too often reductively connected. Although newer writings have since emerged that explore the Method of Physical Action, Toporkov’s Stanislavski in Rehearsal is startling in comparison with other, older material. After years of slow and detailed rehearsal work, Toporkov shows how Stanislavski insisted on immediate activity, declaring ‘start bravely, not to reason, but to act. As soon as you begin to act you will immediately become aware of the necessity of justifying your actions’.38 The undertaking of a dynamic line of physical actions, expressed in clear verbs, is the core of the technique. Active Analysis appears freer in its experiential exploration; here, Stanislavski, through improvisation, wanted his actors to jump into the situation of the play with little preparation, far from the painstaking business of textual analysis around a table. Throughout, Toporkov documents Stanislavski’s overtly physical approach to character and activity, rhythm and relationships. As Brian Smith suggests ‘it was the sense of active play that really animated his [Stanislavski’s] late rehearsals’.39 This immediate,

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holistic approach directly counters any split between ‘mind’ and ‘body’, since actors are immediately affected in, optimally, psychophysical unity.

Analysis In direct contrast to how Stanislavski concluded his work in more playful fashion, Stafford-Clark breaks down a script into units, as does Alfreds, following a ‘traditional’ Stanislavskian process. Stafford-Clark is most well known for his subsequent step, known as ‘actioning’. Rather than defining an action as a step in a physical score as in the Method of Physical Action, Stafford-Clark defines that an action is a refiguring of a line as a transitive verb: for example, ‘I provoke’, ‘I implore’, ‘I reassure’.40 Overall, for Stafford-Clark, ‘actioning’ is a process of mapping ‘the character’s intention or tactic for that particular thought’.41 Despite his acknowledgement that actioning is ‘a slow way of working’, StaffordClark will spend some weeks around the table with actors at the outset of a rehearsal period, actioning a script by rigorously notating the verb for each phrase in the text.42 These ‘tactics’ work towards fulfilling the character’s objective within a given unit and comprise an unremittingly textual rendition of the ‘score’. That said, Mitchell can spend nearly half of a rehearsal period defining what she terms events and intentions with her casts, a resolutely paper based, speech activity ‘around the table’. As Ginman notes earlier, actioning stresses an individual’s strategy within interpersonal relationships through the formulation ‘I’ and the verb. If a transitive verb must take an object, then the other person is the object ‘acted upon’. Some actions are more allusive or metaphorical— ‘I stab’, ‘I twist’, ‘I smooth’ and so on—suggesting that actions are not solely about saying something transitively, but label the experiential quality of intention towards another. Nevertheless, in Stafford-Clark’s directorial practice, acting is thus predicated on a string of verbs to affect another. Although writing from a phenomenological and linguistic basis, Alice Rayner suggests that ‘an act [is made] a construction of language in which an act is identical to the articulation or name; hence it is a self-­ representation conditioned by the position and ideology of the speaker of the word’.43 Viewed from the perspective of acting, Rayner suggests a holism of language, intention and situation. Nevertheless, drawing on her considerable Stanislavskian practice and, importantly, work as an actor with Stafford-Clark, Merlin suggests that actioning can be a

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cerebral process, suggesting that actions ‘can provide a necessary compliment to a more intuitive physical approach’.44 Although Merlin inadvertently ascribes thought, clarity and decision as potentialities only of the mind, Stafford-Clark encourages physical response through improvisation and game-playing, as well as investigations into characters’ relative status, as his book Letters to George recounts. But this is not through a physical process that has its roots in the Stanislavski ‘system’. In StaffordClark’s practice in particular, the minutiae of linguistic analysis render the moment by moment progression of the performance as elements that work to affect the other. Lines are turned into a weaponry of thinking by, as Starr puts it, ‘assigning perceptions a value’.45 In real terms, these words-turned-thoughts-turned-actions are made to work in a certain way, allowing more intuitive physical work to sit around them. Different Given the title of his book, Different Every Night (2007), Alfreds places great emphasis on the freeness and flexibility of the actor. Rather than through textual analysis, this is made possible because of a grounding in the analysis of the circumstances of the play or production. As a director, Alfreds perhaps finds some of Stanislavski’s later playfulness, an emphasis especially seen in Alfreds’ early work with Shared Experience. His sparse staging, foregrounding the body and creativity of the actor, was, I suggest, similar to Donnellan’s work now. Even if Alfreds bases his work on the freeness of the actor, it is still, for him, Stanislavski’s ‘system’ that ‘supports this flexibility’.46 Whilst it must avoid predetermined outcomes, acting is motivational: Alfreds emphasises ‘WANT, DO, FEEL. […] I want something. Therefore I do something. Consequently I feel something’.47 This action and affect structure recalls Whyman’s reference to a Jamesian concept of emotion and, as we will see, mirrors Mitchell’s reference to James’s original writings. Despite his emphasis on action and desire, Alfreds declares that ‘Stanislavsky’s search was to discover how an actor could produce truthful, spontaneous emotion in performance’.48 Although this is not completely correct given the arc of Stanislavski’s work, Alfreds dedicates the bulk of his book to rigorous play analysis and his own ‘search’ as rooted in Stanislavski. Alfreds centres on three interrelated emphases in his own ‘systemisation’: the world of the play, text and character. Each

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runs parallel to the others, and work on each aspect can, as Alfreds demonstrates, enable not only the structure of a day or week, but an entire rehearsal process.49 In this way, a Stanislavski-derived process becomes also a means of scheduling. Alfreds’s Stanislavskian praxis provides a secure structure to performance action, which enables scenes to unfold in ways that are ‘different every night’. Alfreds wants actors who are free ‘dynamically through time and space’ within this carefully composed structure.50 Whilst he uses familiar Stanislavskian vocabulary during rehearsal, Alfreds prefers the Americanised use of ‘beats’ for bits (as used by Benedetti) or units. He also discusses the ‘counter objective’ (something that prevents a character’s achievement) and (like Mitchell) ‘obstacles’ (things that inhibit a character achieving her/his objective). Alfreds also uses the ‘point of concentration’ (‘POC’); he explains: the point of concentration functions as a preoccupation with a given circumstance. Its purpose is achieved by the actors simultaneously pursuing the objectives and playing the actions of a scene while fully preoccupied by a POC. […] Conventionally no doubt, actors take their given circumstances into account, but usually only relate them to the moments in the text in which they’re mentioned.51

The purpose of the POC is focus, designed immediately to affect and enrich the playing of a scene, and avoiding Stanislavski’s dreaded acting ‘in general’.52 All Alfreds’ strategies are designed optimally to enable acting based on collective imagination in, to recall Botella et al., a creative ‘environment’ of ‘collaborators’, rather than a fixed score as with Stafford-Clark’s initial actioning, and which is spontaneous through its moment-by-moment negotiation of relationship, situation and intention. Interestingly, Alfreds inverts normative Stanislavskian procedure by exploring actions, which he defines in the same way as Stafford-Clark, before an analysis of characters’ objectives. In first determining what it is that the actor/character does, rather than what s/he wants and then what to do in order to achieve it, Alfreds gets closer to the Jamesian model of react-act-feel. This is further underscored by a crucial difference between Alfreds and Stafford-Clark’s practice: Alfreds asks actors to physicalise actions and improvise a scene by speaking actions out loud. In contrast to Stafford-Clark’s linguistically precise analysis of actions at the table, Alfreds approach is therefore close to Stanislavski’s Method

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of Physical Action. Although rooted, still, in an analysis of language as affect, Alfreds wants […] the actors to meet the text in the most organic way possible, which means meeting the play holistically, not just with their intellects and their tongues, but with their bodies, which contain their emotional and sensory life, their memories and experience.53

Viewed as a Stanislavskian approach, Alfreds technique optimally brings about a similarly physically scored outline to the scene in question, focussing on what actor/characters do, not psychological manipulation via words. Despite his physical emphases, one of the gaps in Alfreds’s method as derived from Stanislavski, like Stafford-Clark’s approach, is the means to translate the decoding of synchronic moments in the play, and an embodied connection to that logic, into concrete means to create character, as in Stanislavski’s Building a Character or Toporkov’s account. Alfreds has therefore developed a suite of techniques to address character creation: he draws his body-based work from the work of Rudolf Laban, particularly the use of ‘efforts’. Alfreds also uses Chekhov’s practice of ‘centres’ (strictly speaking, the Imaginary Centre).54 Harnessed to the detail of his earlier dramatic analysis, as well as the experiential-based rehearsal of scenes, this makes for a powerful combination. One of the assumptions in at least the early part of Alfred’s treatise is that actors are typically superb artists who know best what should happen in any given scene, and that emotion necessarily arises through the application of an approach to acting that is more or less always successful.55 Alfreds also makes the same point as Mitchell about transculturally shared emotional expression. But in the latter part of his practice as outlined in Different Every Night, Alfreds drops Stanislavski for a collection of relatively technical approaches that, like Merlin, are explicitly offered as ‘tools’ to be used as needed. Alfreds states that he is ‘in no way advocating a system that must be slavishly followed’ and advises ‘use only those processes that seriously connect with you […] use them in any order’.56 This gives the actor tremendous autonomy in terms of her/ his approach to the particular acting demand and accords to the spirit and intention of later Stanislavski. But it also means that the actor—and director reading Alfreds’s book—may simply adopt those techniques which seem to promise an ‘instant’ result and with which s/he feels most

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comfortable. Such chopping and changing amidst a potentially more coherent, joined-up process thereby denies the rigour and challenge of a ‘system’, be that Stanislavskian or otherwise. The Target As Smith suggests, Stanislavski’s model of rehearsal offers ‘a way of thinking about, and of thinking through together, the artistic challenge of performing the play. This intersection of director and actor, teacher and learner, leader and follower, provides a model for the necessary, reciprocal discourse of the actor and director’.57 As a directorial position, this valorises how both the actor and director can together discover more about the play and its manifestation, though still suggests the actor’s need for a mentor figure charged with enhancing her/his prowess. Besides other imperatives for Cheek by Jowl (its focus on classical texts, for instance), the company’s work is, by implication, fundamentally imbued with Donnellan’s philosophy of acting. And as if to get out of the way of the actor, Donnellan’s partner, Nick Ormerod, typically creates designs that are uncluttered, even sparse, by attending rehearsal in order that he can respond to the actor’s work, providing space for the intended qualities of acting Donnellan encourages. Donnellan’s book The Actor and the Target has been adopted by Donnellan and Ormerod’s company, Cheek by Jowl, as its manifesto on acting.58 It was originally published in Russia, a country with a long interest in acting and actor training of course. Donnellan writes from the actor’s point of view, creating both a treatise on the actor and the actor’s essential imaginative powers. Like Mitchell’s imagined production of The Seagull in her book, Donnellan uses Romeo and Juliet to offer an exemplary analysis of the machinations of the play, through which he documents the fictional account of ‘Irina’s’ work as Juliet. If this is a book about directing, Donnellan’s treatise thus remains resolutely based on the actor’s process as the primary revelation of the play. Whilst he similarly considers the director–actor collaboration paramount, Donnellan defines his relationship with the performer analogously since, as he says, ‘I make it very clear that I’m not in the position of a teacher towards an actor, but I am maybe in the position of coach towards an athlete. For me theatre is always at its best when I’m learning as well’.59 Despite his admiration for actors—and a book that rests on the scrupulous consideration of one actor’s creative work—Donnellan

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bases his understanding of acting and directing process on the negative assumption that the actor’s default position is one of creative blockage. Despite his apparent collaboration in rehearsal, for Donnellan, the ‘mantra of the blocked actor’ is, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’; by extension, the director’s job is, most simply, to offer the means to ‘unblock’ the actor, and all will apparently be well.60 To achieve this, Donnellan’s overriding creative model is Stanislavskian—objectives and actions are clearly used, if not termed as such—yet he flips some Stanislavskian approaches (Fig. 2.1). Viewed from the perspective of this chapter, the ‘target’ is Donnellan’s most intriguing reaction to Stanislavski. The ‘target’ reverses the Stanislavskian goal-orientated objective (or Task or intention), typically formulated as ‘I want …’, or ‘to…’, to something external to the actor that makes the character act in a certain way. Donnellan explains that when we are compelled, propelled, impelled towards something, logic tells us that these strong impulses must come from inside ourselves. We perceive this to be ‘true’, but the opposite principle is more helpful to the actor. In other words it is the target that propels, compels, and impels us. We give up control and entrust it to the thing we see. The actor abdicates power to the target.61

Like Benedetti, Donnellan sees acting as a fundamental human impulse; but this impulse is caused by external things—the target—not, as in ‘classical’ Stanislavski, a predetermined desire of the character originating in the character her/himself.62 Donnellan suggests that our lives are full of such ‘acting’, since we play roles (the ‘I’ as parent, teacher, sister and so on), and participate in psychologically sophisticated games or, in varying degrees, ‘lie’.63 In a video interview, Donnellan suggests that the children’s game of ‘now you see me, now you don’t’ is a ‘piece of theatre’: a learnt game, ultimately paradoxically pleasurable, that has at its heart the ‘acting out’ of the potential terror, for the child, of separation from the parent, the figure which forms the target in this particular ‘piece of theatre’.64 But this is only a kind of acting, since it lacks the quality of theatrical performance when, as Benedetti suggests, acting is ‘planned, artistically shaped. The signs are selected’.65

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Fig. 2.1  Valentine Catzéflis and Declan Donnellan in rehearsal for Périclès, Prince de Tyr (2018) (Photo Patrick Baldwin)

Even if it is difficult to take Donnellan’s suggestion as emblematic of acting generally, but rather his desire to root acting in deepseated human behaviour, his view still speaks, like other directors in this chapter, to Pavlovian impulse and Jamesian psychological process. Despite the complex fictional web of his examples (there may be ‘acting’, but the people involved are real), Donnellan continues to see theatrical acting as a rooted in the organicity of the self, however problematic the latter term, as Zarrilli highlights.66 Amidst the given circumstances (to use Stanislavskian terminology), the games of childhood operate as if they were true. The crucial difference in Donnellan’s formulation of acting, however, is that this impulse is fuelled by something other than the ‘self’. For Donnellan, the actor’s ‘unblocking’ is to ‘see’ the target as a cause of action, and is most clearly connected to words. Donnellan stresses that ‘what’s really important is what makes the word happen, which is the imagination and the belief that make the word inevitable’.67 Like Mitchell, this points to a concern for what lies behind a text, the human action and contact within the ‘world’ of a play and its production. Despite his preferred classical work, Donnellan has said, ‘the audience should not be aware that they’re watching something which is

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linguistically dense’; action should, again, first and foremost make sense as credible behaviour and need.68 However, whilst this chapter suggests how Alfreds balances his Stanislavskian deconstruction of text with a collection of physical practices drawn from elsewhere, there is little indication of physical work contained in Donnellan’s account, perhaps a symptom of his investment in language. For Donnellan, acting is a psychological process based on ‘seeing’ or perceiving what the target makes characters do, and thus how they are caused to express themselves in words; I develop linguistic response in relation to neuroaesthetics in the next chapter.

The Actor: Body How Mitchell’s directorial approach plays out in rehearsal and production is the subject of another part of this book; here, I focus on particular elements of her Stanislavskian practice. Mitchell’s work is also informed by her periods of research in Poland and Russia and her later practical investigations into what she terms the ‘biology of emotions’.69 The influence of the practices taught at the Academy of the Science of Acting and Directing, introduced and developed by Sam Kogan, as well as coaching from the directors Tatiana Olear and Elen Bowman, is revealed in some of Mitchell’s terminology. Mitchell’s particularly use of ‘events’ stems from this background and indicates a point in a scene’s action that changes the circumstances and thus intentions for all characters on stage.70 Mitchell’s approach is used regardless of the genre of play she is directing; Chapter 4 discusses her work on surrealist texts. It is more rarely used in the later ‘live cinema’ work where psychologically whole characters are still created.71 Whilst she has a refined visual sensibility, as I explore elsewhere, this directorial craft and ethos is emphatically rooted in the work of the actor. As enshrined in her book’s title, directing for Mitchell is also a craft, suggesting technique and, importantly, a practice that should continually develop. As a psychology of cause and effect, Mitchell’s approach considers that human beings, and therefore characters, are essentially conditioned by their past. Thus all action is caused by previous events. Mitchell’s initial Stanislavskian analysis concerns how a character has developed in biographical terms over time, leading them to behave in certain ways, and how such behaviour plays out in the situation of the play itself

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(compare Stanislavski’s long biography of Othello prior to the action of the play72). A precisely detailed timeline of the character’s life is drawn up, in which past events are added in order to justify behaviour in the present of the play itself. Sometimes, these events are consciously invented to support onstage action. Mitchell’s use of ‘immediate circumstances’ further reinforces the detail of a character’s life in the twenty-­ four hours prior to her/his first appearance in the play. In terms of textual analysis, Mitchell is especially interested in intention—­ her term for the objective or task of the character—the aforementioned events and, going further than typical approaches to Stanislavski’s given circumstances, a stress on the environmental conditions of the play: Mitchell seeks to establish the time, place and, crucially, temperature of the specific situation. The latter factor determines how environmental conditions should affect physical behaviour or bodily responses: deciding that the character is hot or sweating, or cold, should manifestly change the nature of the actor’s physicality in response to the imagined environment. Mitchell’s use of temperature in particular extends Stanislavskian given circumstances based on temporal or geographical factors to a technique designed to be corporeal affective. Although it appears extremely detailed, Mitchell’s purpose is entirely pragmatic; a psychological depth to the work, rationalised through a ‘back story’ derived either from information in the text or consciously constructed, is meant primarily to lead to more informed, more communicative and consistent acting. Mitchell explained to me: it’s not about making actors feel good or having a great time […] the only reason for doing it is that when they [the actors] hit the moment in terms of what they speak and do; it creates a density in a more efficient way, a life-like thickness, and that thickness is durable if you build like this, so even the audience on the last few shows is going to see this. It gives them [the actor] a lot of things to do.73

By ‘thickness’, Mitchell means that the character and actor is clearly operating within a fully fleshed out imaginative context in which justified action takes place. This ‘thickness’ provides a tangible basis of ‘things to do’, which enables repeatability. Not least through the influence of Gestalt psychology, an aesthetic experience can be viewed as a complete event; Nadal et al. affirm that a ‘good’ artwork must of necessity be a ‘good Gestalt’.74 After close analysis, a Mitchellesque approach

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must ultimately be reassembled as a complete percept, a balanced and, crucially, overall aesthetic structure. In terms of acting, Kate Duchêne, one of Mitchell’s regular actors, sees the approach as one of immersion in a dramatic world.75 Duchêne wishes especially to avoid self-consciousness and considers Mitchell’s techniques a means to provide enough to think about to focus reliably on the world of the play. This may include a specific temperature in the scene, a sequence of strong intentions caused by events, or the pressure of time. Mitchell’s concrete formulation of circumstances, translated into actors’ playable tasks, locks the actor squarely in the action of the play, unconcerned by the circumstances of performance itself. The ‘real’ is here grounded in both the construct of the actors’ experience and, ultimately, the evaluation of an audience seeking its own reward. Whilst Mitchell shifts Stanislavskian analysis towards a consideration and, indeed, construction of bodily behaviour, she also employs her insistence on psychology and biography as an underpinning for predetermined theatrical decisions. For the 2012 production of The Trial of Ubu (Hampstead Theatre, London), a decision was made to see the bulk of the play through the characters of the interpreters, a radical departure from the original text, which presents the entire trial.76 Although the production met with a mixed critical reaction, Mitchell explains that the revised version was largely to do with economic circumstances, since assembling a cast large enough for what is essentially a courtroom drama was impossible.77 Instead, the relationship and story of the two interpreters was decided upon by herself and the writer, Simon Stephens. As Mitchell recounts: we decided that the climax of the story was that one of the interpreters could no longer talk - something that happens, very rarely, to interpreters. We had to build one character that was more functioning than the other, so we constructed biographies. We built in that they were very fluent in Ubu’s tongue and decided that for Nikki [Amuka Bird]’s character, the first time we see her it would be the first day of work with Kate [Duchêne]’s character. There were lots of decisions made as we analysed the text and then we built a biography to support those decisions. I would do that with most of the work I do in theatre without sound or video.78

Here, Mitchell’s deliberate and rigorous construction of ‘thickness’ links absolutely with theatrical solutions. Further, although sticking to

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the original puppet performance in the play, Mitchell also reports how ‘we did ‘event and intention’ the puppet play and we did Pa Ubu’s back history, from the 19th century through to the 21st Century’.79 This is extraordinary attention to detail, but one in support of theatricality, rather than a decoding of text in order to discover a potential acting choice, as is the basis of other directors’ work in this chapter. When Mitchell has enough rehearsal time, the rigorous biographical detail built up can be the basis for exploratory improvisations. By reproducing and reliving parts of the characters’ lives, actors create a specific experiential memory, which may later fuel Mitchell’s desired ‘thickness’. As detailed in her book, a rehearsal approach whereby actors initially improvise scenes, slowly drawing in the writer’s text, translates experience into potential staging. Given her focus on the text, how often Mitchell now works through extensive improvisation—if at all—is questionable; as I have seen, the initial textual analysis provides a secure bedrock for immediate rehearsal, using the text, but where moves are completely free and only slowly ‘fixed’ as lifelike.80 Yet such improvisation or, latterly, physically free methods of staging can be quicker than traditional rehearsal, since it gets actors ‘up on their feet’ and relating immediately; as Maria Knebel puts it, in a much older collection on Stanislavski, ‘an actor who has performed even only one improvisation acquires invaluable personal experience. Without any effort, ‘he’, the character of the play, transforms himself into the ‘I’ of the performer’.81 Although Knebel was Stanislavski’s direct student, this remains her interpretation, but it is interesting to note Knebel’s character–actor relationship: the ‘character’ moves towards the actor due to improvisation within the given circumstances. As economic circumstances increasingly do not allow an ideal level of improvisation and exploration, Mitchell is concerned that what might become an intellectual decoding of text, based on her Stanislavskian terminology of events and intentions, should get into the body. She admits that her methods are, at first ‘completely in the actors’ heads’.82 To return to temperature as an example, I have certainly seen moments in Mitchell’s rehearsals when actors seem to be ‘indicating’ heat or cold, not really imaginatively experiencing it. However, to what extent temperature is allowed to affect the body can be rendered as a precisely playable task: to make the playing more specific, Mitchell will ask that a temperature affects the actor at a certain percentage. Whilst not strictly calibrated, here the director attempts to make a character’s behaviour

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clearer via the importance attached to temperature, recalling how neuroaesthetics stresses how a value attaches to a percept. To compare Mitchell to Alfreds, here she is also using a device that can be understood as a POC, articulated as a playable, active task, not a static act of psychological imagination. Where Mitchell’s methods can more readily be seen to extend from original Stanislavskian sources is in her concern with audience perception. Through her practical investigation of archetypal emotions, drawn from the work of Darwin, Mitchell claims to have developed a physical aesthetic of the body based on the response to, and affect of, situations that can give rise to extreme emotion. Again, this is pragmatic on Mitchell’s part: she explains ‘I wanted to cut through all the versions [of Stanislavski] that come up as the result of psychology, to something much more essential, which couldn’t be disputed. For me, biology is much more useful than psychology because it’s about constructing behaviour, it’s scientific’.83 This is again Mitchell’s need for a concrete method that, crucially, can be objectively understood, built up, verified and repeated, but it also reinstates a Jamesian perspective to a contemporary Stanislavskian process. As Mitchell studied each Darwinian emotion in what appears a forensically detailed examination, she found that the physicality of the actors’ responses to reconstructed situations was bigger than conventionally understood (and thus typically staged); secondly, there is thus a tendency to ‘romanticise, prettify’ emotion in performance.84 Mitchell’s critically acclaimed production of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (National Theatre, 2004) was the first production fully to utilise what might be deemed a charged, gestural language, in which, as Mitchell herself recounts, Justin Salinger’s Achilles jumped back several metres at one point.85 This action was taken directly from the earlier workshop on emotion, when Salinger had imagined the presence of a rat. Some of Mitchell’s improvised fragments found their way into performance of Iphigenia at Aulis, not only as remnants of verbal improvisation, but as action, even off stage. Specially constructed booths were placed backstage in order that the actors could improvise ‘off stage’ scenes as immediate circumstances from the beginning of the performance, prior to their own entrance when the action subsequently continued into Euripides onstage text (barring the odd improvised remnant). This seems as near to a contemporary version of Stanislavski’s final Active Analysis phase as exists in regular theatre practice, and certainly by a

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major director, yet retains improvisation around and in actual performance too86 (Fig. 2.2). In her frequent scientific metaphor, Mitchell reinforces how she undertakes the physiological aspect of her work always in terms of an audience; the actors’ physical response is, she has said, ‘what gives the viewer the data about what the emotion is’.87 Mitchell especially prioritises an emotionalisation of the body as percept; attesting too to the ‘cognitive turn’ in understandings and analyses of theatre practice as well as the fairly recent discovery of the mirror neuron.88 But there is not just a mirror neuron; the pattern of neurological ‘mirroring’ activity is spread across parts of the brain as a neurological process. There are, in effect, multiple mirror neurons beyond the oft-cited kinaesthetic response; there is some evidence that an aural mirror neuron process exists too.89 In Mitchell’s stress on somatic communication, cognitive ‘packets’ of information are designed absolutely to affect the spectator. Later, I return to some theorisation of the neuroaesthetics of film, but, for now,

Fig. 2.2  Iphigenia at Aulis (Photo Ivan Kyncl/ArenaPAL)

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it is worth noting fairly fully Torben Grodal and Mette Kramer’s neurological explanation that some of the neurons in the somatosensory part of the parietal cortex (that provides the person’s body map) have mirror properties, just as the experiencing of witnessing pain in others activates some of the same brain circuits as the experience of one’s own pain […] instead of letting evolution invent some new, abstract neuronal tools for dealing with other people, it reuses some of those neural circuits that are employed to control and understand one’s own behavior and emotions by adding a series of “mirror capabilities.”90

Grodal and Mette suggest the evolutionary modification of the brain, which also includes, to recall Starr, how the brain’s apparently discrete processes are nevertheless interlinked. Mitchell’s stress on the body is not one of coldly communicative corporeal data; it assumes an affect whereby the visual information triggers not only the mirror capabilities of neurons concerning the sensation of the body, but also the brain’s habit of routing percepts through emotion-based areas (the insula and amygdala). Mitchell’s is a directorial system that considers the construct of specific bodily response a ‘correct’ way to act and, as a director, what should be encouraged in actors. She assumes an audience’s cognition, since what is presented on stage is, further, assumed credible and, crucially, emotionally affective in terms of spectators’ own lives and behaviour.

The ‘System’ In a constant battle to prevent his work becoming stultified through being written down, Stanislavski questioned: what does it signify, to write down what is past and done. The system lives in me but has no shape or form. The system is created in the very act of writing it down. That is why I have to keep changing what I have already written.91

That the ‘system’ has ‘no shape or form’ unless codified through writing suggests we might question the entire Stanislavskian publication industry—and, in fact, Stanislavski’s own writing—as a repository of

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any absolute process. What Stanislavski really means, however, is that we should follow the spirit of the ‘system’, not its step-by-step processes, even if I have earlier criticised the ‘toolkit’ approach. Merlin has thus addressed the application of Stanislavski in contemporary times, where ‘the realisation that […] you can open yourself up to any method, director and ensemble, is the heart of Active Analysis which can liberate and inspire’.92 This is the spirit of the ‘system’ of course, not its application. Duchêne has also continued to use aspects of the process learnt with Mitchell in other productions, explaining that she uses intentions when working away from Mitchell; and when playing Katherine in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (2010), she seized upon the historical fact that Katherine was a real person who disembarked in England very close to the site of the Globe Theatre today. Although Duchêne used history to aid the construction of her character’s biography, isolating events is, for her, not possible since it needs to be a shared activity.93 The need for ensemble analysis is both a limitation and an important precondition in the contemporary use of the Stanislavski ‘system’. As will also be seen in the case of Carrie Cracknell, a Stanislavskian approach, at least in some form of practical strategy, remains emphatically the norm in much acting and directing. Each of the directors in this chapter represents fuller contemporary renditions of the ‘system’ though, and understandings of acting rooted in a Stanislavskian ontology. Notwithstanding Alfreds’s invitation to dip into his book as and when, these directors offer thought-through, contemporary methodologies, resisting both a portfolio of discrete techniques and a scholarly rendition of what the complete ‘system’ might be. Both Alfreds and Stafford-Clark start with textual analysis and then work out to realising the world of the play. To some extent, Mitchell starts the other way around, with a consideration of the given and immediate circumstances and character biographies, and then applies such aspects as intentions and events. Alfreds works towards a similar immersion in the world of the play as does Mitchell, but is more open to changes in the moment of performance.94 Finally, Mitchell’s work is, as I have suggested, significant in its attention to how an audience perceives theatrical action through the perception of an affective aesthetic of the body, which, as so often in any neuroaesthetic analysis, relies on the assumption of shared knowledge and experience of a percept.

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Whilst some of Stanislavski’s writings, most famously the part of his original work known as Building a Character, offers guidance on the transformational possibility of the actor, as does Toporkov, each of the directors discussed in this chapter tends to rely on physical change as rooted in bodily behaviour, not specific Stanislavskian techniques to create characters’ bodies. Although I have troubled her fracturing of the ‘system’, a more detailed, physically based approach to characterisation and work on text is detailed elsewhere by Merlin.95 Stafford-Clark also adds to his ‘méthode stanislavskoise’ further strategies and playful approaches, including improvisation and status games. Alfreds adds techniques from other practitioners too, as if in reflection of his own, limited (as he considers it) initial training in the emotionality of Method Acting. Donnellan’s book does not squarely address the physical. Whilst Mitchell too is reliant on psychology and biographical tendency in characters, she is at times the closest contemporary director to Active Analysis, since her physical choices as a director are rooted in Stanislavskian ‘given circumstances’. Her understanding of physicality is, though, based on her own, innovative research beyond Stanislavski and her textual approach learnt from other practitioners. Before her later, physically freer staging processes, Mitchell’s rigorous ‘round the table’ analysis of text also primarily renders the later Method of Physical Action a verbally based exercise, rooted back in the breakdown of script-as-action as, to recall Ginman, psychologically driven strategies of interpersonal negotiation. All this tends to reinforce the erroneous perception that Stanislavski is a text-based, psychological taxonomy. To consider this major practitioner otherwise furthers the call by Nadal et al. that the analysis of neuroaesthetic experience should shift from its visual, explicitly painterly, and sometimes auditory (usually musical) fundament, to embrace ‘olfactory, gustatory, tactile and kinaesthetic experiences, as well as multiple combinations of them’.96 At least some of the work of these directors tries to do this, even if that means going outside a praxis of the ‘system’. But Stanislavski would approve of a ‘system’ that lives and develops in oral and pragmatic lineage: each of the directors discussed in this chapter is a practical person of the theatre. Where they lack an adoption of the physical aspects of the ‘system’, they still embody a set of values aligned with and informed by a tradition of Stanislavski, even if not a

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more complete understanding. To return to creative process theory, each creates not only a secure domain in their rehearsals, reinforced by their particular interpretations and ‘systemisation’ of a lineage but, through extensive work and publication, have as catalytic, innovative director-theorists also affected the field in which much acting and directing is understood and practised.

Notes





1.  I write ‘system’ following Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski and the Actor (London: Methuen, 1998). 2. John Ginman, ‘Out of Joint: Max Stafford-Clark and “The Temper of Our Time”’, Contemporary Theatre Review 13: 3 (2003): 16–23 (19). 3. Annelis Kuhlmann, ‘The Director’s Work on Himself’, in Anna Migliarisi, ed., Stanislavsky and Directing: Theory, Practice and Influence (Toronto: LEGAS, 2008), 17–25 (18). 4. For more information on the development and proliferation of the system, see Jean Benedetti, ‘A History of Stanislavski in Translation’, New Theatre Quarterly 6: 23 (1990): 266–278. 5. Ginman, ‘Out of Joint’, ibid. 6. Max Stafford-Clark, Letters to George (London: Nick Hern Books, 1989), 66. 7. Katie Mitchell, comments in rehearsal for Schalfende Männer, Theatre Peckham, London, 6 February 2018. 8. Starr, Feeling, 16. 9.  Compare, for example, the Introduction to Delgado and Rebellato’s Contemporary European Theatre Directors. 10. Bella Merlin, The Complete Stanislavski Toolkit (London: Nick Hern Books, 2007); ‘Using Stanislavski’s Toolkit for Shakespeare’s Richard III, Part I: Research on the Text and the Play’, New Theatre Quarterly 29: 1 (2013): 24–34; ‘Using Stanislavski’s Toolkit for Shakespeare’s Richard III, Part II: Research on the Self in the Play’, New Theatre Quarterly 29: 2 (2013): 159–169; and Rose Whyman, Stanislavski: The Basics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). 11. See Phillip B. Zarrilli, ‘Part I: Introduction’, in Phillip B. Zarrilli, ed., Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 12. Rose Whyman, The Stanislavski System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2008), 11. 13. See too Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993).

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14. Whyman, Stanislavski System, 111. 15. Merlin, Complete, 7. 16. Merlin, ibid., 328. 17. Ibid., 7. 18. Alfreds, Different, passim. 19. Ibid., 93; Rose Whyman, ‘The Actor’s Second Nature: Stanislavski and William James’, New Theatre Quarterly 23: 2 (2007): 115–123. 20. William James, ‘What Is An Emotion?’ Mind 9: 34 (1884): 188–205. 21. Starr, Feeling, 37. 22. Ibid., 24. 23. Whyman, Stanislavski System, 114. 24. Vasily Toporkov, Stanislavski in Rehearsal, trans. Christine Edwards (New York: Routledge, 1998); Benedetti, Stanislavski, 1998; Sharon Marie Carnicke, Stanislavski in Focus (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998); and Bella Merlin, Beyond Stanislavski: The PsychoPhysical Approach to Actor Training (London and New York: Nick Hern Books and Routledge, 2001). 25.  See Konstantin Stanislavsky, Building a Character, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 26. Benedetti, ‘History’, Stanislavski; Carnicke, Stanislavski. 27. See Benedetti, ‘History’, 226–278; Christine Edwards, The Stanislavski Heritage: Its Contribution to the Russian and American Theatre (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 277–288. 28. Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary, trans. Jean Benedetti (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). 29. Benedetti also translated Konstantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). 30. See Richard Boleslavsky, Acting: The First Six Lessons (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). 31. Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 32. Benedetti, Stanislavski, 7. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 3. 35. David Krasner, Method Acting Reconsidered: Theory, Practice, Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 36. Edwards, Heritage, 269–273. 37. Alfreds, Different, 93; see also Edwards, Heritage, 263. 38. Toporkov, Stanislavski, 161. 39.  Brian Smith, ‘In Search of the White-Hot Moment: Stanislavsky and Directing’, in Migliarisi, ed., Stanislavsky (Toronto: LEGAS, 2008), 27–39 (30, original emphasis).

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40. Stafford-Clark, Letters, 66–70. 41. Ibid., 66. 42. Ibid., 49. 43. Alice Rayner, To Act, To Do, To Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2. 44. Merlin, Beyond, 231. 45. Starr, Feeling, 16. 46. Alfreds, Different, 38. 47. Ibid., 42, original emphasis. 48. Ibid., 91. 49. Ibid., 160–161, 284. 50. Ibid., 38. 51. Ibid., 183, original emphasis. 52. Toporkov, Stanislavski, 104, original emphasis. 53. Alfreds, Different, 164–165, original emphasis. 54. For Chekhov, the Imaginary Centre is not just a point of focus in the body, but the imaginative quality of the location; Michael Chekhov, To the Actor (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 55. Alfreds, Different, 98. 56. Ibid., 34. 57. Smith, ‘In Search’, 28. 58. Declan Donnellan, The Actor and the Target (London: Nick Hern Books, 2005). 59.  Maria Delgado and Paul Heritage, eds., In Contact with the Gods: Directors Talk Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 86. 60. Donnellan, Actor, 11. 61. Donnellan, ibid., 23. 62. See also Jean Benedetti, The Art of the Actor: The Essential History of Acting from Classical Times to the Present Day (London: Methuen, 2005), 1. 63. Donnellan, Actor, 4. 64. Cheek By Jowl, ‘Declan Donnellan Discusses Acting’, 12 February 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdWDXyC-MV8 (accessed 8 July 2018). 65. Benedetti, Art, 1. 66. Zarrilli, Acting, 15; Donnellan, Actor, 17–18. 67.  Delgado and Heritage, In Contact, 85; see also Cheek By Jowl, ‘Donnellan’, 2009. 68. Delgado and Heritage, ibid., 85.

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69. Katie Mitchell, conversation with author, Three Mills Studios, London, 30 October 2012; Director’s, 231–232. 70. Mitchell, Director’s, 55–62. See also Sam Kogan, The Science of Acting, ed. Helen Kogan (London: Routledge, 2010). 71. That said, Mitchell did draw together her Stanislavskian procedures and the technicalities of the live cinema work for her production of Reise durch die Nacht [Night-Train] for the Schauspiel Cologne (2012); see Ledger, ‘Thrill’. 72. Konstantin Stanislavski, Stanislavski Produces Othello, trans. Helen Nowak (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1963). 73.  Katie Mitchell, unpublished conversation with author, Three Mills Studios, London, 30 October 2012. 74. Nadal et al., ‘History’, 21. 75.  Kate Duchêne, conversation with author, National Theatre Studio, London, 7 October 2013. 76. For more on The Trial of Ubu, see Adam J. Ledger, ‘It’s Not About Fucking It Up’: The Trial of Ubu, the Text, and the Director’, Contemporary Theatre Review 26: 3 (2016): 345–356. 77. Mitchell, conversation. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Most recently during rehearsal for Schalfende Männer, Theatre Peckham, London, February–March 2018. 81. Maria Knebel, ‘The Nemirovitch-Dantchenko School of Directing’, in Sonia Moore, ed. and trans., Stanislavski Today: Commentaries on K. S. Stanislavski (New York: American Center for Stanislavski Theater Art, 1973), 47–68 (48). 82. Mitchell, conversation. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. Mitchell, Director’s, 156. 86. Duchêne, conversation. 87. Mitchell, conversation. 88.  Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart, eds., Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006); see also Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); and Theatre and Mind (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 89. David S. Miall, ‘Literary Reading’, in Lauring, ed., Neuroaesthetics, 261.

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90. Torben Grodal and Mette Kramer, ‘Film, Neuroaesthetics, and Empathy’, in Lauring, ed., Neuroaesthetics, 274. 91. Benedetti, Stanislavski, xxii. 92. Merlin, Beyond, 249. 93. Duchêne, conversation. 94. Alfreds, Different, 25. 95. Merlin, Beyond; Konstantin Stanislavsky (London and New York, 2003). 96. Nadal et al., ‘History’, 38.

CHAPTER 3

The Director and the Actor

Speaking of her near thirty-year collaboration with the director Deborah Warner, the actor Fiona Shaw considers every time we finish a run of something, I think that this must be the end […]. Our collaboration has been the most enormous boon, but in other ways it’s blocked me off, because every project requires such a long period of gestation. And sometimes I get frustrated and put my head in my hands and tell myself that I’m just Deborah Warner’s dancing bear. Renewal is what I need, and sometimes I wonder how long we can go on renewing each other.1

Shaw seems caught in an actor–director bind: the collaboration is fulfilling yet all-consuming, takes up time yet is potentially creatively original, and reliant always on a durable if not quite negotiated relationship. If the actor is the primary of the director’s several ‘doubles’, as Pavis terms them, one half of the partnership needed in order to create performance, quite who is leading who in the Warner–Shaw double is uncertain2 (Fig. 3.1). Nevertheless, together Shaw and Warner have worked on, amongst other productions, Medea (2002), Happy Days (2007) and an adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1997; each of the aforementioned was revived). Elsewhere, some work is of course created collaboratively by an ensemble with no ‘outside’ director, or in which the

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Fig. 3.1  Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw in rehearsal for Mother Courage (National Theatre, 2009) (Photo Anthony Luvera)

director performs, collapsing the clarity of Pavis’s double. But even without the directorial half of the double act, directing still takes place in these collaborative situations, creating a dual, or parallel creative intent. In terms of creative process, as Botella et al. put it, ‘artistic visions [are] often not personal but interpersonal; they required the look of the other from the very beginning’; such a look, a vision indeed, is for these authors necessarily a collaboration and interpersonal tension in both the processual choices and eventual aesthetic of a production.3 But rather than a discourse of interpretation brought about by the ‘exterior’ look of the director and the ‘interior’ viewpoint of the actor actually performing the material, I want to suggest for a moment that the director– actor relationship can be considered a transaction, and one of skill. Some directors seen in this chapter are or were also actors: Ostermeier has undertaken significant actor training; Wilson has become an actor. Others such as Donnellan have acquired a considerable and productive understanding of acting, sometimes formulating or

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synthesising complete and original approaches to rehearsal. Yet the great majority of directors are not actors—and indeed may be limited in their understanding of acting as a detailed process—clearly rendering the often highly trained or experienced performer a separately skilled figure. Other creatives have a similar, interconnected status in relation to the director too: in this book, it would, amid other examples, not be possible for van Hove to create the videographic aspects of his productions without the collaborative input of Tal Yarden; or for Ostermeier to create the spatial energy of his productions without Jan Pappelbaum. As Pavis points out, some directors have appeared in their own productions, notably Tadeusz Kantor, who, for Pavis ‘saw the staging as a landscape or an object to be shaped’.4 But Kantor ‘shaped’ in immediate terms, placing the ‘present-tense’ act of his directing alongside or amid the unfolding of the work in performance. As a possibly audacious phenomenon of onstage intervention, this foreshadows the metaphor of the director as musical conductor to follow. But the actor does not sit apart from a ‘landscape’, since s/he is so often rooted in the specific detail of the moment by moment act of immersion in the materiality of the dramatic world or events of performance. It is the actor’s ‘phenomenal body’, as Fischer-Lichte put it, that in particular coexists with the aesthetic features of some of work I discuss in this chapter.5 On occasion, directors have a reputation for delimiting, even negating, the actor: I allude to the less than apparently collaborative tendencies of Ariane Mnouchkine in Chapter 5, but, to begin a consideration of one director that I develop further, here I reflect on Wilson in relation to the actor. Looking at some accounts at least, Wilson as a director appears a curious combination of authoritarian, extraordinary visionary, open to new ideas offered by those around him, and able to shift his rehearsal process. His productions regularly feature long periods of slow-motion movement or vocal extremes, which, to recall the inherent judgement and evaluation of the aesthetic event exposed by neuroaesthetics, draw attention to Wilson’s ‘look’ as well as the sheer skill of achieving such phenomena. To develop some of Fischer-Lichte’s perspectives, Wilson’s work, as well as Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, relies on what I see as the extended phenomenal body.6 His deliberate and heightened aestheticisation exemplifies a theatrical ‘foregrounding’ (developed in Chapter 6) as a (usually literary) technique of attracting attention via the aesthetics

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of an overt stylistics. On the other hand, as the account of rehearsal of Danton’s Death (1992) reveals, Wilson appears to have had trouble with some aspects of the acting required in that production.

Seeing Double In his conception of mise en scène as performance, Pavis argues that to direct work necessitates a division of labour.7 For Pavis, the director has to divide her/his attention between multiple concerns and collaborators. Whilst this plurality might return us to the kind of reductive and always-deferred definition of directors I took issue with in the Introduction, it produces the idea of a director as a multimodal point of collaboration inside a ‘vision’ or, in creative process theory again, Botella et al.’s ‘environment’. The director must multiply or replicate her/himself in order to set about, as Pavis puts it, ‘globally seizing the spirit of the performance with some degree of coherence’.8 Ideally of course, directing concerns producing a great deal of coherence, as the Introduction traced in historical terms, but it is the inevitable tension between a totalising act and the diversified practice of the director that underpins Pavis’s argument of doubles. Pavis implies that attempts at aesthetic ‘coherence’ must cascade through others as an extended or distributed creative process. If we accept Pavis’s ideas, the actor also starts to appear as some sort of vicarious director for the director her/himself, usefully drawing attention to her/his ideal situation as a proactive, relational figure engaged in a creative, aesthetic action, not a functionary or, worse, object. Whilst an ethos of practice depends on the director and her/ his priorities and ways of working, to think doubly activates the paired ‘look’ of activity, of action, not only as seeing, but, as I include here, the double of hearing too. We might consider that just as the director works vicariously through the actor, the actor may vicariously see her/ himself through the imagined gaze of the director. This might allow a circular appraisal (judgement, again) of the unfolding structure of their work, in what, to return to Barba for a moment, comprises their ‘actor’s dramaturgy’.9 Perhaps Shaw, above, sees and hears as both herself and as an extension of Warner when she is occupied ‘in the show and in the overall functioning of the mise en scène’.10 Critic Paul Taylor in fact highlights this director–actor double in his defence of Warner’s production of

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Richard II (National Theatre, London, 1995), in which Shaw played Richard. Taylor writes the invidiousness rampant in the critical reaction was well-nigh illogical. Fiona Shaw’s dazzlingly discomforting impersonation of Richard is so integral to the thinking behind Deborah Warner’s gripping, lucidly felt production that it would only make sense to like neither or both.11

Taylor nearly collapses any actor–director double, which further reduces any view of the actor as a kind of function; even the most performance-like work (as distinct from dramatic) relishes, as Lehmann in his conception of postdramatic theatre puts it, ‘human bodies and their warmth, with which the perceiving imagination cannot avoid associating human experiences’.12 Similarly to the perspectives of neuroaesthetics, Lehmann allies the spectatorial perception of the body as always a storification of the human subject, suggesting an inevitable subjectivity. It is the director, and in this case Warner, who has the privilege of seeing and hearing from a decentred position, a little bit outside of preoccupation. Like all directors, she negotiates the tension between her ‘expert’ judgement (Chapter 4) and the always relational, potentially always collaborative arrangement with her principal actor, yet is thus removed from her double who ‘sees’ all the action. Each director in this chapter is ‘actor-centric’ in some way. For Pavis, the ‘actor’s director’ is concerned with ‘decentring’ the actor or performer regardless of genre or mode of performance, such that the actor-performer is not ‘pre-occupied’.13 Pavis seems to mean, unlike Fischer-Lichte shortly, that the actor does not appear as ‘her/himself’, but is seen and heard amid tasks across a wide spectrum of what performance might comprise. From the point of view of many comprehensions of acting, to be ‘pre-occupied’ seems a pretty obvious basic requirement, so I suggest that the director does not decentre actors, but actually the opposite: s/he utilises means to centre them in the dramatic situation, psychophysically in the movement or moment of performance, and inside their relationship to others, be that with other actors or an audience. For the purposes of this chapter, this leads to some consideration of what can be conceived of as training or teaching, either in an expanded sense of generating performance modes or material, a complete rehearsal approach, or in the particular of certain skills; perhaps surprisingly, Wilson too emerges in a pedagogical light.

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From a neuroaesthetic perspective, Lehmann’s ‘warmth’ also offers an opportunity in this chapter to shift a consideration of the neuroaesthetics of film and dance, which is especially concerned with bodily perception and empathy, towards an appreciation of the ‘warm’ actor in theatre performance. Grodal and Kramer assume film as a realist aesthetic and medium, which offers events of ‘empathic participation’; they suggest that a primary relational mode is, as might be expected, to and with the on-screen characters.14 This reinforces how, as Grodal and Kramer themselves invoke, Theories of Mind often surface in neuroaesthetic discussion. They add that it is humans’ social availability, their ‘ultra-sociality’, that provides the fundamental basis for interpersonal relationship and understanding in filmic artworks that, like theatre, are ‘privileged forms of experiencing’ empathy.15 Regardless of genre, Grodal and Kramer explain that, rather than creating new neural pathways to afford experiencing of what, elsewhere, I have called ‘events’ (following Starr), existing circuits are used. Grodal has particularly drawn on the PECMA flow model of visual aesthetics in his work on film: here, an iterative process of perception, emotion, cognition and motor action (hence PECMA) reinforces that aesthetic experience is never static but a process that affects the perceiver in multiple ways.16 These perspectives can help in an appreciation of how the actor is part of the director’s process: here, I want especially to provide space for a consideration of Ostermeier’s actor-centric approach, which I compare only on occasion to his Schaubühne Berlin colleague, Mitchell, who features elsewhere. The highly expressive, realist acting style in Ostermeier’s work (the leading Schaubühne Berlin actor Lars Eidinger calls it ‘acting Ostermeier’) derives both from rehearsal approaches as well as Ostermeier’s training or coaching techniques.17 Ostermeier has a fascinating, contemporary and composite approach to acting, embracing Stanislavskian and Meisner-based exercises, yet where the Brechtian influence in his practice actively draws on the actor’s personality. ‘Ultra-sociality’, above, particularly offers a way of understanding Ostermeier’s work, which nevertheless radically pushes away from a quotidian-like realist-naturalist aesthetic towards what Boenisch calls ‘neo(n)realism’.18 A more objectified, or consciously aestheticised use of the body may not always be about ‘warmth’, though as Fischer-Lichte posits, there is a ‘tension between the phenomenal body of the actor, or their bodily being-in-the-world, and their representation of the dramatic character.

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[…] Humans have bodies, which they can manipulate and instrumentalize just like any other object. At the same time, they are their bodies, they are body-subjects’.19 Directors intervene in this double: the presentation of the body in the event of performance, the representation of the body-as-character and the means to be a body as, in another doubling, the actor as artist-person. Given Grodal and Kramer’s emphasis on humans’ heightened perception of other humans (the initial ‘P’ of PECMA flow), thus it is primarily actors’ skilful physicality within a performance that, in turn, cause what Beatriz Calvo-Merino and Julia F. Christensen, in their discussion of dance, appealingly call ‘hedonic experiences’ in spectators.20 As well as a reflection upon skill, I include a section on the body, sometimes beautiful, sometimes grotesque. Finally, I have reached back to Cole’s radical redefinition of the practice of reading in Acting as Reading (1992). Cole suggests that reading was once not a silent activity and instead should be an act of recovery of an oral tradition of reading. This recovery is, for Cole, a fundamentally physical and communicative praxis, which he dubs an orality.21 Cole rejects the semiotic idea of ‘reading’ a performance, and specifically of the actor’s work, but suggests that the actor ‘restores’, instead, a ‘lost physical’ in reading.22 That the audience is ‘read’ to is not, then, a rhetorical act, but one in which the actor’s own bodily encounter with reading, her/his ongoing recovery of reading, informs the act of performance. As Cole puts it, ‘as he [sic] reads to them, the actor-reader passes on to the audience his own recovered physical relation to the text, in the form of a relation on their part to his act of reading’.23 Reading, here redefined, is thus a communicative act within a relationship, not, as contemporaneously experienced, a silent, personal and usually solo exercise. It is the director’s reading as an initial creative act that remains a private and contemplative relationship with what are words on a page. Only when, and if, an initial reading by the cast is held to kick-start rehearsals are words transformed; here, a collective recovery of reading as a physical and mutual sharing takes place. When considering the director–actor relationship from Cole’s perspectives in this chapter, I want not only to add a little more to his account of acting and reading from a brain-based perspective, but also to shift his later concern with the audience to Barba’s notion of ‘the first spectator’.24 If, as Cole argues, the audience is ‘read’ to by the actors, then the director as ‘first spectator’ is more privileged. Prior to the actor, s/he has of course also read, and reread, the playtext, if one is worked

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on. This is an inevitable part of selecting both the production to be developed and, in terms of casting, which actors might be involved. It is also worth noting that actors are often cast through an audition process that, in part at least, asks them to read aloud from the script. During a process that etymologically is also about hearing, to ‘read for the part’ suggests an activity that already collapses reading and acting as a way for the actors to be ‘audited’, in fact.25 Especially with classic texts, it is also possible that members of an audience have read the play prior to performance; but unlike a (normally well-behaved) audience, it is the director as ‘reader’ who can stop, interrupt and redirect what the actor is doing in rehearsal and how they might, so far, be doing it. As I suggest, this ‘first spectator’ shifts towards a figure akin to a musical conductor, but to extend Cole’s insights into the arena of directing is especially to render the director not only a double reader of both the material and actor, but also a quasi-writer of the reading by altering how, in Cole’s terms, the audience is read to.

Declan Donnellan (Seeing) Donnellan formed Cheek by Jowl with Ormerod in 1981. Ormerod has designed virtually all of Donnellan’s productions, an aspect I explore more fully in Chapter 6. Whilst, from its beginning, international touring has always been a part of Cheek by Jowl’s mandate, between 1998 and 2004 the organisation effectively ceased operation so that Donnellan and Ormerod could pursue their burgeoning international engagements. The pair have long-established links in France, especially with the Théâtre Les Gémeaux in Sceaux (part of the National Theatre of France) and in Russia through the Russian Theatre Federation and the Pushkin Theatre, Moscow. Cheek by Jowl was reopened and reimagined to embrace these international opportunities, though Donnellan still identifies a ‘Russian’ and ‘French’ company. Donnellan centralises his work on the actor; he emphasises that ‘what’s really important is what makes the word happen, which is the imagination and the belief that make the word inevitable’.26 Donnellan positions the actor and acting as the prime causality of any moment in a production, firstly as part of the actor’s imaginative fabric, thereafter as expression primarily through language. Whilst his key text, The Actor and the Target is, similarly, a treatise on the actor and imagination,

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as I suggested in the previous chapter it contains little of an overtly physical approach, but instead emphasises how the actor should be ‘unblocked’ in order to ‘see’ clearly. Instead of Pavis’s conception of ‘decentring’, Donnellan starts from the rather negative assumption that an actor probably cannot, at first, ‘see’. Donnellan uncritically assumes that an actor might be successful merely once s/he is unblocked or, perhaps, uncovers the target, as if it had always been there. In Pavis’s terms again, the actor needs to be enabled to do her/his bit in the director–actor double act, activated in relation to the action of the moment such that s/he can ‘see’ as an active part of the mise en scène. Donnellan’s account of the (fictional) rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet in The Actor and the Target is resolutely based on the actor’s process in rehearsal and how it meets Donnellan’s close analysis of the play’s dynamic of action. Recalling too his earlier coach-athlete analogy, Donnellan positions himself as an inevitably separate outsider who frames activity, responds, provokes and nurtures his protégé, in what is nevertheless a mutually creative, collaborative endeavour. To think of the actor as an athlete also not only renders her/him a fundamentally physical being, but also a potentially elite performer, engaged in a challenging task, which they might ‘win’, perhaps. On the other hand, it places Donnellan, like Warner, in a position where he cannot undertake the audacity of the task, but nevertheless occupies an expert position, based on response to current performance and authority in terms of what may get this actor-athlete to perform even better. In more recent interviews than above, Donnellan has suggested that the actor-centric fundament to his work has led to choices in what play to direct, since he will select and build a production according to his admiration of key actors.27 Donnellan often builds an ensemble, like Mitchell, by returning to the same actors to work with. A further feature in Donnellan’s mature work is, for example, ensemble set pieces, or shared dance and song. Such group aesthetics not only create and express a clear dramatic world, but also the means to work continuously and mutually: group warm-ups are conducted nightly by an assistant director and Donnellan looks always for ‘connection’ between actors, claiming he can detect if adequate pre-performance contact has not occurred.28 Not insignificantly, Donnellan also tries to see his productions weekly, wishing not only to check up on the work, but remain active as a director in the continued exploration of how its ‘liveness’

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can be maintained. Donnellan’s sense of the importance of personal and professional connection also chimes with McBurney’s emphasis on play and, as McBurney’s company name testifies, interpersonal complicity. A clearly discernible aesthetic in Donnellan’s productions is the combination of an actor-centric, ensemble emphasis inside an expressionistic scenography. His work has shifted from the simple, inventive and often scenographically sparse work of the early Cheek by Jowl, to identifiable, usually metaphoric locales in which action can be fluid: ’Tis Pity She’s A Whore (2011) took place entirely in the central character Annabella’s bedroom; the Russian production of Measure for Measure (2013) placed the action in a not altogether covert reflection of Vladimir Putin’s contemporary Russia; and Donnellan’s 2018 French production of Périclès, Prince de Tyr—his first Shakespeare in French—set the action in a hospital ward, in which the imagination of Pericles’s mind conjured the action (see Fig. 2.1, previous chapter). In order for the actor to ‘see’, Donnellan defines that his ‘coaching’ particularly stresses that the actor should be alive to the transaction of the performance moment; he explains ‘a major part of my work is getting people to do things in the present tense. […] It’s very dangerous when actors, in their training, get deluded into thinking it’s all about their feelings. That’s about sympathy. But acting is really about dealing with other people’s feelings: empathy, not sympathy’.29 Here, Donnellan critiques the perception that if the actor experiences emotion as a key aesthetic or texture of a sequence in performance, then this might be unproblematically perceived as desirable because it is somehow transferred to an audience. Instead, Donnellan’s stress on the present tense creates empathetic interactions that are, as The Actor and the Target discusses, infused with the high stakes of a situation and, as so often seen in his productions, a physically enervated stylistic, regularly punctuated by turns, grasps and falls. Viewed from a neuroaesthetic perspective, Donnellan’s subtle differentiation between sympathy and empathy helps the actor in the making and expression of performance choices. Sympathy concerns the intrapersonal experience of the actor only, whereas I take empathy as suggesting an assessment of the character’s situation and some sort of critical distance when considering how to portray her/him. Donnellan’s prescription of the ‘right’ kind of feeling is also paradigmatically opposed

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to Warner’s stress on sheer feeling. As she has expressed, Warner is also interested in words, but as a gateway to personalised and quite extreme emotion, whereas Donnellan sees imagination and empathy as the primary condition for subsequent speech.30 Given, as we have seen, fundamental neuroaesthetic concepts such as the theory of mind, Donnellan wants actors to ‘see’ the characters’ targets and express something because of what is seen, as opposed actively to engage in the event of their own emotion. Optimally, it is not a sympathetic but an empathetic acting process such as Donnellan’s that can be further perceived by spectators. Part of the brain processes concerning empathy relates to the relatively recent discovery of the mirror neuron process; David S. Miall confirms that mirror neurons ‘provide experiential knowledge of others’ emotions, not just a conceptual knowledge of them’.31 As we have seen, it is Mitchell who especially looks for bodily response in the actor which, via the ability of mirror neurons, leads to kinaesthetic or affective response in others. In her stress on emotion, Warner appears to prioritise the potential of an audience’s experiential knowledge, and thus potential response, of and to the emotionality of the actor her/himself. Donnellan’s shift from sympathy to empathy emphasises the aspect of conceptual knowledge in the perception of feeling. To return to Grodal and Kramer, Donnellan emphasises the ‘p’ of PECMA flow in both actor and audience, whereas Warner seems to start from the second stage, emotion, in her acting-direction process. After both these stages, experiential knowledge can arise but, as emphasised by Starr, perception and cognition can allow for the crucial aspect of judgement, evaluation and reward, both for the director as first spectator and for subsequent audiences. To return to Donnellan’s emphasis on words, there is, too, some evidence that the mirror neuron circuity ‘overlaps’ with Broca’s area in the brain, a part which is itself made up of two parts. This is located in the dominant temporal lobe (for right-handed people, thus the left, and vice versa) and controls language.32 That the motor circuits of the brain collaborate with Broca’s area helps explain the auditory mirror neuron and why even talked-about action can have a kinaesthetic affect: consider how audiences might react when hearing Titus’ description of Chiron and Demetrius’ forthcoming role as ingredients of a pie in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.33

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Hearing Across Donnellan’s preferred classical repertoire, texts are linguistically ‘heightened’, which strengthens their attraction via foregrounding as well as, in their situational extremes and rhetorical stylistics, encourages the kind of expression Donnellan enjoys in his ensemble. Donnellan’s love of language conjoins with the overtly physical activity or presence of his actors: for example, one reviewer enjoys how the actors of Donnellan’s Russian company may well ‘shimmy’ on stage in his allmale production of Twelfth Night, but in a production where ‘we have domestic violence amid the comic carousing, Sir Toby Belch punching the uncomplaining maid Maria in the gob only to ply her moments later with healing vodka’.34 Cole emphasises a similar sense of action, of work in fact, in how the ‘reading’ process travels from actor to text, and then actor to audience; he considers ‘it is the oral dynamic of being read to which provides the audience with a way into the acting as reading process - and, specifically, which enables them to share in the actor’s own recovery of a “lost” physical of reading’.35 Such dynamism of choices and communication informs Ostermeier’s understanding of acting also. The third part of the actor-audience relationship, its triangulation, is actor to director; yet the latter is curiously neglected in Cole’s account. If we shift the director into Barba’s role of ‘the first spectator’, then Cole’s ideas can be harnessed a little better, since, as he states, the audience (for which read director) ‘will not “read” the actor’s performance, which is not a text. Rather, they will find reinstated in the situation of being read to the “lost” situational prototype of a reading long since “passed upward” into mental process’.36 Especially if rehearsing a dramatic text, the idea of getting back to, recovering, or expressively re-rendering a ‘lost’ situational prototype is a quite satisfying gloss of the directing and rehearsal process. It also resists an intellectualising (‘mental process’) of reading or the text itself, as Cole posits it, reinforcing the bodily priorities of the directors here. What can be seen of the director’s response not only to acting as reading, but the reading actor in rehearsal? Although a devised performance, the production I explore as part of Chapter 5, Out of Blixen (Riotous Company, 2017), also utilised pre-scripted material, based on Karen Blixen’s short stories and autobiography, and adapted by Paul Tickell. I joined a rehearsal of a section drawn from Blixen’s story ‘Sorrow Acre’.37 Although the scene in question, between Adam and

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the Landlord (Femi Elufowoju jr and Marcello Magni) had been worked on previously, a new script had arrived. As if to reinforce the need to read, to ‘recover a lost physical’ as a response and investigation, these experienced physical theatre-makers, directed by Kathryn Hunter, began by sitting down. The scene between Adam and his mentor the Landlord turns on a clashing of the finery of their philosophical debate, whilst they both observe the sheer muscular effort of Anne-Marie’s (Mia Theil Have) near impossible task of mowing a field of rye by hand in order to save her son from banishment. In final performance, the argumentation of the textual material, initially teased out by Hunter in this initial rehearsal, butted up against Theil Have’s laboured, heavy breathing, as she repeated, and repeated, the action of mowing. In the same way as the story, so too does the staging juxtapose the intellectual haggling with, here, sheer performative effort. Hunter had a dual strategy: an initial imperative for oral ‘texture’ by asking the actors to interpret the material in a certain way; and that of voicing approval during parts of the reading, which is a variation of Donnellan’s position above, that of side coaching. This is a direct contrast to Mitchell’s, and to some extent Cracknell’s, use of reading as a testing out of predetermined intentions. In neuroaesthetic terms, both rely though on gaining knowledge via a principally aural encounter on the part of the director and oral production of meaning on the part of the actors, not least since sitting down limits physical-spatial response. This is a simple example of Cole’s recovery of the physical. We can shift Cole’s orality into an active notion if it is considered as established through a combination of actors’ offers and directorial, oral response; indeed, a fixity of the ‘reading’ for Out of Blixen was determined by Hunter through her perception of mainly aural affectiveness. To return to Starr, Hunter reflected upon what she perceived as the ‘imputation of inner life’: she appreciated how Magni brought the right emotional quality to the playing-reading and spoke of his work in terms of its appropriateness of texture.38 Magni thus captured the ‘right’ behaviour in the scene as an initial offer of oralcy, the right tone with which to ‘read’ to the audience, determined here by Hunter not as the ‘first spectator’, but as the ‘first auditor’. Because the work carried on whilst sitting down, the conveyors of meaning that comprise the neuroaesthetic triggers are prioritised as predominantly linguistic and acoustic (and, here, through an example other than the tendency

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of neuroaesthetics to focus on music). Hunter’s side coaching is, then, a verbalised confirmation of her own aesthetic reward and a pre-emptive opportunity to confirm a ‘reading’ to the audience, before the return to the main space and the assembly of materials in the overall devising process. Complicating the sympathy-empathy shift emphasised by Donnellan, Hunter also called for a strategy of substitution in the reading. In the scene, Adam has a particular, fond, even romantic connection with the place and notion of ‘Denmark’. Hunter asked Nigerian-born Elufowoju jr to consider where his own ‘home’ might be, in order to imbue the moment with, again, the ‘right’ texture.39 Elufowoju jr later revealed that he had substituted Denmark with ‘Nigeria’. What Hunter looked for here is the exposition of Adam’s relationship with what Zeki terms an ‘acquired concept’.40 The actor obviously knows what Nigeria is, but what it means to him, and what Hunter wants him to transfer onto ‘Denmark’, has been acquired over time and experience. As Donnellan urged earlier, the actor shifts from a potentially distanced sympathy for ‘Denmark’ to a precisely empathetic relationship to it, by moving what he has acquired over time to make sense of ‘Nigeria’ and placing it on the notion of ‘Denmark’. In turn, the affect of the substitution should be perceptible to Hunter as the first spectator being ‘read to’, or, perhaps, ‘acted upon’ as listener. If, for Grodal and Kramer, aesthetic experience, and for these authors film in particular, ‘is similar to that of participating in a social event’, then Hunter’s perception is a vicarious judgement that is presumed to expand to the perception of an eventual audience, since ‘central to this event is empathic participation’.41 As an acting technique, substitution—here also called for by the director as (side)coach—may be understood not only through Zeki’s differentiation of concepts, but also as an eidetic image that, in turn, can be perceived by others. An eidetic image is ‘seen’, so to speak, by the inner eye, by the mind. To put ourselves in Adam’s shoes for a moment, we too can recall the image of the home or place where we lived as a child without actually seeing it. Starr suggests that, as in this rehearsal moment, ‘some imagery can be prompted by instruction’, a directorial strategy that appears across Hunter’s directing, as well as others in this chapter, and more broadly in other acting approaches that call for the recall or conjure of ‘internal’ imagery.42 Starr further draws attention to whether such eidetic images—or, indeed, sounds—are propositional or

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analogous; that is, they are the ‘real’ thing or something equivalent that might, optimally, nevertheless lead to the same sort of end result. From the point of view of directing and acting, what matters is that the substitution functions as a vocabulary of investigation towards a communicable playing moment. Since Cole’s basic premise is that reading and attending performance are similar, that ‘theatregoing and reading share a common substratum’, both Hunter, as the first spectator-auditor, as well as the eventual audience, perceive the eidetic image, since it is ‘read’ to them.43 From a brain-based perspective, this takes us back to fundamental areas of sympathy, empathy and the Theory of Mind; even if we are not causing the performance moment in question, we too ‘get’ the kind of moments in performance Hunter is working towards here, since, for Starr, ‘we experience the imagery of sense when we have the subjective experience of sensation without having corresponding sensory input’.44

Thomas Ostermeier and the Actor Ostermeier’s theatre is full of bold characterisation, not least in Eidinger’s portrayal of Hamlet (from 2008) and Richard in Richard III (from 2015). In the latter, Eidinger lurches around with an obviously oversize shoe, braces on his teeth and strapping around his head; as Hamlet, he quite openly wears a fat suit, just as Richard’s ‘humpback’ is visibly strapped to Eidinger’s own back. These are overt, even grotesque bodily embellishments; even if grounded in Ostermeier’s materialist realism, behind the bodily protheses that he and his actors enjoy (which might also include the geeky glasses seen in some of the productions) these artists are clearly playing. For Ostermeier, the body is overtly and theatrically extended and malformed in performances that remain always theatre, yet shot through with his concern with sociopolitical transaction and materialist context. In Ostermeier’s work, an actor not only portrays the character, but is her/his own double. Ostermeier clearly never wants the actor to diminish her/his own being and has developed an advanced rehearsal approach, centred on the actor and acting technique (Fig. 3.2). As Eidinger confirms, the actor’s personality ‘is always present, and becomes a part of what is up for discussion with the audience; the fact, and the effort, of acting the character is a topic, too’.45 In both Hamlet and

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Fig. 3.2  Thomas Ostermeier in rehearsal for La Mouette [The Seagull] (Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne, 2016) (Photo Jérémie Cuvillier)

Richard III, Eidinger frequently stops to talk to the audience, not quite as ‘himself’ but as a doubled character-actor commenting on the dramatic situation and act of performance, and as part of a doubled continuum that Ostermeier clearly plays with as a director. At best, these interventions are cheeky, unexpected and throw the actor and audience suddenly and effectively outside the fiction of the play’s situation; at worst, they verge on the indulgently self-referential. In Richard III, Eidinger keeps referring to his nudity and how it might be embarrassing for us and him; neither is really so, and the gag wears thin. Notably, it is only Eidinger that gets up to such antics, giving a status to a central figure not afforded to others. If Ostermeier likes personality and bold performances, clearly part of the thrill of his work, not everyone gets her/ his star turn. Unlike some other directors, Ostermeier’s approach to acting and rehearsal is not a fixed, inherited or transformed praxis, but an assembly created out of his diverse influences and experience as ‘a set of core principles’, which create what he terms an inductive approach to directing.46 The inductive approach derives from Brecht and concerns investigation, decision and manifestation of discoveries. In terms of acting, a personal

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confrontation with, and response to, the Stoff of the play is paramount; Ostermeier and Boenisch explain this idiosyncratic term: in a very useful way, this German word combines a whole range of useful meanings. Stoff describes the material, the texture, the substance, the fabric and the subject matter. The term immediately makes clear that the playtext, as the starting point of directing work, is far more than words on a page.47

Stoff is the very nature, the stuff, of the world created by the playtext. In Ostermeier’s materialist realism, the familiar acting term the ‘given circumstances’ does not circumscribe a closed, textual or Stanislavskian discourse, but foregrounds his and his ensemble and creatives’ realisation of the contemporary politics of the play. As in the foregoing examples, Stoff incorporates a sometimes overt sharing with an audience: for instance, the fourth act of Ostermeier’s production of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (2014) turns into a public debate, involving the whole audience. Ostermeier’s Brechtian influences further animate the process, since ‘the characters on stage are our vicarious representatives who act, take action, make decisions on our behalf’, pushing action towards a scene’s turning point (again to follow Brechtian terminology).48 In what Ostermeier explicitly calls his ‘materialist, concrete approach to theatre direction’, his concerns centre on dramatic situations and conflicts, with which the actors play in order that they try always, and crucially, to change the situation.49 Alongside Ostermeier’s more evidently Stanislavskian procedures, a rehearsal strategy derived from Brecht is the construction ‘in order to …, I …’. This formulates what Ostermeier terms the actor-character’s process; that is, whatever it is that s/he needs to do in order to alter dramatic circumstances. A Brechtian construction to the process promotes, again, the actor-­ character double who can both evaluate and verbalise how a situation might be transformed.50 Like Stafford-Clark’s emphases, the process is actively directed at someone or something. In terms of the ‘double’, Ostermeier’s hybridised approach further allies process to the possibilities of a Brechtian dialectic in order to harness the actor’s personality— and sometimes bravura—to an always politically inflected analysis and shifting of a particular situation. Whereas Mitchell rigorously works with actors to construct their characters’ ‘back stories’ and biographies, Ostermeier, as might be inferred,

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rejects a potentially essentialist approach to character. Reflecting on acting in An Enemy of the People, Christoph Gwenda affirms that the actor should ‘face the situation of the play in the moment’.50 How aspects of the actor’s own personal make-up, affinities and belief structures align with the Stoff of the character’s situation is therefore deliberately incorporated into Ostermeier’s rehearsal process and productions. For Mitchell, the actor instead becomes a vehicle for a forensic approach to the construction of something always other than her/himself; at least in this part of Mitchell’s process, the mode is a deductive approach in direct contrast to Ostermeier. To create an exacting biography, for instance, offers a totalising, character-driven set of given circumstances, which nevertheless become the characterlogical basis, or deductive concept, for the action of the play. As a biographical, fixed concept, this is not imposed in a negative sense upon the circumstances of the play and its individual scenes or sequences, but is inhabited, often through improvisation and textual analysis, as the existential basis, indeed justification, for behaviour. In stark contrast to Mitchell’s psycho-behaviourist performance paradigm, Ostermeier explicitly rejects the use of character biographies and insists that social situation determines behaviour. Whilst Ostermeier’s explanation for this is compelling in its stress on the reaction to a situation as a playing of process, it also misses Mitchell’s wider point that how someone reacts to and deals with a social situation can still be inflected by her/his preconditioning. Nevertheless, and to return to an observation in the Introduction, Ostermeier can be seen as the conative artist par excellence.51 Synthesis Ostermeier’s ‘Storytelling’ technique actively places actors in situations that are analogous to the play in rehearsal, but also create the basics of staging. Actors ‘story-tell’ instances from their own lives that are thematically similar to certain scenes or have similar relationship structures. Ostermeier offers the examples ‘a situation where you persuade someone to do something forbidden’ […] ‘you have an idea but everyone turns against you’.52 Actors do not perform their ‘storytelling’ themselves, but quickly instruct colleagues. After an initial showing, the actors who appear in the actual scene in question take over the roles in the performance of the ‘real life’ situation. Storytelling remains a directorial tool,

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however, often retaining the basic physical shape of the improvised scene; it does not concern an actor’s experience as part of training, or some kind of therapeutic re-enactment. As Ostermeier and Boenisch describe, even if it is the actors who offer their real-life experiences, storytelling is led by the director, who remains an occasionally secretive guide in his desire to promote not only the basis for ‘good’ acting, but also to create the early stages of a behaviourally based staging. Although he does not overtly reference Stanislavski’s Active Analysis or Method of Physical Action, Ostermeier’s approach is similar in both form and intention. Since the first of these Stanislavskian methodologies constructs a rehearsal process whereby actors immediately begin working on the circumstances and setting of a play, the approach rejects ‘table work’, fundamental to both Mitchell and Cracknell’s approach. By creating the action of a situation step by step, the latter method involves forging a chain of physical action as a score, as if a more systematised version of Ostermeier’s Handlungen (physical action). From the perspective of creative process, these approaches usefully elide Botella et al.’s phases of ‘Testing forms or ideas’ and ‘Provisional object/Draft’; ideas are rendered as responses, which immediately produce form.53 Storytelling offers a reversal though, since the actor’s recollection of a real situation, analogous to the play, may provide a ‘form’ in terms of place, people, time and action, which can more or less immediately be re-enacted as a ‘draft’ staging. Ostermeier further claims that his exercise is ‘similar to Stanislavski’s “emotion memory”’, although it is only in so far as emotion may surface through activity, as was later determined by Stanislavski, thus reinforcing that the approach concerns action.54 It is precise, authentic behaviour that is transferred to the actual scenes and actors concerned, not emotion. As Ostermeier clarifies, his approach is, overall, closer to the Brechtian shift from the epic to dramatic theatre; and Ostermeier is quite open about his indebtedness to Brecht’s ‘Street Scene’ scenario, concerning an objective retelling, not emotion-based re-living, of an incident.55 Understood as a somatic approach, storytelling thus precisely stimulates and requires psychophysical response. From a neuroaesthetic perspective, an iterative process arises in Ostermeier’s improvisatory tactics. In the storytelling approach, actors do not solely enact aesthetic events ‘as if’ (to use Stanislavski’s phrase) they were real but, in Ostermeier’s case, materially real as an invocation of social circumstances. For Ostermeier, the isolation and re-enactment

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of the socially material content of the story is, crucially, an initial basis for a critical and subsequent point of entry into the scene itself. Zeki confirms ‘there is every reason to suppose that acquired brain concepts are strongly dependent upon influences from other, often “higher” areas. This is because judgement, past experience, and memory all play critical roles in updating the synthetic brain concept and modifying it over time’.56 To return to Zeki’s fundamental notion of neural concepts, it is possible to posit that any improvisation places the actor in a situation that, if taken as real (and to recall Knebel), will begin to form impressions, sensory affect and memory as acquired concepts, which the actor can draw upon later. This is the basis of Mitchell’s reliance on the improvisation of character biography and events not seen in the play itself, but which are, either through textual evidence or invention, considered to have taken place. But Ostermeier’s storytelling is a little different, in that the third-party re-enactment of once personal events resists, again, a ‘sympathetic’ emotional experience and instead provides a means to reproduce behaviour that may then be recontextualised. If a definition of Ostermeier’s ‘play’ is the expressive freedom to create the detailed form of the role within a materialist realism, the increased interest in situation in his later work has been augmented by a centralisation of repetition exercises, derived from Sanford Meisner and his ‘Meisner Technique’. In this exercise, each actor verbalises what s/he sees through close observation of a partner, which the partner repeats; this can be nuanced, partners switched and, later, incorporate lines from the play in rehearsal itself. For Meisner and Ostermeier, to pay attention, to repeat, is to receive an energetic impulse. The repetition exercises are not, however, a primary training, but have become a kind of ‘workout’ for Ostermeier to keep his actors ‘alive’ and, in his version of the technique, the addition of lines and movement also elides into rehearsal. As Boenisch reports, repetition exercises returned even at the last stages of rehearsal for Richard III, presumably both to stress the connectedness and presence of the actors amid the final push to ‘get the show on’, but also to return to a training concerning spontaneity.57 Like the storytelling approach, Ostermeier has become adept at collapsing training or developmental aspects and how the material in rehearsal—the collective Stoff—may be manifested as a synthesised experience for the actors. Given that, by all accounts, Ostermeier also does not really use a ‘call’ system in rehearsal—all of the company are present for most of the time—storytelling and, in later rehearsal, the

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repetition exercises have a pedagogical aspect as an ensemble conditioning. Although Ostermeier controls rehearsal procedures, the production is a combination of Ostermeier’s contemporary sensibilities and, to recall Boenisch, the play of theatrality, optimally liberating ensemble actors who are positioned as creative collaborators.

Robert Wilson and the Actor Unlike Ostermeier, who positions his ensemble as productive collaborators, Ellen Halperin-Royer argues for what should still be understood as collaboration between Wilson and his company, through her observation of Wilson’s then-contemporary approach to a production of Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death.58 Whilst Halperin-Royer offers another useful example of rehearsal observation, it appears that collaboration with Wilson seems to comprise those aspects that allow relatively small suggestions by the actor and which appear to come about by accident in rehearsal. Halperin-Royer nevertheless draws on extensive interviews with the large cast; her intention is clearly to debunk any received ideas that Wilson is some sort of cold, directorial dictator, even if in a production clearly dominated by him. Instead, Wilson’s ability to create ‘penetrating visual and aural images’ is instead demonstrated through a narrative that several times shows how actors shift any negative preconceptions of events in the rehearsal room.59 Indeed, to quote the actor Bettye Fitzpatrick, ‘I think several of us who may have come to scoff have stayed to pray’.60 Even if Halperin-Royer further shows Wilson’s changes in approach and uncertainties, here the Wilsonian myth still lurks. Halperin-Royer situates the approach to Danton’s Death as part of a phase when Wilson was moving away from a predominantly visual or aural basis to his performances to begin with playtexts. He began with a workshop, which explored especially the first scene, followed by a break before main rehearsals. Whilst Wilson began by asking actors to offer material, this appeared unsuccessful and he reverted to his normative approaches, typically his ‘number system’, a method of counting moves, which are then notated. Older documentation usefully shows this: in the film Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera (1985), Wilson is heard from behind his desk and microphone, leading a rehearsal of a sequence. The calm, authoritative Wilsonian voice instructs: ‘1, 2, 3, turn the head, 2; no; 1, 2, 3, 4; four counts coming back,

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pause, look upstage for 3, head back in 4. OK, try it. […] OK, walk’.61 At first sight—and hearing—this moment from rehearsal seems at odds with any possibility of a collaborative sharing of skill towards a mutual ‘look’; Wilson simply dictates. However, viewed as choreography, it is not fundamentally different from, say, a dance being ‘made’ (to use the classical idiom) on a dancer. Wilson is not allowing the actor any individual expression here, but neither is he mistreating him, but simply working from another point of entry into the creation of the performance. Wilson creates a score, a movement sequence whereby the primary track followed by the actor is neither words nor psychological motivation, but ‘codified in the form’ as a sequence of action prioritised over the written text.62 Wilson’s concern during the workshop phase for Danton’s Death was, similarly, to create the ‘visual book’, the imagistic fabric of action that should sit with the ‘aural book’, so to speak, of sound effects and music, as well as the text.63 Rather than actors who might produce, marionette-like, his formal demands, Wilson required strong, technically very capable actors for Danton’s Death, who could manifest clear ideas according to the text and ‘visual book’; the actors’ ‘offers’ were typically video recorded and notated. In terms of creativity, Botella et al. note how after ‘First sketches’ such ‘Technical experts’ may be needed in a ‘provisional object/draft’ phase. In Wilson’s case, his collaborators offer technical performance ability mainly in the rehearsal phase; his ‘First sketches’ are, actually, just that, charcoal drawings placed around the rehearsal room, often depicting the scenography, as both an expression of the Wilsonian vision of particular moments in the production still to be rehearsed, but also documentation.64 Wilson’s sketches and the workshop phase comprise a kind of fundamental storyboard-in-action as a manifestation of his vision, and the actor as a key physical-aural means to express it. But as Halperin-Royer demonstrates, Wilson sometimes did not operate through an ‘actor friendly’ vocabulary, but rather through conceptual terms or metaphors; either the actors had to translate this into the detail of playable action for themselves, or a more specific, actor-centric discourse became the remit of the assistant director, Ann ChristinRommen. Actors could offer potential movements and action, but such occasions do not compellingly suggest an actor–director collaboration, but rather brief material generated by actors. There is, more precisely, a

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collaborative aspect to some details of the overall performance score, but over which Wilson retains authority. Given the sense of remoteness around Wilson, it is perhaps surprising that he appears adept at a pedagogical approach to movement: as well as the execution of slow walks during rehearsals for Danton’s Death, Wilson coached actors in intention-based occupation of space, advising ‘an actor should not think in terms of taking two steps and stopping; rather, the line of movement continues through the stillness so that when the actor starts walking again, the movement is simply continuing’.65 This seems close to the manipulation or suspension of energy—the ‘line’ here—seen in other directors’ work or practices.66 Especially important for some actors was the need to find their own motivation for imposed form, to remain relaxed inside what was effectively another’s choreography, or to find how to fulfil Wilson’s call for ‘surprises’, all of which better evidence a specifically skills-based definition of collaboration.67 Jon David Weigand, for instance, found a rationale for the screeching sound called for in his delivery when ‘he decided that these screeches were the “goodness” trying to come to the surface of this evil person’.68 But these impulses appear not to derive from sustained personal or character expression; whereas Barba responds to and shapes actors’ original scores, Wilson prescribes the ‘number system’ and either accepts new actions if they occur, or asks for additional moves.69 As well as through her book length study of Wilson, Maria Shevtsova thus finds that Wilson crafts a shape, without telling them [the actors] how to feel it. What Wilson does not control is how they fill it with their presence, that is, how they sense and imagine within themselves the actions that they do. It is this that gives their actions their particular quality and precludes them from becoming mere executants of Wilson’s will.70

Of course, the implication here is that everything else is ‘controlled’ by Wilson’s will. In terms of the actor though, Shevtosva offers the example of how Isabelle Huppert created a quite different quality to the score of Wilson’s Orlando than actors in the three other versions. Shevtsova reports Huppert’s description of how she ‘took possession’ of the number system.71 The necessary skill for the Wilsonian actor is, it seems, the

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ability to own a sensorial and imaginative ‘riffing’ inside the sometimes iron score. When dealing with emotion in rehearsal for Danton’s Death, or at least what appears as the manifestation of feeling, Wilson appeared most uncertain, cautious or simply that, for him, he was negotiating new aspects of acting.72 Wilson clearly did not possess an actor-based vocabulary to negotiate the intricacies of the territory. If the actors or assistant director provided the detail, Wilson remained rather at one remove in order to focus the bravura of a compelling vision, which nevertheless could only be achieved through the actors’ collaboration at the level of their intrinsic—and often instinctive—skill. To return to Pavis, this is the ‘double’ the Wilsonian actor affords their director; or, as Fischer-Lichte suggests, actors in Wilson’s productions have typically ‘produced embodiment through the transfiguration of actor-bodies’.73 Fischer-Lichte’s emphasis on production also usefully draws attention to active skill and its confrontation with, to return to Ostermeier, the Stoff of the performance to produce the aesthetic event. Given the fixity and sophistication of Wilson’s theatrical imagery, the actor, certainly in Halperin-Royer’s account, is paradoxically very exposed.

Body Writing of Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s production of Giulio Cesare (from 1997), which used the body sometimes in extremis, Fischer-Lichte observes the ‘oscillation between phenomenal body and character’.74 Fischer-Lichte further identifies ‘the unmistakable “abnormity” of the performer’s bodies’ in the production, which pulled perception away from the character towards the actor.75 This slippage can occur too in a character-driven dramaturgy, something which, as we have seen, Ostermeier overtly exploits when he temporarily shatters his own work when Eidinger stops to check in with the audience. In Giulio Cesare, this ‘oscillation’ creates, according to Fischer-Lichte ‘a perceptual multistability’, an interesting term to suggest that both the phenomenal presence of the actor as well as that of the character can coexist as a doubled, yet stable aesthetic event, as in Eidinger’s case.76 Fischer-Lichte suggests that this oscillating perception cannot easily be explained; but from a cognitive perspective, the phenomenon of an actor and character coexistence, a dual stability, relies on the mind’s ability to grasp two notions at once through conceptual integration, or ‘blending’.

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As Bruce McConachie clearly puts it in relation to an audience, this is because: spectators rely on the basic cognitive operation of role-playing that integrates inputs from different concepts - the ‘self’ or ‘selves’ of one or several actors who can move, speak, and so on, plus the concept of a ‘role’ in a script or scenario that seeks certain intentions within a given situation to create a selves/role blend.77

McConachie’s mention of concepts connects, of course, to Zeki’s emphases, especially the synthetic concept, a feature I ally later to the use of intentions. For now, Fischer-Lichte and Societas Raffaello Sanzio, as well as Ostermeier, instead draw attention to conceptual blending, not its collapse, and an ability to trouble it both as a directorial strategy and phenomenon in performance. Iconic In the programme for the Théàtre de la Ville production of Six Characters in Search of an Author (originally produced in 2001) by Luigi Pirandello, the director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota offers a similarly ‘doubled’ vision and intent for the production, in which the very issue of pretence is raised here, the relation between illusion and reality […]. The feeling is that the illusion has trumped body and soul, causing the discomfort of hopelessly divided human beings. We gather on a ghostly stage, invaded by bodies caught in dreams. We then witness the lives of these characters through poorly controlled fitfulness and suppressed past violence […].78

As well as providing a gloss-like treatment of the conception of his production, Demarcy-Mota conjoins what appear the aesthetics of surrealism with physicality and violence in his envisioning of the play and its staging. This may be a production about divided human beings but, like Donnellan’s work, it is also one of quickly conjuring place and image onstage, of ensemble work, and a prioritisation of the actor’s body to cause what its director calls a ‘feeling’. Rather than a dreamlike, surrealist production, parts of the action more precisely tip into the grotesque. Images are distorted, action is taken to the extreme and bodies are not just part of a deftly conjured

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theatricality (e.g. when the ensemble whirls around a dropped-in curtain), but stretched in display too, as when The Mother (Sarah Karbasnikoff) lurches over a ballet barre. This group from Pirandello’s imagination thus become a lurking familial ensemble inside the company itself. They are often side lit as a particular choice too, such that their ‘ghostliness’ or, as Demarcy-Mota puts it, the ‘contamination of the visible world by the invisible’ veers on the self-consciously spooky.79 Demarcy-Mota’s concern with the theatrically numinous, or the possibilities of its contamination, also leads to the distortion of bodies; it is useful to focus particularly on the physicality of the Son (Stéphane Krähenbühl). He veers between a more or less upright physicality, but at times Krähenbühl sinks to a stooped posture as if embodying DemarcyMota’s ‘hopelessly divided human’.80 But this is not all: he is a kind of bug-eyed creature, with a walk that slinks across the space. This is no surrealism, as implied by Demarcy-Mota, but the corporeality of, again, the grotesque. Whilst physical characterisation—which should be included in the array of evident aesthetic choice available to the director and her/his ‘double’—occurs in the case of the other actors and at various points in the action, Demarcy-Mota achieves part of his aesthetic intent in the case of The Son through a conscious bodily ‘signature’. The Son does not speak a great deal in the play, yet it is not merely what this actor-character does, as in realist-naturalist modes, but palpably how it is done, how the body is ‘inscribed’ in space, which communicates meaning. In Demarcy-Mota’s case, the ‘how’ concerns what ‘bodies caught in dreams’ should, to echo Fischer-Lichte, phenomenally become. As Fischer-Lichte rightly suggests, the phenomenal yet fictive body causes a doubling in the actor, such that the director (assuming we are dealing with dramatic work for a moment) is not really dealing with the actor but, to recall conceptual integration, the actor and how s/he ‘becomes’ the character in rehearsal and ‘is’ the character in performance (a period where the director may eventually only intervene through notes). This complicates Pavis’s point, since the actor may well be the director’s double, but this doubling is further multiplied. Again, this multiplicity of view recalls the too-often avoidance of definitions of directing, as well as, on the other hand, the highly structured approaches developed by directors such as Alfreds or Mitchell, or the development of Viewpoints by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, much further than its original dancebased roots.81

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In contrast to directors who have adopted or developed a systematic approach to rehearsal, based in a defined acting process, van Hove has evolved an eclectic strategy. As David Willinger has demonstrated, the theatre training culture of post-war Belgium had adopted ideas from several practitioners, in which ‘Stanislavsky was not disregarded, but little practiced or understood’.82 Willinger also points out that van Hove’s directing training allowed him no consistent access to actors, nor was a consistent method taught, so he followed his own interests and relied on his own extensive viewing of performance. As I discuss elsewhere, van Hove is, in part, influenced by film: his productions frequently use a filmic, contained acting style, and actors usually wear radio microphones in the huge spaces the productions typically occupy, so do not have to be vocally athletic. Yet van Hove has said ‘I continue […] to push my actors to that point where theatre and performance meet. It is still about acting and, as such, actions are carefully directed, but nevertheless there is the experience of something unpredictable and dangerous’.83 But how van Hove arrives at an outcome like this is sometimes unclear, since, as Willinger puts it, ‘his praxis has never evolved into a system. Rather, he adjusts his contours to the context’.84 The actors, especially the Dutch actors of van Hove’s TGA, are muscular, virile, casual and sexy and, ostensibly at least, treat the work as performance, rather than complex, character-based acting. As actor Halina Reijn puts it, ‘Ivo does not have a method or a philosophy as such; he is interested in creating a world within which he allows his actors to explore their emotional responses to situations. […] And his approach is addictive for actors once they have got to know him’.85 Rather than building a complex, psychologised character, for van Hove it is the theatrical ‘world’ that has to be constructed. This becomes the realm in which actors are thrown back on themselves as the primary resource for responsiveness. This dynamism or liveness can also be traced back to van Hove’s interest in live art and makes for ‘danger’; indeed, Reijn goes on to affirm van Hove’s productions ‘feel completely real in an artificial situation’.86 Thus at the outset of van Hove’s Persona, the second part of his integrated diptych After the Rehearsal/Persona (from 2012), Elisabeth Vogler’s (Marieke Heebnik) naked form appears lying, immobile, on an unembellished metal gurney.87 Vogler’s mental breakdown has rendered her unable to speak; recalling Demarcy-Mota above, this work questions illusion and reality, memory and past pain. Whilst van Hove seems to

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reduce, or expose Vogler to what she becomes, a body, his staging of this moment is absolutely and clearly deliberately at odds with the dramatic situation: Vogler is meant to be in a hospital bed, in some sort of private room. Instead, van Hove isolates the body as a form for forensic examination, laid out as the actor’s phenomenal body, yet also simultaneously highlights Vogler’s inability, or refusal, to speak. Whilst van Hove’s aesthetics at this point veer towards the figurative, at one point in the sequence Heebnik moves, stretches and turns in a sequence embellished with music and a shift in lighting. This is evidently choreographic and emotive: Vogler feels trapped, is longing, and reaches out for something imagined. This iconic yet subsequently emotive form warrants some brain-based explanation. Calvo-Merino and Christensen report that relatively little research exists that links what are clearly (in relation to their interests) emotive or aesthetically appreciable dance movements to ‘classic’ emotion processing areas of the brain, such as the insula. Earlier, I suggested that to ally movement perception with ToM offers an explanation of the affect of percepts, yet how this implicates areas concerned with emotion is less clear. Calvo-Merino and Christensen further summarise how a number of brain areas concern dance perception, movement and aesthetic appreciation of dance, though it is the ventral premotor cortex that particularly ‘encodes somatosensorial stimuli’ and may be ‘responsible for the simulation response between observer and artwork’.88 The authors link ‘emotional body movements’ to the inferior parietal gyrus and occipitotemporal cortex but, as ever with the brain, perception and cognition involve more than one part at once and research is emergent.89 Yet, in the overtly visually encoded production of Eugene Onegin for the Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre (from 2013), directed by Rimas Tuminas, it is entirely possible to perceive Tatyana’s frustration (Olga Lerman) when she suddenly braces herself between the foot and head of her bed, lifting herself off the mattress. Elsewhere, Tuminas calls for his kind of sheer physical effort when Tatyana pulls around the obviously heavy bench, as if grappling with her surroundings. As a directorial tactic, these muscular instances, just like van Hove’s more choreographic choice above, are ‘outward’ renditions of ‘inner’ distress. As wordless physical expression, they are clearly meant to be understood as ‘emotional action’, perceived, to use Calvo-Merino and Christensen’s terminology, somatosensorially.

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Such conscious use of the aestheticised body shifts upwards in its hedonism—actually—when in Tumina’s production emotional content later transmutes into the consciously beautiful doubling and multiplying of young women, flying aloft on swings. This image is not only a sculpture, but an installation or mobile, pre-empting my reference to kinetic art in Chapter 6. On the other hand, bodies are magnified but earthbound in Wilson’s Sonnette (Berliner Ensemble, from 2009), in which the performer-singers’ bodies are heavily made up in Wilson’s typical whiteface stylistic. Whilst in the case of Persona, the human form veers towards the sculptural, in Wilson’s case the actors are presented as cool, self-aware figures, bearing the consciously embellished vocality of the sonnets. But Wilson’s performers are often very still with minimal gestural movement; raised eyebrows and askance looks comprise the vocabulary of physical expression. Wilson’s figures thus go further than the sculptural to become ornate, ironised mannequins. In terms of a directorial mode of presentation, the body is never just an aesthetic ‘thing’ in these cases and, as Zeki and others so often reinforce, cannot appear objectively before a coldly witnessing eye. Instead the body is always in operation, in action as an existence inside Pavis’s definition of mise en scène as performance and the ‘warm’ site (to recall Lehmann) of the transaction of knowledge.

Double Warner is clear in her admiration for Shaw, stating that ‘bravery characterises Fiona. She will, in rehearsal, do and try anything. When she’s with a group, what is fantastic is that she’ll lead […]. People will absolutely follow and get better because of her’.90 Just as a director does not simply direct a play, but directs and shapes a production, so too the director does not direct a character, or figure, in a play or performance; the director can but direct the actor’s psychophysicality towards the manifestation of her/his particular performance, as part of other aesthetic concerns and processes of the total production. Warner needs Shaw to demonstrate creative daring, as does the rest of her cast, in order that directing can successfully happen. Alfreds also concludes his book with something of a primary condition, claiming that he maintains a focus on the actor since ‘we go to the theatre, not to see plays, but to see actors in plays’.91 Whilst the immediacy of the actor may be compelling, this

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imperative cannot stand for all theatre going of course, especially contemporary practice. Nevertheless, such a faith in the actor is seen too in Donnellan’s self-identification as an actor-centric director. Directors both demand and rely on actors’ skill; in this chapter, a pedagogic aspect has emerged too in Wilson’s especially physical, indeed sculptural approach, allied, of course, to his visual auteurship. Like some of van Hove’s work, and certainly in the grotesque of Demarcy-Mota, the body in Wilson’s work is quite obviously aestheticised. For these directors, the body is far from the normative corporeal behaviour of realist-naturalist performance and rarely quotidian in its mode. As with Shaw, their actors manifest their abilities, they try anything in rehearsal. As one strand of the ‘doubling’ of the director and actor, some directors have of course been responsible for introducing acting techniques or rehearsal processes. Earlier, I discussed the continued dominance of the foremost of these director-master pedagogues, Stanislavski, one of a line of twentieth-century directors especially associated with new, or revisionist, acting practices, including Vsevolod Meyerhold, Yevgeny Vakhtangov and Chekhov. There are of course more contemporary Russian pedagogues, such as Vasiliev, whose work was witnessed firsthand by Mitchell. Some pedagogic figures are not directors, such as Jacques Lecoq, yet have had huge influence, and some of the American ‘Method’ school (an unsatisfactory catch all) are not directors, including Strasberg and Meisner; the latter has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years, leading to Ostermeier’s exposure to those practices. Mitchell is particularly notable in the rigour of her process, which remains an ideal as laid out in her own book, and not always rigorously followed. I have suggested elsewhere that Mitchell’s process is only possible when rehearsing a play for an extended period. It simply does not occur across her latter ‘live cinema’ practice nor, as I have witnessed, necessarily in her play rehearsals, where pre-preparation of events in the text and selective improvisation have to fit the available time and needs of the work at hand. Mitchell has also been open, and cheerfully self-ironising, about jettisoning her earlier insistence on phases of extensive research.92 Yet Mitchell’s remains the authoritative, contemporised Stanislavskian approach, matched, possibly, by Alfreds. Like Ostermeier, Mitchell has ‘first principles’ and I suggest that they, amongst others, are seen as a new generation of directors who, in their interest in placing the actor

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in the centre of rehearsal, have created their own, idiosyncratic, systematised approaches to acting. Like Alfreds’s, Ostermeier’s is a composite approach, which allies his sociopolitical view of theatre-making, vibrant and iconoclastic productions, and a positioning of the actor as the key manifestation of the theatrality of the production. Approaches such as the ‘Stanislavskian’, or of contemporary directors like Mitchell and Alfreds, immerse the actor in situations in order to stimulate aesthetic response ‘as if’ (to borrow Stanislavski’s famous subjunctive construct again). Ostermeier’s practices initially stimulate actual behavioural expression, not least given his significant interest in the transactions of social materiality, which subsequently become aesthetic form. It is the initial ‘third party’ re-enactment of storytelling that incorporates a perspective towards the eventual critical ‘showing’ on stage, albeit via forensic scrutiny of behaviour, though always inside a politically inflected scenario. For Ostermeier, part of the communication of his contemporary neo(n)realism, as Boenisch puts it, is how the actors themselves align with the politics of the play’s Stoff.93 Mitchell’s actors, on the other hand, are caught inside a psychologically and biologically dense enactment inside a dramatic world; Ostermeier’s actors seem, in this case, more empowered in the political concerns of the play as realised through the production. Both directors embrace, though, as Eidinger puts it, the ‘effort’ of acting. As can be seen in this chapter, directors exploit PECMA flow, albeit unconsciously, but reverse or at least trouble its more or less directional, step-by-step process. Ostermeier explores scenes via physical points of entry, such that motor action leads forwards to emotion via active involvement in a scene, augmented by his great stress on the perception of others via Meisner repetition exercises. If Ostermeier flips the PECMA arrangement, Mitchell’s recourse to script analysis prioritises cognition, out of which physical (motor) response occurs, to create the often highly-charged performances she is known for. Whilst the perception of the body is clearly visual, as Calvo-Merino and Christensen note, the visual and motor systems of the brain are not independent but ‘an integrated multimodal system’.94 In terms of neuroaesthetics, this means that the brain possesses a combined ability to deal with how percepts both appear and move, but also to process artistic experience as a typology. This may incorporate a highly aestheticised or virtuosic feat (classical ballet for example), but also choice of form

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or genre, as well as the emotional connotation of bodily appearance. Indeed, echoing the insight afforded by PECMA flow, Calvo-Merino and Christensen propose that ‘hedonic power’ is especially manifest through body perception, which offers a further understanding of those directors here who prioritise the body.95 Mitchell fleshes out the detailed ‘how’ of the actor’s psychophysical materiality, whereas Wilson prioritises the performance form, inside which his actors need to find the ‘how’, but all such corporeal percepts activate the visual and motor areas of the brain.96 Like Wilson, directors render the body a phenomenal, even sculptural form in which degrees of empathetic connection are achieved. Both Wilson and Mitchell are visionaries of the theatral: Mitchell’s work is expanded realism, Wilson’s that of, perhaps, kinaesthetic painting. Less clear is quite what Wilson’s reliance on the more complete faculties of the actor might be: his vision is so strong, even if, as the earlier account demonstrates, how to articulate that vision in playable terms, beyond the rigour of the number system, seems difficult for him. Still, we should recall that part of Boenisch’s elaboration of thea is kinesis, movement through which, as Boenisch concludes, directing (Regie) ‘can then be grasped as the cultural force that sets in motion a complex and dynamic theatral process where semiotic signs, text and language bind themselves to the forces of kinesis, of moving and transporting information, and aesthesis – its address of experiencing spectators’.97 Even though Wilson appeared to have trouble negotiating the emotional aspects of what emerged in rehearsal, when it comes to the perception of others, the directorial eye of the ‘first spectator’ seeks, as Calvo-Merino and Christensen reinforce, actually to be moved and, crucially, to move others, be that the actor or audience. Cole offers a radical revisioning of reading as not a silent, passive process, but an already and necessarily physical act. As a recovery of the oral, Cole sees acting, as might be expected, as the fundamental process of connection with an audience through utterance. ‘Reading’, in an expanded definition, is rendered communication, not reception. If we accept Cole, then to direct is also to share in a recovery of the lost physical and the oralcy of acting conceived as reading. This is obviously manifest in rehearsal, beyond reading as auditions, or a cast reading together in read-throughs as a way to begin rehearsal. Especially as evidenced in Hunter’s case, when viewed in such perspectives directing becomes a rewriting of the act of reading.

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Conversation Warner reflects on her working relationship with Shaw, concluding that ‘we have a very good conversation in rehearsal. It’s a twenty-five-yearold conversation but it doesn’t feel like an old conversation. Fiona’s very good for me because she pushes me and maybe sometimes I might push her’.98 In offering a means to deconstruct and subsequently express the dramaturgy of the play, the directors in this chapter are not merely insisting on an acting approach, they also provide themselves with a means to direct the play, whilst also requiring actors who can navigate, even fill out, the requirements of particular aesthetics. Caught in the Pavisian double, each harnesses a psychophysical connection and expression, which can only be rooted in their regard for actors. In providing the look of—or at—the other, these actor doubles become a means both for the director to find out how the play works and achieve its staging. Even if the director relies on ‘emotional guidance systems’, more evident in some than others of course, the skill of the director is to confirm for an audience at least the possibility of aesthetic reward and, according to this chapter at least, place the actor as a prime source of aesthetic satisfaction.99 The director is the ‘first spectator’, but also the ‘prime spectator’, a sort of spectatorial first amongst equals, who simultaneously speaks and hears, reads and is read to, and in whose gaze the actor places her/himself.

Notes

1. Rupert Christiansen, ‘Fiona Shaw’s Double Life’, The Telegraph, 10 May 2002, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3577148/ Fiona-Shaws-double-life.html (accessed 9 October 2017). 2. Pavis, Mise en Scène, 284. 3. Botella et al., ‘Learning’, 166. 4. Pavis, Mise en Scène, 20. 5. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative, 76, passim. 6. This may be useful alongside the term ‘extended voice’, used to denote non-naturalistic, ‘heightened’ or extreme vocal practice. 7. Pavis, Mise en Scène, 283. 8. Ibid., 284. 9. Barba, On Directing, 26. 10. Pavis, Mise en Scéne, 284.

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11. Paul Taylor, ‘Second Opinion/Paul Taylor Defends Fiona Shaw’s Richard II from the Baying Critics’, http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/second-opinion-paul-taylor-defends-fiona-shaws-richardii-from-the-baying-critics-1586371.html (accessed 18 January 2018). 12. Lehmann, Postdramatic, 95. 13. Ibid. 14. Grodal and Kramer, ‘Film’, 272. 15. Ibid., 277, 273. 16.  PECMA flow is dealt with in, for example, Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 17. Boenisch and Ostermeier, Thomas Ostermeier, 43–54. 18.  Peter M. Boenisch, ‘Thomas Ostermeier: Mission Neo(n)realism and a Theatre of Actors and Authors’, in Delgado and Rebellato, Contemporary, Chapter 17. 19. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative, 76, original emphasis. 20.  Beatriz Calvo-Merino and Julia F. Christensen, ‘Neuroaesthetics and Dance’, in Lauring, Neuroaesthetics, 293. 21. David Cole, Acting as Reading: The Place of the Reading Process in the Actor’s Work (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 67, passim. 22. Ibid., 15, Chapter 4. 23. Ibid., 212. 24. Barba, On Directing, 11. 25. I call this ‘ur-performance’ in Chapter 4. 26. ‘Declan Donnellan’, in Delgado and Heritage, In Contact, 85. 27. The Guardian, ‘Cheek by Jowl’s Declan Donnellan: Still on the Road’, 11 April 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvzk4mOzdJg (accessed 23 January 2018). 28.  Michael Coveney, ‘Declan Donnellan: “It’s Dangerous When Actors Think It’s All About Their Feelings’’, https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/interviews/2017/declan-donnellan-its-dangerous-when-actorsthink-its-all-about-their-feelings/ (accessed 22 November 2017). 29. Ibid. 30.  Almeida Theatre, ‘Why Greeks Matter, Rupert Goold, Ivo van Hove and Deborah Warner’, 12 June 2015, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=i6kYz-wx2rg (accessed 20 May 2018). 31. Miall, ‘Literary Reading’, in Lauring, Neuroaesthetics, 260. 32. Which, presumably, explains why people sometimes put a hand up to a temple when trying to be precise about what is expressed.

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33.  I mention this anecdotally because during the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2017 production of Titus Andronicus, some audience members were measured for physiological response to assess their reaction to the play’s content. 34. Fiachra Gibbons, Twelfth Night, The Guardian, 6 October 2004, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2004/oct/06/theatre1 (accessed 23 January 2018). 35. Cole, Acting, 211. 36. Ibid., 197, 213. 37.  Isak Dinesan (Karen Blixen), ‘Sorrow- Acre’, in Winter’s Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). 38. Starr, Feeling, 60; Adam Ledger, rehearsal notes, Out of Blixen, Coronet Theatre, London, 20 March 2017. 39. Ledger, ibid. 40. Semir Zeki, Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness (Malden, Oxford and Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 23. 41. Grodal and Kramer, ‘Film’, 272. 42. Starr, Feeling, 72. 43. Cole, Acting, 203. 44. Starr, Feeling, 72. 45. Boenisch and Ostermeier, Thomas Ostermeier, 46. 46. Ibid., 132. 47. Ibid., 133. 48. Ostermeier uses Brecht’s term Drehpunkt (Boenisch and Ostermeier, Thomas Ostermeier, 145) for ‘turning point’. 49. Ibid., 149. 50. Ibid., 146. 51. Botella et al., ‘Learning’, 162 (see Introduction). 52. Boenisch and Ostermeier, Thomas Ostermeier, 156. 53. Botella et al., ‘Learning’. 54. Boenisch and Ostermeier, Thomas Ostermeier, 157. 55. Ibid. 56. Zeki, Splendours, 41. 57. Boenisch and Ostermeier, Thomas Ostermeier, 221. 58.  Ellen Halperin-Royer, ‘Robert Wilson and the Actor: Performing in Danton’s Death’, in Zarrilli, Acting, 319–333. 59. Ibid., 321. 60. Ibid., 320. 61.  Chrisann Verges and Mark Obenhaus, Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera (1985), available at http://ubu.com/film/ glass_einstein.html (accessed 23 January 2018).

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62. Halperin-Royer, ‘Robert Wilson’, 326. 63. Ibid., 323. 64. In the early 1990s, the sketches for Danton’s Death later sold for some $5000 each. 65. Halperin-Royer, ‘Robert Wilson’, 327. 66. For instance, Barba, or the butoh form. 67. Halperin-Royer, ‘Robert Wilson’, 326–327. 68. Ibid., 327. 69. For a discussion of Barba, see my Odin Teatret. 70. Shevtsova and Innes, Introduction, 166. 71. Ibid., 167. 72. Halperin-Royer, ‘Robert Wilson’, 330. 73. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative, 86. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 88. 76. Ibid. 77. Bruce McConachie, Theatre & Mind, 26. 78.  Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, ‘Looking for Any Drama’, in programme for Six Characters in Search of an Author, Barbican Theatre, London, 5 February 2015, 6. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Alfreds, Different; Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition (London: Nick Hern Books, 2014). 82. Willinger, Ivo van Hove, 31. Van Hove studied at Het RITCS. 83.  Johan Thielemans, ‘Ivo van Hove’s Passionate Quest for a Necessary Theatre: An Interview’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 20:4 (2010): 455–460 (457). 84. Willinger, Ivo van Hove, 31. 85. ‘‘In rehearsal with Ivo van Hove’: Halina Reijn and Ruth Wilson, in conversation (June 2017)’, in Introduction, Bennett and Masai, Ivo van Hove, 14. 86. Ibid., 15. 87. It seems reductive to call the work a double bill, since the pieces share not only the same cast but, as critic Paul Taylor puts it ‘these productions bounce suggestively off each other’; Paul Taylor, ‘After the Rehearsal/ Persona, Barbican, London, Review: Ivo van Hove’s Fascinating Double Bill of Bergman’, The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/ arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/after-the-rehearsal-personabarbican-london-review-ivo-van-hoves-fascinating-double-bill-of-bergman-a7971736.html (12 October 2017).

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88. Calvo-Merino and Christensen, ‘Neuroaesthetics and Dance’, 308. 89. Ibid. 90.  ‘Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner’, Financial Times, 11 April 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjjdrlIVrmQ (accessed 20 April 2018). 91. Alfreds, Different, 343. 92. National Theatre Discover, ‘Katie Mitchell on Cleansed’, 7 March 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LizhtwXP8A (accessed 24 Jul. 2018). 93. Peter Boenisch, ‘Thomas Ostermeier’. 94. Calvo-Merino and Christensen, ‘Neuroaesthetics and Dance’, 297. 95. Ibid., 214, 303. 96. In another example of the brain’s multiplicity in reaction and processing, Calvo-Merino and Christensen explain that an appreciation of the body also triggers the parietal and occipitotemporal cortices. 97. Boenisch, Directing, 42. 98.  Financial Times, ‘Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner’. 99.  Mike Radford, ‘Emotion and Creativity’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 38: 1 (2004): 53–64 (63).

CHAPTER 4

‘In the Room’: The Director and Rehearsal

Introduction At rehearsals for Riotous Company’s Out of Blixen at London’s Coronet Theatre (2017), I was called into the discussion circle within five minutes of arriving. Here, the director Hunter’s inclusive tactic was simply not to allow the presence of a scholarly interloper from Birmingham to be an issue in the first place. Van Hove is not quite the same; he is open to rehearsal room outsiders but, once ‘in the room’, I and others have sometimes been ignored as, seemingly, a directorial strategy in van Hove’s super-concentrated rehearsal approach (van Hove typically rehearses for around four hours daily with a half hour lunch break). If most of the director’s time is spent in rehearsal, to consider the period is to examine a very large part of the definition of a director, her/ his work, and how that work is realised. Amid the deferred definitions of the director, a taxonomy that captures an orientation to rehearsal appears: that Mnouchkine is both a Probenleiter ‘leading rehearsals’ and a ‘midwife’, as Delgado and Rebellato put it, suggests that rehearsal, in this instance at least, is simultaneously a gathering of theatre artists, a circumstance where someone has to marshal proceedings, and an artistic gestation period.1 Delgado and Rebellato also characterise Kristian Fréderic as a ‘coach’, as Donnellan calls himself, which renders rehearsal a kind of training ground and acting an ‘athletic’, even virtuosic task.2 But labels can be deceptive: despite her casual labelling as an auteur by some quarters of the press, in Mitchell’s play-based rehearsal, there is, © The Author(s) 2019 A. J. Ledger, The Director and Directing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40767-2_4

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broadly, an evolution through the development of the imaginary of the play through textual analysis, improvisation and a method of staging as it emerges through a behaviourist approach to rehearsal. Rehearsal might be seen as a form of aesthetic determination, often through the application of well-thought through and practised rehearsal decisions, or by creating a particular set of circumstances. Unlike devising, when even fundamental material can be in flux, I have often witnessed rehearsal informed by predetermined, clear points of orientation, not initial creative ‘fuzziness’: in each of the cases in this chapter, the scenography had long been in place and each begins with a text.3 Some directors evidence evolved, step-by-step approaches, brought into rehearsal. Although it may well incorporate periods of testing and evaluation, I suggest rehearsal is better characterised as an intentional, creative assembly towards what Zeki calls the brain’s desire for ‘situational constancy’.4 Linking such constancy to creativity, Zeki characterises art making as an iterative ‘search for constancies, during which the artist discards much and selects the essentials’.5 Some directors demonstrate repeated aesthetic features, even, perhaps, habits across their work, but this constancy is not, as Zeki means, to create circumstances that appear or behave like things of the same kind. Instead, the director evaluates the emergent production as a singular aesthetic constant that reflects, rather than uncritically copies, an understanding of life. But instead of the inevitable discarding in devising or, as I have explored elsewhere, the accumulation then excision of material that characterises Barba’s work, I think here of the director not as someone who gets rid of things in order to clarify, but instead fundamentally considers how ‘the essentials’ may be reached in the first place.6 The director can be considered the facilitator of a selective creative expression; indeed, Mace and Ward consider ‘expertise’ in their account of creative process and claim that ‘experienced professional artists already know what is likely to lead to failure or success in their work. In this regard, expertise is an important factor in creative production’.7 This seems a bold claim. These authors tend, though, to investigate solo artists, as do Botella et al., whereas rehearsal is by its very nature an interactive and collaborative enterprise, even with the case of directors such as Wilson. Like other artists, directors are familiar with their medium and, as Mace and Ward imply, evaluate emergent artworks not only through their own expertise, but that of their immediate collaborators’ expert encounter with the still-forming artwork. Rather than a

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narrative chronology of rehearsal, I am thus most interested in (to borrow Starr) those events of rehearsal process that overlap aesthetic choice. In the next chapter, I draw further on my observation of rehearsal for Out of Blixen (above), so include other experience here. Mitchell has been particularly supportive of my interests and allowed me often into rehearsal; this has provided the basis for other research, so I prioritise observation of both Say It With Flowers (Hampstead Theatre, 2013), based on texts by Gertrude Stein, and The Cherry Orchard (Young Vic, London, 2014) in this chapter.8 The latter exemplified Mitchell’s thorough, imaginative and systematic approach as laid out in her own book, The Director’s Craft (2008). But the sheer weirdness of the Stein texts thwarted this rational way of working, and Mitchell was careful to make me aware that I should not consider her way of rehearsing this production as indicative of her normative or ideal approach. Yet it demonstrated Mitchell’s staging craft, including right up to technical rehearsals, which I attended. On the other hand, in allowing me into rehearsal for Nina Raine’s Tribes for the Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Chicago, 2013), Steppenwolf’s administration stressed that I similarly should not take what I observed as representative of its work per se since, whilst it prioritises the North American ensemble tradition, it is obviously varied.9 In the case of the realism of Tribes, Austin Pendleton’s focus in rehearsal was, like Mitchell’s, on relationships, emotional clarity and the text. I discuss this set of rehearsal observation alongside Cracknell’s production of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (National Theatre, London, 2016). Elsewhere, van Hove’s holistic approach when working with technology was evident during my observation of some of the work on his Antigone (at the Grand Théâtre de la Ville, Luxembourg, 2015). Earlier, I observed a much bigger production, The Fountainhead, which I saw in rehearsal at the Toneelgroep Amsterdam (TGA) (2014). To conclude observation, I have made a point typically to return to see a performance well into the run of a production, even if I have seen run-throughs or a technical rehearsal. Position(ality) Alex Mermikides and Jacqui Smart complicate observation of others’ practice, rightly suggesting that it is unlikely that any observer can see everything and that some work is invisible or ‘hidden’ ‘in the artists’ own heads’.10 I would add to this view that a great deal of directing takes

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place outside of rehearsal: casting, design meetings, production planning, research and the constant practicalities of funding are all part of directing. When I am ‘in the room’, I watch rehearsal, but I am clearly not seeing everything. My particular agenda is to observe the director’s process at a particular rehearsal at a particular point, with the overtly acknowledged intention that I will subsequently leave and write about the goings on ‘in the room’. The delimit of my positionality is a focus on the directorial in a particular context. Since I do not employ an ethnographic approach to rehearsal, I cannot claim McAuley’s status as a long-term ‘participant-observer’, a term used in methodologies such as action research, not least since I have not been continually present in any rehearsal period (Say It With Flowers came most close), save for my own performance projects.11 Although observation might be a form of participation, McAuley’s hybrid term might also disguise a lack of proactivity. To shift McAuley’s position, I am not a participant-observer, but rather a participant-witness. If viewed as a task, this offers a shift away from the potential passivity of observation to that of the iterative activity of witnessing. I participate like McAuley, yet do not report all that is observed, but tell of particular aspects, shape an understanding and offer an interpretation of certain circumstances. For me, a strategy has instead emerged in order to tell a clear story: to see early rehearsal—a time when work might be a little ‘fuzzy’ but also when clear strategies are revealed—rehearsal when scenes are ‘on their feet’, run-throughs and technical rehearsals, when the choices of the director and wider creative team are made actual. In terms of creative process, I have thus witnessed phases of, as Botella et al. put it, ‘First sketches’, ‘Testing forms or ideas’, and ‘Provisional object/Draft’, periods that variously characterise the moments of rehearsal included in this chapter. To witness and, moreover, to bear witness always implies inference in the eventual ‘eye witness account’: sometimes there is a description, sometimes exemplary moments in a wider analysis of the director’s work and its comparison with others. A particular methodology has been to note verbatim comments and, following a suggestion from Mitchell, to note how long something takes; Mitchell has been especially concerned that I might convey the sheer labour of aspects of rehearsal, especially around script analysis, part of the difficulty of the hidden room. To recall Nelson, what I bear witness to is the director’s know-how in the process of making the know-that of the emergent production as, so to speak, ur-performance, and offer it as my own know-what.

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Mirror In discussing the ‘mise’ of mise en scène, Pavis stresses the visual determinants of directing: like previous commentators, Pavis isolates ‘the organising gaze of the Western director’.12 Whilst not of course exclusively Western, Pavis emphasises a crafting and homogenising of the various aspects of mise en scène. As the accounts of rehearsal phases here help demonstrate, mise en scène should be seen as both process and artistic object, refracted through a modernist—and of course still contemporary—determining eye, to which might also be added the contemporary ear.13 If, according to Starr, the spectator evaluates how different aesthetic elements work, in different ways and to different ends in order to find ‘reward’, this too must be the job of the director.14 In the constantly iterative process of rehearsal, the director repeatedly evaluates what occurs and makes choices; as Mitchell reveals of her thinking during rehearsal, ‘I never think: ‘now it clicks’. I never think: ‘this is my style’. I just think, every 10 seconds: ‘is that good enough or not?’’15 Like Mitchell, the director is dealing more particularly with a provisional set of rewards, and assessing them as s/he goes along. Given the textual basis of much of the directing practice in this chapter, Miall’s quite fascinating account of the function of the mirror neuron as a response to reading should be further elaborated here. As we have seen, Miall first isolates the empathetic role of the mirror neuron, which he supports through reference to persuasive scientific literature in the field. His subsequent exposure of the mirror function underpins how, in this chapter, Cracknell or Mitchell deal with the playscript, as well as, albeit in a different mode, van Hove’s apparently instinctive theatricalisation. Miall’s reference to ‘simulation theory’ supports how the director can have a degree of confidence that what seems ‘right’ to her/him can, in turn, similarly affect others. Miall explains ‘people use their own mental mechanisms to calculate and predict what others think, feel, or do; that is, we put ourselves in the place of the other person and figure out what his or her experience means’.16 To build on Starr’s recourse to ToM, Miall’s point that brains want to know what other brains perceive helps explain in this chapter how Cracknell, Mitchell or Pendleton, directors who have a particular psychological or interrelational emphasis in rehearsal, ‘know’ what they perceive. To know what an experience ‘means’ is not quite enough in directing though; Miall’s usefully

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straightforward summary further suggests how the director evaluates and shapes not only the root material (typically, a text) but how it is formed into meaningful, visual and aural expression. As well as an explanation of how audiences may view performance, simulation theory implies that the director has to ensure that others can know what a performance moment means too; in short, part of the directorial response to the emergent aesthetic events of rehearsal should be to work through a ‘know-how’ to make a ‘know-that’. Even if an oscillation between the assessment and configuration of potential reward is the underlying imperative, the reality of rehearsal is more multimodal. McAuley’s rigorous ethnographic approach conceives of rehearsal as a broad, chronological and linear process.17 This suggests that rehearsal rests in the second part of Mace and Ward’s ‘Ideas Development’ phase, concerning ‘enriching, expanding, discovering’, in which ‘the art concept [develops] conceptually and physically, advancing it from an abstract concept into a […] three-dimensional context’, even if ‘making an artwork does not involve rendering a prethought idea’.18 Mace and Ward’s ‘fuzziness’ of process in real terms may well be a feature of rehearsal, but it must of necessity proceed towards what these authors and Botella et al. term ‘Finishing’ or ‘Final’ stages.19 Parts are of course always related to a whole, but a strictly horizontal view of rehearsal process risks a synchronic conception of discrete phases, rather than a stratified, multimodal, diachronic workflow. Indeed, McAuley’s revealing etymological discussion of ‘rehearsal’ notes its origins in the Old French ‘herse’, or ‘harrow’ in English, a usefully agricultural analogy for a process of ‘preparing the soil’.20 In real terms, rehearsal is an enfolded, stratified process of making a performance, wrought in the time and place of the rehearsal room, with the widest set of people (van Hove’s rehearsal set up is a key example) in the overall process of creating a production.21 From the perspective of creative process, ‘problems’—a definition we should recall Mace and Ward resist— come up as part of rehearsal, and are ‘solved’ against an always-emergent understanding of an outcome. Although the process of directing is an area to have received little attention from the turn towards cognitive theory, the idea of ‘conceptual blending’ helps to explain how the directorial brain deals simultaneously with several aspects at once: in theatre terms, the idea that an actor is also a character, for example.22 In directing, quite a complex level of conceptual blend is involved in rehearsal: the reality of actors,

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staging and technical matters blend in the text-based projects discussed in this chapter with character, situation and scenography. Nevertheless, much of the work of the director is to pull apart the conceptual blend, in order to affirm progress, address needs or fix ‘problems’. This occurs on a variety of artistic or circumstantial levels, sometimes simultaneously, yet progressing always towards a whole, the ‘blend’. As a practice, what becomes increasingly fixed towards eventual performance is the reliability—that is, the skill of a repeatable playability—of an accumulated set of rewards.

Process In her long press article for The Guardian, Charlotte Higgins characterises Mitchell as a ‘queen in exile’, hailing her ‘triumphant return home’ to the UK.23 But Mitchell has never really been away from the UK, but rather developed a significant presence abroad, predominantly based on her live cinema work. The two productions I draw examples from here mark, then, not so much a return to her home territory, but to a scriptbased rehearsal process founded on psychological realism and physical behaviourism. Although psychology is always at the root of her work, in their textual foundation these productions are both processually and aesthetically different from Mitchell’s practice—and remarkable output—of multimedia productions on the Continent. Conceived as an ‘experiment’ by Mitchell and playwright Caryl Churchill, Say It With Flowers was a promenade performance, during which the audience of thirty moved through three rooms, to see a triptych comprising Stein’s ‘Lost in the Leaves’ (part of Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights, an opera libretto, written in 1938), ‘Say It With Flowers’ (1931) and ‘A List’ (1923), itself performed in close proximity to spectators as lurking observers in a dining room. The floor for each space was covered with unfinished boards, a preferred motif in Mitchell’s scenography.24 The audience moved through the constructed, immersive space, which was in fact closer to those used in the ‘live cinema’ practice; in that case, the camera does the travelling but, here, offered instead a scenographic ecology. Mitchell’s The Cherry Orchard, in a new version by Simon Stephens, sought a compact, colloquial performance of Chekhov’s play in just under two hours. Scenographically, Mitchell’s production was inspired by contemporary photography and dwelt, visually and atmospherically, in darkness, not least since it was lit in order to

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achieve a kind of two dimensionality.25 Characters hovered in shadows and ominous sound permeated the action, set in an indeterminate twentieth-century period, yet played at speed with—aesthetic events in themselves—swift scene changes between acts. Mitchell typically establishes a team made up of people she has worked with before, clearly evident with both productions. The stage-manager, Pippa Meyer, has worked with Mitchell internationally for over fifteen years; both the lighting designer, Jack Knowles and the sound designer, Tom Hackley, have also worked on previous Mitchell productions. The associate director, Matthew Evans, regularly works with Mitchell, as does her other assistant, Lily McLeish, who was present in the initial stages of rehearsal, before leaving to attend to one of Mitchell’s productions abroad. Mitchell and Churchill had worked together before on A Dream Play (National Theatre, 2005). Churchill had initiated Say It With Flowers with the Hampstead Theatre and had invited Mitchell to direct, holding meetings with her prior to rehearsal in order to discuss plans and choose which of Stein’s texts to stage.26 On first attending rehearsal, Mitchell took a little time to explain to me that rehearsal had commenced with Churchill giving her, as Mitchell put it, a ‘reading’ of the material, implying that Churchill had said what she felt the material to mean, how it might formally function and what story or plot lines might be seen through the dense linguistic patterning of Stein’s text. In the very first days of rehearsal, Churchill effectively fulfilled the role of the playwright, was later at times the arbiter of textual choice and, more potently perhaps, was seen as the representative of the absent dead writer herself, Gertrude Stein. Significantly, all of the actors in Say It With Flowers had also worked with Mitchell before. Sean Jackson has been a long-term collaborator, appearing in several of Mitchell’s productions; Sarah Malin had appeared earlier in Mitchell’s Iphigenia at Aulis; during the first stages of rehearsal, Laura Harling, Peter Hobday and Sarah Northgraves were still performing in Mitchell’s opera production Written on the Skin at London’s Royal Opera House.27 Hobday and Malin would also go on to perform in The Cherry Orchard. That everyone working on Say It With Flowers had worked with Mitchell before is indicative both of her ideal ensemble practice and the experimental circumstances of this production, with a short rehearsal period and limited funds. In short, Mitchell established a team already familiar with her normative directorial approaches

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and who she believed could deliver difficult material in somewhat straitened circumstances. Text Mitchell assumes that a play is constituted by action that must be justifiable and in which actors behave in response to circumstances. Some circumstances are invented as a creative ‘back story’, since a retroactive, biographical timeline seeks to justify the activity of the characters in the present of the play, even when information gaps exist. The biography of characters can incorporate events indicated in the text and contextual research; for example, the biography for Marius in ‘A List’ defines: Marius enlists in January 1918 just after Christmas. He had to wait until he had finished his degree in law. He comes back at the end of the war in November. He moves back into the house where his family lives. His father starts to teach him the business. In 1920 the father dies suddenly of a heart attack.28

Alongside familial and societal events, this account links World War I with biography, location and a crucial ‘indirect’ character. As Mitchell puts it, an indirect character is one that does not actually appear, but affects the circumstances of the play, thereby creating a further web of specifics and personal relationships.29 What are effectively Stanislavskian ‘Given Circumstances’ are discovered via an exhaustive listing of ‘facts’ and the resulting ‘questions’ that arise.30 Mitchell defines four lists of facts and questions that should be drawn up in order that ‘everyone thinks about the play precisely and objectively’31: facts about everything that exists and happens before the action of the play begins questions about everything that exists and happens before the action of the play begins facts about the immediate circumstances of the first scene questions about the immediate circumstances of the first scene.32

Here, every circumstance, be it drawn from the text, the wider sociocultural context or ‘invented’, leads to a question that should be answered

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to help the actor build a clearer picture of the action and her/his character’s background. This provides a fully fleshed out ‘world’ within which to operate as, in effect, a further set of circumstances. Facts for The Cherry Orchard began with, of course, ‘there is Russia’. For Say It With Flowers, the strategy of facts and questions was especially employed with ‘A List’, the text that remained the most closely treated through Mitchell’s process, although ‘Say It With Flowers’ itself made use of character biographies, if not, as I will discuss, close textual scrutiny in terms of characters’ intentions. Albeit couched in Stein’s apparent stream of consciousness wordplay, these facts encompass not only who and what is present, but more interpretive aspects such as the state or nature of a character. Despite running at around only twenty minutes, the facts and questions comprised half a dozen or so closely typed pages, completed and distributed over the first days of rehearsal. In Mitchell’s absence, some of this work had been undertaken by McLeish on the Wednesday afternoon of the first week. The facts and questions are exhaustive; to take just brief examples: There are four people: Maryas, Martha, Marius, Mabel There is Texas Marius and Mabel are united in their thinking about pleasure There is Battling Siki and he was a Senegalese boxer.33

As an aspect of the creative ‘soil’ (McAuley, earlier), Mitchell is open to determining an a priori situation via facts, as in the above examples, rather than leaving all aspects to be discovered in rehearsal. Some of the arising questions in the case of Say It With Flowers embraced too the oddity of the text in order to ‘decode’ it, for instance, ‘did Battling Siki wear a necklace?’34 However strange, Mitchell’s goal is that the text must mean something specific to the character, and thus actor, speaking it. Unlike the ideal approach as outlined in her book, I did not see that Mitchell had pre-prepared her own lists of facts and questions: work proceeded in a way that was delegated, shared and incorporated the actors’ responses. Mitchell also prefers to have all decisions notated and often the associate directors lead on capturing information. Having attended many of Mitchell’s rehearsals, I also find that not every question is answered: even if the purpose of facts and questions is to give the actor a specific orientation or attitude to a moment of thinking or doing, to find or invent an answer to everything may simply not be creatively useful.

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Specific questions can be key: for ‘A List’, two conflated questions, ‘has Maryas ever kissed anyone? And who is she talking about when she says “We never kissed”?’, led to the significant decision that Maryas and Marius had had an incestuous relationship.35 This circumstance could readily underpin moments in performance through a background image or, to borrow Zeki’s title, an ‘inner vision’.36 But in the case of Say It With Flowers, in reality some questions remain only baffling. Whilst, for Mitchell, there must, optimally, be an underpinning retroactive event or circumstance, or at the very least an acknowledgement that there might be, in real terms the process can filter strategically. Drama(tic) Whilst Mitchell and Cracknell’s approaches especially link historical and present life experience in character construction, Pendleton, the director of Tribes, relies resolutely on the present of the play itself. Unlike Mitchell’s faith in the security of a rigorous analysis of the play’s ‘world’, Pendleton’s directing focus is both the exposure and ever greater appreciation of the dramatic situation. His conception of acting is one of an involvement in the moment-by-moment action within a chain of cause and effect, squarely in the realist-naturalist tradition, as if a performance score. Work thus fused Steppenwolf’s ensemble ethos with the familial dynamic as the unfolding crisis of the play. Tribes centres on a family and particularly Billy, the youngest sibling and deaf, and his decision only to communicate through sign language having met Sylvia, who is herself going deaf. As its title suggests, the play exposes a sometimes brutal emotional honesty within the dysfunctional family, exposing the nature of loyalty and belonging. Pendleton did not follow the script during rehearsal but clearly knew it very well indeed. He did not readily intervene in rehearsal, at least at this later stage of the process—when I also saw the first run through— but relied on more occasional, discursive elaboration of the situation. On the second day of my observation, for example, active rehearsal stopped for some half an hour to discuss what appears in the script as a loosely typed half a page. Earlier, during rehearsal of Act Two, Scene Nine, when it is revealed that Billy has been adding to the transcripts of CCTV footage he has been commissioned to lip read—an activity that leads to his prosecution—Pendleton quite expertly offered very detailed analysis of the structure of the scene. He concluded that whilst its structure had

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been elaborated, there thus might be many manifestations of the ­situation. As a director, Pendleton opens up understanding, not a ­fixing of what the actors should do; he wishes subsequently to see and, by implication, evaluate a particular manifestation. Pendleton’s text-based actor-centricity is also to produce a performance aesthetic: an intense, high stakes mode of acting emerged, which matches not only the intra-familial tensions but also the personal crises of every character, with which the play is replete. More precisely, Pendleton often exposed the major choices a character faced; for example, guiding Francis Guinan, playing the father, Christopher, Pendleton defined that Christopher might either completely reject or accept a shift in circumstances. Earlier, Pendleton advised Alana Arenas, playing Sylvia, that she might have decided beforehand that she disliked certain other characters. As a director, Pendleton clearly orientates the actors towards a single attitude, in order that they might progress effectively and without interruption through a deliberately loaded situation. Whilst it is possible to see the approach I outline here as comparable to Mitchell’s in its placing of actors amid dramatic circumstances in order to allow them to behave, a Mitchellesque, rigorous analysis of the wider ‘world’ of the play appeared to be missing in this rehearsal of Tribes. Steppenwolf’s dramaturgs had prepared a research pack, but this was largely concerned with factual elements mentioned in the play. There appeared to be no decision as to when the play was set, the time progression within the play or even (and I verified this) where the action took place, other than signified by the adoption of Received Pronunciation English. Having effectively isolated himself as part of the lip-reading deaf ‘tribe’, the question of when Billy learnt to sign, or how long it took, or how good he is at it, or how this allied or conflicted with his ability to lip read, was simply not addressed.37 Despite comprising the major inciting element in the play, as if to underline the trust in the text, these facts were simply taken as read. Pendleton’s exclusion of wider fictional context throws epistemological attention onto the stratum of the performance score, something which Mitchell suggests leads to ‘thin acting’.38 On the other hand, such an approach seeks an ever-closer alignment of the actors’ performances with an ever-clearer perception of the dramatic situation; this is similar to Donnellan’s idea of ‘seeing’, but it is to ‘see’ only one aspect, the present of the play. For Pendleton, directing is a constant exposure and

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dramaturgical analysis of the play as current action, in which characters are faced with only major decisions. If an analysis of evident and imagined information produces a mapping of the imaginary of the play as a retrospective dramaturgy, then it is Mitchell’s core practice of specifying events (occurrences in the action) and intentions (goals) that encodes the text as playable action in the characters’ present. In contrast to some of the too-lazy press criticism of Mitchell, her approach privileges a linear, dramatic and textual fundament; that is, the play.39 Yet, during ‘intentioning’ of ‘A List’, Mitchell almost admitted defeat amid Stein’s mind-bending construct, far from the familiar Stanislavski-friendly dramatic paradigm. In contrast to the action and aesthetics of ‘Say It With Flowers’, which, as I discuss, emerged out of its hands on, sometimes harem-scarem early rehearsal process, even a playable rationale for ‘A List’ was not immediately forthcoming, despite the attempt at rigour of textual analysis. Still around the table, Mitchell asked the actors to play sequences of the text assuming various scenarios: they are characters who don’t know what play to be in; someone has just had an idea to be in a play called ‘A List’; everyone is discussing how to notate everything after a death; a group of people looking for something really pleasurable. Whilst credible, none of these inflections sustained the playing: as Mitchell said at the time, ‘it completely rejects all systems’.40 Mitchell did not appear to be frustrated by this, and suggested further playing solutions: an attempt was made to go as fast as possible, until the line ‘a list lost’, when Mitchell asked that actors speak as slowly as possible.41 Instead of this quite technical possibility, here an arbitrary choice as an experiment, Mitchell and her cast returned over the ensuing days to prioritise the finding of events and to craft as many intentions as possible; slowly, the moment-by-moment possibilities of how to play the text emerged, alongside an understanding of character biographies, if never quite the sense of why it should all happen in the first place. Intention(s) The use of intentions offers a rhetorical encoding of a moment towards a potential change or goal, which, for Mitchell, is played through until the next event occurs, which then shifts circumstances for all characters present. The phrasing of intentions can be surprisingly long; to take just

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one example from The Cherry Orchard (here I quote Stephen’s text and add in parentheses the intentions decided upon in rehearsal to begin the event): Anya: You would not believe the things I’ve had to put up with these past five weeks [to make Varya realise Mummy’s circumstances are much worse than imagined] Varya: I’m sure [to make Anya aware it’s a bad moment].42

This moment from rehearsal reveals how the expression of intentions can be inflected via a character’s relationship to another; Lyubov is ‘Mummy’. I find, too, that Mitchell has a basic set of constructions along the lines of ‘to get someone to realise…’, ‘to convince someone to…’, emphasising an intention as a direct, rhetorical goal to affect another. A little later in rehearsal for The Cherry Orchard, it was thus determined that the event beginning on Dunyasha’s line, ‘Simeon proposed to me. On Easter Monday’ was underpinned by the intention ‘to get Anya to see the importance of it’.43 If viewed via the initial verb, Mitchell’s intentions seem close to Stafford-Clark’s preferred ‘actioning’, using transitive verbs, though that technique is applied to each line, whereas for Mitchell the intention carries on until the next event, which thus shifts intentions for everyone in the scene. The construction of an intention as a verbalised and notated statement further moves beyond a goal-orientated action to offer instead a tight focus on an interpersonal, processual manipulation over time, since the other character is embedded even in the expression of the intention. At the National Theatre, one of Cracknell’s stated goals in rehearsal for Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea was to shift away from received notions of how to play this type of ‘well-made’ text, towards a tone of performance and production that (as I perceive it) was Ibsenesque in both its high stakes playing and awareness of social context. I had attended a read through (which did not start work but concluded the first few days of initial exploration), some initial work on the text and early improvisation. Cracknell first focussed on an ‘immersion’ in the world of the play; when sequences of the play were run later, the richly conceived world of the play, cultivated through a rehearsal milieu of psychological scrutiny, shifted towards a more deliberately crafted performance dynamic.44 I also include a short account of Cracknell’s later note-giving here.

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Part of the recent revival in plays by Rattigan concerns his attraction not (as is sometimes assumed) to the portrayal of the wit and polish of clubbable characters, but an account of previously secure lives in states of crisis.45 As Cracknell said in rehearsal, ‘people want so much that is not expressed’.46 This is, optimally, what most realist performance seeks to explore and convey, but also reveals Cracknell’s primary interest in psychological states and complex interpersonal transaction. Whilst Mitchell tends to use events and intentions for her play-based theatre work and not typically with her live cinema practice, Cracknell has used events and intentions to provide a basic analysis for all her productions, regardless of form.47 Cracknell confirmed that ‘intentioning’ was undertaken on Medea, a previous collaboration with actor Helen McCrory (National Theatre, 2014), who played Hester in The Deep Blue Sea. Both Cracknell and McCrory further confirmed in conversation that the director and cast worked through the complete text of Medea before further rehearsal, although the practice had shifted for The Deep Blue Sea, when a particular scene was intentioned prior to immediate improvisation and staging, before moving on to the next part of the text.48 Both Medea and Macbeth (2015) were also collaborations with choreographer Lucy Guerin and incorporated sequences of dance as a kind of contemporary physical expressionism.49 In conversation, Cracknell suggested that her choreographic aesthetic is something she ‘had wanted to do for a long time, and still up for debate’, whilst a psychologically realist approach is where she is ‘perhaps most happy’.50 Cracknell in fact distributed an analysis of each character of The Deep Blue Sea, commissioned from two psychoanalytic psychotherapists in order to ‘shrink’ the dramatis personae. These accounts of psychic make-up and social environments offered an external validation of Cracknell’s preferred psychological determinism. Her rehearsal vocabulary is thus full of the psychophysically ‘switched on’; playing should be ‘live’, situations have ‘heat’.51 Much like my arguments around the Stanislavski ‘system’, the use of events and intentions can be seen as a contemporary process to have been promoted by Mitchell, but now taken on by a set of directors as a still-evolving practice rather than prescribed methodology. Indeed, whilst Cracknell trained with Mitchell, she has evolved and adapted elements of Mitchell’s original techniques and, as we shall see, added new elements to create her own practice. Whilst she is concerned with the nature of a play as a realist document of complex psychologies and the actuality and dynamism of moment-by-moment playing, Cracknell displays

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a pre-emptive directorial hand since a significant feature of her practice is to split up the text prior to rehearsal to indicate events.52 In general, Cracknell’s sectioning on the page appears to forge shorter sequences than in some of Mitchell’s practice, and she evidences an especially rigorous, if explorative and playful use of the event-intention process, often using sophisticated wording. To reinforce her close scrutiny of the stepby-step unfolding of the dramatic situation, Cracknell further uses the term ‘unit’ for the sequence of action caused by an event, which continues up to the next event. A particularly instructive example is the treatment of the scene between Hester and her estranged husband Collyer in Act 3 of The Deep Blue Sea, which I draw on here and in the following section. One pre-emptive ‘slicing up’ of text delimited the following exchange, to which intentions were added in rehearsal: Hester: (quietly). You weren’t in love with me on our wedding day, Bill. You aren’t in love with me now, and you never have been. Collyer: Hester! Hester: I’m simply a prized possession that has now become more prized for having been stolen, that’s all. Collyer: (hurt). What are you saying? Hester: You force me to say these things, Bill. Do you think I enjoy hurting you, of all people?53

In this section, Hester’s intention was determined as ‘to expose his romanticised, controlling paternalism’, whereas Collyer’s is ‘to reprimand Hester for hurting me, and will her to be gentle’. As with other directors, Cracknell’s use of events and intentions optimally seeks complexity in performance, situated, as here, in the often contradictory intentions of characters. But Collyer’s intention is a double goal or one intent emergent from another; he reprimands her, but because he wants to be treated differently, his intention, interestingly, ends up reinforcing Hester’s, since she rejects his attempt at control. Although transitive verbs occur in the above example, like actioning, Cracknell clarifies that ‘I always try to keep the language of intentions relatively cool […] then a specific and varied range of emotional actions (to shame, prick, shake, fondle, caress, debase) can be used instinctively by the actor throughout the process to deliver the deeper overarching intention’.54 What Cracknell really means is that she distinguishes

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between verbs that are clear, strong and active (‘expose’, ‘reprimand’) in order to give room inside the unit for more ‘emotional’ tactics as exemplified by her foregoing choice of transitive verbs. Whilst she does not overtly use a notated action per line or thought like Stafford-Clark, and in contrast to Mitchell’s exhortation that her team rigorously notate all decisions, Cracknell allows a more instinctual action patterning to emerge through the interplay between the actor-characters and responds to what the actors find; she may also leave intentions written as and/or alternatives, encouraging, again, ‘heat’ and the ‘live’. Crucially, to identify an intention should not simply name, exemplify or re-render the action as apparent in the text, which would merely re-word it as an articulation of a straightforward understanding. Instead, it should embed a playable, alternative interpretation that seeks to expose a rich, subtextual transaction. For example, Cracknell’s tight sectioning isolated one of Hester’s lines as an event in itself: Hester: No, Bill. You wanted me simply to be a loving wife. There’s all the difference in the world.

Here, Hester’s intention is ‘to implode his outdated sense of what true, equal connection means’. This usefully demonstrates an intransitive verb, and how, like Mitchell, an intention occurs inside an event. A slight difference in Cracknell’s practice is that she may determine that the fulfilment of an intention by one character causes the next event; as far as I have observed in Mitchell’s rehearsals, events are determined by more overt, mutual changes of circumstance. But in the isolated event above, Hester’s intention both remains potent and helps to build and clarify Hester as a character seeking, in this production, to find some sort of control of her own destiny rather than (thankfully) some sort of portrayal of female victimhood. Concept In a section of his Splendours and Miseries of the Brain concerning ambiguity, Zeki rewrites his central neuroaesthetic argument in terms of concepts. He concludes: if […] the function of art is an extension of the function of the brain, namely the acquisition of knowledge about the world, and if the brain does

124  A. J. LEDGER so by forming concepts of all that it experiences, then it stands to reason to suppose that the mechanisms used to instill [sic] meaning into this world are the very ones used to instill meanings into works of art. It is those basic mechanisms that artists have used in creating their works and it is those same mechanisms that we use to interpret those achievements.55

Zeki claims throughout his writings that a fundamental basis to neuroaesthetics is to conceive the making and reception of art as a form of neurological knowledge; in this later book, he suggests knowledge itself resolves into both inherited and acquired concepts. For Zeki, these concepts again both help to understand how art is created and are apparent in what is produced. Zeki’s explains that an acquired concept is of necessity a synthetic concept.56 For Zeki, acquired synthetic concepts are not just the result of experience, but of several experiences, which the brain puts together, or synthesises, in order to generate a new level of understanding. He explains memory and judgement, which allow for the capacity to compare the new experience with previous ones, are obviously critical factors here. Hence we find that, unlike the inherited brain concepts, the acquired ones are open to wide influences from other brain areas and are critically dependent on the brain’s memory and judgemental systems. They are therefore also critically dependent upon the influences from the so-called “higher” brain centers as are to be found in the frontal lobes.57

Crucially, a synthetic concept, which I equate to the conceived fulfilment of an intention, may not yet have occurred; it is envisaged by the ‘higher’ brain areas as a potentially complex outcome, put together— synthesised—from multiple previous experiences. Simply put, to play an intention is, then, the attempt to understand and shift a moment of the dramatic status quo into an already-conceived, unrealised concept, and one that is possibly highly synthesised. To rehearse with the close scrutiny that the articulation and application of intentions affords is to create a weave of activity-as-knowledge; dramatic action is thus comprised of concepts of pre-meditated, goal-orientated behaviour. Directors and actors who use events and intentions (and their various terminological variants) to construct a psychologically determined performance score thereby rely on two crucial neuroaesthetic processes: the ability first to deduce and evaluate

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behaviour embedded in a script and to encode it as an intention and, next, the brain’s ability to imagine something different. Directors and actors determine what has not yet occurred and which characters wish to make happen, and formulate and name intentions as desired concepts. To build on Zeki’s view above, a rehearsal task is to interpret the text as a set of concepts; next, these are subsumed into performance to become, ultimately, a mode of artistic knowledge that is (re)interpreted by an audience. In directorial terms, it follows that to read a script is to perceive empathetically and envision action. In his neuroaesthetic account of reading, Miall explains that even to read an ‘action word’ appears to be enough to trigger the mirror neuron as if the action itself were perceived. Miall evidences how language and motor areas of the brain share empathy circuitry, to the extent that the premotor cortex may even be implicated in understanding words on the page in the first place.58 Indeed, Miall notes that Broca’s area in the brain (concerning language) overlaps with parts of the brain that deal with hand and mouth movements; this may also explain Cole’s earlier emphasis on acting as reading and the recovery of the ‘lost physical’ and, of course, the deep physiological link between the word on the page and the oral mechanism. The skill of the director is thus to take such empathetic responses and translate them into playable instructions for the actor—‘to instil meaning’, as Zeki says above—as well as the physicality that, in turn, will stimulate the spectator. This adds something to Miall’s literary analysis, which relies on the text-to-reader relationship, since the director articulates and manifests a neurological response, but expresses it via another medium as a more extended text–director–actor–performance–audience relationship. As an aesthetic construct, and if we accept Zeki’s emphases, then the director and actor must demonstrate in rehearsal a sophisticated neurological ability ‘to envisage synthetically’ and, crucially, articulate an alternative situation to the status quo of the dramatic moment in their determination and playing of intentions. This starts to explain the sometimes surprisingly long wording of intentions. To return to The Deep Blue Sea, Cracknell proposes that for one unit, Collyer’s intention is ‘to force an honest dialogue about my true feelings for her, and expose her damaged inability to accept that’, whilst Hester’s is ‘to have him see that his limited understanding of my soul was damaging to my self-esteem’. These are simultaneously dramatically thrilling and hard to keep in mind, but must, in rehearsal, shift from a conscious wording of a concept as

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determined by the director and actor—which may be beyond even the vocabulary or intelligence of a character her/himself—to the desire for a concept as an instantaneous moment in performance. As a development of her practice, Cracknell sometimes differentiates between a conscious and unconscious intention; for instance, one of Collyer’s conscious intentions was determined as ‘to save Hester from fragile solitude’. He may well think—or, rather, the actor and director might determine that Collyer thinks—that he is acting magnanimously, but Cracknell suggested his subconscious intention might be ‘to rescue Hester with paternalistic love’. Again, this debate leads to the construction of a more nuanced character through exposing his basic attitudes. It equally obliges conversation and decision; if, in Zeki’s terms, ‘paternalistic love’ is a synthetic concept acquired over time through knowledge of the world, quite how consciously it should be played by the actor playing Collyer needs to be decided upon via higher-level brain activity in the rehearsal room. The further interesting complication is that Collyer may or may not realise his unconscious intentions himself as he confronts Hester. In practical terms, Cracknell concludes ‘often it is useful to name both [conscious and unconscious intentions] even if the actor has to play the conscious intention, with a darker inner thought swirling beneath, vibrant but hard to define’.59 Directors working in this way draw from their own experience of human interaction and judgement systems in order not only to determine the intentions of others but also, as I have suggested, often to push intentions towards more complex, dramatic and ‘high stakes’ moments. As directors, Mitchell and Cracknell are clearly especially adept at perceiving the psychology of interpersonal transaction and foreground their interests as a key aesthetic of their productions. Even if there may be some negotiation or revision in collaboration with the actor, I have often observed that it is Mitchell who overwhelmingly states what a particular intention might be, whereas events are, usually at least, decided upon mutually. Mitchell’s articulation of intentions is thus a significant part of her directing practice; it determines both a rehearsal methodology and the nature of character action. With similar authority, it is Cracknell’s delimiting of events that revises the text as a predetermined, sequenced action; this provides the basis to decide intentions in rehearsal, inside which particular tactics can emerge through the actuality of the actors’ instinctive work ‘in the room’. In turn, the assumption here is that this rigorously encoded, concept-shifting behaviour is perceived by an audience.

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As well as giving a fixity to the nature of characters at certain moments, the use of events and intentions is laboursome; in so much rehearsal I have witnessed, the reality of the activity of the ‘higher brain’ is translated into a slow-moving notation activity using erasers and pencils. It does, though, ultimately offer the basis for rigorous predetermination and intervention in fundamental performance choices. Later in rehearsal for The Cherry Orchard, for example, Mitchell stopped the reading of the example above, as Catrin Stewart’s intention as Anya had slipped into ‘to get sympathy for myself’. This is an ultimately undynamic action in that it cannot really shift the status quo and confirms an already understood, or assumed, emotional state; there is no new concept to be envisaged and achieved. Both Mitchell and Cracknell have also said anecdotally that they might also inflect intentions according to the actor or aesthetic outcomes, thus shifting the actor out of possibly too-comfortable habits. This makes bespoke the evolution of a more complex scenario for the eventual audience’s scrutiny. Indeed, working on The Cherry Orchard, Mitchell overtly stated at one point that, as a director, she sought sometimes to ‘angle events and intentions into a dark place’ and sought to ‘rescue’ the character Anya from what Mitchell perceived as a negative production history through the selection and playing of ‘high IQ intentions’.60 This formulates the character in such a way as to further Mitchell’s feminist perspectives through her work. Working on intentions ‘around the table’ creates a word-based ur-performance, in which actors practise intentions in order that a degree of security is reached before actors try out the scene freely in space.61 The basis of both Mitchell and Cracknell’s rehearsal and staging is thus not ‘blocking’, but a psychologically based action track. These directors establish a means whereby actors can move through a sequence of already determined and verbalised goal-orientated tasks in, as I discuss, a mutually established environment. As a director, to insist upon an event and intention analysis of the playtext, fundamental to the two directors here, is also to harness an acting technology that renders interpretative outcomes securely. Given its eventual encoding of intentions including the result-orientated ‘to get someone to…’, it was ‘A List’ that maintained a surety during the run of Say It With Flowers, missing, I thought, from the final part, as I discuss shortly. Because it insists upon a root acting process as a means to embed cause at a fundamental level of action, to dictate intentions—and this happens in rehearsal, especially

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‘around the table’—can be a simultaneously deterministic and actor-centric mode of directing, both as a means of initial analysis and subsequent performance. Space, Place If Mitchell’s work cultivates what Fischer-Lichte calls ‘the actor’s bodily being-in-the-world’, it does so by collapsing it with the character’s bodily being in the dramatic world: I think of Natalie Klamar’s twitching, highly sprung Varya in The Cherry Orchard, hopping and squirming about in agitation, ardour and anguish.62 But Mitchell’s aesthetic also emphasises the contours of the body: in contrast was Klamar’s automated, repetitive, coldly erotic yet emotionally vulnerable choreography as ‘Woman’ in Mitchell’s Cleansed, a production—as so often in Mitchell’s work— infused with the motif of dance. And in Say It With Flowers, the contained bodies around the dining table of the first part exploded into an almost cartoonesque physicality in the third, generated in part through the sheer effort to get through Stein’s mind-bending narrative. In contrast to van Hove’s theatrical paradigm, in which the actor’s body creates a performative presence as ‘itself’, and despite Mitchell’s evident visual sensibilities, her direction relies on conditioning her actors to respond to an aesthetic construct as if (the Stanislavskian term again) it were real life. In rehearsal for The Cherry Orchard, a moment we might consider occurred after it was reported that the Young Vic theatre had foreseen a problem with the sightlines of the production, so some restaging became necessary. In a bid never to make her actors think about the audience, Mitchell proposed that the windows of the Ranevskaya house were shifted to the imaginary (and rigorously played) fourth wall. Mitchell was concerned to preserve the integrity of approach to acting and in no way oblige illogical moves by the actors; in this case, collaboration with her actors, founded on a shared working vocabulary of the imaginary, refused a more mechanistic solving of problems. ‘Blocking’ (for want of a better word) doesn’t happen in Mitchell’s rehearsals. Instead, she insists that actors ‘play the room’, not the stage, and thus the logic of movement is created by the need to go to, or travel from, other people or objects, windows and doors. Like Donnellan, Cracknell is also open to new possibilities emerging in each rehearsal: for instance, in Act 3 of The Deep Blue Sea, McCrory (Hester) and Nick Fletcher (Miller) ended up in different places until they finally settled

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on sitting on the floor, leaning up against the kitchen cupboards. Whilst Fischer-Lichte suggests ‘the body’s specific kinaesthetic potential’, for directors who root their work in the responsiveness of the actor inside a highly detailed scenario, it is the act of playing out interpersonal relationships amid imaginatively invested space that produces such potential.63 For Mitchell, the treatment of space as an environment is part of an interlinked process of psychophysical exploration of the character through improvisation, especially of her/his biography and events outside the immediate play. Typically, events are fairly carefully selected and planned in order to enable the character’s ‘bodily-being’ to find physical expression, but are also psychological. Mitchell posits that the improvisations you do should reconstruct these events and thereby lodge a lasting and concrete picture of what happened in the actors’ minds—almost as if it were an actual memory. These pictures will then determine how their relationships are played in the action of the play or how the characters talk about the past.64

During rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard, improvisations were largely decided upon by the actors: I witnessed Simeon Yepikhodov’s proposal to Dunyasha; the billiard game where he breaks a cue; and a meal; all of these events are later mentioned in the playtext. Mitchell further suggests that an improvisation should take around ten minutes, a timescale I see borne out in rehearsal.65 Here, the use of improvisation is resolutely strategic; rather than free-form exploration that concerns experience or emotion, Mitchell uses improvisation to create underpinning, subtextual events, which are assumed affective as fundamentally pictorial, yet absolutely concrete memories. As Zeki often stresses, the visual is a primary means to construct knowledge about the world; for Zeki, ‘visual consciousness’ is also ‘distributed’ in space as well as time. This further confirms Mitchell’s stress on seeing pictures as a memory created from the construction of a fictional, if durative event, set in a particular location. In rehearsal for The Cherry Orchard, especially poignant was Gawn Grainger’s solo improvisation as Firs, in which, in something of a reversal of Mitchell’s process, he incorporated the lines from the play, ‘I don’t feel very well […] I haven’t got the strength for this any more’.66 For directors working like Mitchell and Cracknell, improvisation is thus frequently a retroactive procedure to construct knowledge of a past world, nevertheless assumed as still affective in the present of the play.

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If considered as the construction and experience of an acquired concept, improvisation is especially powerful. Zeki explains that inherited concepts tend to localise in particular brain areas, whereas ‘there is every reason to suppose that acquired brain concepts are strongly dependent upon influences from other, often “higher”, areas. This is because judgement, past experience, and memory all play critical roles in updating the synthetic brain concept and modifying it with time’.67 If the brain of the spectator reacts to aesthetic events as if real, it is not too much of a leap to consider that the actor’s brain is affected as if improvised events were real too, even if consciously set up. In turn, rehearsal strategies like these create a physically played out memory for the actor as an embodied experience of the acquired synthetic concept: the fiction, derived from what remains a literary source, has been expanded into the time and space of a performance actuality. Whilst some of the improvisations forged the experience of past events in order to support aspects of the play in performance, the strength of the exercise lies too in creating ‘internal’ images or, rather, the judgements, experience and memory Zeki cites as a necessary modifier. Improvisation in rehearsal for The Cherry Orchard was, apart from Grainger’s improvisation above, often undertaken in groups, creating a mutually shared concept. For Say It With Flowers, what can be understood as Stanislavskian solo ‘silent études’ (or studies) were prioritised and appeared during one afternoon’s rehearsal as a means to create ‘inner’ experience. Mitchell asked the actors each to find a space in order to undertake a simple activity, anchoring this in a specific time and place before the action of the play, but where the character is alone. Like The Cherry Orchard, what to improvise was up to each actor, allowing them to prioritise what each considered important and useful to her/his own work. During the afternoon working on Say It With Flowers, the actor played out a character’s past situation individually and, crucially, in silence, affording something of a meditation on her/his changing experience over the course of an event. A feature to note in the étude work is the importance of establishing not a ‘set’, but a credible location in which to carry out a task. As such, the actor-character establishes relationships to the detail of an environment, which is imaginatively invested, not a place. Unlike Mitchell’s aforementioned short and strategic improvisations, these études continued for nearly half an hour. To take some of the work: Jackson set up a desk and appeared to be doing the cake shop’s accounts; Hobday constructed an

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event where he painted outside; Malin packed and unpacked cupboards. Mitchell did not continually observe the work but used the time to have a pressing conversation with the production manager. In order to draw out the point of what might be gained from the études, Mitchell simply asked ‘was it useful?’.68 Voicing the experience specifies what has been found as an action of the ‘higher’ brain, expresses what can be taken forward and, as a by-product perhaps, is useful in allowing the other actors to hear a perspective on another character; this promotes a shared understanding of potential points of connection, just like the group improvisations for The Cherry Orchard. Mitchell isolated and repeated certain phrases or information offered by the actors: her response to Jackson’s feedback was that William Long is ‘very precise’, specifying a characteristic.69 As with rehearsal for The Cherry Orchard, Mitchell facilitates a psychophysical conditioning that is carried into the action of the play itself, where, optimally, affective behaviour will be manifested. Whilst the close quarters of Say It With Flowers allowed for an aesthetics of intimacy (in terms of proximity at least, rather than performance genre), an immersion in place starts in rehearsal through imagination. In rehearsal, Mitchell refers to what can be considered kin aesthetically implicated space as ‘geography’; this geography is inherently of the dramatic world and implies movement beyond the confines of the stage area. On the rehearsal room wall during The Cherry Orchard, a map of Europe charted Lyubov and her retinue’s train journey from Paris to Russia and the various changes required to reach her family estate. As a hand-drawn exercise in rehearsal, the map is not only an object that manifests the actors’ research, but also an imaginative exercise, which further feeds the fabric of Mitchell’s reconstruction of the past. The map records not only an event sequence, but the topography and movement of the imaginary. Although the term ‘geography’ does come up in rehearsal, in The Director’s Craft, Mitchell does not use it, but ‘circles of place’.70 In The Cherry Orchard, the biggest circle is Russia (which is also, above, the first fact of the play). A smaller circle of place and a closer range geography is the estate and, crucially, the location of the cherry orchard, but also the particular ‘geography’ of the house. This localised mapping enables actors to imagine in concrete terms—or in terms of bricks and mortar, stairs and doorways—where, as characters, they come from and where they go to beyond the limits of the stage area, erasing the more theatrically functional ‘enters’ and ‘exits’. Just as retrospective events are

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added into the overarching chronology of the play, the geography of the house was rebuilt in order to make sense of and inform the action where needed; during a rehearsal session, pencils and erasers were brought out again, toilets were added and walls and doors erased and re-drawn. As Fischer-Lichte suggests, the body is given a material status ‘equal rather than in subordination to the text’ in both Cracknell and Mitchell’s directing approach and, here, also not in subordination to normative theatre movement patterning.71 Once inside the set, Mitchell’s insistence that actors ‘play the room’ on its own geographical terms as a localised circle of place, not as stage space, begins in rehearsal and carries through to performance. Characters were therefore often at least partially obscured in The Cherry Orchard: for example, when revealing he had bought the estate, Alexander was obscured by Boris, lined up almost on the front-back stage axis. And the great, threatening hulk of the Wanderer was only more magnified given that his face could not be seen, as he ‘played the room’ to the upstage party. Some reviewers disliked what they found a kind of gimmick, but not to see actors’ faces paradoxically draws attention to the created reality of their immersion in the world of the play.72 In Mitchell’s directing, space becomes place, in which bodies behave on their own terms. Mitchell’s kinaesthetic aesthetics thus challenge ingrained theatre conventions and expectations of spectatorship: you never just see in Mitchell’s work, you see a management of visual organicity, which appears real but simultaneously disrupts attention. This creates a curious sense of looking harder at her work. In contrast to the conceptual and environmental scenographic treatment of The Cherry Orchard, Mitchell had clearly not pre-empted how to stage ‘A List’ or ‘Say It With Flowers’. These two (of three) pieces formed the focus of the work I observed at the end of week one of rehearsals and demonstrated quite different approaches over the course of the Thursday (Fig. 4.1). Whilst the attempt to treat ‘A List’ through events and intentions continued, an attempt also to stage it as if a Cubist painting took place; chairs at oblique angles and a tipped over table were tried, only to be resolved into a more regular dinner table arrangement. But quite how to put ‘Say It With Flowers’ into action seemed uncertain. A key feature of this latter text is that it is not written in dialogue form, but as a kind of narrative in which situations can morph easily from one scenario to the next, time and place quickly shift and characters can appear and disappear with fluidity. Whilst it is undeniably linguistically dense, characters in ‘A List’ at least actually speak to one another and

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Fig. 4.1  Rehearsal for Say It With Flowers (Photo Becky Paris/Hampstead Theatre)

could, with some persistence, yield to an analysis through events and intentions. In contrast, ‘Say It With Flowers’ narrates its own action and seems fluidly filmic in development. Since the characters of ‘Say It With Flowers’ bring into being the occurrences they perceive, caught up in convoluted language, the actors ended up speaking nearly all of the text: this includes the announcement of locations, their own names and words like ‘scenery’. Although they played the immediate situation, not least given the previous work on silent études, what was spoken was a ‘voicing’ of perception, rather than an action-based development of relationships and the transactions of behaviour rooted in dialogue. All this is far from Mitchell’s more familiar Stanislavskian milieu. In a quest for some kind of form or framework to this seemingly impossible text, Mitchell spoke of it in the first week of rehearsal as a kind of dream and, more specifically, ‘as if they’re [the characters] in their own dream’.73 At first, this logic, with its potential connection to surrealism, seemed useful and satisfied Mitchell’s admitted need to grasp the genre of what it was she was

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working on. It points too to the concern for concrete acting choices: couching the work as a ‘dream’ meant that, despite the fluid logic of the text, the actors could find some credibility in their characters’ action. Although not like the rigorous construction of circumstances brought about by working on biography, facts and questions, here justification occurs through a grasp of the ‘rules’ of a particular genre or mode. But in order to get started on material that would not easily accept other, closer rules, Mitchell announced ‘let’s just do exactly what it says on the page’: characters entered and exited as and when they needed to speak, announced themselves by name on appearance and undertook action as it was stated in the text.74 Actors were allocated lines as well as stage directions or place names (e.g. ‘the cake shop in Gisors’). This knockabout affair was attempted in the central area of the hall, which had not yet been marked up, and was clearly tried out ‘on the hoof’, with Mitchell inventing as she went along. The basic pattern of this rehearsal session was to try out something, relying solely on what was on the page, find out what worked and more or less fix it, then loop back over the section before pushing on. As a director, Mitchell’s primary task became to drill the actors in the precision of the cartoonesque treatment of the bizarre material. Her film director language struck me: she used ‘standby…and action’ constantly, which seems to come from her more recent work in ‘live cinema’; this created a rehearsal mode or framework for the development of precise action sequences, as well as a means to maintain energy, in stark contrast to the measured, psychological exploration of ‘A List’. What quickly became apparent was both the speed of action, exaggerated by constant entrances and exits, as well as the humour of the material. Despite her attention to process, usually framed by a clear sense of genre and detailed textual analysis, an evident aspect to Mitchell’s directing to appear across the many rehearsals I have witnessed is her openness to experimentation. Although Mitchell led the rehearsal, the company worked out solutions together; actors certainly appeared confident in speaking up and contributing ideas and solutions in a joint effort to plunge into the material and find a way to make it work. In turn, Mitchell declared or reinforced conceptual discoveries, such as the importance of place; as seen already, this is a feature of her typical approach but exaggerated in the case of ‘Say It With Flowers’ by the

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flipping between locales in the piece. To keep track, locations were added to the text (quoted below) by the associate director, again employing a filmic convention, for example: INT. 3PM. CAKE SHOP The welcoming of a man and his dog and the wish that they would come back sooner. EXT. 5PM. SEA FRONT George Henry and Elizabeth Henry and Henry Henry ruminating, INT. 4PM. CAKE SHOP Elizabeth and William Long. Waiting. Who has asked them to be amiable to me. She said she was waiting.75

Even if some points of clarity emerged and, like ‘A List’, facts and questions were drawn up (if not events and intentions), as Mitchell surmised at the end of the rehearsal, the key to tackling the material would be to remember ‘the piece is confident in its weirdness’.76 To conclude, the actors ran through this draft material, ‘to show Caryl tomorrow’.77 A Note In contrast to the choreography of ‘Say It With Flowers’, Cracknell, like Mitchell’s normative practice as evidenced in The Cherry Orchard, dislikes giving moves, as she confirmed in discussion. In rehearsal, I have seen her determine final positions, if not the route to get there, a tactic that also appears in van Hove’s rehearsals. As a directorial strategy, this creates a physical culture through the circumstances of an instruction, not its means of fulfilment. This directorial mode is evident in Cracknell’s approach to notes too: she called for the cast to work towards ‘the eradication of pauses’ without, at this stage, noting the location of the offending gaps. Cracknell’s advice was that the actors should ‘play the thought on the line, not before it’.78 This is, really, pretty basic acting technique, but here it is a gloss-like corrective to the less than ideal playing that had emerged, not least because of the foregoing focus on the psychological intensity of the characters and how they might move freely about the expansive set. Another note was, simply,

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‘you can all sharpen the experience of drinking whisky’.79 Such notes are carefully worded intentional tasks for which precise solutions are found by the actors in the ‘heat’ and the ‘live’ of the moment. In the example of the whisky, the directive re-focusses the actor on a relationship to an object or substance; other instructions move bodies in time and space, whereas encouraging the dynamic of textual delivery is to move language around in time and texture. Know-That Notes and, of course, other director’s comments in rehearsal respond to the actuality of the moment as a form of iterative reflection-action process. In Nelson’s terms, notes are the articulation of a directorial knowhow as an instant towards a changed know-that, which, as a production, creates a performative document of collective know-what. Conceived as ur-performance, what the directors in this section so often create is, as Starr puts it, ‘self-generated, complex fictional imagery’, which she allies to the ‘medial prefrontal cortex, a large swath [sic] of which is implicated […] in intense aesthetic experience’.80 Starr is careful to emphasise that brain areas do not simply overlap, but create networks, even if quite how these function needs further investigation. It is imagery that binds up aesthetic perception; Starr elaborates that ‘powerful aesthetic experience involves the engagement of multiple components of the default mode network; […] imagery may provide a gateway to this engagement’.81 Clearly, much of what Mitchell seizes upon can be understood as an image of some sort: a fact derived from the circumstances of the text; biographical constructions and imaginings; the experience of improvisation and the foresight of a fulfilled intention. In explaining what she looks for in the emerging performance, Cracknell too told me that she seeks ‘immersion; that everyone is all in the same place and world’.82 Cracknell really suggests that she perceives an aesthetic event herself, forged, in terms of acting, by an ensemble that itself operates, or is immersed in, a mutually inhabited aesthetic network.

Performance-Making The TGA, led by van Hove, has produced work that is contemporary, energetic, visual, athletic and emotional.83 But TGA rarely produces new writing; van Hove is particularly drawn to film scripts, classic American

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Fig. 4.2  Ivo van Hove in rehearsal for The Fountainhead (Photo Jan Versweyveld)

drama and, recently, adaptation of novels, including an adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead by playwright Koen Tachalet (Fig. 4.2). Rehearsal for The Fountainhead lasted for seven weeks; I observed work at the end of the third week, when scenes from the middle of the production (eventually running at four hours in total) were rehearsed with set and technical elements in place. Rehearsals for Antigone, one of van Hove’s many international engagements and with an Anglo-Irish cast, had begun in London (at the Barbican Centre) with a focus on initial work with the actors but, like The Fountainhead, with scenographic elements subsequently present in rehearsal. By the time rehearsal had moved to Luxembourg, where I attended for some days before Antigone opened, van Hove’s wider set of collaborators was again present and working holistically on all aspects of the production, which was, though, still in quite a state of flux. These two phases of van Hove’s rehearsal process demonstrated an approach that collapsed the various strata of rehearsal, as well as a normative, linear process of moving from initial exploration and staging towards technical and dress rehearsals.

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Seen as an expression of her philosophical views on Objectivism, Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead concerns individualism and creative potential, and centres on the brilliant architect Howard Roark, his colleague and rival Peter Keating and what is, ultimately, the love story between Roark and Dominique Francon.84 Directing what has been called his ‘personal bible’, van Hove explains when I first read the novel the characters gripped me, each and every one of them humans of flesh and blood, and at the same time they are larger than life. They are symbols for ideas of grandeur […]. To me, The Fountainhead is a war of ideas. The great question the book poses: What is creation? What does it mean to create? And what is integrity in the process of creating? […] It is an engaging, addictive novel that was begging to be staged.85

As a director, the importance of van Hove’s personal response appears here, but his analysis suggests too a ‘grandeur’ of theatricality, very different from Scenes from a Marriage (Chapter 6). The salaried ensemble of actors and a healthy budget allowed the sound designer, videographer and often stage management, technicians and musicians, to be present and working in rehearsal, as well as designer Jan Versweyveld. Whilst the root of the production of The Fountainhead was the initial text by Tachalet, the final work would be wrought in rehearsal itself, when script changes were made by van Hove and his team in response to practical work. These were written up daily by the assistant director and assistant dramaturg; this is the direction of an adaptation made possible by quite a complex machinery of personnel and production processes. Since Antigone centred on a pre-prepared version of a long-established text, its rehearsal process maintained a level of dramaturgical evolution and conceptual enquiry. The dramaturg, Peter Van Kraaij reported in discussion that an early, particular question in rehearsal had concerned the identity of the Chorus.86 Van Hove had conceived these figures as a set of archivists, who file away what appear to be aspects of the story, recorded on state and personal documents, in the numerous draws and files that linked the upper and lower sections of the set. If the Chorus dealt with records as if of events it had witnessed, how these figures might also relate to other characters in the present of scenes had to be established. Van Hove explored a strategy whereby some characters emerged out of the Chorus; that the Messenger came from this group of adviser-recordists thus made sense, even if the doubling of Ismene and

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Chorus member (Kirsty Bushell) seemed less clear. Van Kraaij also told me that the conception of Kreon had shifted from the more aggressive figure the actor Patrick O’Kane had begun with; O’Kane would later formulate an intense, internalised, oligarch-politician, who calmly stated his violent intentions.87 The later choice created a significant journey; Kreon breaks down at the end, but does so from, so to speak, within, and the sudden physicality at the end of the role is thus all the more surprising. Despite this focus on the identity and nature of character, van Hove seems rarely to speak in psychological terms, but mainly of situation, tone and mood. In Luxembourg, van Hove worked on an early sequence, the first appearance of the Chorus: the group gathers to see the central disc of the back wall swing slowly away to reveal the sun, before Chorus member Finbar Lynch’s line, ‘the glories of the world come sharking in’, an example of the muscular, metaphorical renderings of the original by Anne Carson.88 Van Hove said in rehearsal that the actors ‘should not play grief’, but instead that Lynch should note the moment he shifts focus from the sun to this colleague in the Chorus. Collectively, van Hove advised they should remember ‘the war—it’s over’.89 Van Hove focusses the group on a sequence of actions here, which contrast to the previous image of Antigone, adrift in a storm. The positive instructions shift both the tone of the production and the narrative, before, as van Hove put it, the Chorus move ‘back into the world of the archive’.90 Whilst attention and perception are of course overtly captured through contrast in many directors’ work, and indeed across art forms, the use of juxtaposition at a holistic level of theatrality appears in van Hove’s practice. Like this Chorus sequence, the acting may appear lowkey, but in emphasising action steps through a neat scenographic event, underscored by quasi-religious organ music, van Hove firstly provides (to return to Lehrer; Introduction) significant peak shift stimulus as ‘deliberate hyperbole’. This early sequence in Antigone also relies on juxtaposition, so important to Starr, underlined by a protracted duration (it takes some while for the sun to appear); we should recall too Starr’s emphasis on the temporal dimension of the aesthetic.91 Moving Van Hove has said ‘I continue […] to push my actors to that point where theatre and performance meet. It is still about acting and, as such, actions are carefully directed, but nevertheless there is the experience of

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something unpredictable and dangerous’; although the actors tended to speak quite quietly in rehearsal since, later, they would use radio microphones (as is common in TGA’s performance work), a concern with physical detail pervaded.92 It is precision that provides the framework for the actor to explore her/his own response to the work, which makes for potential ‘danger’. Given his interest in performance, van Hove tends to stage through an often improvisatory quality, which throws performances back on the actors’ bodies. He tends to offer fixed points that actors should reach, rather than traditional ‘blocking’. In contrast to the psychological culture of Cracknell and Mitchell, within which actors move, the significant mark of van Hove’s direction is not just this point to point progress, but how action extends beyond—or below—the performance score to cultivate a physical stratum that reveals the actuality of situation. Van Hove’s production of Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge (Young Vic, London, 2014), for example, demonstrated similar features to Scenes from a Marriage; actors wore basic costume and worked in bare feet amid a minimalist, non-mimetic—if highly crafted—contemporary setting. Here, the closeness of Eddie and Catherine’s relationship, central to the play, emerged physically: embraces regularly suggested their fondness and Eddie’s (over) protective, ultimately controlling attitude towards his niece. Yet this teetered on the inappropriate: Phoebe Fox’s (Catherine) repeated action of leaping around Mark Strong’s (Eddie) waist, wrapping her bare legs and feet around him, seemed a quite deliberate directorial tactic, as was her cleaning of the floor in a skirt that was clearly a little too short. These physical choices are disturbing since they sexualise and objectify Catherine, significantly inflecting her relationship with her uncle. Quite differently, in Scenes from a Marriage, Hugo Koolschijn (Johan) suddenly breaks into dance as Marianne sleeps; rather than the constant mutual excoriation in the text, this reveals far more as a kind of private expressionism. If, for van Hove, the hidden desires of characters appear as a physicalised subtext, a focus on the complex character Dominique provides an example of recourse in rehearsal to the exactitude of the score of action in the novel. Van Hove first read out the prose account of the scene between Dominique and Gail Wyland, in order to fix its detail as given in Rand’s narrative. At the outset of the scene, Dominique declares ‘I have come about Stonebridge’ referring to the potential award of an architectural contract to her husband.93 But, after various alternatives,

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the actor Reijn perched provocatively on the table, an action not in the novel, suggesting what was really on offer in return. Later, the attempt, at least, of a passionate kiss breaks the multi-layered sexual politics of the situation; van Hove responded to this semi-improvised moment, specifying ‘yes, but keep the mouth open’.94 Like Koolschijn’s moment of danced emotional revelation above, this better reveals Dominique’s desires, despite her manipulative intentions yet, in contrast to the typical reliance on psychological undertow, deftly elaborates a relationship between the characters through physical choices. Technical As a director, van Hove treats production elements as factors to be tried out in rehearsal, not to accompany the acting. Later in the particular rehearsal for The Fountainhead above, van Hove decided that a very large projection of the sea should appear (the characters go away together on a yacht) and, already, the assistant sound designer could underscore this with the sound of the ocean; van Hove even plotted in when the volume should build after a particular line. As a juxtaposition again, the romance of the projected image contrasts with the emotional bleakness of the scene. Given that use of film is so dominant in van Hove’s oeuvre, it was quite surprising to see him change the video projections at a late stage of rehearsals for Antigone. In rehearsal, old movie footage of injured soldiers returning home had been used but was cut by the time of the first run through. That said, a long-standing dramaturgical decision was that Kreon should visually be associated with the city, whereas Antigone should be linked to the desert; but what film should be projected, how and when seemed to shift constantly. A further particular pressure was that Versweyveld had not been able to begin lighting until the last few days, so changed lighting states during the run through I saw; as with the absence of technical rehearsal, there seemed to be no separate lighting plot period. Rather than a process, van Hove creates a rehearsal situation, which forms an opportunity not just for him but also his collaborators to make a performance as an interweaving process of creation in a very rich, yet supremely flexible environment. In the midst of this theatrical potential, van Hove directed as if staging a kind of exposed, contemporary realism; as can be seen in the foregoing examples, the clarity of moments,

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relationships and emotion were paramount. In rehearsal, van Hove attends to the nature or quality of the aesthetic event and its understanding, not necessarily the specifics of a playable psychological density to achieve it.

Rehearsal Rehearsal remains a difficult to access area of the director’s work; once ‘in the room’, I have couched the scholarly activity as witnessing. To witness includes always the potential for a later telling; as Allain says, ‘if one does have privileged access to such processes, it might be ‘indecent’ to say nothing’.95 Unlike McAuley, I have not offered a single historical narrative nor an historiographic shape to this chapter, not least because I discuss more than one director; when I leave rehearsal, instead I distil, describe or infer out of a practice-relevant positionality as a witness. Ideally, this produces a further knowledge, a form of know-what on the page. If we are in the room as a witness, this is, as Allain suggests, to bear responsibility, the ‘decency’ of concluding an epistemological loop. Rehearsal concerns more than exposing and realising a play though, despite the emphasis in Pendleton’s approach, but a process of finding and perfecting what I have termed a performance score, wherein all concerned, especially the actors, absorb and manifest what should happen in the performance. Pendleton promotes an encounter with action through experiential practice coupled with rational debate, orientated to mining the dramatic situation; this appears more fully in Mitchell’s systematic yet exploratory approach. Even when conceived as actor-centric, in the case of Cracknell, Mitchell and Pendleton, aesthetic choices enfold the intricacies of methodology. The rigour of the director’s approach thus provides a technology (to recall Ginman’s term) that processes the circumstances of text as a significant materiality of a wider performance aesthetic, forging an ecology of making but also of spectatorial offer. Whilst Pendleton exposes the character via dramaturgical elaboration, both Cracknell and Mitchell construct the actor’s work via the building and experience of imaginary circumstances. A Stanislavskian approach to acting assumes that a character envisages the possibility of a different outcome within a current situation, based on her/his implied memory and judgement, in order to negotiate the other characters they encounter. In neurological terms, this explains ‘playing an intention’, much of

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what directors like Mitchell and Cracknell scrutinise in their rehearsals, both in initial textual analysis and as a vocabulary of acting. As readers of the playscript, the labour and encoding of a text through intentions is accessible to the actor and director, but not, generally speaking, the character; no character consciously thinks up a carefully worded intention inside a situation, just as no actor consciously thinks of an intention (or should not be) in the middle of a scene. The director’s work concretises the notion of ‘felt lack’ in theories of creativity; the director and actor—and subsequently character—feels the lack of something, perceives the need to achieve it, and determines a potential strategy to fulfil that need by conceiving of its completion.96 To realise that most acting, and certainly in the Stanislavskian iterations that still dominate practice, is driven by the actor-character trying to realise something that exists only as a still to be fulfilled synthetic acquired concept, renders the great majority of directing and acting fundamentally the identification and pursuit of the absent. Van Hove combines what has earlier been identified as the subjunctive aspect of acting (the ‘as if’) with implicit remembering of the performance score through attention to action. Whilst he attends to actors’ work as performance, as opposed to mimetic construct, I have suggested that van Hove’s process is one of total theatre-making. Certainly, once rehearsal has progressed, van Hove also rehearses with actors already in costume. But, unlike Wilson perhaps, van Hove needs a set of key collaborators with complementary skills, especially videography and sound, to change things until, as with Antigone, the last minute. Inside his theatricality, it is van Hove’s self-defined careful crafting of action and physicality that affects the viewer; as Miall confirms, the insula—concerning emotion or negative experience—is involved in perception, but mirror neurons also stimulate physical response. Even to see someone touch someone else fires the viewer’s somatosensory brain areas.97 To recall simulation theory, van Hove thus shapes bodily behaviour via his own simulation, but then re-simulates the action in order that others might similarly view it. For Miall, the mirror neuron concerns not only ‘knowledge that’ but is experiential. Simply put, for van Hove, as with many directors, rehearsal partly concerns the creative manifestation of empathetic response. Of course, aesthetic choices are not necessarily predetermined; whilst creating scenographic circumstances, directors must respond to emergent

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form and meaning as it appears in rehearsal—van Hove is a useful example in this chapter—suggesting an improvisatory stratum to rehearsal. In terms of staging, a further feature to emerge in this chapter is that of an organicity around the physical occupation of space and place in the work of directors such as Mitchell and Cracknell. This activates and prioritises the actors’ behaviour in the locale of the dramatic world, not the topography of the stage floor as a mechanics of theatre space to be negotiated. To return to the idea of conceptual blend, this means that at least part of the blend, the emergent performance score, is being created in the moment of rehearsal. Clearly, much directing does not proceed ideally, seen most clearly here in Mitchell’s attempts to stage ‘Say It With Flowers’. As Mace and Ward suggest, some things cannot or do not materialise in a sub-phase of ‘shelving or abandoning the work’, since there are, most simply, ultimately always limits of time.98 Still, to build on the notion of ‘felt lack’, or my point about intentions as driven by the perception of the absent, Zeki maintains that ‘one of the factors determining creativity is the attempt to satisfy the dis-satisfied brain concept. Hence a permanent dissatisfaction is one of the most powerful ingredients driving creativity’.99 Rehearsal can be understood in neuroaesthetic terms as actualising a synthetic concept, itself largely emergent in the brain of the director. This is not necessarily easy; as Zeki puts it, ‘perhaps the most common approach to realising a real counterpart to the synthetic concept in the brain, and thus satisfying its reward system, lies in trying, and trying again, to come closer and closer to that concept’.100 Part of the stratification of rehearsal is thus practise: actors master what needs to be done by shifting their performance scores from, as McConachie puts it, explicit to implicit memory.101 And Di Benedetto summarises what has appeared in other literature, especially Zeki, that ‘the brain is plastic and all sensations it experiences continually modify how it perceives the world’.102 Here, this is meant in relation to the spectator, but represents too what happens to actor and director; the latter figure shifts from a perception of the theatrical quanta of rehearsal, during which, as McAuley’s etymology reminds us, the director might ‘dig’, to technical rehearsal and giving notes, and changing a theatrical totality. In terms of linguistic shifts in the term ‘rehearsal’, the French répétition or the German Probe encompass useful terminological variants: the former is an activity that repeats, the latter a period of testing. Two key directorial factors are, though, always at work: that towards determining

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what the performance or production is, and that of facilitating the learning, embodiment and repetition of the performance action. Rehearsal is both a practice and practise.

Notes 1. Delgado and Rebellato, Contemporary, 19. 2. Ibid. 3. Mace and Ward, ‘Modeling’, 190. 4. Zeki, Inner Vision, 22. 5. Ibid. 6. See Annelis Kuhlmann and Adam J. Ledger, ‘The Tree of Performance Knowledge: Eugenio Barba’, in Paul Allain, ed., The Great European Stage Directors (Volume 5): Grotowski, Brook, Barba (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 7. Mace and Ward, ‘Modeling’, 180. 8. Ledger, ‘Thrill’, 69–90. 9. See https://www.steppenwolf.org/education/school-at-steppenwolf/ our-roots/ (accessed 18 December 2018), for further information on the ethos and evolution of Steppenwolf Theatre Company. 10.  Alex Mermikides and Jacqui Smart, eds., Devising in Process (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2. 11. McAuley, Not Magic, 2, passim. 12. Pavis, Mise en Scène, 57. See also Cole and Krich Chinoy, ‘Introduction’, Directors; Cody and Schneider, ‘Introduction’, Re: direction. 13. Cody and Schneider, Re: direction, 5. See also Chapter 3 here on ‘acting as reading’ and the director’s listening. 14. Starr, Feeling, passim. 15.  Philip Oltermann, ‘Katie Mitchell, British Theatre’s True Auteur, on Being Embraced by Europe’, https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2014/jul/09/katie-mitchell-british-theatre-true-auteur (accessed 4 January 2018). 16. Miall, ‘Literary Reading’, 259. 17. McAuley, Not Magic, 187. 18. Mace and Ward, Modeling, 184, 185. 19. Ibid.; Botella et al., ‘Artists’. 20. McAuley, Not Magic, 1. 21. It is worth recalling the perspectives of Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi outlined in the Introduction. 22. McConachie, Theatre & Mind; Nicola Shaughnessy, ed., Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).



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23. Charlotte Higgins, ‘Katie Mitchell, British Theatre’s Queen in Exile’, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jan/14/british-theatre-queen-exile-katie-mitchell (accessed 5 January 2018). 24. As in, for instance, Mitchell’s production of Chekhov’s Ivanov, National Theatre, 2002, or August Strindberg’s Easter, RSC, 1995. 25. The ‘look’ of The Cherry Orchard was inspired by the work of the photographer Richard Tuschman. 26.  At around the same time, Churchill had also instigated a season of ‘Surprise Theatre’ as part of the Royal Court Theatre’s (London) ‘Open Court’ season. Churchill has a long association with the Royal Court. 27. With a libretto by Martin Crimp, another long-standing collaborator. 28.  Say It With Flowers, ‘Facts and Questions’, unpublished rehearsal document. 29. Mitchell, Craft, 29. 30. Ibid., Chapter 1. 31. Ibid., 143. 32. Ibid. 33.  Say It With Flowers, ‘Facts and Questions’, unpublished rehearsal document. 34. Ibid. 35.  Say It With Flowers, ‘Facts and Questions’. 36. Zeki, Inner Vision. 37. In the UK at least, there is some conflict between deaf communities who lip read and those that prefer to use sign, typically identified as Deaf. 38.  Mitchell, discussion with author. Three Mills Studios, London, 30 October 2012. 39. For my previous discussion of the (British) mainstream press criticism of Mitchell, see Ledger, ‘The Thrill’, and ‘It’s Not About Fucking It Up’. 40. Katie Mitchell, comments in rehearsal, Say It With Flowers, Hampstead Theatre, London, 14 March 2013. 41. Gertrude Stein, ‘A List’, rehearsal copy, 244. 42. Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard, English language version by Simon Stephens (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 7. 43. Simon Stephens, unpublished rehearsal script for The Cherry Orchard. This exchange was later cut and does not appear in the published version. 44. Carrie Cracknell, conversation with author, National Theatre, London, 24 May 2016. 45.  2011 was the centenary of Rattigan’s birth. Nick Hern Books publishes a set of plays by Rattigan, contextualising each through original research: see http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/terence-rattigan/ (accessed 7 December 2017).

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46. Carrie Cracknell, comments in rehearsal, The Deep Blue Sea, National Theatre, London, 21 April 2016. 47. Though events and intentions were used on Mitchell’s live cinema version of Reise durch die Nacht [Nighttrain] (2012); see Ledger, ‘The Thrill’. 48. Cracknell, comments in rehearsal. 49. For Cracknell and Guerin’s discussion of their work, see, for example, Lyndsey Winship, ‘Carrie Cracknell: My Medea Needed Some Killer Moves’, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jul/15/medea-national-theatre-dance-carrie-cracknell (accessed 7 December 2017). 50. Cracknell, conversation. 51. Cracknell, comments. 52. Although this can of course also be symptomatic of the need to work efficiently if rehearsal is lacking in time; in the first few days of rehearsal of Schlafende Männer (February–March 2018), Mitchell sat with the writer Martin Crimp and split up the text into events whilst actors were working on biographical tasks, cf. Chapter 2, n. 7. 53. The quoted text from The Deep Blue Sea in these two sections is taken from the rehearsal text. 54. Carrie Cracknell, correspondence with author, 9 July 2018. 55. Zeki, Splendours, 97. 56. Ibid., Chapter 5. 57. Ibid., 43. 58. Miall, ‘Literary Reading’, 259. 59. Cracknell, correspondence. 60.  Mitchell, comments in rehearsal, The Cherry Orchard, London, 2 September 2014. 61. Mitchell regularly uses the term ‘practise’, rather than ‘rehearse’. 62. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative, 76. 63. Ibid., 81. 64. Mitchell, Craft, 72. 65. Ibid., 74. 66. Stephens, Cherry, 51. 67. Zeki, Splendours, 42. 68. Mitchell, comments, Say It With Flowers. 69. Ibid. 70. Mitchell, Craft, 147–149. 71. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative, 89. 72. See, for example, Dominic Cavendish, ‘The Cherry Orchard, Young Vic, Review: “Artificial”’, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/ theatre-reviews/11169556/The-Cherry-Orchard-Young-Vic-review. html (accessed 8 January 2018).

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73. Mitchell, comments, Say It With Flowers. 74. Ibid. 75. Gertude Stein, ‘Say It With Flowers’, unpublished rehearsal text. 76. Mitchell, comments in rehearsal, Say It With Flowers. 77. Ibid. 78. Cracknell, comments. 79. Ibid. 80. Starr, Feeling, 98. 81. Ibid. 82. Cracknell, conversation. 83. As noted in the Introduction, the TGA was renamed the ITA in 2018. I maintain the older version, since the productions I discuss were produced under that name. 84. Briefly, Objectivism concerns the individual’s pursuit of happiness in the context of an objective perception of reality, which Rand deems separate from consciousness. 85.  https://tga.nl/en/productions/the-fountainhead (accessed 9 January 2018). 86.  Peter Van Kraaij, discussion with author, Grand Théâtre de la Ville, Luxembourg, 20 February 2015. 87. Ibid. 88. Ann Carson, Antigone (London: Oberon Books, 2015). 89. Ivo van Hove, comments in rehearsal, Antigone, Grand Théâtre de la Ville, Luxembourg, 19 February 2015. 90. Ibid. 91. Starr, Feeling, 17–18. 92. Thielemans, ‘Ivo van Hove’, 457. 93. Toneelgroep Amsterdam, The Fountainhead, unpublished rehearsal script. 94. Van Hove, comments. 95. Allain, ‘Thick Description’, 486. 96. Nelson and Rawlings, 221 (see also Introduction). 97. Miall, ‘Literary Reading’, 260. 98. Mace and Ward, ‘Modeling’. 99. Zeki, Splendours, 57. 100. Zeki, ibid., 55. 101. McConachie, Theatre & Mind, 45. 102. Di Benedetto, Provocation, x.

CHAPTER 5

‘Making Something from Within’: The Director and Devising

Introduction Reflecting concerns of authorship and collectivity in devising practices, Innes and Shevtsova introduce the idea of a devising group as ‘performance authors’.1 The term is more loaded than it seems: it moves away from the playtext as the fundamental determining object of performance and replaces it with the development of potentially non-dramatic performance action; it can place responsibility for content and form across multiple, authorial figures; and points to the concern with hierarchy that maintains a peculiar grip on discourses of devising. ‘Performance authors’ thus resolutely locate their collective theatre-making in the rehearsal room. But devising is not one thing; indeed, Govan et al. begin their account by avoiding finite definitions, positing that taxonomies ‘are unreliable and constantly in flux’.2 But rather than dwelling in uncertainty of definition, I suggest it is more productive to consider devising, like directing, as occurring precisely in different locales or contexts and through different, if clear, intentions, which are incrementally manifested as a project finds direction and form. Though by no means exhaustive, devising may encompass the development or ‘authorship’ of key ideas or themes, responding to or adapting texts (as in this chapter’s two central

Mia Theil Have, conversation with author, London, 7 February 2017. © The Author(s) 2019 A. J. Ledger, The Director and Directing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40767-2_5

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examples), an orientation towards certain target groups or audiences such as in applied theatre practices, or a reaction to and manifestation of place or space in the case of site-based work. Following the finer meaning of the term ‘playwright’, devising can be conceived as a process whereby performance is ‘wrought’ from extant or created materials, through the joint efforts of a company but, especially for our purposes here, typically led by a director. As an authorial task, the director leads or facilitates the development and assembly of material, optimally threading through key dramaturgical themes or images as the material grows. Given an apparent shift away from older group ideologies towards contemporary modes or aesthetics of making, as identified by Heddon and Milling, and a troubling of assumed binaries between devising and text-based theatre, Duška Radosavljević rightly proposes that ‘a departure from the term “devising” in contemporary theatre and performance discourse may well be wise’.3 A ‘wise’ revisioning of ‘devising’ might perceive it as a considered, intentional, reflective development and construction of performance, where the terminology of ‘theatre making’— whether to indicate devised work, as here, or scripted performance—better suits the actualities of a praxis and contemporary theatrical parlance. If devising is not a slippery definition, but a clear task, I want further to suggest that it is always already relational. I do not imply a relational engagement with spectators, as Radosavljević has so clearly discussed, but how a company has a relationship to source material and ideas; and that, notwithstanding the presence of multiple ‘authors’, work involves the choices of a named director, always part of, yet in relation to, a group.4 Secondly, I want to consider devising as the moving out from inciting points to a theatrical form, which rejects some of the phased modelling of devising. Of course, as with any rehearsal period, it is possible broadly to apply a phase-based structure, or at least general steps, to an understanding of devising, which traces progress from original idea to the polishing of a performance. Jackie Smart, for instance, adopts director David Glass’s model to make sense of Gecko’s devising of The Arab and the Jew (2007–2008), incorporating stages of preparation, creative origination, creative organisation, manifestation/presentation and reflection and renewal.5 Smart’s is really a conceptual decoding in order to make scholarly sense of a creative process and recalls the models of creativity discussed in the Introduction. An issue with retrofitting a diachronic view on to devising is that it can suggest a product-orientated approach, which mirrors the linearity of

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playwriting from early draft to performance and perhaps through to publication. But what Smart usefully offers is an extension before and after main rehearsal. This reflects most devising companies’ close relationship with their material as personal expression and probably a great deal of work even to make the devising happen. Later, a period of considering its impact both on audiences and the theatre industry may occur, as well as more inter- and intrapersonal reflection. Like the example in this chapter, it may well be that very clear ideas or images pre-exist rehearsal, such that devising becomes a kind of circular route back to—or an unfolding that bends back towards—the realisation of a starting point, which can later be assessed. Given that much devising begins with strong ideas, definite material and, indeed, catalytic individuals, this unfolding can also be seen to support a multidirectional process.6 Shifting devising towards the Continental European idea of ‘authorial works’ or ‘authorial theatre’, as Radosavljević also alludes to, returns us to the idea of ‘performance authors’, but grants too a status to the director and to decisions made in relation to writers’ works, as in the cases here.7 Time and Space Whilst not quite undoing the notion of a phase-based historiography of making, in terms of creativity process theory, Mace and Ward demonstrate that phases can be ‘dynamically interactive such that multiple feedback loops link various parts of the model. This means that a developing artwork can return to an earlier development stage’.8 The authors blur chronological linearity, capturing how ideas become manifest in practice: in Complicité’s The Encounter, one of my key examples in this chapter, the decision, later in the process, to make the work a solo performance feeds back to McBurney’s initial ‘encounter’ with the book he was given. In the case of Out of Blixen, my second principal example, the image of the angel was long envisaged by Mia Theil Have. This appears in Blixen’s story ‘The Diver’ from the collection Anecdotes of Destiny; it was developed in devising, yet eventually returned to the image as first foreseen. These creative ‘fixed points’ drag Glass and Smart’s ‘manifestation/ presentation’ phase right to the beginning of a process, thereby unfolding development simultaneously back and towards what has already been selected. In contrast, how to stage the final story of Out of Blixen had not been devised, let alone rehearsed properly, until the final days of work. When I attended the second day of the production’s technical

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rehearsals, it was clear that the lighting designer had not fully plotted the lighting states in an otherwise normative period of a traditional ‘LX plot’. This had to happen in stops and starts during the ‘tech’, collapsing ‘usual’ procedures as, unfortunately, the company had not been ready to offer a full run through at an early enough stage. Nor could Nikola Kodjabashia finish composing the music. But, if sticking to ‘fuzzy’ development (Introduction), there is no particular phase where composing might be considered to lie, especially as Kodjabashia responds in rehearsal to the work, thereby offering another kind of feedback loop, that of his sonic response. Elsewhere, I have been involved in attempts at considering Barba’s directing, both as a practice and its situation within the complex structures of Odin Teatret, as a rhizomatic process.9 As in that account (and to lean on Deleuze and Guattari only for a moment), devising can be envisaged as a process of immanence, a perpetual ‘coming into being’. Rather than synchronic progress, notions of the assemblage further reinforce a bringing together, an assembly in devising. In contrast to the discourse of the hierarchical, Linda Knight and Tamara Cumming offer the example of the salon, the intellectual, discursive collective or assembly of the seventeenth century. Knight and Cumming find that things, events, occurrences, or singularities exist in multiple, and in myriad simultaneous instances, and their rhizomatic connections are unpredictable and not layered. […] The human subject does not operate as a germinating seed from which all other aspects of the assemblage grows, it is part of the scene but is no more important than any other aspect of the assemblage, such as the scent of the food, the clink of glasses, the chairs, the light fixtures.10

Like devising, such careful drawing together of creative people, ideas and things makes, in Knight and Cumming’s terms, a ‘scene’ in which, optimally, a group can get to grips with an idea through the pragmatic negotiation of immanence. Shifting to a Deleuzian notion of assemblage, in which, as in my discussion of Out of Blixen and The Encounter, objects, equipment and scenography also create devised material, places an emphasis on the potency brought about by a gathering. The potential of space and key ideas unfolds, or is immanent from, aspects of a ‘scene’, in a collectif of common, if yet unfound outcome. On the other hand,

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and to remember the catalytic individual, these productions clearly involve a human ‘germinating seed’. However conceived, if we remember the ‘field’ of theatre-making as opposed to the domain of a particular devising project, there exist broad, contemporary steps in some devising.11 In the UK, Arts Council England’s introduction of the project-based ‘Grants for the Arts’ scheme (latterly renamed National Lottery Project Grants) has led to a mode of work whereby smaller companies in particular apply for research and development funding to produce initial material towards a production, which is than shared with potential backers and bookers, before a follow-up funding bid is made in order to rehearse and tour the work.12 In recent years, a plethora of ‘R & D sharings’ has characterised the independent theatre scene. Alongside contemporary notions of ‘theatre making’ a burgeoning ‘scratch’ or ‘pilot night’ scene has developed, led by a host of independent producers or organisations, which talk of their practice of curation.13 Some devised work or contemporary theatre-making has thus begun to mirror its more literary equivalent, that of the rehearsed reading of a play, and does not concern the slow development of ideas once in rehearsal, but how to get work financed and produced. Even in the case of a leading company like Complicité, other projects need to be negotiated around and preclude very long periods of rehearsal, further encouraging the staggered making of a new production. McBurney’s direction of the Berlin Schaubühne’s Beware of Pity (2015) occurred within periods of creating The Encounter; a second actor, Richard Katz, also took over part of the international tour of The Encounter due to McBurney’s other commitments. Before main rehearsal, Riotous Company, a much smaller group, worked for one week in 2014, a further week with the full company in May 2016 and a preparatory week in the performance space in October 2016. The reality of both ends of the sector makes for discrete and somewhat isolated steps in the creation and consideration of new work. As well as offering a better grasp of work during its typically fragmented, if thereby periodically intensive development, to consider a model of making that moves outwards from a central idea also places creativity and directing in spatial as well as temporal terms. Each main project example here can also broadly be considered an adaptation, a practice that necessarily enfolds within it the relational, authorial

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re-rendering of original material; indeed, in her consideration of adaptation, Linda Hutcheon (following Lessing) notes that literature can be considered an art of time, and painting an art of space, ‘but performance […] manages to be both’.14 As well as a brief consideration of some of the ecologies of making as a ‘field’ that might offer an understanding of my main examples, I am especially interested to think about how ideas become form, as Hutcheon alludes to; over the time of rehearsal, this must also mean placing actions in space, which usefully offers a way to conceive of directing the materiality of devising. Hutcheon also usefully stretches what might constitute ‘adaptation’ in her conception of the montage-like nature of computerised films and indeed the computer itself; this offers an understanding of the treatment of the texts in both the devising of Complicité and Riotous. Hutcheon humanises the computer by demonstrating how it, and its films, work like memory, such that an accumulation of images is really one image or part of a story nested inside another. Lev Manovich (in Hutcheon) describes computerised perception as ‘the logic of addition and co-existence. Time becomes spatialised, distributed over the surface of the screen’.15 Instead of an accumulation of material across time, temporal phases unfold outwards into events in space and imply a ‘forgetting’, neglect, erasure or exclusion of what may once have appeared in this creative space-time continuum. Making The Encounter was developed from 2010 by Complicité and following its premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival (August 2015), toured to major venues internationally. The production is based on the Romanian author Petru Popescu’s book Amazon Beaming, which Popescu wrote after his journey to Amazonia, where he met the photographer Loren McIntyre.16 The book recounts McIntyre’s encounter with the Mayorunan tribe in 1969, which McIntrye stumbled upon when he became lost in the Javari Valley in Brazil. Out of Blixen was performed at London’s Coronet Theatre in April 2017. After a great deal of exploration, changes and cuts, the production was eventually based on four short stories drawn from various collections by the Danish author Karen Blixen (1885–1962), who also wrote under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. Blixen’s autobiography, Out of Africa, was also consulted, a title more familiar to Anglo-American audiences

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as the basis of the 1985 film of the same name starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. As well as Africa, Blixen spent several years displaced in the USA. If devising begins with an instigation of an unfolding, when considering Riotous Company’s Out of Blixen, I see the key artistic figure, or instigator, as Theil Have, who I first met through my research into Odin Teatret. Through the course of several performance iterations of her own fascination with Blixen, Theil Have long predates the appointment of Hunter as the named director. I include examples of Hunter’s work on the performance, which incorporated elements of music, flying and ensemble performance of story, yet wrought out of a difficult overall devising process, ultimately at odds with Riotous previous, and preferred work method. Just as The Encounter, more positively, suggests how Complicité remains committed to finding form for story, the case of Out of Blixen reveals how the ideals of a company may not always be manifest in a production. Even in the midst of mismatching visions and ethos of process, it offers an instructive consideration of the director’s relational position, as well as more on rehearsal observation. Like Theil Have’s inciting position, McBurney instigated Complicité’s The Encounter, but employed a shifting set of collaborators in order to realise the performance. The Encounter utilises burgeoning contemporary binaural technology, which audiences experience through headphones, enabling me to refer a little more to some of the neuroaesthetics of music and sound. I also discuss the project’s direction through drawing on my conversations with Kirsty Housley, the co-director. In both The Encounter and Out of Blixen, there is the added, intriguing factor of the director performing in the work too. I address this at points, not least because the arrangement allows artistic authority to reside in another figure named, in the case of Theil Have, as creative producer, and in another, relatively rare complication, that of a co-­director in the figure of Housley. The director her/himself seems quickly to provoke questions and some anxiety in discussions of devising, typically about hierarchy; yet as Jen Harvie boldly puts it after decades of attempts at democratic practice which were at best sometimes frustrating and at worst grossly compromised, many practitioners are now exploring strategies for negotiating democratic practices and relationships, in recognition that dispersed power is not necessarily democratic power and also that negotiated leadership can facilitate group agency.17

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Harvie dissipates the sometimes lurking negativity around the director in devising, rightly drawing attention to the potential romanticism of the non-hierarchical, suggesting that attempts at ‘flat’ hierarchy may also iron out lines of communication and leverage, features that can still be democratic. Harvie instead posits the director as an authoritative, facilitator figure, responsible for the leadership of practical mechanisms of devising, a forward moving scrutiny and an arbiter of choice. Whilst true of any theatre-making, devising especially conspicuously concerns the bringing together of several elements and personnel to form the material circumstances out of which the work is forged. The Encounter benefits from Gareth Fry’s specialist input on sound, as does Out of Blixen from Luis F. Carvalho’s scenographic expertise. Carvalho is also a core member of Riotous Company, placing design prominently, as in the work of both Cheek by Jowl and van Hove. Viewed more productively, ‘hierarchy’ might better give way to productive artistic structures that allow collaborative relationships, specialisms, debate, negotiation and considered decision. As a productive operation, directing can thus cascade throughout a process and a group, in which instigators of moments of performance development might not be, and indeed regularly are not, the director.

Director Like Harvie, Heddon and Milling boldly position the figure of the director in their historical survey of devising, noting that ‘despite their resistance to conventional hierarchies, many groups had strong directors, figures who displaced the authority of the writer’.18 These authors are right to suggest the often charismatic figures of the avant-garde, yet also ascribe original authority to the writer, whom the director can only replace. Nor does, instead, an absence of a pre-existing script in devising remove another starting point, such as a topic, genre, staging configuration, locale (especially in the case of site-responsive work) or (like so many examples in this chapter) text other than a script. In real terms, the singular authority of the writer or director shifts according to the set-up of a company or project. Govan et al. consider devising comprises a group process of ‘an eclectic and experimental mix of playing, editing, rehearsing, researching, designing, writing, scoring, choreographing, discussion and debate’.19 That said, Innes and Shevtsova conclude that McBurney

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effectively redefines the role of playwright as a deviser in a poetic drama where gesture and movement communicate more directly than speech, and redefines the role of director as the organizing consciousness structuring the results of group improvisation […] McBurney serves as playwright of physical theatre.20

Although the role does not have to be elided with that of the writer and does not preclude eclecticism, if devising is the work of the ‘wright’, then someone has to ensure that elements actually are wrought. Given a contemporary concern with the authorial, several commentators identify how devising has shifted from its more radical roots: indeed, Mermikides and Smart speak of contemporary devising as ‘one of the major methodologies’ of theatre-making, which Harvie suggests has solidified into ‘significant disciplinary and institutional orthodoxy’.21 Radosavljević usefully points out that the term ‘devising’ itself emerged out of the British Theatre in Education tradition, establishing a primary educational, social intent in a company’s self-generation of work, and that the allied term ‘theatre-making’ has roots in the American avantgarde and European laboratory tradition.22 But Mermikides and Smart further harness some devised work to a postmodern ‘style’. This may be a contemporary truism aesthetically, if hardly an orthodoxy; but postmodernism is a complex cultural movement, which results in certain imperatives in artistic practices, and not confined to a single form or stylistics.23 It is, rather, the status of devising that appears certain, yet approaches are, like script-based theatre, diverse. The more contemporary, and rather definite sounding term ‘theatre-making’ seems nuanced enough to identify the contemporary artist who sits between categorisations of performer, deviser, writer, or director. The key figures in this chapter, Theil Have, Hunter, Housley and McBurney clearly fit the definition. Away from devising, many directors now also refer to rehearsal practices rooted in the realisation of a playtext as ‘making’ a production, as if better to capture the ‘building’ of a work, informed by a set of collaboratively positioned actors and creatives. On the other hand, given Harvie’s suggestion of orthodoxy, to direct devised work may be considered as something of a norm not, as it once was, a radical, alternative or particularly political act. At the outset of their study, Heddon and Milling question the potentially idealistic view that devising is necessarily democratic and devoid of hierarchy. Instead, as here, these authors draw attention to the clear

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demarcation of the figure of the director, which the authors see as particularly emergent in the devising practices of the 1990s, a period when, they suggest, devising became ‘mainstream’.24 Given its laudable political agenda, it is instructive to note, for instance, that The Red Room is run, according to Gareth White, as an ‘enlightened hierarchy’ and not a collective, and that subject matter, not its own group organisation, is key to its politics.25 White explains that The Red Room’s director, Topher Campbell, establishes in rehearsal that ‘there is no ambiguity about who has “ultimate control”. He [Campbell] regards this as the best way to do political work: to maintain coherence of thought and to be responsive and decisive’.26 Whilst what, or who, established the company’s ‘enlightened’ creative organisation is a moot point, it is nevertheless couched as a functional process in order to reach political efficacy, not a dysfunctional hierarchy. In contrast to some of the foregoing commentators, Jem Kelly invokes the contemporaneous and often negative connotations of the auteur in a discussion of Julian Maynard Smith’s role as director in Station House Opera’s The Other is You (2006).27 In their introduction, Mermikides and Smart acknowledge Maynard Smith’s ‘responsibility for the vast amount of planning and preparation needed for this highly technical production’ and his artistic position as the chief constant.28 Yet it is difficult to see how and, crucially, why Maynard Smith could and should abandon what is implied as his ‘authoritarian’ position, especially since other directors led parts of the project, a structure that needed an overarching artistic organiser. As the authors suggest, it is nevertheless possible to balance the shaping role of the director with ‘facilitating a sense of shared ownership and joint responsibility’, as in Shunt’s work.29 Discussing The Red Room’s Unstated (2008), White thus helpfully observes how ‘interlocking circles of collaboration […] create different kinds of agency’; indeed, devised theatre directors typically act as arbiters of choice, can be skilled negotiators and, optimally, are possessed of a critical faculty borne out of constant reflexivity and a concern for artistry.30 In his foregrounding of improvisation, often a key tool in devising, Roberto Ciulli offers a politicised approach to the pursuit of collectivity. Although he works with texts, Ciulli embeds his politicised philosophy of freedom ‘in a process of mutual improvisation, where a director takes ideas and actions from the actions improvised by the actors, improvises conceptually and passes the images of action that emerge […] back

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to the group’.31 This is a kind of looping process, within which there is nevertheless a clear directorial process of determination. But Ciulli’s challenge is not so much to assumed hierarchies of personnel, but to frameworks that, for him, constitute a theatrical imprisonment, be that the playtext or fixed actions. Quite who has the ‘last word’ in devising is a difficult question. Quoting Charlotte Metcalfe, a performer in Complicité’s The Noise of Time (2002), Heddon and Milling affirm a working mode in the company in which ‘there’s always collective feelings about things but in the end it’s always going to be Simon’s call’.32 Since it relies on some sort of discussion and reflection via the group, this may be the eventual authority of the director, but it is not of the high-handed auteur. Given that Elizabeth LeCompte defines her directing of the Wooster Group as a process whereby ‘I make the frame. You have to make the picture within the frame’, she needs, presumably, then to arrange the frames.33 Elsewhere, we are told that McBurney ‘rips and trashes through the mounds of material and crafts the show. He wrestles with subject, form, space, sound and actor to make something new’; on the one hand, this is the thrill of making, but at times the force that is McBurney might also be unstoppable.34 Still, to focus on an individual’s relationship to the artistic product, rather than idealised notions of its production, seems altogether more reflective of actual practice and a more productive way of understanding directing in devising. Perhaps a better question is when is the last word. Mirroring my own thinking, Innes and Shevtsova refer to Collaborative Theatre: the Théâtre du Soleil Sourcebook (1998), in which Ariane Mnouchkine confidently claims ‘it’s a mistake to say that collective work implies the suppression of the specific place of each individual. I’m not talking about hierarchy, but about function’.35 Even if others have suggested that some are more equal than others at the Théâtre du Soleil, Mnouchkine’s is a firm positionality and grounds something worth remembering in relation to the adaptations considered in this chapter; that ‘free variations’, led by directorial imagination, can lead to adventurous theatricalisation.36 Simply put, the opposite of collaboration is not hierarchy, nor is collective making the opposite of a necessary individualism. If we are too seduced by the promise of anti-hierarchy, albeit rightly embraced by many political, community and laboratory companies from the early 1960s onwards, it risks an unhelpful gloss of all devising;

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and an unhelpful inverse assumption arises that directing a play must necessarily embody unquestioned authority. I have been in rehearsal with some very successful, very well-known directors and have been struck by the collaboration, respect and integrity of their work, both in relation to the material at hand, the actors and wider creatives. At close range, these directors demonstrate great skill in creative and team management and, where necessary, the clear determination of a result inside a group endeavour. Neither is the rehearsal of a play a fixed, hegemonic process, but one, often, of exploration, dialogue, testing and development, even if bounded by the prior existence of a dramatic world, dialogue, and the scenographic decisions typically required beforehand by major producing venues. Lurking too in discussions of ‘flat’ hierarchies is the rejection of the Romantic-Modernist authority of the writer. Yet it is worth recalling the many models and precedents of writers working in devised performance, or where plays have offered a foundation. Complicité is a contemporary case in point, as is the work of Frantic Assembly (collaborating with writer Bryony Lavery, for instance), and a number of examples included in Mermikides and Smart’s Devising and Process (Enda Walsh’s collaboration with theatre O and Fin Kennedy’s work with The Red Room, for example). The writer may offer a starting point or assemble material into a script, as was the case with Tickell for Out of Blixen. The writer and director in such examples are not there simply to quash the rest of a team’s input. Further collapsing differentiated notions of devised and scripted performance, Shevtsova and Innes introduce the term ‘textual devising’ to describe the work of Théâtre du Soleil.37 This interesting conflation suggests a working out from a pre-existing text, but a result quite different from a ‘straightforward’ production, especially given Mnouchkine’s interest in Asian performance forms. One example is Théâtre du Soleil’s ‘Kabuki’ Richard II, which Innes and Shevtsova persuasively critique as reliant on ‘free variations on what really must be called imaginary forms from an imagined East’.38 Whilst the authors highlight Mnouchkine’s ‘Orientalist overtones’, they also invoke her artistic and individualised leadership ‘conjured up from her imaginings’ and also trace Mnouchkine’s quite vexed identity as a director within a collective.39 It is worth noting that, aside from the example of Mnouchkine above, many smaller companies are led by artistic directors who either direct many of the companies’ productions, or perform in them, as in the case

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of Complicité and Riotous. More often than not, decisions concerning new projects and, prior to devising and rehearsal, the potential shape and direction of the work, would already have been made by these figures, not least since funding would have been sought.40 The role of the ‘creative producer’ has also emerged as a contemporary figure who not only manages the financing and organisation of a project, but expects to offer a significant input into its artistic concerns. Theil Have complicates matters again since she is the key figure of Riotous, performs in Out of Blixen and is its creative producer. Questions of hierarchy need, then, to give way to considerations of actual company and creative structures, predicated on areas of responsibility and skill, and bounded by need.

Company Traditions of training or approaches to practice can inform lineages: historically, there are, for instance, lines of connection between Stanislavski’s Moscow Arts Theatre, Meyerhold’s theatres, Grotowski’s Teatr Laboratorium, the Odin Teatret and the various companies in the Polish tradition. Dance and movement-based companies such as Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal connect through to DV8 and Frantic Assembly, or link Judson Dance to Goat Island and, now, Every House Has a Door. The Lecoq and physical theatre groups such as, most famously in the UK, Complicité, as well as Told by an Idiot and Gecko, each comprises members with sometimes identical, typically similar and always complimentary ethics and methodologies of training. As Dymphna Callery suggests, ‘a shared vocabulary is what fuels devised work: the way you train and play will inevitably inform the style of work you produce, even what you produce’.41 It is training that encouraged the fundamental aesthetic of the physical in Complicité’s work. A group of peers who had trained together at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq formed Théâtre de Complicité (as the company was initially named) in 1983, including Marcello Magni, who features in this chapter as a performer in Out of Blixen.42 Initially, the group worked collaboratively, reflecting the members’ experience of Lecoq’s autocours. In this part of Lecoq’s curriculum, students create work over the course of a week in ‘self-taught’ (that is, autocours) groups in response to a theme. Lecoq retained this element of the curriculum after its introduction in response to the Paris student uprising of 1968; and on his school’s thirtieth anniversary,

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Lecoq declared that students should remember ‘don’t do what I do. Do what you do’.43 Through the intense devising of the autocours process, as well as the ethos of Lecoq’s later provocation, many student groups discovered and developed common aesthetic interests, retaining these when they stayed together to form companies. Like many companies, especially those in the independent theatre sector, Riotous Company, as with Complicité, brings in members of an artistic extended family on a project by project basis, more regularly employing only key artistic and administrative personnel. This exemplifies what Mermikides and Smart describe as a ‘core-and-pool structure’, a strategic arrangement the authors link to the ebb and flow of funding.44 Since Complicité produces work over extended periods of research and development, what is striking is how the ‘core and pool’ model becomes an expanded definition, to include particularly wide and diverse collaborations and consultancy on The Encounter. Because of its construction as principally a sound world, key collaborators included the highly experienced Fry, with Will Duke for video. The mathematician Marcus du Sautoy (who also collaborated on Complicité’s A Disappearing Number [2007]) and psychologist Chris Frith also collaborated. Some of these figures (du Sautoy, for example) were also recorded during The Encounter’s making and their voices feature in the performance. As with the key projects here, a mutual ecology of making and of mindset may encompass the development of new skill. Whilst broadly conceived as an ensemble engaged in shared devising, both Complicité and Riotous Company are not, though, easily aligned with the older, great ensembles of Continental Europe, from where, as Radosavljević suggests, the term ‘ensemble’ derives in a more contemporary sense, or even the contemporary ensemble conditions of, say, Ostermeier’s Schaubühne or van Hove’s TGA.45 What might instead link these groups is a sense of ethos, rooted in communal activity across a number of projects. In terms of its ‘core’ personnel and values, Riotous Company positions itself as creating performance through a melding of music, image, action, story and skills, centred on Theil Have, Kodjabashia and Carvhalo.46 Such a centre already embodies common interests and mutual sensibilities, as well as aesthetic diversity and specialised skills. Yet a company nevertheless cannot be certain how a project will unfold since devising appears in the moment of its making; there is risk. Riotous

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can be seen also to have taken a further risk, albeit qualified and intended as positive and proactive, in its new collaboration with performers Magni, Femi Elufowoju jr and Hunter. To draw on a wider ‘family’, or assemble a company for a specific project, ideally formulates a wider set of like-minded individuals. Unfortunately, the rather dominant working relationships of some of these new creative compatriots mismatched the ideal company ethos. Complicité also describes itself pluralistically; it produces ‘distinctive, visually rich stage language, which layers physically beautiful performances and tightly choreographed ensemble work with innovative lighting, sound and video design’.47 Instead of introducing training, as many directors have of course, McBurney (as with other directors of the earlier Complicité productions) relied on the aforementioned a priori training and a mutual vocabulary, or at least mutual approach, to the discovery of a theatrical mode for a production. Even though they tend to discuss the older Théâtre de Complicité work, it is clearly not quite correct that Innes and Shevtsova introduce McBurney as a director who works (or did work) ‘primarily with mime and wordless action’, not least since most of Complicité’s productions have often been based on a book, set of short stories or a play. Spoken text has frequently featured; a reliance on literary material is worth remembering when considering arguably the leading devising company to have emerged in the UK in recent years.48 More latterly, the company defines itself through what its performances are like in a broad aesthetic of the theatral, not how they are created. Given the longevity and impact of its work, it is surprising to note though that Complicité’s ‘core’ is under ten people, including mostly administrative and producer staff, led by McBurney and producer Judith Dimant. Complicité has formalised the ‘core-and-pool’ structure by establishing ‘Complicité Associates’, an arrangement whereby the company offers ‘production and artistic support and producing a new show that pushes both the artist’s own work and style, as well as stretching Complicité’s theatrical boundaries’.49 Here, an expanded and formalised ‘pool’ allows Complicité both to develop new work and continue to move away from its older aesthetic identity through strategic use of other personnel; at the time of writing, Housley had directed A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer through the Complicité Associate model.50 These associates are simultaneously connected to the ‘core’ yet have an artistic self-­ identity, albeit one which Complicité may influence.

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Complicité never quite set out to make physical theatre, but to find a means theatrically to manifest the stories in which it, and of course McBurney, are interested. As the cast sizes of Complicité’s shows expanded, McBurney stepped more clearly into a director role, although has still regularly performed in the company’s work alongside his separate and international directing career away from the company. All of McBurney’s contemporary work similarly finds a form for story, yet does not necessarily need either to draw on a ‘Lecoq approach’ or performers trained in that tradition. In her own training, Theil Have has been particularly influenced by the intercultural, training-based encounters provided by the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), co-founded by Barba in the late 1980s. Having left Odin Teatret in 2006, Theil Have sought her ‘non-Odin identity’ by developing international work and longer-term encounters.51 An internationalism and cross-culturalism is thus inbuilt into Riotous Company. This also attests to the frustration Theil Have felt when engaged in short-term tours with Odin Teatret, sometimes visiting other groups and theatres for a few days at a time and with a long-standing repertoire, and in contrast to her sense of fulfilment through the community or socially orientated practice developed by Odin Teatret. Upon her departure from Odin Teatret, Theil Have strategically contacted festivals in order to internationalise her directing and project-leadership, underpinned by her performance skill, eclectic methodological approaches and new project ideas. This resulted in three projects in Nepal. Further international work took place in South Africa, where the social aspect of Theil Have’s praxis could be developed through, for example, street and stilt performance in the community. In South Africa, Theil Have would seek out and involve the young people of outlying villages to create what she calls a ‘visibility via performance’, which could eventually cut across class divides.52 More overtly politicised perhaps was the work in Palestine with the Freedom Theatre, as well as projects with a theatre school and the Palestinian Circus School. This is to use performance action as the manifestation of cultural value, but again centred in and moving out from the inciting force of an individual.53 In the guise of Riotous’s director, Theil Have also directed a new musical, Penelope X, for the Macedonian National Ballet and Opera (2013), composed by Kodjabashia and designed by Carvalho.

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In more conventional terms, Theil Have had worked with Hunter as assistant director on Kafka’s Monkey (2009/2015), directed by Walter Meierjohann, with sound and music by Kodjabashia. Despite later misgivings during Out of Blixen, Hunter’s agile performance is an example of Theil Have’s view that Hunter breaks boundaries in her artistic work and that her work is ‘composed’, suggesting a physical and pictorial aesthetic as a performer.54 Theil Have’s aesthetic appreciation of this particular feature of Hunter’s performing echoes her training with Odin Teatret, where physical actions can be built one upon the other in a conscious assembly; this is especially the approach of one of Theil Have’s mentors, the Odin actor Else Marie Laukvik. In conversation, Theil Have identifies the productions previous to Out of Blixen, Divertimento for Rope and Strings (2016) and Scherzo for Piano and Stick (2016/2017) as defining work for the company. Both these performances embrace not only Kodjabashia’s musical fabric but, in the case of the latter piece, also work out from Theil Have’s considerable physical skill to create what she refers to as ‘an integrated dramaturgy’ whereby the visual, aural and textual are combined towards a seamless sense of purpose.55 As a case in point, Peter Oswald created a text for Scherzo for Piano and Stick in response to images created through physicality and music, and through conversations with its director, Tage Larsen (also from Odin Teatret). An ethos and ecology of work remains central to the purpose of Riotous; a shared aesthetic sensibility, a politics of purpose in the contexts and reach of performances, and a regard for training and the nature of ensemble. In both cases in this chapter, proficiency breeds creativity: rather than an extant training out of which possibilities emerge, these aspects are, to use contemporary jargon, a kind of continuing professional development towards the fulfilment of new aesthetic possibilities. The acquisition of new skills was evident in Out of Blixen: Theil Have developed her aerialist technique and Elufowoju jr learnt to go up on stilts. For The Encounter, the entire team had to grapple with the latest binaural sound technology. Yet even in its ostensible multimodality, the inability to break away from an adaptation only of the Blixen stories meant that dramaturgical integration, via collaborative process, appears to have suffered with Out of Blixen. Whilst the ethos of Complicité and Riotous suggests an alternative to perceived creative traditions, notionally centred around a linear narrative

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of playwright-director-designer-actor process, such collectifs maintain key, instigating—and often visionary—personnel, not least for artistic stability and financial planning. New members, including those occupying a directorial position, did not, or could not, work to Riotous’s established processes and creative ethos, nor manage the complex devising process. In other words, the pool sought its own decisions on the material, despite the extant core. Of course, established processes may become, at worst, fetishistic mechanisms of an aesthetic insularity in a group or, at best, creative springboards. Here, Complicité and Riotous’s projects demonstrate the vicissitudes at play in the absolute need not only to collaborate, but to choose collaborators carefully.

Unfolding Theil Have had previously worked on some of the Blixen material as a solo performer and had especially engaged with the questions the material seemed to provoke: the stories explore gender issues, power and authority, love, death and travel. This latter theme, allied to Blixen’s troubled health and, elsewhere in her biography, awkward association with colonialism, offered Theil Have, a fellow displaced Dane, a means to explore her own ‘identity journey’.56 Eventually, Riotous Company put together a multinational cast for Out of Blixen, including the Nigerian born actor Elufowoju jr In a similar development, McBurney had been interested in Popescu’s Amazon Beaming for some twenty years before creating The Encounter. He overtly positions the project as personal expression; indeed, it is worth noting the string of ‘I wanted to…’ statements of intent in one of the online interviews with McBurney on the Complicité website.57 Both these artists have negotiated their position not only in terms of a relationship to starting points and sources, but also how their vision can explicitly be central to the instigation of a project. Following developmental phases, the Blixen material was first shaped into a basic text by Tickell, credited as ‘dramaturg/writer’ for the project. Whilst he has directed screen drama, Tickell is predominantly a documentary film-maker, but joined the project through his association with Kodjabashia; reinforcing her inciting position, it was Theil Have, not Hunter, who approached and appointed Tickell.58 He assembled a great deal of information and writings on and by Blixen and engaged in protracted dramaturgical conversation in order to situate and flesh out

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the project. Following early research and development, in late January 2017 Tickell delivered what should be understood as a working script one month before rehearsals started (27 February 2017). His early wordsmith position again troubles too-easy definitions of devising as a rejection of text.59 Even in its title, Out of Blixen playfully alludes not only to the iconic film, but also points to how the company might maintain a consciously theatricalised response formed—or wrought—‘out’ of the tales. A further iteration of the script had the five performers playfully jostle for the status ‘I am Karen Blixen’, a sequence drawn from earlier devising.60 Given the multicultural nature of the cast and its evidently crossgendered impersonation, the device also refracted questions of identity, not least for the Dane, Theil Have who, at least in the early version, declared she should play Blixen, since ‘I look most like Meryl Streep’.61 Harnessing contemporary binaural technology, Complicité’s The Encounter grew into a sound piece about the performance of an ‘encounter’ with a source work, providing the means to unfold the resultant themes of Amazon Beaming (Fig. 5.1). The roots of the production lie in a commission from the Avignon Festival: early work began in 2008 and Housley joined in 2010, having previously worked with McBurney as associate director on Shun-kin (2008).62 What had been envisaged as an exploratory workshop into Amazon Beaming of only two weeks turned into a protracted four-month period when, Housley reports, the first quarter of the performance was created.63 However, Complicité realised that the material was not appropriate for the large Avignon space and McBurney diverted his attention to creating The Master and Margherita (2012). The Encounter maintains McIntyre’s story, but framed by McBurney’s biographical material, including the ‘appearance’ of his daughter’s voice, as well as others, and his reflection on time and memory (which are recurring themes in Complicité’s work, especially Mnemonic [1999]). Mirroring McIntyre’s mind-expanding encounter even further, the production spins into a kind of extended meditation on the nature of consciousness and individualism. Innes and Shevtsova’s account of Complicité’s work suggests a kind of contemporary expressionism.64 For these authors, McBurney constructs a visual poetics in reflection of ‘the soul-searching, hysteria and sense of crisis in contemporary society’, as well as the isolation of the individual in earlier and significant work such as The Street of Crocodiles (1992) or The

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Fig. 5.1  Simon McBurney in The Encounter, Edinburgh International Festival (Photo Robbie Jack)

Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol (1994).65 Complicité’s later stylistics seems to have developed through two key strands: the internationalisation of the work, particularly through collaborations with Japanese organisations, and the introduction of technology, especially video in, for example, The Elephant Vanishes (2003) and A Disappearing Number (2007). For these productions, instead of devising—or, more precisely, responding to text through devising—by generating fragments of imagery that McBurney then assembled or scripted, initial work on The Encounter centred on isolating textual fragments from Amazon Beaming. In this case, ‘complicity’ concerns collaboration between an expanding and contracting group and network, but also the onstage production of the aural, eventually made complicit with the individuated yet collective experience of spectators

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with headphones. Again, McBurney unfolds and tells a story, even at the level of process and making; he does not, as in his previous productions, assemble a montage of physicality or imagery. In The Encounter, the earlier process of threading together expressionistic aspects for the eye has given way to an aural expressionism by splicing together moments for the ear. Even if a particular circumstance for both The Encounter and Out of Blixen was that the director also appears in each performance, McBurney still sees himself primarily as an actor; Hunter too is a long-established actor, who has worked internationally, including with Peter Brook.66 As well as the sheer practicality of how to manage a dual, if synthesised role, the director–actor collapses distinctions. In contrast to McBurney’s reliance on ‘‘hearing’ the structure of a piece while acting in it’, intensified in the case of The Encounter since it was a solo performance, Hunter stepped into and out of various sections during rehearsal for Out of Blixen, made simpler when her ‘Blixen’ role occurred in isolated fragments around more fulsome scenes and action.67 Another performer stood in for Hunter in the technical rehearsal however, which ultimately caused a delay in opening since Hunter was simply not ready to perform herself. The real circumstance of the director who also performs is that s/he must primarily ‘know’ the aesthetic surety of her/his work kinaesthetically; McBurney relies on the ‘feel’ of something, usefully at odds with the visual dominance of directing and, of course, Zeki’s own stress on the visual encounter.

Adaptation Radosavljević sketches a brief critical history of adaptation, largely centring her discussion on the vexed and largely discredited notion of ‘original’ and ‘adaption’ and thus, I think, the theatrically unproductive questions of ‘fidelity’ to source material. As Margherita Laera asks elsewhere, ‘faithful or unfaithful to what, anyway?’.68 Both Out of Blixen and The Encounter are ‘faithful’ to something: each includes the accurate speaking of segments of the respective texts, bringing sources into performance and maintains the central characters. But they are also something else; discrete theatre performances that emerge out of the complex labour of devising, which cannot be reduced to their faithful, or otherwise, relationship to books their directors once picked up and enjoyed.

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Even if narrative arcs are intact, in each case the performance texts are filleted from the ‘original’ as an intermedial adaptation through an editorial act; this was undertaken by the group for The Encounter, and for Out of Blixen mainly by Tickell. Whilst Hunter did not use the proposed multiple ‘Blixen’ figures to frame the performance, The Encounter incorporates a quite long preamble, a technique McBurney also employed in Mnemonic. It recounts the historiography of the adoption and adaptation of a book as the basis of the performance, as well as an explanation of binaural sound production. McBurney’s prologue is one of both his personal response as performer and as a display of the key directorial choices made in order to shape and convey the material. His prologue thus frames the subsequent assembly of the various textual sections and, significantly, places him squarely at the centre of the work. As can already be seen, meaning may not reside in a homologous text, such that adaptation is always already on a continuum of ‘infidelity’ to its source and to which it cannot profitably be compared. Radosavljević suggests, following Pavis, that a productive ‘convergence’ of original material and, in our case, whatever the devising company might produce, should instead take precedence.69 Radosavljević helpfully draws on Kamilla Elliott’s view that adaptation might be seen as creative translation, offering a ‘figurative likeness’ that forges ‘metaphorical theatrical manifestations of ideas sourced through other media’.70 Out of Blixen is a ‘faithful’ staging of a collection of short stories by Blixen, but a production that, at times, uses flying as figurative or metaphorical translation of story text. The Encounter is no longer a book by Popescu, but ‘through other media’ becomes a sound-based experience ‘in’ the spectators’ consciousnesses. Elsewhere, Hutcheon further proposes that adaptation cannot be seen as a singular phenomenon but is a ‘double definition […] as process and product’, pointing back to how devising is wrought in the rehearsal studio in relation to an extant work, as well as the performance itself.71 Adaptation cannot ever be a maintenance of the so-called original, but a pragmatic view upon it, in order to promote the active creation of a new theatrical artefact. In the case of both key productions here, this view is overwhelmingly ascribed to, and inscribed by, key, visionary figures. Through the prologue-like stress on time, memory and consciousness, McBurney stages the double of adaptation: he manifests his ‘faithful’ response to some of the book’s content, but his narrative is quite clearly an addition to the content of the book and a selective framing

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of it. This first sequence also hides how significant amounts of the book were actually cut. Amazon Beaming in fact offers an account of McIntyre’s subsequent journey to the Amazon; his original intention was to travel to the source of the Amazon Rriver, but the deal made with the National Geographic magazine at the time obliged him first to visit tribal lands. Housley reveals this complete narrative was potentially part of The Encounter for some time during its devising, but elements had to be removed as, not least, a performance would potentially have been several hours long.72 A focus on selected parts of the narrative means that The Encounter is an appropriation of the thematics of the ‘original’; it allows McBurney to reflect upon other aspects, yet also releases him to ‘become’ McIntyre later in the performance. Although, as I discuss, Out of Blixen sometimes undid adaptive refiguration, or ‘translation’ in its nervousness to pull away from its sources, The Encounter exemplifies how directorial intervention, and I mean this in its broadest sense of input from the entire company, may adapt not just across media, but across time and mode. Here, Laera helpfully introduces notions of intra- and intertemporality; the first maintains the time setting of the original, whereas the later translates it.73 I see this as allied to Hutcheon’s adaptive modalities of ‘showing’ and ‘telling’.74 In Sally Cookson’s National Theatre/Bristol Old Vic production of Jane Eyre (2015) (another example of an explicitly devised production, but based on an iconic text), there is both narration as a telling and dramatic action as a showing of this intermedial adaptation of Brontë’s novel. Devices such as narration, prevalent in, say, the numerous theatrical adaptations of Dickens, sit within the world of the piece as an intratemporal telling. These strategies simultaneously stand outside the plot, sometimes oscillate against the aspect of showing, or frame or jump through intratemporal action. For example, Jane Eyre incorporates a number of sequences of heightened, physicalised journeying in what can be understood as a showing mode, yet which represent a devised vocabulary of telling. Like Out of Blixen, the production is an intratemporal adaptation since it retains the time setting of Brontë’s novel, but its telling is one of a devised and potentially intertemporal form. At least at the outset of the project, Out of Blixen further sought a visual and physical language as a figurative mode of adaptation, a showing enabled by the flying rig installed in the stage space and the ability to change its configuration (Fig. 5.2). Much rehearsal confronted the complicated mechanics of ropes and pulleys and the possibilities of the

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Fig. 5.2  Mia Theil Have in rehearsal for Out of Blixen (Photo Stephano Regueros Savvides)

moveable curtain track. When devising the final story by Blixen, ‘The Blank Page’, for example, considerable time was spent discovering how the rotating curtains could form a corridor and walls. Hunter responded positively to the resultant shapes and movement of the curtaining, appreciating its hypnotic quality.75 In neuroaesthetic terms, this self-conscious, metaphorical action offered, for Hunter, aesthetic reward through an explicit ‘hedonic signature of a given experience’.76 As such, it came as rather a surprise that all of this was cut in performance. ‘The Blank Page’ was, much more simply, delivered as direct address by Hunter in the guise of Blixen; I was later told anecdotally that the staging of the story had still not been resolved with only days to go before public performances. Whilst this

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final section functioned neatly as a kind of epilogue and, in fact, this was my immediate reaction, as I said also to Hunter, it is, on the other hand, not an unfolding of a theatricalisation of a story. Instead, and as seemed to happen quite a lot through Hunter’s choices, it collapses any adaptive distance into not only a telling, but also of simply being ‘read’ to in Cole’s terms earlier by the director–actor. The Encounter, on the other hand, adds to accounts of adaptation since its mode is overwhelmingly that of the acoustic and the spectators’ experience of an immersive world ‘inside’ the headphones. Whilst there has clearly been a contemporary growth in immersive and experiential performance, Hutcheon further provides an understanding of the sensorial possibilities of adaptive treatments via, interestingly, phenomena such as videogames and theme park rides. These offer ‘a sense of being “transported” […] in psychological and emotional terms’.77 In neuroaesthetic terms, the aural is considered particularly adept at ‘transporting’ the spectator; writing specifically about neurological response to music, Jens Hjortkjær finds that ‘music is a temporal act that requires real time integration of sound elements, engaging attentional systems and working memory’.78 ‘Transport’ occurs because the brain does not passively receive aural information, but proactively processes and assembles stimuli as meaning, in a way that McBurney and his team can actively exploit as the ‘real-time’ construction of an acoustically sensual, participatory act of imagination and memory. Nevertheless, Housley reports that she needed some time to appreciate the function of the aural, which, although other things had been tried out, had been long decided upon. She explains, ‘usually adaptation concerns dramatising a story, action and conflict. But, we felt, The Encounter might exist in a different language. I had to let go and not create conflict or tension and find a dynamic in some other way’.79 Housley had a particular concern to, as she puts it, ‘find the picture’ as a storification of moments; as an experienced director of new and devised work, Housley suggests how both she and the wider company gave space to new forms through the influence of intermedial adaptation and risked a letting go of assumed dramaturgies of adaptation. Elsewhere, I have pointed out that technology has been introduced in Mitchell’s ‘live cinema’ work, typically based on novels or texts, as an extra-contemporaneous element in relation to the period of the original world of the material.80 Such technology produces an explicitly intertemporal mechanism for an intratemporal adaptation. In the case of

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The Encounter, high specification acoustic equipment, far removed from the late 1960s setting of McIntyre’s story, is needed to make the particular personalised, auditory experience of its telling. For instance, in one incident from Amazon Beaming played out by McBurney, a monkey steals McIntyre’s camera and exposes his precious, but absolutely analogue, 35 mm film, an incident McBurney stages in a dramatised and technologised ‘showing’ mode. The digital wizardry around McBurney is employed as an intertemporal telling but, given the prologue-like demonstration of the high-tech equipment, becomes also the telling of its telling. Again, the directorial wrangling of modalities has ultimately made the production. For Katya Krebs, the proliferation of adaption in contemporary theatre practice concerns the ‘(re)writing, (re)construction and reception of cultural positions and ideologies’.81 A performance should thus be conceived as an independent aesthetic phenomenon, already distant from its ‘source’ through formal refiguration, and sometimes analogous or metaphorical, even politically repurposed in its showing or telling. The Encounter is no straightforward showing or telling (in Hutcheon’s terms) but places the spectator inside the intratemporal reality of the work, conditioned always through the presentation of McBurney’s personal response to Amazon Beaming. As can already be seen, the cultural politicisation of material in Out of Blixen via the demonstration of a personal response was however cut even at the outset of the draft script.

Wrought Out of Blixen and The Encounter demonstrate how texts can clearly be a part of devising. But since the devising of Out of Blixen continually, and inevitably, re-engaged with the source texts, clashing them with still emergent theatrical imagery, each new iteration of the script also caused the necessary unlearning of a previous version. Although Mermikides and Smart acknowledge that writers may be positioned in devised practice in various ways, they also ally the presence of the writer to authorship at the expense of the actor.82 More than once, I saw Magni spend his lunch break pacing the space as he relearnt material. But relationships cannot be assumed: later in the foregoing collection, White demonstrates how the writer Fin Kennedy rewrote a scene of Unstated after an actor raised concerns.83

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Like Kennedy, Tickell was considered part of the devising company from the outset, engaged in an iterative process. His initial script created a montage based on several earlier periods of research and development. He had also drawn together a great deal of early research material, which emphasised certain aspects of Blixen’s life and work. Assembled by Theil Have to share with me, this material runs to over fifty pages and variously consolidates the early idea of the appearance of the figure of Blixen as a storyteller, connections with other artists (real or imagined), recurrent themes, information, responses to earlier development days and ideas for music and staging. Tickell also offered a long exposé of Out of Africa, which selected fragments of text, similar to Complicité’s early approach to Amazon Beaming. Albeit not yet forged into dramatic shape, Tickell’s dramaturgical assembly can be seen as the equivalent of the ‘world’ of a play in script-based rehearsal. Tickell later took the short story ‘The Sailor-Boy’s Tale’ and used it as a framework within which other stories were nested. Yet, on attending a rehearsal in the third week, I was told that Tickell had visited three times only, at the request of the director. Even if limited, Tickell’s visits and responses, alongside Hunter’s wish to explore her own versions of the emergent dramaturgy, resulted in repeated alterations to the script, during which the assistant director, Stefano Requeros, valiantly attempted to produce and distribute updated versions. This occurred alongside the increasingly evident placing of Magni in protagonist roles by the director. Again challenging the conception of a phase-based rehearsal, Tickell introduced a new version of ‘Sorrow Acre’ during the third week of the process, for which I sat in on a first-stage rehearsal (see Chapter 4). The story concerns the accusation that Anne-Marie’s son, Goske, had set fire to the lord’s barn, but that the allegation would not be pursued if she mows, by hand, an entire field of rye in a single day. Hunter adopted the pretty regular devising approach of splitting the group and using two spaces: Theil Have and Kodjabashia created the powerful action sequence of extreme physical labour; in contrast, and in order to prioritise the work of the director, I followed Hunter, Magni and Elufowoju jr into the Coronet’s studio. Whilst it would unravel any reasonable definition of devising that it might start with a complete script, the practice regularly involves scripting as part of a process, just like Out of Blixen and, eventually,

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The Encounter. As with Riotous Company, the work of a writer may be a necessary and key step in the development of the work or, as in the case of Frantic Assembly’s work with Bryony Lavery, the writer might provide not just text to be spoken, but theatrical provocations.84 Such moments or sequences are not necessarily written as normative script, but as the recording of a pre-emptive, if as yet unformed, imaginary. In contemporary terms, devising can be conceived as a process where text or scripting, and the breadth of what these terms might capture, are part of a holistic process. Echoing LeCompte’s modelling of her directing earlier, Tickell’s authorship concerned the framing of previously devised content, but also to define further the substance of what was framed. He nevertheless could not easily shift beyond shaping and scripting any scenes so far loosely devised. As a writer-dramaturg, Tickell’s role thus oscillated between early input, subsequent consolidation and later suggestion, even if his later script updates appeared sometimes ignored. Tickell’s status, as well as his writing, is further undermined if Hunter’s position is acknowledged as dominant and authorial via her decisions to excise material, notwithstanding her significant status as gatekeeper of the rehearsal space. The Encounter has developed into a major and international production but, at the outset of devising, expectations about form, cast and length were open. McBurney’s relationship with Amazon Beaming provided the only certainty during the long and segmented devising process, which progressed outwards from the Popescu’s writing. The devising team selected and edited textual fragments; how and where these might find theatrical expression as the basis for a production dictated the terms of further development.85 As Housley puts it, this stage ‘was probably the least dynamic rehearsal process for everyone; people assume they need to be doing exciting things all the time’.86 Like playwriting, there may periodically be a quietude of construction, at others, the productive quick thinking of a bashing about in rehearsal; in the case of The Encounter, this incorporated what happened to be in the room at the time, such as water bottles, which remained in performance (Fig. 5.3). During the early explorations, the absence of defined roles appears to have prioritised the textual material itself, how it should best unfold and what the right assemblage of creative personnel might be. Various collaborators attended for short periods (including Hunter in fact). Initial work also assumed the performance would be an ensemble production; when it shifted to a solo work and that McBurney himself

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Fig. 5.3  Simon McBurney in The Encounter, Edinburgh International Festival (Photo Robbie Jack)

should perform, this made concrete not only McBurney’s incitement of the project, but his long relationship to what can be seen as its source. This significant decision also established the clearer role of co-director for Housley. Reflecting a growing concern in the work with individualism and consciousness also led to the desire for a theatricality of ‘sound language’, whereby the themes pervading Amazon Beaming could find form. Spectators might thus imagine their respective ‘Amazons’ through immersion into a non-visual medium of sound. In contrast to earlier Complicité work, Housley characterises the approach to creating material during the extended, and to some extent free-form process for The Encounter, as a ‘really extended dialogue’.87 As a description of both the actual discussion that characterised work and as a metaphor for its long making involving an evolving set of collaborators, this is clearly quite different from the exploratory playing of earlier Complicité devising, or the stress on physical or Lecoq-based approaches in other commentaries. Responding directly to my question as to what a ‘typical’ rehearsal was like, Housley reports:

178  A. J. LEDGER roughly, there would usually be some sort of warm up. Then usually there would be a task. We might edit a text. And there was a lot of reading, not just of the main book, but other books that were brought in. So we would edit, and then this would be taken to Simon.88

The recourse to text in devising is again absolutely evident, as is a reliance on reading to fuel the next step. However, I understand the process of ‘taking things to Simon’ not necessarily as a means to seek his approval but, in contrast to the degree of investigative selection and splicing of text, a trying out of elements by the (only) performer to assess ‘fit’. Here, a looping process occurs via the sort of action-­responseaction model suggested earlier by Ciulli’s approach to improvisation. Given further changes and attempts, or a seeking of fresh textual inputs, this early process also provides an example of Mace and Ward’s ‘multiple feedback loops’.89 But since he remained the director, that McBurney would have the ‘last word’ seems rather implied. Whilst it is clear that she relished the making of the work, evidenced not least by her commitment to the devising process and performance over several years, Housley nevertheless characterises her co-director position as ‘really difficult’.90 Difficulty seems to lie in the constant negotiation amid a directorial arrangement that is not often seen and perhaps unclear in terms of its rules of engagement. Without labouring the point, it is not insignificant that the original core director duos of Frantic Assembly as well as Gecko have separated. Still, Housley articulates her directorial diplomacy clearly; she explains that progress is made if the director can ‘articulate the argument; be as clear as you can, clear on the problem and how to resolve it’.91 This stance is striking in its recourse to a focus back onto—and into—the work at hand, not the hierarchical combat of another’s point of view. Housley further supports her process through a personal ethic of ‘not saying just “no” but offering another frame […] you can’t just take an option away but should offer another frame instead’.92 A specific example evidences this constructive mantra: during the devising, some of the other voices included in the work were heard on a portable speaker, which, as she reports, Housley challenged as a too cold, technical choice. Instead, she introduced—and had strongly to pursue— the introduction of an iPhone, which remained in performance. Given the contemporary near ubiquity of the smartphone, it is a truism that

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the documentation of our lives and, often, significant access to others, lies in this bit of technology. When, in performance, McBurney allies his iPhone to his own memory, the object thus both affords and captures his personal investment in the articulation of, so to speak, his encounter with The Encounter. How the director is positioned in devising in Housley’s case concerns her recognition of the complexity of the role of co-director, but also of its purpose as a position of some objectivity. She explains, ‘you are the person outside […] it might be good for Simon but not working from outside’.93 In contrast to Hunter, who could not, it appears, allow Tickell to be simultaneously the writer in devising and, as Theil Have had envisaged, the ‘person outside’, Housley’s position stretched throughout the life of the production. For example, Housley offered the anecdote that some audiences during the North American leg of the production’s tour had thought that the considerable spoken text had been pre-recorded and that McBurney was not performing live. This is not so. Housley saw the performance in San Francisco and was able to diagnose that since McBurney had become fluent in the delivery of the text, he was at times no longer looking up and out into the auditorium, thereby also losing connection with the audience. This apparently simple, but nevertheless counterproductive new playing choice had crept into McBurney’s performance; his aforementioned internal sensibility, in the sense both of his responsiveness and position inside the performance, could not detect the issue. As a co-director, Housley offered a more objective directorial eye to correct it; here, her directorial role is as a kind of spectatorial surrogate.

Form and Space Though clearly very different pieces, what unites both Out of Blixen and The Encounter are the features Fischer-Lichte isolates as the ‘performative generation of materiality’; that is, the fabric of the performance is characterised by its evident production, and such means are meant to be engaged with sensorially.94 When, for instance, McBurney in the prologue seems to pass behind us and whisper in our collective left, then right ear, he simultaneously reveals his magician’s trick but enthrals the spectators with the peculiar magic of the effect. In Out of Blixen’s first story, Theil Have ‘becomes’ the falcon caught in rigging, but the means

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to do it with the flying mechanism is not disguised: its performativity stems from Theil Have’s display of skill but also its fiction as an analogous action. In broader material terms, neither of the key production examples of this chapter have a set as such but, as I pick up elsewhere in relation to van Hove’s work, occupy a theatre space or arena that is instead reconfigured as a space of potential action. Items were included either in rehearsal as preconditions or outcomes of devising. For Out of Blixen, the imposing rig with which to rehearse, built of square truss and moveable tab rails, had emerged from early development work and, to recall Fischer-Lichte, offered a significant mode to produce the performative materiality of the production as the work unfolded.95 So the rig was more like an installation, its existence—and significant expense— demanding use as a predetermined aesthetic possibility. Scenographic elements in devising also provide simultaneous points of departure and return; the idea and use of curtains had been part of the project since 2009, reflecting Blixen’s penchant for long, voluminous curtains in her various houses, including her African property.96 As a core member of the devising team, Carvhalo introduced the further idea of parallel curtains that could rotate in the space. As well as the moving curtains, the piano too moved several times in the performance: at one point, it became the yawl of ‘The Sailor Boy’s Story’, wheeled more or less sedately across the space, accompanied by a Russian song. Such potential movement is a performative aspect of spatiality: the curtains in particular are, again, a sort of installation, but move to make space (I mention kinaesthetic art in the next chapter). For Theil Have, this drapery resonates both as a colonial image and one of class, not least since Blixen arrived in Africa with her European soft furnishings amid her belongings.97 Further exemplifying the circularity of devising, the closing image of the production, when coffee beans rained down from the rig, was in fact one of the earliest, envisioned in discussion stretching back some years. If flying stemmed from the repeated motif of wings in Blixen’s writings and was itself a clear precondition of the rehearsal and performance space, earth might be its juxtaposition. This creative opposition led to ideas of nature, rain and, crucially for Blixen the colonial plantation farmer, coffee. The falling beans also brought the all too rare inclusion of aroma in theatre and a spatiality of a different sort in its aromatic filling up of

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the auditorium, and another example of how devising can unfold retroactively to long extant starting points. None of these things are, of course, a conventional, dramatic set, but offer the delineation and possibility of a functional space, shifting the performance from, in Hutcheon’s terms, a telling to a showing. Especially in Dmitry Krymov’s case, objects too are collected in the rehearsal space, which often include transformational elements such as paper, paint or ink (Chapter 6). These items are granted a presence as a generative assemblage; they are to be played with as objects of creative possibility. Instead, in Out of Blixen, objects punctuated the established space, where time appeared fluid: the Sailor Boy (Magni) adopted big, red rubber gloves to create hands drenched with the Russian sailor’s blood; and, in the same story, Magni already had the gold watch he is given, making it appear by sleight of hand. As an engaging strategy, this also shifts the mode of objects from a showing or, more accurately, appearing, to one of telling. As a directorial strategy, there is here a similar drawing of attention, like Krymov, to how objects are used, or what they represent or become, beyond their obvious instrumentality. Given the potential of the company’s plentiful textual and theatrical surroundings, Hunter’s vocabulary in early rehearsal often framed the various attempts to adapt text into theatrical time and space as proposals.98 Through this careful use of language, which is not exclusive to Hunter, the idea of a particular element was never imposed but offered into the devising as a means to unfold it as, again, performative materiality. Hunter’s principal directorial mode was thus one of response to what can be conceived as ‘offers’. Whilst, in the long run, this might have hidden her direction towards the inclusion of more and more of the original Blixen text at the expense of Tickell’s own scripted ‘offer’, Hunter appeared a facilitator of unfolding. Until the production later ran into trouble, a strategy of directorial affirmation was clearly in operation. In performance, one particularly visceral sequence came from a swiftly devised, repeated and laboursome ‘offer’ from Theil Have and Kodjabashia and remained the only sequence to expand in terms of staging into the full auditorium. Whilst Hunter worked with Magni and Elufowoju jr on the dialogue-based part of ‘Sorrow Acre’ in the Coronet’s studio, Kodjabashia and Theil Have worked quickly to stage Anne-Marie’s mowing.99 They created a repeated physical action, which Theil Have carried up one set of steps into the auditorium, behind the

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audience seating and back down the other side to stage level, fuelled by Kodjabashia’s insistent and percussive soundscape. Hunter responded enthusiastically to Theil Have and Kodjabashia’s swift, precise and sonically-enhanced staging of Anne-Marie’s extraordinary task, supported too by the conscious use of audible breath (Theil Have’s), conveying not only the task in the story but also the sheer physicality of its enactment. As a director, here Hunter confirms points of fixity in the otherwise fluxlike state of devising, just as, in The Encounter, emergent work was subject to McBurney’s response. In terms of the multimodality in the directing of devising, the rehearsal of the rye field sequence unfolded performative material that is both figuratively imagistic and actual through its underlying physical task. At its conclusion, Hunter worked with Theil Have to refine how one of the big flying silks, laying on the stage floor, could be drawn in as if the rye were being harvested; this collapses a real-time task with the visually evocative. It offered particular reward, since the silk creates an actual resistance to Theil Have as she works to draw it closer around herself, formulating a moment that is clearly consciously part of the visual aesthetic. In this rehearsal, an evaluative directing approach operated. This stance depends on devising as a mode of creative production that foregrounds a ‘finding’, rather than, say, directorial instruction; the performers created the action, but the director confirmed its accuracy or, in neuroaesthetic terms, the reward of the ‘how’ of its formal enactment. Placing specific pictorial elements around and against the recourse to text further established a multimodal form, obliging the actors to shift around in terms of the nature of their presence. At one point, for example, Theil Have transmutes quickly from playing the young woman in ‘Sorrow Acre’, to the figure of the angel made with the hanging curtains as wings.100 Theil Have also plays the clarinet, before, finally joining in a song duet (Fig. 5.4).101 But elsewhere in the directorial mode of proposal and response, some images were overtly rejected: Hunter suggested that at the end of the performance, the cast might remove their outer costume and lay clothing onto the stage floor. This might become, perhaps, the image of the dead Blixen or her grave, Hunter proposed. As a theatrical logic founded in the materiality of the space, this captured and extended the resolution of ‘The Blank Page’. The divesting action would, further, also have been a potentially useful framing in relation to the self-conscious (cross)dressing and ‘putting on’ of roles that the draft script proposed. However, in an example of how directorial decision can

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Fig. 5.4  Mia Theil Have in Out of Blixen, Coronet Theatre, London, 2017 (Photo Dan Fearon)

shift through a company, Theil Have troubled the action, finding it sentimental, and Hunter’s proposal remained just that. As well as a resistance to Tickell’s input, over time Hunter tended to take over the writing of the material, or, more accurately, how it became ‘wrought’. This included the excision of previously agreed design elements, which, unusually for Riotous’s normative process, had been previously agreed and built ready for the beginning of rehearsal. Over time, I noted in particular that there appeared also a reduction in what Hunter deemed virtuosic or consciously pictorial aspects in others’ proposals, unless rooted in the immediate telling of story. As part of the initial version of the mowing sequence, for instance, Theil Have mounted the raised part of the auditorium (the remnant of the original dress circle), still wrapped in the flying silks. Hunter found this circus-like.102 I take this as an indication of Hunter’s growing resistance to work that drew attention to scenographic elements and the overt skill at their production. Elsewhere, action was discouraged if it seemed acrobatic; later, what had earlier appeared in rehearsal as the hoisting aloft of Hunter as the cowfish in ‘The Diver’ story was also cut and replaced with a fishlike

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group movement, which shifted the more figurative action—in which the cowfish is high in more ways than the physically vertical—into something indicative. Sound For The Encounter, the Sennheiser binaural ‘head’ microphone provides a degree of visual focus, surrounded by non-descript tables and chairs, and a backdrop of foam soundproofing. The set-up constructs an aural spatiality. In his post-performance credit of his team, McBurney refers to audio-visual operators as ‘fellow players’, since The Encounter’s acoustic elements especially are produced through live mixing. There is no Deputy Stage Manager cueing the show; operators (both light and sound) fire various cues with a degree of flexibility since the sound elements are not a string of uncompromisingly delivered conventional cues, but a serious of aural elements that, to some extent, can be modified in performance in terms of exact start and finish points as well as volume. McBurney also operates a loop station on stage. Whilst this overall configuration is no loose arrangement, but ‘meticulous’ at least on the level of an overall score in which clear possibilities exist, the potential for ‘playing’ renders aurality a necessarily shifting and responsive feature in the liveness of the performance.103 Rather than the passive-sounding ‘underscore’, Kodjabashia’s soundscape permeated and accompanied the action of Out of Blixen as a similarly active component in performance. In the complete absence of the kind of digital technology employed for The Encounter, sound was reinforced as resolutely analogue and acoustic in Kodjabashia’s prepared upright piano.104 As might be expected, at times the music shifted the atmosphere or tone of the work, such as the overt beauty and romance of the French song in ‘Sorrow Acre’, here composed by Kodjabashia. At other times, Kodjabashia demonstrated his striking ability to punctuate action: in ‘Sorrow Acre’, the moment ‘Anne-Marie agreed to the contract’, Kodjabashia hit the keyboard such that the strong note exploded Theil Have into the beginning of her gruelling mowing action. Whilst such emotive potential of music is familiar, Hjortkjær draws attention to the limited understanding of emotional processes in the neural substrate; yet to deny neurotypical emotive response to sound and music, with which performance is of course replete and which directors overtly and fulsomely use, would seem to duck the obvious.105 Indeed,

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Hjortkjær continues, ‘music appears as a drug or a primitive reward from the perspective of the brain’.106 Thus Kodjabashia offers no mere musical accompaniment and, in The Encounter, sound is so fundamentally the telling of the content, that both are sonic architectures that possesses their own energetic, affective dramaturgy as part of the totality of the performance.

Vision(ary) At least as an unfolding of creativity, I suggest devising can be thought of as a process that evolves out from clear, central ideas, to achieve fixity sometimes very late in the making of a performance. As a networked process, which is reflective and responsive, devising comprises a situation where developments happen synchronically. Even if fluidity is open to risk, the assemblage in devising can itself be seen as an intentional assembly; the individuals are the appropriately selected ‘raw ingredients’ that will create a personally and artistically inflected piece of work according to their sensibilities. Because Kodjabashia was part of Out of Blixen, for example, the production would inevitably have some sort of acoustically made piano soundscape; given McBurney’s concern with autobiography in some of his works, that his daughter’s voice might be heard in the production is a possibility in its unfolding. Arguably, the entire devising processes were a working outwards from both McBurney and Theil Have’s long-held artistic touchstones, where immanence is seeded in a set of books. In short, and even if the troubled director-led dramaturgical cohesion for Out of Blixen offers a peculiarly instructive example, when devising perhaps the ‘right’ people will make the ‘right’ work from the ‘right’ beginnings. To muddle the practicalities and pressures of devising with arguments about hierarchy seems unproductive. Still, an historical growth in the personal expression of the performer, rooted, in part, in 1960s counterculture, allows Govan et al. to suggest ‘the creativity of performers in the process of theatre-making not only reflected a commitment to breaking the authority of directors, and, in some instances, to challenging the authorial voice of the playwright, it also signalled a new interest in the power of spontaneity and improvisation’.107 Improvisation is, of course, only one of a number of generative tools. Instead, both The Encounter or Out of Blixen are works at least based on textual selection, where content emerged from a negotiation between a respect for long-published

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material, and the editorial authority of a company armed with virtual, yet unequivocal scissors. Devising is not one type of practice. Just as theatre-making based on an extant playscript may take place through different directorial emphases, contexts of devising also set practical terms, particularly of shared training or vocabularies, an ensemble or key collaborators. Usefully, the contemporary rhetoric of devising acknowledges these shifting working arrangements, which are not unfocussed, but always particular. Just as Harvie suggests, most of the earlier examples in this chapter reveal the role of the director as a key and responsible artist, whose decision-making is an incisive aspect of defining a dramaturgy. Of course, both The Encounter and Out of Blixen are, deliberately, quite particular examples, and both are complex. Both had directors who were also performers in the work, and one had a co-director. In the former, an oscillation between collaboration and singular vision occurred and, in the latter, a vision could not quite unfold in its own oscillation between originary ideas and a director who saw things differently, and in conflict with Theil Have as an alternative instigator of the project. Yet in their unfolding, both found a vocabulary, as Callery suggests, not through training, but a long, stepped process. Like Out of Blixen, material ingredients were present in rehearsal of The Encounter, notably the audio equipment, to enable the ‘how’ of the telling and were integral to the devising. To return to an earlier point, to become skilled in aural ‘kit’ or to acquire the strength for aerial work is also to promote devising through the harnessing and incorporation of new or acquired skill in the display of story. As an unfolding of a consciously developed new skill, the various actions of hanging upside down, climbing, falling and swinging in Out of Blixen, or the conscious layering and manipulation of the perception of sound in The Encounter, exist as already extant directorial possibilities. In performance, such phenomena remain, but are never ‘of’ the story per se, just as the affectiveness of The Encounter ultimately works ‘in’ the spectator’s heads as acoustic response, not the onstage trickery to produce it. The Encounter eventually embraced a mode of adaptation via the aural and its storification of the solo performer, in which McBurney is not only the director of the performance, but also Complicité’s artistic director, responsible for a cohesive company output. As the process evidences, McBurney appears to have retained ultimate authorial veto, yet simultaneously needed a set of collaborative experts, as well as a co-director.

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Once in the later stages of rehearsal and on tour, the fact that Housley gave notes finally allowed McBurney, at least at times, not to be a director. The making of Out of Blixen attempted to maintain a collaborative approach. An assemblage of artists with clear and particular contributions characterised at least the set-up of the process: this included performers, designer, musician, writer-dramaturg, the various assistants, the production and creative personnel. Hunter’s appointment as director was not so much one of an ethical, creative or political negotiation, but one which first emerged out of the needs of this group. Yet rather than drawing in new skills such as Theil Have’s aerial work as part of a homogenous ‘telling’ as rehearsal developed, Hunter and Magni tended to occupy central roles in the individuated key stories. Out of Blixen met with mixed reviews. Writing in The Stage, Tom Wicker found ‘the performances have a feverish quality that – at times – captures the disorientating anarchy of Blixen’s fables, with their murky ambivalence’.108 Reviewers tended to praise the performers but found the cohesion and overall purpose of the work lacking. Instead of exploring strategies to draw attention to how a multicultural ensemble might handle Blixen’s writings—its own ‘encounter’—the production eventually resolved into what another reviewer ambiguously described as ‘the essence of old school devising’.109 I take this to mean the prioritising of text, physical storytelling and ensemble inventiveness. As the reviews pick up, this was done well and clearly suited both Hunter and Magni, who have long experience of devising based on extant texts in the early period of Complicité’s work. However, Hunter also cast herself as the only ‘Blixen’ figure to appear, abandoning Tickell’s framing device of multiple figures at the outset of the performance. Corrie Tan, reviewing for The Guardian, concluded ‘this version of Blixen feels little more than a patchwork of a pithy quotes, a ghost of the woman she was’.110 Out of Blixen had started from images and actualities of flying, which ultimately sat uneasily against this more familiar story-theatre mode, without a cohesive, thematic purpose. Riotous Company’s production was an intermedial adaptation that constructed a response to the source writing as writing, not the basis for a radical theatricality. Even amid the almost incessant music-soundscape, the bodily strength of the occasional aerial work and use of the curtaining, the production, like The Encounter, found a key security in a resolutely word-based mode. Tensions thus existed between the original

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aims of the work as it aligned to the company’s history and ethos, and indeed on a personal level in the group, so much so that Hunter ceased to serve as Riotous Company’s patron. In devising, and in more ways than one, collaboration has to be with the right people. Perhaps the only real difference in contemporary terms between devising and script-based rehearsal is that the latter provides a more or less stable component to a process; as Turner and Behrndt conclude, a devising process might therefore require, on the one hand, a search for structure, while on the other hand, a facilitation of possibilities. […] Paradoxically, this seemingly free and open-ended process might require an even stronger sense of structural organization and overview than a production of a conventional play would demand.111

My proposal of an image of moving outwards can, of course, be applied to rehearsal of a play; but in devising, the director may well offer prompts to theatre-making, and this inevitably necessitates a response to what the actors create. Devising places the director in a dramaturgical position of commenting on the work and, depending on the set-up of a company and project, the catalytic intervention in the shaping of the performance. Directing is always refracted through a conversation as already part of a relational set-up. As I suggest in relation to Riotous Company’s work, older social, applied or political ideologies in devising can be replaced by ideologies of aesthetic, purpose, training and participation. Each can further suggest an intentionality and authority of the director in, crucially, the process of making and threading through meaning, narrative elements and motifs. Especially if we see the rehearsal room as a space of unfolding, a place where cognitive space becomes material, there is in contemporary terms an increasing limit to how profitable it may be to offset devising against other types of work.

Notes

1. Innes and Shevtsova, Introduction, 2. 2.  Emma Govan, Helen Nicholson, and Katie Normington, Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 4.

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3.  Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling, Devising Performance: A Critical History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 5; Duška Radosavljević, Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the 21st Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 62. 4. Radosavljević, Theatre-Making, Chapter 5. 5. Jackie Smart, ‘Sculpting the Territory: Gecko’s The Arab and The Jew in Process’, in Alex Mermikides and Jackie Smart, eds., Devising in Process (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 170–171. 6.  For ‘catalytic’ individuals, see Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, in Introduction. 7. Radosavljević, Theatre-Making, 82. I also encountered the latter term when devising in the Czech Republic (2008). 8. Mace and Ward, ‘Modeling’, 190. 9. Kuhlmann and Ledger, ‘The Tree’. 10.  Linda Knight and Tamara Cumming, ‘Troubling Dissemination: Experiments with the Salon as Conference Event’, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 14: 6 (2014): 589–594 (589–590). 11.  These terms derive from Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, in Introduction. 12. See http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/grants-arts (accessed 4 February 2018). In 2016–2018, I directed a devised project, Where’s My Igloo Gone? (2016–2018) for The Bone Ensemble, which followed this developmental model through three ‘Grants for the Arts’, funding initial research and development, a rehearsal period and regional tour, and national tour. 13. To give only brief examples: Fuel, which has developed significant theatre-making in collaboration with artists and independent theatre organisations; China Plate (based in the West Midlands), which regularly hosts ‘R & D’ showings and invests in ‘winning’ entrants; Pilot Nights (based in Birmingham, UK); and, earlier, the regular ‘scratch nights’ hosted by London’s Battersea Arts Centre. 14. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 35. 15. Ibid., 67. 16. The book was originally published in 1992 and reissued in 2016 to coincide with The Encounter. 17.  Jen Harvie, ‘Introduction’, in Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender, eds., Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 4, original emphasis. See also, for example, Mermikides and Smart, Devising, 4; Heddon and Milling, Devising, 5–6.

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18. Heddon and Milling, 61. 19. Govan et al., Making, 7. 20. Shevtsova and Innes, Introduction, 225. 21. See Heddon and Milling, Devising, 5; Mermikides and Smart, Devising, 4; Harvie and Lavender, Making, 2. 22. Radosavljević, Theatre-Making, 66. 23. See also Heddon and Milling, Devising, Chapter 7. 24. Ibid., 5. Although representative of the innovative devising of the time, The Visit (see n. 42) was staged in the main Lyttelton auditorium of the National Theatre and was based on the play by Dürrenmatt. 25. Gareth White, ‘Devising and Advocacy’, in Mermikides and Smart, eds., Devising, 93–109 (96). 26. Ibid., 97. 27.  Jem Kelly, ‘Three-Way Inter-Play’, in Mermikides and Smart, eds., Devising, 50–73 (70). 28. Mermikides and Smart, Devising, 18–19. 29. Ibid., 19. 30. White, ‘Devising and Advocacy’, 95. 31. Innes and Shevtsova, Introduction, 220. 32. Knapper, in Heddon and Milling, eds., Devising, 180. 33.  Euridice Arratia, ‘Island Hopping: Rehearsing the Wooster Group’s Brace Up!’ in Cody and Schneider, eds., Re: Direction, 332–346 (336). 34. Catherine Alexander, ‘Complicité—The Elephant Vanishes’, in Harvie and Lavender, eds., Making, 59–80 (72). 35. Innes and Shevtsova, Introduction, 101–102. 36. See, for instance, Patricia Cohen, ‘Troupe’s Communal Vision Includes Lunch’, New York Times, 5 July 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/ 2009/07/06/theater/06mnouchkine.html (accessed 24 Jul. 2018); Adrian Kiernanader, Ariane Mnouchkine and Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 117. 37. Innes and Shevtsova, Introduction, 102. 38. Ibid., 100. 39. Ibid. 40. To inflect this point, it is worth noting that Coventry’s (UK) Talking Birds is led by a designer and musician-composer, though regularly works with a particular director and pool of artists. 41. Dymphna Callery, Through the Body: A Practical Guide to Physical Theatre (London and New York: Nick Hern Books and Routledge, 2001), 163. 42.  There is a background, overlapping ecology here too: as well as Magni, who also joined Out of Blixen, Hunter too has performed with Complicité. I vividly remember seeing Théàtre de Complicité’s (as it

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was then called) production of The Visit (the 1991 revival), an astonishingly inventive, physical production, in which I first saw the gravel voiced Kathryn Hunter. 43. Franc Chamberlain and Ralph Yarrow, eds., Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre (London and New York, 2002), 73. 44. Mermikides and Smart, Devising, 16. See also my earlier account of Stan’s Cafe, which operates similarly; Adam J. Ledger, ‘Stan’s Cafe: The Vision of the Ensemble’, in John Britton, ed., Encountering Ensemble (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 45. Radosavljević, Theatre-Making, 11. 46. See www.riotouscompany.co.uk (accessed 21 June 2017). 47.  www.complicite.org/company.php (accessed 21 June 2017). 48. Innes and Shevtsova, Introduction, 220. Théàtre de Complicité changed its name to simply Complicité in 1999. 49. Complicité, ‘The Company’, http://www.complicite.org/company.php (accessed 5 February 2018). 50. Complicité, ‘A Pacifist’s Guide to the War on Cancer’, http://www. complicite.org/productions/APacifistsGuideToTheWarOnCancer (accessed 23 May 2018). 51. Thiel Have, conversation. 52. Ibid. 53. Whilst Barba’s practice too embraces the manifestation of cultural identity through performance, this relies on the interventions of a long-established group, rather than individual instigation and new projects. The Odin Teatret actor Kai Bredholt is perhaps an exception and has led numerous projects through the ‘barter’ methodology. See Ledger, Odin Teatret, Chapter 4. 54. Theil Have, conversation. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. ‘Making The Encounter’, http://www.complicite.org/encounterresource/map/simon-mcburney.html (accessed 27 January 2018). 58.  Tickell and Kodjabashia worked on the BBC documentary Racism: A History (2007). 59. See Heddon and Milling, Devising Performance, 3. 60. Paul Tickell, draft rehearsal script for Out of Blixen, Riotous Company, 21 March 2017. 61. Ibid. 62. For The Encounter, the associate director was Jemima James. 63. Kirsty Housley, conversation with author, The Other Place, Stratfordupon-Avon, 16 June 2017. 64. Innes and Shevtsova, Introduction, 225.

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65. Ibid. 66.  See ‘Simon McBurney: Complicite Is “a Nomadic Family”’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/video/2010/sep/22/ simon-mcburney-complicite-nomadic-family (accessed 1 March 2018); Innes and Shevtsova, Introduction, 220. 67. Innes and Shevtsova, Introduction, 223. 68. Margherita Laera, ed., Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 5. 69. Radosavljević, Theatre-Making, 80. 70. Ibid., 70, 72. 71. Hutcheon, Adaptation, 9. 72. Housley, discussion. 73. Laera, Theatre and Adaptation, 7. 74. Hutcheon, Adaptation, 38–46. 75. Ledger, rehearsal notes, 23 March 2018. 76. Starr, Feeling, 15. 77. Hutcheon, Adaptation, 133. 78.  Jens Hjortkjær, ‘The Musical Brain’, in Lauring, Neuroaesthetics, 211–243 (212). 79. Housley, discussion. 80. Ledger, ‘Thrill’, 2017. 81. Katya Krebs, Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 9. 82. Mermikides and Smart, Devising, 21–22. 83. White, ‘Devising and Advocacy’, 94. 84.  Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett, The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009). 85. Examples of these can be seen on the pages for The Encounter on the Complicité website. 86. Housley, discussion. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. Mace and Ward, ‘Modeling’, 182. 90. Housley, discussion. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid. 94. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative, 76. 95. Truss is a lattice-like steel structure, usually square, though sometimes triangular or parallel in formation, which can be installed in component lengths. 96. Theil Have, conversation.

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97. Ibid. 98. Ledger, rehearsal notes. 99. See also Chapter 4 for a discussion of this sequence. 100. In ‘The Diver’, this figure is the dancer who appears as an angel before Saufe. 101. Theil Have learnt the clarinet specifically for Out of Blixen. 102. Ledger, rehearsal notes. 103. Housley, discussion. 104. A ‘prepared piano’ typically has additions such as paper, binding, objects or wired parts to change its sound, and features in the music of John Cage. Kodjabashia also uses his percussively and keeps other small instruments to hand. 105. Hjortkjær, ‘Musical’, 230. 106. Ibid., 231. 107. Govan et al., Making, 16. 108. Tom Wicker, ‘Out of Blixen Starring Kathryn Hunter Review at the Print Room, London—“Unsatisfying”’, The Stage, https://www.thestage. co.uk/reviews/2017/blixen-starring-kathryn-hunter-review-printroom-london/ (accessed 26 November 2018). 109. Camilla Gurtler, ‘Review: Out of Blixen, The Print Room’, A Younger Theatre, https://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-out-of-blixen-theprint-room/ (accessed 28 February 2018). 110.  Corrie Tan, ‘Out of Blixen Review—Patchwork Portrait with Stilts, Knives and Bloody Gloves’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2017/apr/10/out-of-blixen-print-room-at-the-coronetlondon-review-kathryn-hunter (accessed 26 November 2018). 111.  Cathy Turner and Synne K. Behrndt, Dramaturgy and Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 171.

CHAPTER 6

Design and the Director

On entering the auditorium to see the Young Vic’s production of Yerma, the space, often used in a three-sided configuration, immediately struck me; it had been arranged in the comparatively rare (for this venue) front-on arrangement. For this contemporary version of Yerma, explicitly ‘after Lorca’ and written and directed by Simon Stone (2016), a Perspex wall rose from floor to ceiling, close to the seating bank.1 In the dim lighting, the plastic became reflective, doubling the perceived size of the auditorium. As Zeki has explored, an object lesson in facial attraction appeared through the near impossible task of not looking at others in this ‘mirror’.2 But this was no audience gazing at its collective self, but a parallel audience bank the other side of Stone and designer Lizzie Clachan’s location of the performance inside a big box (or at least between two walls, with entrances at either end). Stone had used this device before for The Wild Duck (2011), but this time, given Yerma’s plot of a contemporary young woman’s desire to become pregnant, the result became, as one reviewer put it, ‘a glass case to display a jewelled life, a fragile bubble, a membrane, or a shrine’.3 As well as these mechanisms for scrutiny, the design also called to mind an incubator or womb. Yerma was astonishing in how the interior scenography of the ‘box’ could be altered from carpeted domestic interior, to grassy lawn, to muddy festival field (complete with rain), and back again, through highspeed scene changes. This virtuosity of transformational scenic design offered sheer visual reward, as well as an evaluative hook.4 Nevertheless, the box bounded the performance: Billie Piper, as ‘Her’, held aloft a © The Author(s) 2019 A. J. Ledger, The Director and Directing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40767-2_6

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baby (subsequently revealed to be her character’s sister’s), as if showing the child the world outside a window. But Piper later smeared the wall with mud, vomit and blood, returning it to its status as, to offer another interpretative response, a container or specimen tank. Like many scenographies, the nature of Stone and Clachan’s space changes in its modality. For the actors, it is treated as an evolving set of dramatically realist locales to which to relate and behave within.5 Through its plastic delimitation, the space is a clearly constructed object into which the audience is obliged to look, observing the intensity of the action within. Later, when ‘Her’ staggers around in the festival location, either (or all of) drugged, drunk, confused or mentally unravelling, the box shifts into a representational, even surrealist space, evoking the state of ‘Her’s’ mind through warped amplification of other characters’ voices. This acoustic choice places the audience ‘inside’ ‘Her’s’ psychotropic state, recalling McBurney’s aural tactics in The Encounter. But to smear earth and bodily fluids up the walls emphasises the actuality of the box’s construction; again, it becomes a place of display, drawing attention to the clear choice by the director to have, in this case, ‘Her’ throw up against the wall or immolate ‘Her’-self against it. Finally, this production embraces resolutely the making of space through the overt construction and dominating presence of the box in this flexible theatre venue. If, as Zeki argues, vision is the predominant means of acquiring knowledge about the world, then Yerma’s director overtly offered the materiality of seeing in collaboration with his design creatives. What was seen by their audience constituted a major knowledge exchange mechanism of the performance. This collaborative, scenic construction of knowledge appears throughout contemporary practice; to state the most well-known partnerships between several major directors and designers, especially those that appear in this book: van Hove works exclusively with Versweyveld at Toneelgroep Amsterdam and internationally in theatre and opera; Ostermeier with Jan Pappelbaum; Mitchell has long-standing relationships with Vicky Mortimer and, again, Clachan, as well as Alex Eales, with whom she has developed the ‘live cinema’ work; Donnellan works exclusively with Ormerod to allow the design process to respond to rehearsal.6 Whilst acknowledging the shared enterprise of scenography and how several directors maintain key and long-term collaborators, in this chapter, I consider how design can be perceived as directorial intent; indeed, van Hove has said that ‘if you look at it [the set] independently

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from the plays, it already tells a story’.7 My focus on directing is in no way to diminish the work of the designer, but rather to consider that the director is also part of scenic choices; that design must be part of the totality of what the director offers. The Perspex box set-up of Yerma was already established in Stone’s work before his production with Clachan, and in the case of significant and international figures such as Lepage and Wilson, directors are the designers too. Whilst for Pavis, ‘scenography can be seen as culminating in a global practice which can no longer be readily distinguished from directing’, here I would like to try to present things the other way around, to consider what can be revealed about directing through the perspective of scenography.8 If, as Zeki puts it, ‘the function of art is the search for constancies’, I am interested in how directors construct scenographic signatures as a kind of Gestus of visual constancy.9

Perspective(s) In his earlier writings, Zeki tends to categorise visual art as typically narrative, representational or abstract.10 Painters may construct a picture that tells some sort of story, recalling van Hove’s view, above. For painters such as Vermeer, narrative is made ambiguous; those of the Impressionist school capture a scene as an affect. The abstract work of Picasso or Mondrian grasps something of a scene’s ontology, but shapeshifts this into another object of scrutiny. Whilst theatre better explores the abstract through the dramatic and language (although I think too of Samuel Beckett’s later theatrical experiments), we might similarly conceive of scenic design as dramatic, representational or figurative, as well as functional or utilitarian. It is this working taxonomy I use to marshal my examples in this chapter.11 The first is of course ingrained in the still predominant realist-­ naturalist movement, where the set is the materiality of the Stanislavskian ‘as if’. The curtaining and aerial silks of Riotous Company’s Out of Blixen ‘become’ angel wings in representational terms; and the black, inky water into which the set for Cracknell’s Birdland (Royal Court Theatre, London, 2014), designed by Ian MacNeil, tips Paul (Andrew Scott) gives the impression of the mire into which the central character’s egomania figuratively, as well as actually, descends. In another design mode, much of van Hove’s work makes spaces for performance: The Fountainhead ranges through an enormous space full of architectural

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equipment, screens, furniture and roving cameras, out of which various locales are briefly conceived before returning to its utilitarian nature; at the end, a huge industrial and resolutely analogue printing press disgorges paper after paper. And in his later Obsession (2017), van Hove has the actor Jude Law quite obviously run on a treadmill set into the floor as a way functionally to stage running away; Law really runs, and runs hard, but he doesn’t travel anywhere. Some sets hide their performativity: Mitchell’s production of The Cherry Orchard also used a front on arrangement at The Young Vic, though constructed a realist space for behaviour in this play ingrained with memory and the inevitability of loss, emblematised too in the imagined exterior of the cherry orchard itself. But even though Mitchell returned to her long-standing collaboration with Mortimer, her recent work in live cinema found its way into this production, where ­shutters fell to close off the ‘fourth wall’ and, like Yerma, high-speed scene changes took place. The set had become akin to a mechanical performance in itself, an analogue machine in which the actor-characters invested in imaginative terms, yet trapped in the pressure cooker of their memories. In contrast to the self-consciously functioning, realistic set of The Cherry Orchard, part of an emergent taxonomy can account for the taking away of obvious scenography to make an unladened space. Van Hove and Versweyveld’s setting for Scenes from a Marriage (2005), for instance, divides the space into three so that the looping performance can function; later it flies out and it is the actors’ bodies, adrift in the empty space, that veer between the performance of kissing, dancing, yelling and fighting, amid the space of what is a non-set. Similarly rejecting the plethora of design elements embraced by some directors, Phyllida Lloyd explains ‘my stripping away to the empty space, to the actor in the space is unconsciously because I feel that I don’t need to accommodate this other thing and because there’s something so unique happening in the live experience’.12 Lloyd clearly prioritises the presence and action of actors as the materiality of storytelling and sees design elements as a separate element, an ‘other thing’, and even a potentially deadening aspect. Although she thinks visually, often storyboarding her productions—a practice perhaps derived from her initial training as a television director—Lloyd’s highly successful production of Schiller’s Mary Stuart (2005) used, like Donnellan’s preferred practice, a simple setting.13 Yet to remove an obvious set to expose the openness or possibility

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of an apparently empty space remains still part of a continuum of design decisions and, like Lloyd, is a choice concerning a director’s stress on the potential of the actor. Pavis’s conception of mise en scène is, as we have seen elsewhere, that of an active process. Pavis also tries to lay out a taxonomy or typology of scenography. Firstly, he sees a crucial difference between scenography and mise en scène; for Pavis, scenography is the visible and material part of mise en scène. It is only one component among others […]. Space is seen as the barometer of time, as the chrysalis from which mise en scène emerges. There is an underground struggle between scenography and mise en scène.14

If mise en scène is the overall phenomenal intent of the performance, Pavis implies that scenography is thus static as the iconography of the visible, pictorial or topographic elements of a production. Pavis’s typological proposition of ‘the powers of stage illusions’ relies on DemarcyMota’s production of Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello), which has been staged incorporating the auditorium of the Bouffes du Nord, Paris; though it seems the exception, Pavis implies that scenography has to break the limits of the stage space in order to exert itself independently.15 But this has not always been the case: as mentioned earlier, I saw the production at London’s Barbican Theatre where it did not use the expanded scenography of primary and secondary spaces as Pavis describes. Even if confined to the stage, I would contest that space incontrovertibly measures the pressure of time, especially given Pavis’s stress on stasis. Time is better perceived through actions inside space over a duration; in which case, Pavis’s emergent butterfly rather nicely suggests the activity of the performer. In this chapter, I further trouble Pavis’s distinctions, since scenographic elements are often not static, especially in the case of Lepage and Krymov, and actively constitute mise en scène in the moment of performance. Pavis’s further categorisations also operate through a consideration of how foregrounded a perception of space appears to be in relation to other elements of mise en scène. In one of his typologies, ‘the echoes of space’, Pavis offers a brief account of Alain Timar’s Festival d’Avignon production of Le Livre de Ma Mère (2003), in which music and a moving set appeared as key and active agents. In another, ‘Crossing the image’, Pavis suggests that ‘sometimes directors feel the need to design their

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own set in order to have it conform as closely as possible to their dramaturgical vision’.16 Yet no director would, surely, knowingly embrace a set that clashed with her/his ‘vision’. And for some directors, the set is explicitly part of the vision: here, I consider Dmitry Krymov’s work, which particularly aligns with Pavis’s ‘echoes of space’, but also, more briefly, that of Lepage and Wilson. Pavis’s totalising idea of mise en scène usefully includes the invisible. Rehearsal is clearly the fundamental ‘invisible’ aspect to directing. But an elongated notion of production preparation can, in turn, further destabilise Pavis’s insistence on stasis. Much of the labour of scenography— the mise en scène of scenography, perhaps—is located in the ‘invisible’ work of, for instance, sketching, drafting, model making, construction and painting, and design and production meetings. Whilst Pavis includes the sonic in his totalising understanding of mise en scène, a contemporary understanding of scenography should also include the materiality of sound as a particular directorial choice. Further, like the example of Yerma, I see a shifting of scenic means and purposes in a single production. Drawing together sight, scenography and multimodal directorial-­ design choices, Pavis too is cautious about too-closed typologies, finding that ‘different principles of scenography can thus coexist perfectly well, provided that the spectator plays a significant role in their utilisation’.17 Again, Zeki is invoked in this processual, transactional means of making visual meaning, here also predicated on the response of the individual. Many of the scenic arrangements I consider in this chapter are those of spatiality, which Fischer-Lichte distinguishes from space: the former is the extant pre- (and post-) performance ‘architectural-geometric’ space; what occurs inside this space is the spatiality of, as Fischer-Lichte puts it, ‘special possibilities for the relationship between actors and spectators and for movement and perception’.18 In Krymov’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) (2012), which I discuss shortly, there is a notable orchestration of ensemble physicality: flocking, expansion and contraction of the ensemble surrounds moments of fine detail. There is a slow procession of the huge line of nobility who, once upon their scaffold viewing platforms, are interrupted by gags; one figure taking one too many champagne glasses or the too-careful sweeping of sawdust. The final, extraordinary, bergomask dance expands and spirals into a display including a troupe of ballerinas. But what is missing in Fischer-Lichte’s helpful definitions is the presence of a set, which forms a created space within extant architecture. To a great extent, the set of a production thus

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creates its spatiality, since it provides and constructs the particular conditions that invite the possibility of a more kinaesthetic and (as with the example of Yerma, above) transformative spatiality. Nevertheless, spatiality should be understood as that produced and, in Krymov’s case, as the conscious ballooning of an image and action. Later, I also align Krymov’s practice with the vernacular, especially what is known as ‘vernacular design’, as a means to grasp the production of his unique style. In terms, again, of how space is used, Susan Garfinkel formulates a specific understanding of the vernacular as architecture. For Garfinkel, buildings and spaces create meaning through how they are used; they are ‘built form in use’ and, thus, ‘performance is the creation of meaning through use’.19 Through her focus on the display of pragmatics, Garfinkel couches the vernacular as ‘performance’, in which she also reaches back to the thinking that generated ideas of ‘performance’, both in her particular field of architecture and that of performance studies, especially the work of Richard Schechner.20 This recalls, too, Fischer-Lichte’s stress on performance as event.

Seeing At the outset of his fundamental text, Inner Vision, Zeki is at pains to stress that the eye itself does not see, but instead receives information in the form of light, which is then processed by the brain. Zeki demonstrates that although sight is processed in an area of the rear brain known broadly as the visual cortex, this is divided into specialist areas. The primary visual cortex is known as V1, and the adjacent parts V2 and V3 (and V3a); for our purposes, these fundamental areas ‘distribute selectively visual signals’.21 Perhaps more interesting are V4, which deals with colour, and V5, which processes motion. Zeki thus argues that certain artworks and artists, albeit unconsciously, target visual differentiation in the brain. For instance, some kinetic art (typically mobiles) is coloured only black and white in order predominantly to stimulate V5. Zeki argues that the rise of Fauvism in painting, which prioritised colour, offers similar reward and satisfaction to V4.22 Some parts of the visual brain contain cells that respond to movement only in certain directions, or prefer squares, or certain colours, as Zeki quite fascinatingly shows.23 This cellular aspect is of course very detailed for our purposes, but offers an explanation for, say, the width and linearity of van Hove and Versweyveld’s staging of Antigone, or what goes on in the brain

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when the iconography of night-time in theatre lighting, the use of blue light, appears as a representational device. And whilst I acknowledge that it may be something of a generalisation, we might recall Zeki’s stress on geons and the geometric (Introduction), since it is reasonable to point out that most performance spaces and sets are constructed of straight lines and comprised of square-like geometries (and to build an alternative is less easy) and orientated to a front on or three-sided spectator configuration.24 Sight, then, is not passive. Although he also concludes that it is the brain, of course, that does the ‘seeing’, Di Benedetto spends some time describing the physiology of sight.25 This adds to Zeki’s account, namely by explaining that incoming visual signals from the eye structure travel through older ‘reptilian’ parts of the brain and thus affect the body’s fundamental, instinctive and survival processes; for instance, Di Benedetto explains that signals travelling through the pretectum (in the midbrain) cause changes in pupil size in reaction to too little or too much incoming light. He adds that stimulus of the superior colliculus (again in the midbrain) allows the eyes to move in short jumps (called saccades); in fact, the eyes cannot move around to offer a smooth image, but apparently instantaneously join up many ‘snapshots’, which the brain turns into joined-up vision as if the eyes were a panning camera. Given Zeki’s insights, Di Benedetto perhaps places too much emphasis on these reflex-level processes in the total perceiving task of the brain, and the brain parts he identifies are already part of the visual system, but usefully offers an account of how the brain is affected amid its perception of the totality of the performance space. Design is not, then, a kind of box (or box set) in which to place performance, but like sight itself, should be understood as a constant process in performance. Zeki concludes ‘the brain, then, is no mere passive chronicler of the external physical reality but an active participant in generating the visual image, according to its own rules and programs [sic]. This is the very role that artists have attributed to art’.26 If, as I outlined in the Introduction, designers and directors work towards a satisfaction of their own aesthetic brains not just as organs of knowledge generation, but also of evaluation and reward, by implication this must rely on a shared understanding of what a particular choice might evoke in their audiences. My isolation of the tipping of Birdland’s set into water would not be quite the same if the water had been, say, green or blue,

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since, in many cultures at least, black is connoted to the negative; here, Cracknell and MacNeil have again relied on, in Zeki’s terms, an acquired concept.27 Another example is how in Lloyd’s production of Peter Grimes (Opera North, 2006/13), which incorporated ‘a suspended net that represents everything from the manhunt to the billowing seas’, spare elements have become metaphoric, not simply ‘stripped away’.28 Here, Lloyd has relied on how spectators’ brains can ‘see’ something other than the obvious kinetics of a suspended net and understand instead the swelling of waves by placing the movement against the stored experience of seeing a real ocean.

‘Real’ Spaces Van Hove’s scenographic emphasis is clearly influenced by film in his contemporary work; many of his productions are in fact stagings of film texts, and film is often incorporated into the productions through video projection. For van Hove, film is an especially personal affinity or sensibility; he explains ‘I went to see as many arthouse films as possible, and they left a strong and lasting impression on me. Even today, those films are important for my work, since they belong to my personal mental archive’.29 Here, van Hove reveals his personal, ‘internal’ aesthetic and the pull of his ‘archive’ as production choices are made. His particular specification of ‘arthouse’ films also suggests a certain aesthetic (one of, broadly, a focus on relationships, individual psychology, an identifiable directorial style), but also of a visual telling. Yet van Hove further cites ‘our [his and Versweyveld’s] affinity with visual art installations and our predilection for performance art’, the latter of which helps explain his focus on the actor.30 Van Hove and Versweyveld’s sets are never mimetic, but spaces closer to installations, with in-built features (the disc at the rear of Antigone, the ‘flying’ truck engine of Obsession), furniture or specific areas (Roman Tragedies; The Fountainhead), or objects and machinery with which to interact (The Fountainhead). The influence of installations points too to the productions’ clean and contemporary aesthetic lines, often emphasised by the left-right pull of the cinematic, ‘letterbox’ staging. These arenas are not coldly clinical but, as Willinger stresses, full of ‘potential for extreme spectacularity’ and, despite their clean designs, often doubled in meaning.31 For Willinger,

204  A. J. LEDGER the sets include highly selective elements that suggest the stuff of daily life, in order to invoke an indeterminate world that is both universal and contemporary, utilitarian and metaphorical at the same time, if there is a thrust toward representation at all, it is first and foremost a visual emanation of how life feels, and not necessarily how it looks.32

Life, in Versweyveld and van Hove’s spaces, is exposed, detailed, isolated, full of the potential for confrontation, work and debate. Like performance art, these are spaces in which to house the potentiality and, eventually, actuality of action. Reinforcing his clean, contemporary aesthetic, van Hove has said, simply, ‘I can’t do plays in costume’; he does, of course, but the costuming, like Versweyveld’s sets, should be seen as the contemporary dress worn by his actors, not, as implied here, a kind of disguise of period decoration.33 Throughout van Hove’s work, I see a shift from space to spatiality, as Fischer-Lichte puts it and (in my terms) the functional and utilitarian to the representative. For Pavis, this is an oscillation between his latter notions of ‘echoes of space’, ‘migration of subspaces’ and ‘silence of space’.34 Van Hove’s approach has evolved of course: from early devising, to work based on textual analysis but using improvisation to, now, beginning immediately in the space, working on staging, research and discussion simultaneously. Underpinning any perception of a typological continuum across van Hove’s work is the push towards the treatment of constructed spaces as material reality; van Hove categorically states ‘we refuse illusionism. Our theatre must be concrete’.35 Given van Hove’s emphases, Versweyveld’s sets are present, as complete as possible, from the outset of rehearsal, born of long-term prior discussion with van Hove. The a priori envisioning of space and the visual is thus central to the pair’s work, in which scenic design is intertwined with the evolution of the performance. As well as his interest in the actor, van Hove’s direction can be inextricably linked to the construction of what are more accurately considered ‘environments’ ready to meet rehearsal.36 In what might be called his ‘signature’ production, Roman Tragedies (2007–2018), van Hove’s most well-known work, the five and a halfhour amalgamation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra take place in the setting of a conference. There are desks, computers, working microphones and, typical of his work, large screens for ‘live feed’ video projection of the performance. Other locations appear more figurative: a large, spiral staircase dominates

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the performance space of Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2013), enabling actors to descend into, and ascend out of, the action at stage level, simultaneously establishing and exaggerating the intensity of the domestic setting and familial conflict of O’Neill’s drama. A View from the Bridge (Young Vic, London, 2014) removed all traces of 1950s American mimesis. The actors wore contemporary dress and worked barefoot within an empty, art-gallery like space, which opened, box-like, at the beginning of the performance to reveal only an upstage entrance and bench seating. In these examples, the first is a practical space, inviting the machinations of international politicking; the latter expose, develop, and hold, sculpturally and clinically, the themes of the play and the intertwining of relationships. What unites the numerous examples throughout van Hove and Versweyveld’s extensive collaboration is how spaces comprise utilitarian sets with which the actors materially engage; the pair simply don’t do the scenically ornamental, but offer a platform or framework for action. Van Hove’s trademark use of live video feed suggests ways of perceiving the performance as it roves what can be deemed ‘locations’, to follow the filmic influence, in his theatre practice. In Roman Tragedies, Mark Antony delivers part of his iconic ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech sitting in front of a lectern, on the ground, clearly dispensing with traditional, rhetorical formalities. The image of the semi-prone Mark Antony is relayed via the video feed, when a camera operator scurries on stage to create the close up of Mark Antony’s face. As elsewhere in van Hove’s work, a spectatorial double vision occurs here, since some of the onstage spectators turn and look up at what plays out live only some metres away from them, complicating the functioning of ostensible performance, witness and spectator engagement. But van Hove overtly includes the rest of the audience in this most pivotal moment, since Hans Kesting, playing Mark Antony, comes out into the main auditorium seating area, still on camera. Van Hove chooses to have the actor be amongst the populace; here, Mark Antony explains Caesar’s death by using a photo and bright-red marker pen to indicate blood, which is zoomed into and projected on screen, ballooning a moment that would be hard to see if left purely to the live medium. Van Hove creates a multiplicity of viewpoints of the same thing, as well as an observational feedback loop: those on stage can see the screen, which shows what they can see being filmed, and know that others can see it too. This complex act of spectatorship creates multiple aspects

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of simultaneous viewing of the real and the feigned, so central to Julius Caesar. Van Hove’s use of video in this production further offers a different example of Pavis’s notion of ‘the power of stage illusion’, since it is via video feed that van Hove expands normative performance space and proxemics to fill a wider space. This is a particular event that, whilst fictional, nevertheless implicates spectators in the actuality of its form. In Immersive Theatres (2013), Josephine Machon deconstructs the nature of immersive performance, echoing van Hove’s position that the audience is the ‘heart of the work’; Machon suggests that the artistic imperatives of immersive performance stem from visual art practices, physical theatre and, in certain circumstances such as one to one performance, performance art.37 Whilst not claiming that van Hove’s work is part of the contemporary trend in immersive performance, it is worth remembering that in Roman Tragedies spectators can at points go up on stage and lounge on sofas, check their emails and visit the onstage bar. In later revivals, a social media feed was also set-up, where spectators could comment on the action; here, Pavis’s ‘power of stage illusion’ expands to the Twittersphere. Spectators are at once immersed in the set, undertake real activities and are at liberty to move around, get in the way of actors and talk to each other, plus can comment on the whole experience. These overlapping activities are of interest to van Hove since, as Machon writes, the palpably live event, here with immersive qualities, ‘colludes in a continuing, immediate and interactive exchange of energy and experience between the work and the audience’.38 Whilst the stage set of Roman Tragedies is clearly a constructed, fictional space, van Hove affirms ‘the naked experience itself became the focal point. Basically, we offered the audience an environment in which we provided new experiences’.39 Although it also allows audiences to be inside the playing area, Alexander Zeldin’s production Love (2016) works quite differently. This devised play, concerning the frustrating circumstances of two families living in temporary accommodation and caught up in the complexities of the benefits system, hinges its affects on troubling normative divides between actors and audience, the real, actual and performed. The set is a very close reproduction of emergency housing, providing a realist, narrative construction for the drama it houses. What Zeldin and designer Natasha Jenkins establish is an erasure of the stage and auditorium divide through two key strategies. At least part

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of the audience can take seats inside the performance space, butting right up to the activity in the shared communal kitchen area. Unlike in van Hove’s work though, actors remain inside their own dramatic world: the scenic mimesis provides the environment for the (hyper)naturalism of the actors’ performances, who never make contact with those who have become, perhaps more accurately, witnesses. Zeldin’s second strategy is to leave the house lights on. This resolute breaking of usual theatrical protocol means that actors and audience are in the same illuminated space. Audience members could also clearly see one another, again Zeldin’s tactic to implicate everyone in a shared situation. At Love’s conclusion, Zeldin reverses van Hove’s direction of travel between stage and auditorium: Anna Calder-Marshall exits, but via the front part of the main auditorium seating. She reaches out for supportive hands and, finally, physical contact is made between character and spectator. As Machon puts it, it is the environment that ‘gives permission to behave in a way that goes against convention, takes the space and the action within that space outside of the everyday’.40 Yet this final action is of the everyday and its power lies in the fact that caring, human contact is enabled and enacted in a fictional situation turned powerfully and extraordinarily actual. Zeldin’s performative implication is that the situation is shared; these characters are those of our society and, even in the title of the play, depict something for which we should all take responsibility. Whereas Love subtly shifts audiences into bearing witness, in Roman Tragedies Versweyveld’s environment allows a role or, more accurately, the refiguring of group behaviour as role, to emerge spontaneously. Even before his excursion into the auditorium, any spectators on stage during Mark Antony’s eulogy ‘become’ the public, the ‘countrymen’, through their close proximity and observation of the speech. As Thielemans puts it well, van Hove utilises these spectators as ‘both onlookers and decorative presences’.41 This apparently accidental collective forms not only a convenient crowd of ‘extras’ at the forum, fleshing out the space—or making it spatialised bodily—but also find themselves cast, in the eyes of other spectators, as the citizens for which Mark Antony’s rhetoric is intended.42 Here, spectators are more or less unwittingly enrol(l)ed as a wider community, moving them beyond their assembled ‘community and conviviality’ to pseudo-fictive presences.43

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Narrative and Representational Scenographies In her production of Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea (National Theatre, London, 2016), Cracknell expanded her attention to the detail of psychological realism to fill a big house of a set, which, here, is sliced in half. The action plays out in Hester Collyer’s flat, on one floor of the house, but here stretched widthways in Tom Scutt’s design; one half is her sitting room, the other the kitchen, with a door to the rest of the house in between. The unnatural breadth of space often caused a prowling, stalking movement patterning, emphasised by how the play is largely structured as long, two-handed scenes. Characters have to figure each other out physically as well as from inside the personal, high stakes machinations, where individuals each have so much to gain or lose. Cracknell created an intensity of focus within this expanse of staging; the position of furniture caused closer proxemics or provides islands for respite: resisting the implications of Rattigan’s ending, where Hester folds her lost lover Freddie’s clothes, Helen McCrory, as Hester, next cooked an egg (in real time), but, as if steeling herself for an independent future, was finally seen munching away, perched on her kitchen chair. At other times, sequences of emotional upheaval were physically condensed in the space; McCrory ended up at one point on the floor with Miller (Nick Fletcher), who reveals his own secrets, squashed up against a kitchen cupboard. Technically, Scutt created a composite set; parts of other rooms of the house were placed above the stage level and, via lighting and a gauze structure, could be made translucent. Beyond the named characters, Cracknell had a host of Collyer’s neighbours appear through these ‘walls’.44 They scuttled up and down stairs and were sometimes seen overhearing the various arguments in Hester’s front room. These sequences of the life of the wider house became extended interludes, or vignettes, between acts; in this play, everyone appears to go about their business, or spy on others, but each has a background that needs to be veiled. And instead of a clipped-speech naturalism, Cracknell and her company’s attention to research, biography, backstory and given circumstances became rooted in the often visible ‘off stage’ world. That an audience was also quite obviously meant to see around the sides of the set of The Deep Blue Sea recalled Stephen Daldry’s version of An Inspector Calls (from 1992). In this long-running, expressionistic production, the Birling’s house was miniaturised but opened out like a doll’s house as a sort of crucible for the action; similarly, the Lyttelton’s

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Theatre’s pulley lines were visible for The Deep Blue Sea, as well as the fan stage left to create wind. To coin a term, this created a posterior scenography, where both the wider world of the onstage action is manifested, but also the means of the production’s making. At times, this became more readily imagistic: McCrory suddenly crawls forwards on the floor, in a pictorial elongation of her grief, ubiquitous cigarette still poised; and after the revelation of Miller’s shady past, he is lit in his room above. Despite her focus on psychological realism, for Cracknell, a set is ultimately a constructed space to be sometimes undermined; as well as the aforementioned tipping at the end of Birdland, the entire set was sucked back into the auditorium at the end of Julie. As an anterior scenography, Cracknell and Scutt’s scenic choices ultimately resist mimetic staging, but demonstrate, instead, how the realism of performance can be housed in a place of obvious exposition. Cracknell also overtly uses sound to augment moments; after Hester and her estranged husband Collyer kiss, for instance, the underscore audibly swells. Sound sometimes also drew attention to otherwise ostensibly mundane activities, such as when Hester ponders her next move whilst apparently just buttering bread. The play relies, often, on the intervention of letters, so sound tended to peak when letters were pulled from envelopes. Here, Cracknell allies the acoustic to action not just as an accompaniment, but a counterpoint, highlighting the significance of moments in the action as interventions or, in acting terms, events. In this production, the scenography has, again, qualities of an installation, inside which Hester is spied on or overheard, and around which there is room for Cracknell again to draw attention, visually, kinaesthetically and aurally, to the house as a kind of crucible in which to examine the playing out of a situation. Van Hove too explores marital territory in Scenes from a Marriage, although, unlike Cracknell’s ultimately ‘fourth wall’ production, in which an audience is implicated through spatial decisions. The production shows the disintegration of the relationship between Johan and Marianne over some years and is based on Ingmar Bergman’s film script of the same name, which is itself based on the original 1973 TV series. In contrast to the slick technology of Roman Tragedies, van Hove and Versweyveld created a simpler theatricality for Scenes from a Marriage. The set comprises a suspended, heavy canvas structure that divides the performance space into three smaller areas. The audience too is divided into three groups, each beginning at a different point in the cycle of

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scenes played out three times over the first half of the performance. Inside this structure, van Hove presents Johan and Marianne at different stages of their lives, played by three different sets of actors. In one of the few press reviews for the 2013 London performances (of which there were only four), critic Michael Billington observes how ‘spatial experiment is combined with hyper-realism as we become intimate eavesdroppers on the collapse of a marriage’.45 Despite these structural interventions, the TGA’s dramaturg, Johan Reyniers, does not describe the production as an adaptation, since it is a staging of Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage as it exists on the page.46 Even if, as Reyniers implies, the production maintains and incorporates Bergman’s film script, still the staging radically adapts the form of the original to offer something different from the filmic experience. The stripped back aesthetic appears one step further than a late rehearsal: lighting is simply working lights, furniture is built from steel deck and rostra, and props are stand-ins. In the increasingly fraught, drunken dinner party section for instance, with the younger Johan and Marianne, ‘alcohol’ was quite obviously bottles of water. To recall Hutcheon’s terms, Bergman’s words may well remain intact, but the scenography evidently stages a showing of Scenes from a Marriage as an adaptation of form. To return to Pavis, van Hove creates an ‘echo of space’ through a physical echoing of the internal workings of dramatic situation in the material structure of the set itself and, crucially, the audience groupings’ journey through it. In his programme notes, van Hove explains: I wanted the actors to be very close to each other. But I also wanted the public to be very close to the actors. Physically and, as a consequence, mentally close. […] There is almost no music, no video at all. I am thrilled that after the lavish productions […] with lots of technical refinement, we will now focus totally on the actors, their emotions, voices and bodies.47

Stand-in props and mocked up furniture will clearly do for van Hove’s intent. Elsewhere, the set for Obsession had a bar area stage right, though this, like Scenes from a Marriage, was similarly bereft of decor; instead, plates for meals, without actual food, were served up, in order that van Hove could abstract the act of eating to shift focus onto the brewing, subtextual chemistry between Gino (Jude Law) and Hanna (Halina Reijn). And going further than the screen-based naturalism of the

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original Scenes from a Marriage, van Hove embeds the cyclical events and rituals of marriage in the evident, overt mechanics of the performance itself. In the first half of the production, the televisual origins of the original are cleverly exploited and extended by the new form. To bring audiences up close to the performance gives them an opportunity to examine its liveness as if on the TV or cinema screen, without van Hove requiring video to zoom in on the action. On occasion, characters also speak directly to spectators and even sit amongst them, ignoring any fourth wall pretence. Devoid of the paraphernalia of full-scale production, the work is thrown back on hyper-realistic acting and the double exposure of actor-characters, in which, albeit more explicitly than Love, we too are implicated in their relationship. Zeki’s stress on the process of seeing is theatricalised here, as van Hove draws attention to the act of watching since spectators can glimpse fragments of action in other scenes through the central windows. As the set is in no way sound-proof, we can also hear parts of the repetition of subsequent or preceding scenes: on occasion, actors even refer off the cuff to their ‘noisy neighbours’. In terms of the work’s performative process, the semi-obscured scenes are the ghosts or precursors of what we, as an audience, have experienced or will encounter; in terms of its content and Johan and Marianne’s marriage, it is as if their past haunts them and their future seems already mapped out and doomed. But van Hove offers a paradox: when not in a scene, actors are clearly visible in the central ‘green room’ and can be seen drinking water, eating fruit and doing the crossword. For the audience, the form is constantly being drawn attention to, just as if we might turn around in the cinema to see the flicker of the projection beam (Fig. 6.1). Even if they ‘already tell a story’, as he puts it, van Hove’s spaces clearly resist mimetic place and represent often multiple locations. The barren, grey width of the space for Antigone, walled to the rear with an expanse for projection and a disc-like sun, becomes a desert, the battlefield, a graveyard, but also the archive-like residence of the Chorus and, recalling the ancient Greek staging practice, Kreon’s palace, outside which the debates of the drama happen. Obsession further evidenced the pair’s preference for open performance spaces; this scenic design was, again, significantly wider than deep, creating a left-right pull to the space. Van Hove and Versweyveld’s sets are places to be filled with action and travelled through: in Antigone, entrances and exits happened

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Fig. 6.1  Scenes from a Marriage (Photo Jan Versweyveld)

on the letterbox, horizontal plane, broken, significantly, by the one entrance centre stage made by Kreon (O’Kane). At the far stage left end in Obsession, Hanna and Gino changed clothes, following a shared bath (in which underwear never quite got removed). This took place in the large, wheeled tank, which both fits the aesthetic of the mechanic’s shop in its actuality, yet, here, is dealt with as, again, a multifunctional locale rendered representational. The ‘story’ of van Hove and Versweyveld’s performance arenas is that moments are simultaneously actual and metaphorical. At times, objects are powerfully real: aside from mimed eating, a joint of meat suddenly appeared in Obsession, its fleshy actuality again an excess of substance in the otherwise abstracted arena. A mechanised, self-playing accordion punctuated the action with sound; objects such as Joseph’s gun (Hanna’s husband; Gijs Scholten van Aschat) suddenly burns in the space in its reality. Whilst working doors were placed upstage, curiously the vehicle in Joseph’s mechanic’s workshop was suspended above centre stage. Later, it dropped oil on the three central figures after the murder of Joseph. This kind of visual motif has been seen before in van Hove’s

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work, such as the shower drenching the ensemble in blood at the conclusion of A View from the Bridge and Hedda (Ruth Wilson) getting covered in tomato sauce in Hedda Gabler (2017). Van Hove’s choices might involve real substances and excess, but are visually impactful as emblematic portrayals of potentially violent acts.

(Making) Space Pavis identifies what he calls ‘the migration of subspaces’.48 But spaces do not migrate somewhere else; they briefly multiply inside the main space, so that smaller locations appear, then disappear. In practical terms, what Pavis really means is that individual ‘spaces’ may be moved on- or offstage, such that they add up to something more than the sum of their parts. He pins his explanation to Mnouchkine and designer Guy-Claude François’s Théâtre du Soleil production of Le Dernier Caravansérail (Odyssées) (2003), in which individual ‘spaces’ are presented on stage trucks, which are wheeled onstage by stage hands. For Pavis, these subspaces concern the presentation of isolation, borders or refugeeism, as micro-stories within the otherwise vast staging. In Scenes from a Marriage above, the isolation of smaller scenes comprises a larger scenic aesthetic and, in contrast to Pavis’s choice, one in which it is the spectators that migrate. Here, though, I consider two examples, in which a plurality of minimised locales sits inside an overall scenic choice that ultimately supports a monumental aesthetic. Like Mnouchkine’s production, scenes within the presentational complexity of van Hove’s The Fountainhead take place at or on tables, on a downstage couch, or are filmed from above. There are fights, a rape, each confined to isolated spaces. Peter Keating commits suicide seated upstage on a single chair, facing away from the audience yet simultaneously enlarged and isolated in close up on the rear screen. As Pavis puts it of Mnouchkine’s production, yet so apt here, ‘each is nonetheless a world in itself […] the space is not mimetic, and yet details of costume and movement are accurate; the attitude and the gestus [sic] of the violence are precise’.49 Mnouchkine’s mini-worlds thereby reveal the circumstances and meaning of acts. Through their own use of spaces within spaces in The Fountainhead, van Hove and Versweyveld deal with the enormity of individualistic actions drawn from a very long novel. Even if rooted in the prowess of the TGA actors, a fluidity of time and place is overall reinforced in the adaptation, facilitated by

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The Fountainhead’s performance space. The large area incorporates several wheeled architectural drawing boards, printers, including the very heavy industrial printing press, areas of seating or tables, some with office equipment, and a central area for musicians and sound operators. Cameras are suspended above each table allowing action to be projected, along with, at other times, moving images. Temporality is meddled with through specific objects: reel to reel tape players make the setting less than contemporary, yet the electric typewriters and modern printers make it more contemporary than the novel. Rand’s reference to the University of Stanford is changed in the adaptation to Stanton (both exist). As an adaptive and performative Gestus, van Hove and Versweyveld’s tactics recall the muddling of inter- and intratemporality discussed earlier. The mix of the particular within a broader, freer scenographic canvas thus frames the adaptation as a dramaturgy of memory or stream of consciousness. Monumental The monumental staging of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe co-production Phaedra(s) (2016), with a design by Małgorzata Szczęśniak, employs a space that serves as a stylistically cohesive location for the shifting narratives he explores. Like van Hove’s personalised encounter with Rand’s novel, Warlikowski’s Phaedra(s) is a grand, theatrical meditation on the figure of Phaedra, which incorporates parts of Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love (1996), sections of Euripides and Seneca’s versions of the Phaedra legend adapted by Wajdi Mouawad, and parts drawn from J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello (2003). Its scenic quality operates in a representational, if monumental, mode. Szczęśniak’s space appears to be simultaneously a bleak, if ultra-modern hotel room, a palace, and possibly a psychiatric ward. Warlikowski’s visual world is a cold, domestic interior, a sculptural-like near void with a sink, two overhead fans, a couch and on oversize mirror, in which Isabelle Huppert (Phaedra) prowled, rolled and languorously lurched. This is a similarly polished and crafted space as Versweyveld’s cuboid design for A View from the Bridge. Whilst a strategy of slowing down and elongating the body within space featured often, recalling moments of McCrory’s isolated physicality in The Deep Blue Sea, a characteristic of Warlikowski’s directing, at least as evidenced in Phaedra(s), is his strategy of making retrospective sense of such images. At one point, Huppert becomes covered in blood (on,

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of course, a white bed), then drags herself upstage, again a movement drawn out in its simple yet extended choreography. To recall FischerLichte, Warlikowski creates spatiality through the arrangement of the body. As in van Hove’s work, a live feed also offers a magnified view of Phaedra’s attempt to wash herself in the upstage shower. But only later do we hear the text ‘blood from my womb’, which makes retro-sense of Warlikowski’s earlier choices. Again, when Phaedra and her companions speak of Hippolytus, he appears on a recorded video projection, his presence doubled when, next, he crawls on stage (though two actors play Hippolytus in the complete production) on all fours. Phaedra demands, ‘tell me dog…’. Through this habit of showing then telling, Warlikowski prioritises the palimpsest of images within certain sequences, heightening the visual as a means, in Zeki’s terms, of acquiring particular knowledge of what is before us. It is no accident that status, or posturing, is conveyed architecturally through height. The extended vertical lines of buildings are clearly a display of grandeur; to be bigger and apparently better often means being taller. In Phaedra(s), even when trucking allows each scene of the Kane material to be wheeled in from stage left as if offered up for scrutiny, this is no platform (Pavis refers to Mnouchkine’s platforms as mansions) but a floor to ceiling set in itself.50 Like Yerma, this lair of Hippolytus is also enclosed in a box. Regardless of height, this scenic decision appears something of an emergent trope in contemporary scenography, seen too in Chloe Lamford’s design for Mitchell’s Ophelia’s Zimmer (Schaubühne Berlin, 2015) and used in the same director’s production of Cleansed (National Theatre, London, 2016), where the woman was wheeled on in a kind of transparent peep show cubicle. Similarly, Phaedra(s) offers a three-dimensional picture frame through which to heighten a sense of observation or examination, but has unnatural height. Zeki convincingly makes the case that modern art has explored lines as a dominant form; the paintings of, for example, Ellsworth Kelly, Kazimir Malevich, or the moving images of Hugo Demarco.51 Because of the movement orientated cells in the brain, horizontal and vertical lines tend to activate area V3; in his discussion of certain artworks, Zeki ­concludes ‘it is difficult to imagine stimuli that are better suited to excite the ­orientation plus motion (including the direction) selective cells of the visual brain’.52 But even if we accept that certain artists—and directors and designers—have unwittingly enjoyed making forms that stimulate brain parts, given that we cannot feel our brains getting excited, then we need to dig a little deeper into what might be happening in some

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moments of Warlikowski’s performance and its enjoyment of the grandeur of the vertical. Since it is a medium that seems to dwell in the horizontal, I would posit that it is comparatively rare to move the eyes up and down in the perception of theatre. Because the eyes are anyway constantly and slightly moving, the retinal image is displaced and the brain has to compensate. Extrapolating from Zeki’s explanation, this means V3 has to work relatively hard to make sense of an image because the eyes are never totally still.53 The comparative unfamiliarity of the vertical means that the business of seeing requires a little more brain power since the form has to be paid special attention to. As it is unusual, the vertical can be especially satisfying, as in the case of multiple actors lifted aloft on swings in Rimas Tuminas’s production of Eugene Onegin for the Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre of Russia (from 2013). This is a consciously created, beautiful and romantic image and returns us to Starr, who resolutely links aesthetic reward and feeling, since ‘aesthetic experience builds on emotional life as well as on our desires for beauty, awe, or wonder and for the pleasures they may bring’.54 In other words, we can recognise the offer of pleasurable romantic beauty especially clearly in the unusual verticality of Tuminas’s image, just as we can recognise the austere and ambiguous palatial form of Phaedra’s surroundings through, as Zeki stresses, shared brain concepts. As a deliberate aestheticisation, these choices are also a kind of visual foregrounding, a quite purposeful (literary) technique I explore further in the case of sound shortly. Kinetic Alongside van Hove and Versweyveld, Donnellan and Ormerod exemplify one of the longest director-designer partnerships in contemporary European Theatre. Examples of their recent Cheek by Jowl productions offer an opportunity to extend a consideration of neuroaesthetics and scenic design into the kinaesthetic, here not the movement of people but the viewed object. Although Zeki and others have prioritised an enquiry into static visual art (typically painting), Zeki does later consider kinaesthetic art in Inner Vision. In straightforward terms, kinaesthetic art suggests sculptural forms that move, for instance large, suspended mobiles, often hung in gallery atriums; it is worth noting that Wilson too has produced similar artworks.55

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Ormerod’s focusses his work resolutely on the needs of the play and how he can liberate the actors to fulfil the ideas of Cheek by Jowl’s overwhelmingly classical repertoire. He explains his approach pragmatically: ‘I always do a lot of dramaturgical work on the text: what does it suggest, what possibilities does it offer? I’m always keen to get a sense of what the actors think. But I need to move pretty quickly to get a set designed and costumes made’.56 Ormerod clearly primarily positions himself as a respondent to the text but, optimally, does not finalise the design until work has begun in the rehearsal room, even if this causes practical pressures. Like Donnellan’s approach to directing, Ormerod too is keen to allow space for the actor’s work, both interpretatively and practically. Ormerod’s sets are typically sparse, offering enough materially to support and liberate the corporeality of the actor and the key ideas of the play, and little else. His set for the (short lived) RSC Academy’s production of King Lear (2002) mainly used two large wooden trunks; Cheek by Jowl’s landmark production of As You Like It (1991, 1994) had, similarly, an almost bare stage until shards of green cloth tumbled from above to emblematise the environment; indeed, it is Rosalind’s line, ‘well, this is the forest of Arden’ (II.4) that shifts the locale, without the need for elaborate scenery.57 Cheek by Jowl’s Russian production of Measure for Measure (2013– 2015) incorporates design choices that offer Donnellan a means to show aspects of his and Donnellan’s understanding of the play as if exhibits. The production features three large, red, cube structures, framing a central entrance; contemporary industrial lanterns are suspended overhead. This is a stark, red and black environment, in which Isabella (Anna Khalilulina), clothed in her white nun’s habit, is clearly meant to stand out. The cube structures can be illuminated and spun; we see Isabella isolated in the central box, which turns to display her as if an object of purity, in contrast to the simultaneous sexual debauchery seen in the two outer cubes, as if rooms in Mistress Overdone’s whorehouse. Overall, the flexible or, more precisely, specifically kinetic set further allows Donnellan to reveal shifting locales and what goes on inside them, which, in this play, are very different worlds within the overall schematic. As the Russian press reviews acknowledge, it is quite clear that the wider world to which the production refers might be Putin’s contemporary Russia.58 This is a corrupt environment, full of sexual depravity and brutality. On the other hand, the production embraces its Russian

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sensibility through its religious iconography, the use of movement and dance in circles, and the sensuous use of music. A review captures this physical-aural feel of the work, describing how ‘the ensemble moves as a compliant herd, or joins hands in a folk dance. They pirouette; they waltz to folk music. Scene changes are handled deftly with performers zipping about the stage and short bursts of daunting industrial music’.59 The movement signatures seen in Cheek by Jowl’s earlier Cymbeline (2007) were sometimes similar, as characters sat via a turn or swirl. But, to undercut the physicality of Measure for Measure, much music is played live on the double bass, simply and stilly. The instrument becomes a scenographic object in itself as it is moved around the space almost like a piece of set. Within this moving world, the acting is physically expressive, muscular, full of close contact between actors and aided also by something of a recurring motif in Donnellan’s work, that of male actors stripped to the waist, the cellist included. If Pavis’s notion of ‘crossing the space’ implies the director’s absorption of design into the directorial process, Ormerod and Donnellan exemplify the incorporation of design into the concerns of dramaturgical investigation and elucidation, as well as the expressiveness of acting. In Measure for Measure, such concerns emerge as the display of the actor inside Donnellan’s otherwise typical emphasis on their presence and contact. As a pair, Ormerod and Donnellan ‘cross the space’, but they do so in another direction.

Figurative Robert Wilson’s production of Krapp’s Last Tape (2009), in which he performs, toured to London’s Barbican Centre in 2015 as part of its International Beckett Season. Wilson has a reputation as a complete theatre artist, typically not only directing and designing the scenic space for his productions, but also the lighting. Wilson also performs in Lecture on Nothing (2012), though with one other actor, which is a staging of the composer John Cage’s text of the same name. Furthering, its significance amid Wilson’s international productions, Krapp’s Last Tape represents his final step in his totalising artistic control, as he performs solo in the work. If, as Pavis maintains in his notion of ‘crossing the image’, the director instigates a collapse of intent in the dual work of designer and director, Wilson seems one of very few directors with no ‘image’ left to cross.

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In Krapp’s Last Tape, Wilson pulls together theatrical elements to offer a highly formalised production, which is, of course, indisputably all his own work. The opening sequence of the production is a bold gesture of Wilson’s intent: the slow rise of the curtain sets an initial rhythm and reveals a precisely lit set. A very high-volume thunderclap sound effect is cued simultaneously with a lighting change and the sound of rain. A lightning flash reveals Wilson: in this otherwise monochrome world, Wilson’s shock of hair, red socks and red eye sockets are striking, offering a deliberately bold interpretation of Beckett’s stage directions.60 This costuming fits into the already established, highly crafted aesthetic form, characterised also by the precise placing and use of objects. Wilson further establishes a formal, heightened gestural language by peeling bananas, as Beckett calls for, but in this production in a step by step, ritualistic method of eating them. Around him, what appear archival objects caught in stasis augment Wilson’s setting of the play in a kind of glacial audio museum. The one exception is the working tape recorder itself, which, as in so many productions, Wilson embraces as if the woman in the recollection of his failed love affair.61 In Wilson’s production, Beckett’s absurdism is, overall, clearly stretched towards a contemporary directorial formalism. Wilson’s acting style is formally expanded to his scenic conception; he reacts to the storm by raising his arms high and reaching back and away from the lightning flashes. In this production, the weather seems to trap Krapp in his den through its environmental force. Elsewhere, Wilson’s physicality is choreographic and heightened, as is, later his high pitched, sing-song vocality. This seems to take its cue from Beckett’s instruction that Krapp should enjoy the word ‘spooool’.62 In terms of acting, Wilson’s artificiality of control is built of reactions expressed and made form, rather than the realisation of a physical behaviourism caused by an ‘inner’ stimulus. Like so many of his productions, Wilson seems to treat the body and voice of the actor as scenic materiality, often through slow-­motion movement patterning and an extended vocal aesthetic. The ‘white face’ make-up used in Krapp’s Last Tape recalls, for instance, Wilson’s productions of The Life and Death of Marina Abramović (2011), or Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2009). As a scenic signature, Wilson’s make-up style becomes a mask, simultaneously to heighten the facial features of the actor, but also behind which to disappear. Given Wilson’s conflation of movement, image, music, song and speech in genre-blending

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productions close to the operatic (and Wilson is also an opera director), it is interesting to recall the etymology of ‘persona’ as that of the sound moving through the masks of the actors of the ancient Greek theatres. Sound A sound of a different sort and an overwhelming choice in Krapp’s Last Tape, at least during the first section, is Wilson’s use of unusually high-volume rain sound effects. Exaggerated sounds are also heard throughout: the opening and shutting of drawers and Krapp’s drinking, which in this case we do not see but only hear. Whilst Wilson’s performance in Lecture on Nothing is timed to an inflexible soundtrack, attesting to Cage’s own interest in time structures, sound and silence, the aural features of Krapp’s Last Tape are a conscious, crafted soundscape within which Wilson himself seems to perform the ‘music’ of the performance. Van Hove’s Obsession reveals a similar directorial ‘ear’. At one point, Gino hands Hanna a seashell, through which she hears the sound of the sea, but here expanded to the performance space to provide an acoustic sensuality to the sharing of a private moment. The amplified, artificially heightened tinkling of coins seems to exaggerate the value of money. Hanna’s French song emerges out of sudden silence; later her inner monologue is, extraordinarily, sung operatically, only to be cut off by the closing of the main doors. There is an emblematic, acoustic shaping to Obsession, a conscious drawing attention to the expressionistic use of sound. This is quite different from van Hove’s earlier A View from the Bridge, which is underscored entirely by an opera soundtrack, but both examples suggest a different approach than Wilson’s wall of sounded precipitation. It is instructive to consider sound in van Hove’s theatre work in the light of his extensive productions of opera. In Obsession, there is a variety of what can be understood as acoustic gestures, whereas van Hove’s classical soundtrack in A View from the Bridge alludes to the grand, dramatic territory of high opera, and offers a continuous, emotive sound experience. But in his discussion of van Hove, Francis Maes draws on Wagner’s use of motifs to demonstrate that sound, and music in particular, is not singular in function. Maes explores the tension between a kind of musical duplication of action, as if to reinforce its dramatic qualities, and the representation of ‘mental concepts that guide the drama’.63

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Rather than an underscore, van Hove’s choice of opera is better considered a musical accompaniment to, or comment upon the action of the play; it is alongside and amid, not underneath. For Maes, why such musical motifs ‘remain meaningful in a radically realistic setting may be attributed to this middle ground they occupy between the poles of mimesis and abstraction’.64 Van Hove and Versweyveld’s spaces also occupy a similar tension in their evident construction, yet actuality of function in their lack of mimetic pretension. To circle back to the beginning of this chapter for a moment, the drone effect to support the conclusion of Yerma is clearly a sounded representation of ‘Her’s’ madness. As we have seen, both Mitchell and Cracknell are prolific users of underscores like this, often reducing the volume of the various hums, rumbles and tones to an almost imperceptible level. These tactics surreptitiously sneak acoustic affect into our ears and brains; Starr reinforces an earlier point, that response to sound and music is, neurologically, fundamentally emotional.65 In his detailed analysis of the ‘musical brain’, Hjortkjær further confirms the emotional affect of music, which processes what the ears bring to it via the primary auditory cortex (PAC). This comprises various parts that deal with aspects of sound, including those concerned with emotional response and arousal; like direction orientated cells, the brain, astonishingly, even contains frequency selective neurons.66 Although pitch is an evident aspect of an underscore, Hjortkjær also draws attention to timbre; whilst not a structural element of music or sound, timbre is still ‘a crucial aspect of what people generally find pleasing or interesting in music’.67 Directors quite obviously intend that underscored sequences are perceived as threatening, disturbing, unbalanced or emotive in some way, just as Stone does at the end of Yerma. As a directorial strategy, underscoring functions because musical elements work together, so that the brain, Hjortkjær claims, forms ‘intuitions about tension and release patterns’ to effect a kind of colouring of action via added sound.68 To shift Zeki’s basic idea a little, certain tones, pitches and timbres are thus able to provide a sounded concept. The acoustic ‘coding’ inherent in underscoring thus relies on a ‘global recognition of different sound qualities’, as Hjortkjær continues. This patterning is related to the literary concept of foregrounding, seen especially in poetry through conscious—that is, foregrounded—techniques of rhyme and alliteration, for example. Miall argues that such techniques initially render an artwork defamiliarised, after which the brain

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very quickly assimilates and re-conceptualises what is, in this case, read. For Miall, it is formalistic features that trigger a process; they are ‘found striking (i.e. defamiliarizing) and arouse feeling; feeling, in turn, provides a context within which over time the unfamiliar aspects of the phrase are recontextualized’.69 Miall’s circular explanation means that we ‘re-read’ and perceive an underscored sequence via the feeling evoked through its sounding in the first place. The difference, to return to Krapp’s Last Tape, is that some of Wilson’s aurality is not an embellishment or signification nor, if considered foregrounding, a kind of aesthetic package that formalises meaning. In the case of the rain, the sound effect ceases to be that of ‘showing’ or, rather, making heard the rain, but becomes instead the sheer force of sound. It is very loud indeed. Since it overwhelmingly presents an assault to the ears, Wilson’s choice of sound level is not easy to understand. Yet it is nevertheless a directorial daring, an unavoidable decision of the performance, just like Hofesh Schechter’s dance theatre works, where, for instance, volume is an emblem of totalitarianism in Political Mother (from 2010). Just as Krapp is caught inside the looping action of listening to memories on his spools, Wilson also presents him trapped inside a strident, even unbearable acoustic he can apparently no longer keep in his own mind. In neuroaesthetic terms, there seems little reward in this Wilsonian racket. Yet a difficult to accept aesthetic, self-consciously drawing attention to itself, still remains neurologically proactive. Indeed, Starr includes potentially unpleasant experience in her evaluation of aesthetic affect, since ‘we might conclude that not only is the neuro-physiological space of emotion similar for aesthetics and daily life but also that the way in which emotions are evaluated (as positive or negative) is similar’.70 As we have seen elsewhere, Starr again invokes the similarities between daily and artistic experience. Usefully for an understanding of Wilson’s aural excesses, this suggests that the irritation felt in response to aggravating noise in an everyday situation could, for some audience members at least, very well be the same as the displeasure of Wilson’s rain. However, Starr maintains that, regardless of their tenor, emotions must be evaluated. An audience will at least always be conscious of Wilson’s choice in which his foregrounding absolutely demands aesthetic judgement. Wilson thus takes foregrounding to the extreme, such that the volume of sound becomes just that, amplitude, not merely the sound of rain.

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Total If, as Starr maintains, aesthetic appreciation is predicated on events, then in Needles and Opium Lepage offers slick and sequential appreciative experiences, constantly drawing attention to the means of their production. Needles and Opium toured in 2016 in a newly developed version of the 1991 original. Performed initially by Lepage, the piece is semi-­ autobiographical; Lepage created it ‘after a painful break-up’ as, in part, ‘a reflection on the impulses and sometimes painful situations that drive certain artists to create’.71 Lepage’s conceit is that Jean Cocteau, Lepage himself and Miles Davis have each lost a lover (‘Robert’ is now played by Marc Labrèche, recalling how ‘Simon’ was later played by another actor in Complicité’s The Encounter). The production is partly a meditation on addiction, narcotic or otherwise. It is also a set of connections: Davis died as Lepage started work on the production and Davis visited Paris at about the same time as Cocteau went to New York. Lepage thus uses coincidences to collide and compare characters and situations across time and space. Robert, Davis and Cocteau are put inside a shared place theatrically, as well as metaphorically and emotionally, that of Lepage’s suspended, spinning cube structure, which offers another example of the kinetic (Fig. 6.2). In the first version, only Lepage appeared and Davis was only heard. Rather than a revival, the later version is really a reworking, which allows Lepage to unleash an astonishing visual display. The production incorporates some stage level action, but is mainly placed inside the ­ open-sided, spinning cube structure, with numerous hatches and doors. It also makes great use of flying or suspension: Wellesley Robertson III, as Davis, appears upside down and spinning whilst playing the trumpet; later he slides down from a very off-kilter window to meet his lost lover, Juliette Gréco, in the bath; and Cocteau flies skywards, ‘writing in a nocturnal sky’.72 Here, the body is made attractive in neuroaesthetic terms, and in a step further than McCrory and Huppert’s foregoing physical elongation. To return to Calvo-Merino and Christensen’s perspectives on dance, these authors demonstrate that the brain perceives the body via movement, allying the visual and motor areas of the brain. They conclude, logically enough, that whole body movements are especially effective; they affirm ‘the more we like a movement, the more a particular set of brain regions (here parietal and occipitotemporal cortices) is

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Fig. 6.2  Marc Labrèche in Needles and Opium, Barbican Theatre, London (Photo Tristram Kenton)

active’.73 If Lepage keeps flying bodies around us, there is (in the case of flying into the starry sky, for instance) more obvious reward. For Lepage, directing is conceived here as the realisation of extraordinary images, but also the sometimes actual up-ending of the body so that it is seen anew. As an aesthetic, it is a foregrounded, even choreographic, phenomenon. As well as the moving cube, Lepage travels between locales and visual references through very sophisticated videographic projections allied to the scenic structure. The filmic aesthetic is squarely, if self-­regardingly, placed: after the prelude-like first scene, titles roll. Lepage’s filmic environment subsequently allows for rapid and fluid shifts of place and atmosphere. In one sequence, Davis appears sequentially in the street, on a balcony, is hit by a car, then is in a room, and finally goes to a pawnbroker to raise cash by parting with his trumpet. Particular projected images also sometimes arrive before a rotation of the set is completed,

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augmenting fluidity. This is especially effective for the sequences of drug-induced hallucination, when an oversize syringe is projected to inject drugs. Rather than Wilson’s expanded acting style in Krapp’s Last Tape, and unlike the showmanship of Cocteau, Labrèche, as Robert, nevertheless maintains a realism of acting within the animated set. It is the shifting, pictorial locales inside the movable cube, which becomes a mechanised body, from which we derive reward. Given Starr and others’ further stress on the brain’s constant evaluation of aesthetic experience, part of the pleasure of experiencing Lepage’s work is that he does not hide the means of its construction. It is impossible not to notice the clever, synchronised scenic shifts or the fact that actors fly in mid-air with visible wires. Yet, like Wilson, Lepage is a total(ising) theatre artist. What we perceive is a hybrid of sound, theatre and film, even literature, since words can sometimes only be read through projection. Lepage’s aesthetic bounds a central, human story in a built, mutating space, which affords the visually virtuosic. Although very different pieces of work, what connects Lepage’s Needles and Opium and Donnellan and Ormerod’s Measure for Measure is movement; Lepage aligns the shifting projections with a spinning box, and boxes too spin in Ormerod’s set. Although each part of the ‘visual brain’ work together, we should remember Zeki’s isolation of the V4 area, concerned with movement. Although Lepage’s impressive cube departs from older examples of monochrome kinaesthetic art to shift chromatically, we are nevertheless aware and able to make an objective aesthetic evaluation of its structure, upon which colour is principally added through projection. On the other hand, Ormerod’s turning boxes in Measure for Measure remain red and it is instead their turning that shifts perception. Both these sets develop the idea of scenography from that of a static set to a scenic construction as an animate object and, here, a kinaesthetically determined art object.

Echoes of Space Krymov combines design and directing with a fundamental interest in pedagogy; his theatre work is simultaneously visionary and homespun, celebrating the craft of the artisan and the inventiveness of his professional-student ensembles. Following his training as a designer at the Moscow Art Theatre School (graduating in 1976), Krymov began his theatrical career designing for his famous director father Anatoly Efros (1925–1987). After abandoning the theatre to pursue a successful career

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as a painter for twelve years from 1990, Krymov joined David Borovsky as his assistant at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (RATI-GITIS), where he founded his own design course in 2004. Krymov’s position has evolved from designer, to painter, designer-teacher, designer-director, to director. Krymov maintains his own self-expression drives his professional work, claiming ‘all my performances are looking for friends with whom I can talk about my feelings, my troubles’; this statement, an emotive, extended metaphor is a particularly personal one.74 Krymov’s later theatre has been described as furthering the work of his mentor, Borovsky, in ‘active design’, in which elements are made or painted as part of the performance.75 In one sequence in Opus No. 7 (2008) for example, the actors throw black ink onto the rear paper walls, which drips down to the floor. Semi-circular black cut-outs are stapled above the ink to which black wool is attached. The image of orthodox Jews appears. The performers produce flick knives and cut around the fragile, cowered shapes: the flaps created in the set bob back and forth, as if the Jews are at prayer. Next, shards and shards of newspaper are blown out through the created gaps, covering the auditorium and spectators with fragments of Russian newspaper. Rather than narrative or even, often, words, Krymov’s work is typically structured through this kind of inventive, image-based logic (Fig. 6.3). Clearly rejecting traditional design training, which he finds ‘dead’, Krymov instead works immediately with students on practical theatre work.76 Like their teacher, some of Krymov’s students are hybrid artists, making theatre as both designers and performers. Material is created, problems solved and learning happens very much ‘on the job’ over a five-year duration. Krymov has drawn a number of students into his professional work, some of whom now design in their own right with Krymov named separately as director, and has won several awards alongside them.77 He makes a clear distinction between his student-based and independent practice though: in his teaching, Krymov has said that he is primarily interested in drawing out the ideas of the students, who work as designer-performers, attending to how ideas find theatrical form.78 Following various internal rearrangements at the RATIGITIS and Krymov’s increasing identification with the role of director, his course has now largely been subsumed into the school’s directing programme.79 In his independent productions, Krymov keeps his more experienced professional actors separate from the design element. More

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Fig. 6.3  Opus No. 7 (Photo Dmitry Krymov Lab/Natalia Cheban)

recently, Krymov has established a laboratory at Anatoly Vasiliev’s School of Dramatic Art, comprising graduates of RATI-GITIS and the Shchukin Theatre Institute. Despite its ad hoc beginnings, Krymov’s work has, like many significant contemporary directors, an international presence. The two productions I discuss here were performed at London’s Barbican Centre: Opus No. 7 was presented as part of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) (2014) and a later work, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) had previously appeared at Stratford-upon-Avon, having been commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. But these productions are explicitly credited as designed by others: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) by Vera Martynova and Opus No. 7 by Martynova and Maria Tregubova. Krymov maintains what he terms an ‘intentionally ‘ignorant’ method of working’.80 Much like Lecoq’s via negativa, through which Lecoq rejected emerging performance material that was not working in order eventually to find the ‘right’ way to do something, Krymov does not start with a conception of how something might be achieved, but allows

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the work itself to reveal its direction.81 Other than a hands-on attention to design, Krymov has no fixed devising methodology, speaking instead of creating ‘hundreds of versions’ of the draft performance.82 Krymov’s contemporary practice collides objects, structures, bodies, puppets and painting-as-action.83 The work incorporates music, movement and only some spoken text. Vernacular I align Kymov and his designers’ rough and ready praxis with the vernacular and architecture in particular. Vernacular architecture contrasts to the ‘polite’. Rather than the engineered materials and clean lines of contemporary or modernist architecture, or the overt decorativeness of some historical building, the vernacular suggests the rural, the utilitarian and pragmatic; a barn is an obvious example. Vernacular architecture may become romantic in its rough-hewn nature, yet also reflects societal, labour or environmental conditions. Krymov and his collaborators achieve a certain aesthetic since, in the vocabulary of vernacular studies, it embraces what is ‘everyday’.84 Krymov’s motley company paints, builds, drills and saws. In ‘Shostakovich’, the second part of Opus No. 7, the group’s technical team also appears, costumed as the actors and thus conceived as part of the ensemble, and build a rough-hewn piano on stage with power tools. This is a different reworking of materials in performance than with the paper flattage in part one: rather than a refashioning, this is a created object, made out of what appears to be wood found left lying around at Krymov’s laboratory, and here shifted on stage. In this case, the labour of design, and specifically set-building, becomes labour in performance in an overall approach to theatre where design is evident construct, not aesthetic packaging (Fig. 6.4). One definition of the vernacular in the built environment is that of the ‘local’, which should be understood beyond a geographical sense of ‘community’.85 Whilst theatre may not be vernacular in the anthropological sense of significance of place historically, Krymov and his collaborators’ practice is ‘local’ in that his laboratory generates a particular approach to design, undertaken by a more or less defined group, and delimited by the milieu of its making. As Garfinkel suggests, a placebased comprehension of the vernacular ‘directly unites people with their

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Fig. 6.4  Opus No. 7 (Photo Dmitry Krymov Lab/Andrew Freeburg)

inanimate spaces’; in performance and scenographic terms, this tight connection causes action.86 Krymov’s actors and onstage technicians find themselves in surroundings that overtly invites or unites the use of paint, the working of stage machinery, makeshift musical bands, objects that appear and disappear and the visible operation of often huge, if roughhewn, puppets. The first part of Opus No. 7, ‘Genealogy’, is a slowly evolving, imagistic and musical exploration of Jewishness: musicians and singers assemble photos, which are laid out on the stage floor and a family tree is spoken (‘Abraham begat Isaac…’); a video projection of a Nazi officer, complete with the sound of menacing footsteps, appears; shoes tumble out of walls, an image redolent of the concentration camps; a group of children is drawn on the back wall and a cut-out arm pops up to grasp the hand of the (human) adult. Although these images are striking in their apparent simplicity, formed by a collision of the rough-hewn and, often, musical beauty, Krymov inflects this pragmatism politically. In the programme to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It), Elena Dyakova describes Krymov’s theatre as

230  A. J. LEDGER […] live art performance[s], or a collage slowly turning into another collage. […] In the spirit of arte povera there is an edgy sense of the poor the wounded and worn-out flesh of objects, costumes and characters from Soviet-era Russia appear from one work to another. The shabby overcoats of ancestors killed during the 1930s and 1940s […].87

In Krymov’s laboratory, collaborators use and refashion objects and materials around them, but like many artists, a shared aesthetic suggests ideological sensibilities across an oeuvre. Krymov’s spaces do not pretend to be anything other than performance space; they offer a stripped-back aesthetic, devoid of the traditional theatrical trappings of a fictive or mimetic set. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It), proceedings are also overseen by artisan figures who embody the vernacular. The performance centres on their efforts to put on a performance for the assembled dignitaries, who are seated (at least in the London version) on two scaffold seating blocks either side of the sloping space, with built-in footlights, and initially covered with polythene, still showing its sticky-tape repairs.88 In Krymov’s design, carried on by the next generation of his tutees which includes those who now design for him, figures make meaning by what they do in relation to the design, they do not operate within a passive set that claims to be something that it is not. Ideas Although his practice is delightfully handmade, I suggest that Krymov’s theatre furthers our pre-existing brain-based forms and can rely, instead, on an expanded representation of shared ideas. In Opus No. 7 for instance, Mother Russia—or rather the Soviet state—glides around in the guise of an enormous puppet, which dominates the figure of Shostakovich. Zeki provides one way to understand Krymov’s practical mutations. He takes issue with the Platonic Ideal (that there exist ideal forms, external to the mind) though approves, to some extent, the Hegelian Concept (Hegel’s view that the brain generates an idea), both of which require ‘stored records’ in the brain.89 Since many ideas can be expressed in many forms, these records are really the understanding of something; for instance, and to stick with objects, we know what a house is, but can imagine many different kinds, or recognise several different

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pictures of houses we have never seen before as still the idea of ‘house’. In his discussion, Zeki thus quotes and troubles the Cubist statement […] ‘to discern a form is to verify a pre-existing idea, an act that no-one, save the man we call an artist, can accomplish without external assistance’. But what is this pre-existing idea, save the same stored visual record of a brain that has been exposed to many forms.90

Krymov relies on our shared visual records and an understanding that, by and large, we will know something of the oppressive Soviet regime—a recurring aspect of Krymov’s work—and can further conceive of the idea in the form of an enormous mannequin. Allied to design elements, the extremities of Krymov’s physical theatre become an allegory in his critique of the Soviet state. In ‘Shostakovich’, the figure of the composer is constantly manipulated, quite literally by being pushed, pulled and even suspended from a chandelier. Later, a parade of pictures depicting, amongst others, Meyerhold and Mayakovsky appear and Anna Sinyakina’s angular, tense physicality as Shostakovich is skewered by a huge state medal. Later, Shostakovich’s music accompanies a crazy piano ballet, performed by dodgem-car style rusty metal pianos. In contrast to this action-design creativity, the video sequences of ‘Genealogy’ are sophisticated and interactive: a football, previously only seen on screen, is thrown from backstage and used in an impromptu game, with paint-buckets as goalposts. More than A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It), Krymov thus develops a taxonomy of image making in Opus No 7. Spectators can engage either or both with the boldness of the bodily image, with objects, with active design that is especially transformative, or the plane of the very wide performance space. As might be suggested in covering the audience with bits of newspaper in Opus No 7, the audience is readily acknowledged in Krymov’s practice. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) the house lights are also left up for the majority of the first part. The production is an extended version of the play-within-the play ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, staged by the Mechanicals. Prior to the performance, the actors, in the guise of The Mechanicals, are present, and, once the performance is underway, call on spectators to help bring what seems to be their scenery down towards the stage from the auditorium: this includes various bits of tree trunk and branches, as well as a

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leaking fountain that, in a step further than the newspaper deluge, sprays the first few rows of seating. Even at its outset, the production exemplifies Pavis’s notion earlier of ‘the powers of stage illusion’, but playfully disrupts it as the Mechanicals’ bits and pieces are carried over the stage and away, suggesting that the performance to follow will clearly reject the traditional paraphernalia of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is to be no pretend forest here: instead, the makeshift stage is stripped of its polythene cover, industrial lights are switched on and footlights cranked out of the downstage part of the platform, all in some contrast to the huge chandelier suspended above. A pseudo-intellectual text signals that the Mechanicals are undertaking deeply artistic work about the history of love: Pyramus and Thisbe are their example and appear, like Mother Russia, as enormous puppets. As with words in general in many of Krymov’s productions, hardly any Shakespearean text itself is spoken: even when it comes, Peter Quince’s speech to the assembled court is paraphrased. Again, reference to the Soviet era is made: like Opus No 7, Meyerhold appears, but this particular history of love must incorporate mention of his murdered wife, Zinaida Raikh.91 Taken together, these two productions offer especially rich examples of directorial multi-modality in design, as well as how Pavis suggests the activation of a plurality of scenographic principles. Vernacular design elements populate the stage such that Krymov’s spaces are no mere ‘echoes’, as Pavis puts it, but arenas of dynamic, vernacular storification through the assembly of the found and repurposed. This is not a reverberation, but a mode of performance that combines acting and design, which formulates the place of its activity as the spatiality (Fischer-Lichte) of imagistic telling. Objects and Puppets Krymov’s director-design aesthetic can be traced back to his teaching, where students approach their work step by step and logically through physical actions expressed not by acting but by ‘cobbling together props, costumes, and other objects using hammers, scissors, knives, cardboard, shocks of cloth, wire, string, felt pens, paint, clay […]’.92 Although she points out that cognitive science has paid limited attention to objects, Melissa Trimingham’s perspectives offer a way to consider Krymov’s

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choices. As Trimingham points out, cognitive science has tended to see objects purely as material elements, which are handled or interacted with, but not in any way imaginatively transformed: quoting Chris Sinha, Trimingham exposes the essentialist view that an object is often perceived as a ‘curiously abstract thing, lacking semiotic and fictional value, any object being substitutable for any other object’.93 Instead, theatre, and this case Krymov’s active design, takes objects and renders them, as Trimingham puts it, ‘vehicles of meaning’.94 The same can be said of the puppets in Opus No 7 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It), which are, basically, very big, pre-constructed objects that can be animated. Krymov’s puppets provide the director with a means to dominate the visual field. Both Mother Russia and Pyramus and Thisbe are several metres high and have long, out of proportion arms that reach huge distances across the performance space. Their bodies are adept at making spatiality without having to move particularly far; a long limb hinges and space is activated. Yet in spite of their scenographic dominance, these figures are outsiders; even though Mother Russia has both visual and political powers over all she surveys, she remains ever aloof as the anthropomorphised metaphor of the Soviet regime. The huge forms of Pyramus and Thisbe serve as the objects of the Mechanicals’ performance, yet, paradoxically, find it difficult to embody love since their fallible body parts fall-off. In changing the action of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Bottom and Flute play Pyramus and Thisbe, respectively (maintaining their human stature in more typical productions), Krymov makes his version the story of how the Mechanicals perform their mini-production as an oversized event that demands visual attention. An interesting difference from Opus No 7 is that the actors operate the puppets as well as voice them, but separate themselves from the structure to perform as the character also. Here, again, is the shifting of modes not only in terms of scale but also of what is performing. The striking size and presence of the puppets, yet also their clumsiness, can only be fulfilled in terms of detail by the real body of the actor, able to operate precisely. But the actor can also step away from what is, really, an animated machine, to take on the character of Pyramus or Thisbe her/himself. Drawing on her own practice, Trimingham discusses the notion of distributed cognition (sometimes called extended cognition), which

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seeks to account for how the mind ‘expands’ into an environment via particular objects; this offers some explanation of an actor’s relationship with a puppet, as well as through it into space. As Trimingham suggests, the example of using navigation instruments to be cognisant of, comprehend and make decisions about a complex task demonstrates distributed cognition; using the Internet might be seen similarly or, in theatre terms, programming and operating a lighting board, which is no mere button pushing, but a way cognitively to ‘expand’, through lighting, into space to conceive and produce changes in illumination. But when the actor uses the puppet, s/he is able to relate to the theatrical environment through the ‘instrument’ of the puppet, an object which also operates in ‘a storied world’.95 The actor is thus able to ‘think’ her/himself into the fictive given circumstances, whilst simultaneously focussing on the more technical task of operating the puppet. This goes some way to explain how the puppeteer manages to ‘perform’ in an environment not immediately or haptically available to them. Krymov’s puppets are, then, the supreme expression of ‘active design’ in that the puppets link design and elementary engineering to acting and the portrayal of character, yet always within an expanded relationship to space. Sustain Juan A. García-Esparza suggests that the vernacular is a sustainable approach, using what is available, an approach clearly evident across Krymov’s oeuvre.96 If, as Fischer-Lichte argues, performance is always an event—and, as we have seen, Starr further suggests an aesthetic encounter is always an event—then Krymov’s active design stages events inside events. His is a theatre of ‘spatiality [which] emphasizes the nature of performative space as constantly mutating’.97 Events occur in the constructed nature of the space, as well as the performance that will be constructed in it and are placed before spectators through the absence of mimetic or figurative elements. Even if continuing something of the tradition of Borovsky, Krymov’s is a craft and aesthetic in and of its own context of production; Krymov’s productions are ‘not so much the creation of place where things happened’ but ‘the action itself ’.98 This is not design for theatre, but a theatre of the designer. Krymov thus collapses Pavis’s separated notions of scenography and mise en scène, since his active design simultaneously sustains both.

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Taxonomy, Typology, Modality Despite their evident interest in other aspects of theatre-making, in this chapter design can clearly be seen as fundamental to a number of directors’ conception and realisation of a production. Many also feel the need repeatedly to focus design from production to production through a key collaborator; as Oddey puts it, the desirability of a ‘developed sense of shorthand, of language, gesture and vocabulary pertinent to their process of working together, can be depended on within the organics of the rehearsal room’.99 ‘Organics’ suggests how a familiar interpersonal creative dialogue houses cumulative artistic choice, which, even if conceived through the kind of creative processes outlined earlier in the Introduction, are, as Oddey suggests, typically shared. These partnerships can exist at a level of managing fundamental organisational, company and creative choices: like Versweyveld, Ormerod is involved in decisions about projects but also casting; both he and Donnellan are, significantly, both named as Cheek by Jowl’s artistic directors, offering a joint status to the designer. A regular design collaboration establishes many directors’ particular aesthetic ‘signatures’: to take Mitchell as an example, the astonishing detail of her realism finds form in her long-term collaboration with Mortimer, where a repeated aesthetic of domestic and institutional decay also appears. Mitchell’s work in Germany is predominantly designed by Eales, whose realism sometimes slides, especially in the live cinema work, towards the functionality of, here, Lepage’s cuboid machine. On the other hand, directors such as van Hove more or less finalise a set long before rehearsal, and the pre-emptive formation of such spaces is overwhelmingly Versweyveld’s contribution to the realisation of van Hove’s ideas. Even if it places the director-designer conversation earlier, as a clear spatial determination of what is to come, this particular partnership undermines the supposed ‘organics’ of a later process in rehearsal. On the other hand, it is Krymov who playfully stretches ‘organics’ to the extreme in his vernacular process where design emerges in the moment of rehearsal. Although I have drawn out selected directors’ work for expanded discussion, I suggest that all director and designers’ practice should be considered an active aesthetic. The designer Chloe Lamford describes the aims of her work as ‘making metaphor […] anything kinetic, that takes an idea and dismantles it’.100 Lamford’s often playful, interactive

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designs tend to explode ideas out from the work in question to form pictorial representations; as well as the aforementioned design for Ophelia’s Zimmer, her design for Mitchell’s production of Lungs (Schaubühne Berlin, 2014) obliged actors and technicians to pedal dynamo bikes to provide power for the performance of this play concerning environmental impact. As Lamford puts it, ‘I design quite dramaturgically’.101 Despite this kinetic imagination, Lamford reinforces how the designer, for her, does not work in isolation, but alongside and in collaboration with a writer and, in her case, particularly the director.102 The flip side to this arrangement is, of course, that the director too works in collaboration, expressing the play in spatial-pictorial terms through their designer. In contemporary terms, directing appears far from the staging of a play inside some kind of passive, representational box. Spatiality is activated through a dynamic, conceptual manifestation. What is missing in Fischer-Lichte’s helpful definitions though is the presence of a set, which, however, defined, appears in each example in this chapter. Whatever its form or genre, and even if the more conceptual visualisation of a play’s ideas structure in Lamford’s work, a set forms a created space within extant architecture. It is the set that provides the conditions and invites the possibility of a more kinaesthetic and, as with the example of Yerma I began with, transformative spatiality.103 And in Krymov’s case especially, the transformation of image and action, indeed its creation in the first place, happens in the moment of performance. Pavis conceptual, even esoteric, renderings of the nature of scenography gives rise to a taxonomy of design, which, here, I have reconfigured in practical terms. As can be seen, realist-naturalist productions do not merely sit inside a passive set, but interact with what are better conceived as environments. Here, space becomes place, which can be simultaneously mimetic and still evidently created, as in the examples of The Deep Blue Sea and The Cherry Orchard. Versweyveld too creates places, but resolutely of performance and to elaborate van Hove’s stress on the performing body. These factors are expanded in some of Warlikowski’s work, where a grandeur of intellectualism matches the stretching of the body and a monumental form in the case of Phaedra(s). Needles and Opium is eventful directing inside Lepage and his colleagues’ aesthetic machine; in the case of Wilson, this kind of totality is subsumed into a complete, and individuated, theatrical Gestus. In the Wilsonian aesthetic, even objects are afforded a presence quite different from that of

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Krymov’s performance making. In Krapp’s Last Tape, objects are specimens, not transformative materials; Wilson’s hands hover over Krapp’s accumulated artefacts, some placed on ordered shelving full of neat piles of paper, lit with precise shards of light. This refinement contrasts to the vernacular creative pleasures of Krymov’s conception, where the director draws attention to the circumstances of visual making. In real terms, the directorial scenic Gestus is a typology or modality. For example, the appearance of glass boxes in contemporary work concerns a particular concern with viewing and voyeurship. Evident too in nearly all the work discussed in this chapter is the scenically kinaesthetic. An interest in movement is liberated through design in certain directors’ productions, offering, through the eye, particular reward via the motor areas of the brain. Further, the directorial interest in a ‘telling’ through pictorial movement has served to align some of Zeki’s thinking, so resolutely pinned to two dimensional artworks (except in the case of his later exploration of literature and music), to a sometimes travelling three dimensionality. The use of underscore too seems common in contemporary directing; these embellishments comprise a set of acoustic codes and are clearly meant knowingly to create atmosphere or emotional affect. In each of these cases, scenic choices are clearly a primary means by which directors construct and convey knowledge. A better way to understand design is not through particular ontologies—what the set ‘is’—or how it may be defined in relation to another scenographic mode but, in terms of the director, what it does and why.

Notes





1. The production was very successful, gathering ‘Best Actress’ for Billie Piper and ‘Best Revival’ awards at the 2017 Olivier Awards. The production was revived at the Young Vic in 2017, and in New York in 2018. 2. Zeki, Inner Vision, 167–182. 3.  Susannah Clapp, ‘Yerma Five-Star Review—Billie Piper Is EarthQuaking as Lorca’s Heroine’, The Guardian, 7 August 2016, https:// www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/aug/07/yerma-review-young-vicbillie-piper-simon-stone (accessed 22 February 2018). 4. This was achieved through the use of two sliding stage floors, one above the other. One could be slid out to be prepared off stage, before repositioning it above or below the flooring of the scene that had just concluded, before repeating the process.

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5. Like in van Hove’s work, the actors were also miked but, here, both to amplify their voices trapped inside Perspex and to aid a low-key realism. This technique has also appeared in Katie Mitchell’s practice, for example, Anatomy of a Suicide (Royal Court, London, 2017) and Schlafende Männer (Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg, 2018). 6. Jack Knowles, a lighting designer, has also worked with Mitchell across several productions, some of which have used light sources other than theatre lanterns. 7. Thielemans, ‘Passionate’, 458. 8. Pavis, Mise en Scène, 72. 9. Ibid. 10. Zeki, Inner Vision. 11. See, for example, Beckett’s, Come and Go (1966), Footfalls (1976), and What Where (1983). 12. Alison Oddey, ‘The Organics of the Rehearsal Room’, in White, ed., Directors and Designers, 95. 13.  Ibid., 94. Lloyd, and her production of Mary Stuart, features further in Adam J. Ledger, ‘Great Britain’, in Fliotsos and Vierow, ed., International. 14. Pavis, Mise en Scène, 63. 15. Ibid., 66. 16. Ibid.,  69. 17. Ibid., 76. 18. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative, 107. 19. Susan Garfinkel, ‘Recovering Performance for Vernacular Architecture Studies’, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 13: 2 (2006/2007): 106–114 (106). 20. Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 21. Zeki, Inner Vision, 16. 22. Zeki, ibid., 197–204. 23. Respectively: Zeki, ibid., 102 and passim; 118–125; 101 and 197–204. 24. See also Helmut Leder and Pablo P. L. Tinio’s account of how the eye is drawn to basic geometric shapes; ‘Experimental Aesthetics’, in Lauring, ed., Neuroaesthetics, 54–57. Theatre-in-the-round might be an exception, and a form I have worked in and enjoyed because of its flowing and kinaesthetic properties outside of a front-on arrangement. On the other hand, it is instructive to realise that, in the UK at least, there are only four permanent theatres-in-the-round (or near to that configuration): the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough; the New Vic Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme; the Royal Exchange, Manchester; and the Orange Tree, Richmond. The latter is in fact square.

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25. Di Benedetto, Provocation, 31–35. 26. Zeki, Inner Vision, 68. 27. See Chapters 3 and 4. 28. A. Hickling, ‘Peter Grimes’, Grand Theatre, Leeds, The Guardian, 28 October 2006, in Oddey, ‘Organics’, 99. 29. Thielemans, ‘Passionate’, 456. 30. Ibid., 458. 31. Willinger, Ivo van Hove, 44. 32. Ibid., 45, original emphasis. 33. Thielemans, ‘Passionate’, 457. 34. Pavis, Mise en Scène, 71–76. 35. Thielemans, ‘Passionate’, 458. 36. Ibid., 455. 37. Josephine Machon, Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 22. 38. Ibid., 44. 39. Thielemans, ‘Ivo van Hove’, 458. 40. Machon, Immersive, 137. 41. Thielemans, ‘Ivo van Hove’, 458. 42. A similar tactic was used for Nicholas Hytner’s production of Julius Caesar at the Bridge Theatre, London (2018); see https://bridgetheatre.co.uk/whats-on/julius-caesar/ (accessed 22 February 2018). 43. Machon, Immersive, 144. 44. Cracknell has an ensemble tactic of using understudies actively in a production, seen too in her subsequent production at the National Theatre, Julie [2018], where the wider company performed as party guests. 45. Michael Billington, ‘Scenes from a Marriage—Review’, The Guardian, 15 November 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/nov/ 15/scenes-from-a-marriage-review (accessed 23 July 2018). 46. Johan Reyniers, correspondence with author, 5 August 2014. 47.  Ivo van Hove, in programme to Scenes from a Marriage (London: Barbican Theatre, 2013). 48. Pavis, Mise en Scène, 73. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 73. 51. Zeki, Inner Vision, 136–142. 52. Ibid., 138. 53. Ibid., 141. 54. Starr, Feeling Beauty, 21.

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55. Wilson’s ‘La Traviata’ chandeliers, based on set elements from his production of La Traviata (2015), were installed in the Acropolis Museum, Athens. 56. Andrew Dickson, ‘“Tom Hiddleston Sang a Boyband Number”: Nick Ormerod on Cymbeline’, The Guardian, 1 August 2016, https://www. theguardian.com/stage/2016/aug/01/tom-hiddleston-was-pureclown-in-cymbeline-he-sang-a-boyband-number (accessed 5 September 2017). 57. The RSC Academy was a project for younger actors, intended to develop their experience and skill in performing classic text. 58. Cheek by Jowl’s website prioritises Novaya Gazeta’s view that the production is a shattering portrait of contemporary Russia, http://www. cheekbyjowl.com/measure_for_measure.php (accessed 5 September 2017). 59.  Steve Dow, ‘Measure for Measure Review—Russians Add Layers to Shakespeare’s Problem Play’, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jan/09/measure-for-measure-review-russians-add-layers-toshakespeares-problem-play (accessed 5 September 2017). 60. Beckett’s stage directions read ‘White face. Purple nose. Disordered grey hair’; Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, the Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 215. 61. For more on this moment in performance, see Andrew Head, ‘Krapp’s Last Tape in Great Britain: Production History Amid Changing Practice’, in David Tucker and Trish McTighe, ed., Staging Beckett in Great Britain (London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016), 107–121 (111–114). 62. Beckett, Krapp’s, 216. 63. Francis Maes, ‘Reality Overtakes Myth: Ivo van Hove Stages Der Ring des Nibelungen’, in Willinger, ed., Ivo van Hove, 274–293 (286). 64. Ibid. 65. Starr, Feeling, 93. 66. Hjortkjær, ‘Musical’, 212. 67. Ibid., 218–219. 68. Ibid., 227. 69. Miall, ‘Literary Reading’, 251. 70. Starr, Feeling, 42, original emphasis. 71. Robert Lepage, ‘Robert Lepage on Needles and Opium’, programme for Needles and Opium (London: Barbican Theatre, 2016), 4. 72. Cocteau’s text is taken from his ‘A Letter to Americans’ (1949). 73. Calvo-Merino and Christensen, ‘Neuroaesthetics and Dance’, 295–296.

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74.  James Thomas, ‘“My Manner of Telling the Story”: An Interview with Dmitry Krymov’, Contemporary Theatre Review 24: 1 (2014): 82–88 (87). 75. James M. Thomas, ‘The Visual Poetics of Dmitry Krymov’s Theatre Laboratory’, Contemporary Theatre Review 21: 3 (2011): 340–350 (347) and Adrian Giurgea, ‘When Designer and Actor Are One’, American Theatre (January 2009): 46–47, 146, 148 (47). 76. Thomas, ‘Manner’, 85. 77. Thomas, ‘Visual’, 341. 78. Thomas, ‘Manner’, 86. 79. Giurgea, ‘When Designer’, 148. 80. Thomas, ‘Manner’, 85. 81. Jerzy Grotowski’s via negativa is not the same. For Grotowski, the via negativa concerns the eradication of ‘blocks’ in the actor, so that s/he may find an authentic personal expression in performance. 82. Thomas, ‘Manner’, 87. 83. Like Sebastian Nübling’s The Trial of Ubu, Chapter 2, n. 76. 84. Garfinkel, ‘Recovering’, 109. 85. Ibid., 106. 86. Ibid. 87. Elena Dyakova, ‘Elena Dyakova on Dmitry Krymov’, programme for A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It) (London: Barbican Theatre, 2014), 6. 88. Barbican Theatre, 4 June 2014. 89. Zeki, Inner Vision, 95. 90. Ibid. 91. Shortly after Meyerhold was arrested by the Stalinist regime, Raikh was stabbed to death in 1939 at their Moscow apartment in mysterious circumstances. 92. John Freedman, ‘Dmitry Krymov: Designer’s Theatre’, TheatreForum 32 (2008): 13–18 (15). 93. Melissa Trimingham, ‘Touched by Meaning: Haptic Effect in Autism’, in Shaughnessy, ed., Affective Performance and Cognitive Science, 229–240 (231). 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid. 96. Juan A. García-Esparza, ‘Epistemological Paradigms in the Perception and Assessment of Vernacular Architecture’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 21: 9 (2012): 1–20. 97. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative, 114.

242  A. J. LEDGER 98. Thomas, ‘Visual’, 347. 99. Oddey, ‘Organics’, 99. 100.  David Jays, ‘“How Does the Internet Feel?” Chloe Lamford’s Astounding Stage Designs—In Pictures’, https://www.theguardian. com/stage/2017/jul/12/chloe-lamford-stage-designs-in-pictures (accessed 14 June 2018). 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 103. See also Matt Trueman, ‘Designer Chloe Lamford: “Theatre Designers Make More Than an Object—I Design Feeling”’, The Stage, 18 July 2018, https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/interviews/2018/designer-chloe-lamford-interview/ (accessed 23 July 2018).

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion(s): The Director and Choice

Introduction This book has been concerned with the artistry of the director, the pragmatics of directing, and how both align to aesthetic choice. A production does not just explode into existence to offer an object of spectatorial, cultural, scholarly or theoretical contemplation, but is rooted in a detailed, processual coming into being. As I have suggested throughout, the director is catalytic in this. To remember terminology derived from discourses of creativity, I maintain that s/he remains also the fundamental determining artist working in the domain of rehearsal. Often, it is also the director that instigates a project, usually because of ongoing relationships. That the director both shapes and works inside such a reality is, though, inevitably to work collaboratively. Directing can thus be understood as a singular craft that informs mutualised theatre-making processes, which leads to aesthetic experiences. Term(s) It is theatre’s peculiar artistic, social and multimodal practices that give rise to the hybridised terms prevalent in some accounts of directing. These are not simple to resist, aside from pointing out that hyphenated similes are often used as a deferral of definition. In this book, I have tried nevertheless to particularise the director’s working modes. Rather than a set of avoidances, terms need to be repurposed to indicate, © The Author(s) 2019 A. J. Ledger, The Director and Directing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40767-2_7

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instead, specific directorial orientations, or even shifts in a director’s career (Krymov is a good example), or a set of operational modes that come into play at particular points across the pre-production, rehearsal and performance phases of a project. Similarly, I suggested that Pavis’s proposition that the director ‘decentres’ the actor needed to be inverted since, in pragmatic terms, the director seeks to do the opposite; every director in this account, regardless of their aesthetic or preferred processes, situates the actor very clearly on a continuum of dramatic world and formal exposition. In the same way, there is no real point in maintaining terminology whereby the identity of the director is also decentred and rendered a shifting set of amalgamations of various similes. Definitions of the director reside not in the identity of a generalised figure but, as Chapter 4 has stressed, most often through the specificity of work ‘in the room’. Practicalities have also reconfigured other conceptual terms: rather than ‘crossing the space’ (Pavis), there is in Donnellan and Ormerod’s work a collapsing of the space, so that it might re-emerge as a manifest unfolding of an understanding of the play and, especially, how space best serves Donnellan’s actor-centric concerns. Any terms I have suggested or continue to use thereby point to the pragmatics of a moment, the definition of the work at hand, its outcomes, and not the figure of the director her/himself. If any homogenising terminological comparison is useful, I propose it might be that of director to conductor. Considered in the light of a musical counterpart, the director becomes an artist who sets the coordinates to ensure congruous work across a production. (And a glance at the admittedly selective illustrations in this book might suggest that, aside from speaking, the director’s principal tool, like the conductor, is her/ his hands; Fig. 7.1.) Such a director-conductor brings elements into sync, time and counterpoint, like music, but must also render space and spatiality. But the conductor not only rehearses the orchestra but re-performs that act as performance itself, whereas the theatre director disappears from her/his finished artwork. Determining choices are left as sometimes only traces amid artistic phenomena or, to use a key term, aesthetic events. As my initial survey of some directors working in devising demonstrates, how roles and responsibilities are negotiated is, generally, right for the company and project and, importantly, usefully productive. Whilst one case in that chapter unfortunately went somewhat wrong, it helps to demonstrate that devising, and the directing of devising, may cascade through a group. As an intent and process beyond the director, this concerns not only the making and shaping of content, but can, and

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Fig. 7.1  Ivo van Hove in rehearsal for The Fountainhead (Photo Jan Versweyveld)

often is, a formally based response to extant text. Moreover, I did not see the directing of devising in any opposition to the directing of playtext. It is in the shaping of modes within modes that perhaps directing, and especially the direction of devising, lies. Creative Creativity may well be intrinsic to certain personality types but, like any creative person, the director cannot just autonomously ‘be creative’. If s/he is to be a ‘catalyzing influence […] on others creative efforts’, s/he needs to be aware of the organising creative circumstances, further organise them, and to be stimulated by those surroundings.1 To be dissatisfied creatively, as I suggested at the close of Chapter 4, suggests not only a corrective search for the absent as a way to understand art-making, but the proactive ability of the director to question, encourage, imagine or, simply put, realise a ‘vision’. In Chapter 2, I began too by demonstrating how the director can be a catalyst for acting approaches; indeed, the mark of several contemporary

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directors is how they cause acting processes, either by insisting on rehearsal methodologies, or how they significantly interpret or modify others. In so doing, many contemporary directors have shifted the creative field by borrowing and colliding older practices, especially the so-called Stanislavskian practices. None of these appear in ‘pure’ form, attesting too, of course, to Stanislavski’s own shifting of his ‘system’. If, for Pavis, the director and actor are ‘doubles’, then the director relies on the actor’s skill, and several demonstrate pedagogic or systematic approaches. Wilson’s controlled stylistics clearly call for a director able to prescribe a form, but also demands actors of tremendous skill, able to ‘flesh out’ his formal vision. I suggested van Hove sculpts the body too. Set by the director-conductor, these constraints harness, rather than limit, the expression and creativity of the actor. A limit with neuroaesthetics is the tendency to see interventions and other events as extrinsic; they are percepts external to the body that are deemed to have an affect. It is therefore crucial to ally notions of reward and judgement to Zeki’s stress on the neurological workings of the brain and the development of concepts. Future developments might see neuroaesthetics as a means to theorise acting as a process of interoception, beyond the current interest in cognitive perspectives. Nevertheless, the experience of training, for instance, may well provide the underpinning aesthetics of an ensemble if, of course, a company actually shares a training; this is actually far less evident in, say, Complicité’s contemporary work than might be expected. And whilst it assumes neurotypicality, my foray into neuroaesthetics addresses an identifiable gap in the study of directing and seeks the actuality and affect of the performative moment as made by the director. Design Design appears a major system of conveying knowledge. In Chapter 6, I proposed a taxonomy that is not, like Pavis, conceptual but, again, a practical modality of directorial intent. That said, directors return to scenographic signatures: the white face of Wilson; the naturalistic decay of Mitchell; glass boxes and industrial drones. These are not just motifs but have become repeated tropes. If some directors want design to get out of the way, for others design has been brought firmly into the directorial expression. Further, unless they are multi-skilled artists such as Lepage or Wilson, the so-called auteur directors have around them

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strong scenographic teams, undermining often negative connotations of singlehanded, wilful theatrical authorship. In all cases, scenography encompasses, as van Hove puts it, the ‘telling of story’ through, in Zeki’s terms, the visuality of knowledge. Choice Starr suggests that ‘aesthetic experience works to produce new value in what we see and what we feel. The reward and emotional systems help make that value available to compare with a range of other kinds of knowledge, from the knowledge of experts […] to that of all of us’; this goes some way to explaining how the director knows s/he is satisfied.2 Starr’s reference to ‘expert’ knowledge as a cross-comparison suggests too how certain directors have aesthetic commonalities across their work (‘the knowledge of experts’) with which to compare the emergent work (the creative field, again). If directing is the work of a determining expertise, the question arises as to how such skill and experience are to be gained. Further research is needed into the arena of director training, which, in comparison with actor training, is extremely limited in scholarship. Unlike the stress on formal directing programmes on the Continent and to some extent in the USA, in the UK there are at present three ways a director might emerge; by making her/his own work; by undertaking one of the fairly few courses of study; and by assisting an established director. Each overlaps and none are completely satisfactory, attested to by the further context of the burgeoning directing schemes and awards run by some theatres and organisations.3 What directors seem to do is expertly to assess the iterative presence of ‘resonant experience’ and, crucially, make choices.4 A key and composite skill of the director is the ability to engage in an orientated, goal defined process, but where a goal cannot be completely determined until it can also be recognised as ideal, that it offers reward. Optimally, her or his audience will be satisfied too. Anecdote (Final) At the National Theatre, London, Cracknell is leading a technical rehearsal of her production of Polly Stenham’s Julie (2018), a contemporary version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) and staged in the

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National’s second auditorium, the Lyttelton Theatre. This session is one of seven dedicated to technical rehearsal. There are a large number of people present, including the entire stage-management and creative teams, as well as some observers, myself included. The voice coach also advises at points and a photographer appears. There are frequent stops. Working in collaboration with the sound designer, Cracknell suggests that the ‘guillotine’—the nickname for the upstage wall that splits the playing area in half—should, she says, ‘maybe fly out in eleven seconds not seven’.5 This precise suggestion reveals a choice concerning what the event should feel like, and how to make a decision about it, not the precision of some sort of internal directorial clock. The choreographer solves a movement issue to aid this moment; a lighting state is changed. Later, and beyond technical issues, there is some crafting of the action: a beer bottle is added to the fridge; quite how Julie (Vanessa Kirby) can almost step onto broken glass is changed; an entrance and exit are added; how and when the party guest characters should make offstage noise is determined. Here, the director is inside and leading a collaborative set up. I am struck by the way Cracknell’s presence fills space: she is not ‘on cans’, so uses a microphone at times to convey instructions; she approaches and goes up on the stage to deal with particular moments. She almost bounces about the auditorium with a positive and patient energy. There are a large number of people here, but Cracknell absolutely exemplifies the determining artist, crafting a precisely aestheticised outcome in the final stages of a production process.

Notes 1. Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, ‘Catalytic’, 338. 2. Starr, Feeling, 66. 3.  In the UK, for instance, schemes at the Young Vic and the National Theatre Studio, the JMK Award, and the Regional Theatre Young Directors scheme. 4. Starr, Feeling, 64. 5. Adam J. Ledger, rehearsal notes, National Theatre, 29 May 2018.

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N. B. The bibliography does not list the live productions included as part of the foregoing discussion or as already referenced in endnotes. Alexander, Catherine. ‘Complicité—The Elephant Vanishes’. In Making Contemporary Theatre: International Rehearsal Processes, eds. Jen Harvie and Andy Lavender, 59–80. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Alfreds, Mike. Different Every Night: Freeing the Actor. London: Nick Hern Books, 2009. Allain, Paul. ‘Thick Description/Thin Lines: Writing About Process in Contemporary Performance’. Contemporary Theatre Review 26, no. 4 (2016): 485–495. Almeida Theatre. ‘Why Greeks Matter, Rupert Gould, Ivo van Hove and Deborah Warner’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6kYz-wx2rg. 12 June 2015. Arratia, Euridice. ‘Island Hopping: Rehearsing the Wooster Group’s Brace Up!’. In Re: Direction, eds. Rebecca Schneider and Gabrielle Cody, 332–346. London and New York, 2003. Arts Council England. http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/grants-arts. Barba, Eugenio. ‘The Part of Us Which Lives in Exile’. In Theatre: Solitude, Craft, Revolt, ed. Eugenio Barba, trans. Lluís Masgrau. Aberystwyth: Black Mountain Press, 1999. ———. On Directing and Dramaturgy: Burning the House. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Beckett, Samuel. ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’. In The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Benedetti, Jean. Stanislavski: His Life in Art. London: Methuen, 1988.

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250  Bibliography ———. ‘A History of Stanislavski in Translation’. New Theatre Quarterly 6, no. 23 (1990): 266–278. ———. Stanislavski and the Actor. London: Methuen, 1998. ———. The Art of the Actor: The Essential History of Acting from Classical Times to the Present Day. London: Methuen, 2005. Bennett, Susan, and Sonia Massai (eds.). Ivo van Hove: From Shakespeare to David Bowie. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2018. Billington, Michael. ‘Scenes from a Marriage—Review’. The Guardian. 15 November 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/nov/15/ scenes-from-a-marriage-review. ———. ‘Kwame Kwei-Armah Named New Artistic Director of Young Vic’. The Guardian. 26 September 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2017/sep/26/kwame-kwei-armah-named-new-artistic-director-ofyoung-vic. Boenisch, Peter M. Directing Scenes and Senses: The Thinking of Regie. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. ———. ‘Looking for Ostermeier: Researching Methodologies of Theatre Direction’. 24 April 2017.  https://www.facebook.com/ universityofkentschoolofarts/posts/1273064652747666. ———. ‘Thomas Ostermeier: Mission Neo(n)realism and a Theatre of Actors and Authors’. In Contemporary European Theatre Directors, eds. Maria M. Delgado and Dan Rebellato, 339–359. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. Boensich, Peter M., and Thomas Ostermeier. The Theatre of Thomas Ostermeier. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Bogart, Anne, and Tina Landau. The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition. London: Nick Hern Books, 2014. Boleslavsky, Richard. Acting: the First Six Lessons. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Botella, Marion, Vlad Glaveanu, Franck Zenasni, Martin Storme, Nils Myszkowski, Marion Wolff, and Todd Lubart. ‘How Artists Create: Creative Process and Multivariate Factors’. Learning and Individual Differences 26 (2013): 161–170. Callery, Dymphna. Through the Body: A Practical Guide to Physical Theatre. London and New York: Nick Hern Books and Routledge, 2001. Calvo-Merino, Beatriz, and Julia F. Christensen. ‘Neuroaesthetics and Dance’. In An Introduction to Neuroaesthetics: The Neuroaesthetic Approach to Aesthetic Experience, Artistic Creativity, and Arts Appreciation, ed. Jon O. Lauring, 293–326. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2014. Carnicke, Sharon Marie. Stanislavski in Focus. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998. Carr, Marina. Hecuba. Unpublished Rehearsal Script, Royal Shakespeare Company, 2015. Carson, Ann. Antigone. London: Oberon Books, 2015.

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256  Bibliography Lepage, Robert. ‘Robert Lepage on Needles and Opium’. In Programme for Needles and Opium. London: Barbican Theatre, 2016. Letzler Cole, Susan. Directors in Rehearsal: A Hidden World. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Mace, Mary-Anne, and Tony Ward. ‘Modeling the Creative Process: A Grounded Theory Analysis of Creativity in the Domain of Art Making’. Creativity Research Journal 14, no. 2 (2002): 179–192. Machon, Josephine. Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Magarshack, David (trans.). The Seagull, Produced by Stanislavsky. London: Dennis Dobson, 1952. Manfull, Helen. Taking Stage: Women Directors on Directing. London: Methuen, 1999. McAuley, Gay. Not Magic But Work: An Ethnographic Account of a Rehearsal Process. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. McConachie, Bruce. Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ———. Theatre & Mind. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. McConachie, Bruce, and F. Elizabeth Hart (eds.). Performance and Cognition: Theatre Studies and the Cognitive Turn. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006. Merlin, Bella. Beyond Stanislavski: The Psycho-Physical Approach to Actor Training. London and New York: Nick Hern Books and Routledge, 2001. ———. Konstantin Stanislavsky. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. ———. The Complete Stanislavski Toolkit. London: Nick Hern Books, 2007. ———. ‘Using Stanislavski’s Toolkit for Shakespeare’s Richard III, Part I: Research on the Text and the Play’. New Theatre Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2013): 24–34. ———. ‘Using Stanislavski’s Toolkit for Shakespeare’s Richard III, Part II: Research on the Self in the Play’. New Theatre Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2013): 159–169. Mermikides, Alex, and Jacqui Smart (eds.). Devising in Process. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Miall, David S. ‘Literary Reading’. In An Introduction to Neuroaesthetics: The Neuroaesthetic Approach to Aesthetic Experience, Artistic Creativity, and Arts Appreciation, ed. Jon O. Lauring, 245–270. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2014. Michael Grandage Company. ‘Theatre’. http://www.michaelgrandagecompany. com/theatre/. Migliarisi, Anna (ed.). Stanislavsky and Directing: Theory, Practice and Influence. Toronto: LEGAS, 2008. Mitchell, Katie. The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre. London and New York: Routledge, 2009.

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258  Bibliography Riotous Company. www.riotouscompany.co.uk. Roach, Joseph. The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Royal Shakespeare Company. ‘Writer & Director Talk’. Swan Theatre, Stratfordupon-Avon. 23 September 2015. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. ———. Say It with Flowers. ‘Facts and Questions’. Unpublished Rehearsal Document. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Schino, Mirella. Alchemists of the Stage: Theatre Laboratories of Europe. Holstebro, Malta, Wrocław: Icarus Publishing Enterprise, 2009. Schneider, Rebecca, and Gabrielle Cody (eds.). Re: Direction: A Theoretical and Practical Guide. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Shaughnessy, Nicola (ed.). Affective Performance and Cognitive Science: Body, Brain and Being. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Shevtsova, Maria. Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Simonsen, Barbara (ed.). The Art of Rehearsal: Conversations with Contemporary Theatre Makers. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2017. Smart, Jackie. ‘Sculpting the Territory: Gecko’s The Arab and The Jew in Process’. In Devising in Process, eds. Jackie Smart and Alex Mermikides, 165– 185. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2010, 170–171. Smith, Brian. ‘In Search of the White-Hot Moment: Stanislavsky and Directing’. In Stanislavsky and Directing: Theory, Practice and Influence, ed. Anna Migliarisi, 27–39. Toronto: LEGAS, 2008. Sofia, Gabriele. ‘Introduction: Towards an Embodied Theatrology?’ In Theatre and Cognitive Neuroscience, eds. Gabriele Sofia, Victor Jacono, and Clelia Falletti, 49–59. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017. Spacey, Kevin. ‘The Old Vic’. https://www.kevinspacey.com/theatre/ theoldvic/. Stafford-Clark, Max. Letters to George. London: Nick Hern Books, 1989. Stanislavski, Konstantin. Stanislavski Produces Othello, trans. Helen Nowak. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1963. ———. My Life in Art, trans. Jean Benedetti. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary, trans. Jean Benedetti. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. ———. Building a Character, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. ———. An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

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Index

Note: Page references for illustrations are given in italics A ACE. See Arts Council England action, dramatic, 51, 138–39 Active Analysis (Stanislavski), 41, 45, 47–48, 59–60, 63 actor-centric direction, 16, 73, 76–78, 97–98, 244 actor-directors, 4, 70–71, 71, 164, 169, 186–87, 218–20 actor-managers, 4 actors/acting, 15, 17, 52, 52–53, 69–101, 98 and artistic vision, 76–77, 79 and audience interaction, 83–84, 206–07, 209–10 and autonomy, 51–52 and the body, 42–43, 62, 98, 128, 128–29, 223–24, 245–46 and bravery, 97 and character, 83–85, 92–93 and collaboration, 50, 88–89

and emotion, 78, 92 and empathy, 78, 78–79, 79, 82 and fame, 14 and flexibility, 49–52 and metaphor, 90–91 Method Acting, 40, 44, 45, 63, 98 and motivation, 53–54, 54–55, 89–92 and movement, 89–92, 91 and naturalism, 4 and personality, 74, 83–84 and puppets, 233–234 as reading, 8, 75–76, 80, 100 and realism, 74 and scenography, 16, 198–9 and self-consciousness, 57 Stanislavski ‘system’, 4–5, 5, 39–48, 61–64 by technicians, 228–29 and ‘thickness’ (Mitchell), 56–58 toolkit, 43, 51–52 training in, 55, 73 adaptation, 153–54, 167, 169–74, 185, 210

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 A. J. Ledger, The Director and Directing, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40767-2

261

262  Index Adler, Stella, 47 aesthetics, 8, 41, 248. See also kinaesthetics; neuroaesthetics and physiological responses, 24–25, 27, 60–61 reward, 24, 27–28, 111, 172–3, 216, 222 and unpleasant experiences, 24–25, 28–29, 93–94 Alfreds, Mike, 16, 42, 97 Different Every Night, 49–52 point of concentration (POC), 50, 59 and Stanislavski’s ‘system’, 40, 49–52, 62, 63 Antigone (Sophocles), 109, 138–9, 141, 211, 211–12 artistic directors, 9, 160–1 artistic vision, 20–21, 24, 185, 246–47 of actors, 76–77, 79 and collaboration, 70 and hierarchy, 157–9 and scenography, 199–200 Arts Council England (ACE), 14, 153 assemblage, 152–3 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 200–01, 217, 227, 230, 231–32, 233 audiences actors, interactions with, 83–84, 206–7, 209–10 and immersive theatre, 206–7 integration into performance, 206–7, 231–2 and live theatre, 18–19, 74 perceptions of, 59, 74–75, 79, 95–97, 99–100, 111–12 responses, 60–61, 79, 82–83, 111 and scenography, 202–3, 209–10 and sight/seeing, 195–6, 205–6 audiovisual technology, 248. See also music film, 141–42, 203, 214

sound, 155, 173, 173–4, 184, 209, 220–2 video projection, 17, 141–2, 205–6, 214, 224–5, 229 auteurs/auteurship, 10–11, 11, 12, 158 authority, 89–92, 155–56, 156–57, 176–79, 181 autocours process, 161–162 autopoiesis, 12, 18–19 Avignon Festival, 14, 167 B Barba, Eugenio, 1–2, 5, 10, 152–53, 164 Beckett, Samuel, Krapp’s Last Tape, 218–20, 222 Benedetti, Jean, 46 Bergman, Ingmar Persona, 95–96 Scenes from a Marriage, 140, 198, 209–12 Birdland (Stephens), 197, 202–03 Blixen, Karen, 80–83, 151–52, 166 body/bodies of actors, 42–43, 62, 98, 128, 128–9, 223–4, 245–6 and aesthetic responses, 24–25, 27, 60–61 aestheticised, 95–97 and emotion, 59, 60–61 and empathy, 99–100 grotesque, 93–94 and movement, 95–97 and neuroaesthetics, 223–4 in performance, 74, 74–75 and reading, 125 and temperature, 56, 58–59 body/mind separation, 41, 42–43 Boenisch, Peter, 6, 11–12, 32, 100 Boleslavsky, Richard, 46, 47

Index

Borovsky, David, 226 Bowman, Elen, 55 brain, 79, 111–2, 230–1, 248. See also neuroaesthetics and aesthetic responses, 26–27, 60–61, 83, 96 Broca’s area, 79, 125 mirror neurons, 60–61, 79, 111–2 and sight/seeing, 25–26, 201–3 Branagh, Kenneth, 4 brand, director as, 12, 14–15 Brecht, Bertolt, 5, 84–85, 87 Mother Courage and her Children, 70 Britten, Benjamin, Peter Grimes, 203 Brook, Peter, 13 Büchner, Georg, Danton’s Death, 89–92 C Campbell, Topher, 157–158 Carvalho, Luis F., 156, 164 casting, 166, 187 catalyst, director as, 23, 245–46 Catzéflis, Valentine, 54 characters action, developed by, 48, 50 and actors, 83–85, 92–93 biographies of, 41, 55–57, 86, 115, 121 and environment, 56 and improvisation, 58 and intention, 143 and motivation, 53–54, 54–55 and puppets, 233–34 and social situation, 85–86 and storytelling, 86–88 Cheek by Jowl, 13, 52, 76, 78 As You Like It, 217 Cymbeline, 218 Measure for Measure, 78, 217–18

  263

Chekhov, Anton The Cherry Orchard, 113–14, 119–20, 127–30, 131–32, 198 La Mouette (The Seagull), 84 Chekhov, Michael, 42 Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov), 109, 113–14, 119–20, 127–30, 131–32, 198 choreography, 89–90, 91, 96, 121, 128, 139–41, 219, 223–24 Christin-Rommen, Ann, 90–91 Churchill, Caryl, Say It With Flowers (Stein), 31, 109, 111–13, 130–31, 133, 132–135 Ciuli, Roberto, 158–59 Clachan, Lizzie, 195–96, 196 Cleansed (Kane), 24–25, 128, 215 coaching, 53, 77 co-directors, 179 Coetzee, J.M. Elizabeth Costello, 214 cognition, 19, 41 cognitive science. See neuroaesthetics Cole, David, Acting as Reading, 8, 76, 80, 100 Cole, Toby, Directors on Directing, 10 collaboration, 50, 70, 73, 89, 160, 248. See also companies/ ensembles and devising, 153, 156, 160, 166, 185–87 and scenography, 17, 236 community theatre, 165 companies/ensembles, 3, 78, 89, 115, 162, 229, 248. See also Cheek by Jowl; Complicité; Frantic Assembly; Red Room; Riotous Company; Royal Shakespeare Company; Societas Raffaello Sanzio; Steppenwolf Theatre Company; Toneelgroep Amsterdam (TGA); Wooster Group, The and devising, 166

264  Index in rehearsal, 136, 138 Complicité, 18, 159, 160, 162, 164, 169 The Encounter, 151, 153, 154, 162, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 177, 184, 187 Measure for Measure, 18 concepts (neuroaesthetic), 26, 82, 88, 113, 124, 130 configuration of theatres, 195, 198, 202 Cookson, Sally, Jane Eyre, 172 costume, 183, 204, 205, 217, 219 Cracknell, Carrie, 136, 209 Birdland, 197, 203 The Deep Blue Sea; Deep Blue Sea, 123, 209 and intentions/events, 121, 123, 126 Julie, 248 Medea, 121 and rehearsal, 123, 136, 142, 143 Craig, Gordon, 5 creative producers, 161 creativity, 9, 21, 23, 144, 165, 246 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 21, 23 D dance, 128, 217–18 Danton’s Death (Büchner), 89–92 Deep Blue Sea, The (Rattigan), 120–23, 208–9 Delgado, Maria M., 10–11, 12–13 Demarcy-Mota, Emmanuel, 93–94, 98, 199 de Sautoy, Marcus, 162 design, 4, 10, 17–18, 77–78, 156, 195–237, 246–47 active design, 226 and actors, 16, 198–99 and artistic vision, 199–200

and audiences, 202–3, 209–10 boxes, 195–96, 215 and collaboration, 17, 235–36 costume, 182–83, 203–4, 205, 217, 219 definition of, 17–18 and devising, 179–84 écriture scénique, 10 and empty space, 198–99, 217, 230 and illusion, disruption of, 231–32 and installations, 203–4 kinetic space, 216 lighting, 17, 141, 184 make-up, 219–20 and mise en scène, 199–200, 234 and ‘monumental’ space, 214–16 narrative, 208–13 naturalist, 197 and neuroaesthetics, 201–3 and performance, 202–3 props, 197–98, 203–4, 210, 213– 14, 229, 232–34, 236–37 realist, 197, 206–7 and rehearsal, 138, 203–4 set design, 16, 17, 52, 236–37 sightlines, 128 and sound, 209, 220–22 and space, 213–18 and spatiality, 143–44, 200–1, 203–4, 234, 236 and time, 199, 213–14 totalising, 223–25 and the vernacular, 201, 228–30 and vertical lines, 215–16 video projection, 17, 141–42, 214, 205–6, 224–25, 229 devising, 149–88, 244–45 and authority, 176–79, 181 and collaboration, 152–53, 156, 158–60, 165–66, 185–87 and companies/ensembles, 161–66 definition of, 149–51

Index

director’s role in, 156–61 and funding, 153 and hierarchy, 155–56, 157–59 phases of, 150–53 and scenography, 179–84 and text, 160, 174–77 and time, 150–53 and writers, 160, 166–67, 174–77 Di Benedetto, Stephen, 202 director-philosophers, 16–17 directors, 248. See also Alfreds, Mike; Barba, Eugenio; Cracknell, Carrie; Demarcy-Mota, Emmanuel; Donnellan, Declan; Hunter, Kathryn; Krymov, Dmitry; McBurney, Simon; Mitchell, Katie; Mnouchkine, Ariane; Ostermeier, Thomas; Pendleton, Austin; Stafford-Clark, Max; Tuminas, Rimas; van Hove, Ivo; Warner, Deborah; Wilson, Robert actor-directors, 4, 70–71, 71, 164, 169, 186–87, 218–20 actor-managers, 4 actors, relationship with, 15–17, 52–53, 69–101 artistic directors, 9, 160–61 authority of, 155–56 BAME, 9 co-directors, 176–79 as conductor, 76, 244 definition of role, 6–7, 107–8, 244 as ‘first spectator’, 75–76, 79–83, 100, 101 historical development of role, 4–5 women, 7, 9 and writers, 175–76 diversity, 9, 166, 187 Divertimento for Rope and Strings (Riotous Company), 165 Dodin, Lev, 5 Donnellan, Declan, 5, 13, 54, 76

  265

The Actor and the Target, 52–55, 76–77 and actors, 16–17, 76–80, 97–98 Cymbeline, 218 Measure for Measure, 78, 217–18 Périclès, Prince de Tyr, 54, 78 and scenography, 216 and Stanislavski’s ‘system’, 40, 52–55, 63 ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 77–78 As You Like It, 217 doubles actor-character, 83–85, 92–93, 94–95 actor-director, 94–95, 101, 246 drama events, 119, 121, 121–23, 124–25, 125 intention, 119–23, 121–23, 124– 25, 125, 126, 142–43, 143 targets, 53–54, 54–55 dramatic situation, 117–19 dramaturgy, 138–39, 175–76 Dream Play, A (Strindberg), 114 dreams, 24 Duchêne, Kate, 57, 62 Duke, Will, 162 E Eales, Alex, 196, 235 écriture scénique, 10 eidetic images, 82–83 Eidinger, Lars, 83–84 Elufowoju, Femi, jr, 82–83 emotion, 19–20, 20, 44–45, 59, 78, 92, 95–97, 99 emotion memory, 44, 46–47, 87 empathy, 78, 78–79, 82, 99–100, 125 Encounter, The (Complicité), 151, 153, 154, 162, 166, 166–67, 168, 170, 170–71, 177, 184, 186–87

266  Index Enemy of the People, An (Ibsen), 85, 86 ensembles/companies, 1–3, 77–78, 88–89, 114–15, 162, 228–29, 248 and devising, 161–66 in rehearsal, 136, 138 enunciation, 8 études (studies), 130–31 Eugene Onegin (Puskhin), 96–97, 216 Euripides Iphigenia at Aulis, 59, 60 Medea, 121 Phaedra, 236 Evans, Matthew, 114 Even, Charles, 17 events (in dramatic structure), 119, 121, 121–23, 124–25, 125 events (performance), 18–19, 27–28, 234 expressionism, 167–69 F failure, 144 fame, 14 festivals, theatre, 12–13, 167 film, 141–42, 203, 214 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 12, 18–19, 92–93, 200–1 Ford, John, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 77–78 Fountainhead, The (Rand/Tachalet), 109, 136–38, 137, 141, 197–98, 213–14, 245 fourth wall, 128, 195–96, 208–9 Fowler, Benjamin, 6 Fox, Phoebe, 140 François, Guy-Claude, 213 Frantic Assembly, 160 Fry, Gareth, 156, 162 funding, 13–15, 153, 162

G Garfinkel, Susan, 201 Garrick, David, 4 gender, 7, 9 geography, 131–32, 143–44 Gestus, 17, 236–37 Grainger, Gawn, 129 Grandage, Michael, 14 grants, 13, 14 Grodal, Torben, 74 grotesque, 93–94 Grotowski, Jerzy, 5, 10 Guerin, Lucy, 121 Gwenda, Christoph, 86 H Hackley, Tom, 114 Halperin-Royer, Ellen, 89 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 83–84 Harling, Laura, 114 Harvie, Jen, 155–156 hearing, 24, 60–61, 80–83, 155 Heebnik, Marieke, 95–96 hierarchy, 10, 155–56, 157–59, 185 Hobday, Peter, 114, 130–31 Housley, Kirsty, 173, 176–79 Hove, Ivo van. See van Hove, Ivo Hume, David, 24 Hunter, Kathryn Kafka’s Monkey, 165 Out of Blixen, 80–83, 107, 151–52, 154–55, 170, 197 Huppert, Isabelle, 91 Hutcheon, Linda, 153–54 I Ibsen, Henrik, An Enemy of the People, 85, 86 ideas, 230–31

Index

illusion, disruption of, 204, 208–9, 231–32 imagery, 136 images, eidetic, 82–83 immersive theatre, 17, 206 improvisation, 41, 58, 59–60, 130, 140 installations, 17, 203–4 intention/intentions, 119, 119–23, 124–25, 125, 126, 142–43, 143 Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. See Toneelgroep Amsterdam (TGA) internationalism, 12–13, 164, 166 interpretation, 5, 41, 45, 48–49, 115–17 intonation, 5, 219 Iphigenia at Aulis (Euripides), 59, 60 Irving, Henry, 4 J Jackson, Sean, 114, 130 James, William, 44, 44–45 Julie (Stenham), 247–248 juxtaposition, 26–27, 139, 141 K Kafka’s Monkey (Kodjabashia), 165 Kane, Sarah Cleansed, 24–25, 128, 215 Phaedra’s Love, 214 Kantor, Tadeusz, 71 kinaesthetics, 24, 27, 79, 128–29, 131–32, 216, 223–24, 225 Klamar, Natalie, 128 Knowles, Jack, 114 Kodjabashia, Nikola, 181–82 Kafka’s Monkey, 165 Penelope X, 164 Kogan, Sam, 55

  267

Koolschijn, Hugo, 140 Kramer, Mette, 74 Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett), 218–20, 222 Krich Chinoy, Helen, Directors on Directing, 10 Krymov, Dmitry, 18, 225–34 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It), 200–1, 227, 230, 231–32, 233 Opus No. 7, 226, 227, 229, 229, 230–31, 233 vernacular design, 228–30 Kwei-Armah, Kwame, 9 L Laban, Rudolf, 42 laboratory theatre, 10 Labrèche, Marc, 224 Lamford, Chloe, 215, 235–36 Larsen, Tage, 165 Laukvik, Else Marie, 165 LeCompte, Elizabeth, 159 Lecoq, Jacques, 161–62, 227–28 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 5 Lehrer, Jonah, 28–29 Lepage, Robert, Needles and Opium, 223–25, 224 Letzler Cole, Susan, 6–7 lighting, 17, 141, 184 listening, 60–61, 81 Lloyd, Phyllida, 198–99, 203 Peter Grimes, 204–5 Long Day’s Journey Into Night (O’Neill), 205 Love (Zeldin), 206–7 M Macbeth (Shakespeare), 1

268  Index Machon, Josephine, 206 MacNeil, Ian, 197, 202–3 Maes, Francis, 81, 220–21 Magni, Marcello, 174, 181 make-up, 219–20 Malin, Sarah, 114, 131 Manfull, Helen, 7 Martynova, Vera, 227 masks, 219–20 Maynard Smith, Julian, 158 McAuley, Gay, 30–31, 31, 110 McBurney, Simon, 17–18, 151, 153, 159, 164, 186–187 The Encounter, 153, 154, 166, 166–67, 168, 170, 170–71, 177, 184, 186–87 Measure for Measure, 17–18 McCrory, Helen, 121, 208–9 McLeish, Lily, 114 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 17–18, 78, 217–18 Medea (Euripides), 121 Meierjohann, Walter, 165 Meisner, Sanford, 88, 98 memory, 44, 46–47, 87 Merlin, Bella, 43 metaphor, 90–91, 136 Method Acting, 40, 44, 45, 63, 98 Method of Physical Action, 45, 47, 63 Meyer, Pippa, 114 Miall, David S., 111–12, 125, 143, 221–22 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (As You Like It) (Shakespeare), 231–32 Miller, Arthur, A View from the Bridge, 140, 205, 220 mind, theory of (TOM), 29–30, 39, 96 mind/body separation, 41, 42–43 mirror neurons, 60–61, 79, 111–12

mise en scène, 4, 10, 14–15, 72–73, 111, 199–200, 234 Mitchell, Katie, 6, 9, 13, 15–16, 16, 42, 59 A Dream Play, 114 and character development, 55–57, 86, 130 The Cherry Orchard, 114, 120, 127, 128, 130, 132, 198 The Director’s Craft, 109 and improvisation, 130 and intentions/events, 119–20, 126 and neuroaesthetics, 60–61 and rehearsal, 48, 98, 113–17, 119–20, 142, 143 and scenography, 5, 198, 215 and Stanislavski’s ‘system’, 40, 41, 61–63 circles of place, 131–32 Cleansed, 25, 128, 215 Iphigenia at Aulis, 59, 60 Ophelias Zimmer, 215 Say It With Flowers, 31, 133, 109, 113, 131, 135 The Trial of Ubu, 57–58 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 10, 159, 160, 213 Molière, Tartuffe, 47 Month in the Country, A (Turgenev), 46 Mortimer, Vicky, 196, 198, 235 Mother Courage and her Children (Brecht), 70 Mouawad, Waidi, 214 movement, 5, 100, 121, 248. See also kinaesthetics and actors, 90–92 and rehearsal, 136, 141 and scenography, 237

Index

and the body, 97 emotive, 97, 99 music, 77–78, 217–18, 220, 229 and neuroaesthetics, 184–85 underscore, 209, 220–222, 237 N Nakamura, Jeanne, 21, 23 naturalism, 4, 10, 117, 197, 206–7 Needles and Opium (Lepage), 223–25, 224 Nelson, Barnaby, 9, 20–21 Nelson, Robin, 31–32 neuroaesthetics, 24–30, 26–27, 83, 96, 248. See also brain and audiences, 60–61 and the body, 223–24 concepts, 25–26, 82, 87–88, 112–13, 123–24 and creativity, 19, 20 definition of, 7–9 and emotion, 44–45 and empathy, 79 and improvisation, 130 limitations of, 246 and live theatre, 74 and movement, 95–97, 223–24 and music, 184–85 and objects, 232–34 PECMA flow model, 74, 79, 99 and perception, 99–100 and props, 232–34 and rehearsal, 111–13, 144 reward, 24, 27–28, 28–29, 111, 172–73, 216, 222 and scenography, 201–3 and sight/seeing, 25–26, 201–3 and sound, 173, 221–22 and storytelling, 87

  269

and underscoring, 221–22 and vertical lines, 215–16 neurons, mirror, 60–61, 79, 111–12 neurotypicality, 25 Ninagawa, Yukio, 2–3, 3 Northgraves, Sarah, 114 notes (directorial), 136 O objectivity, 87 observation of rehearsal, 30–32, 89–92, 107, 109–10, 141 Obsession (Visconti), 198, 211–12 Odin Teatret, 2, 10, 152–53, 164–65 O’Kane, Patrick, 139 Olear, Tatiana, 55 O’Neill, Eugene, Long Day’s Journey into Night, 204–5 Opus No. 7 (Krymov), 226, 227, 229, 229, 230–31, 233 Ormerod, Nick, 16, 52, 77–78, 76, 216, 235 As You Like It, 217 Measure for Measure, 217–18 Ostermeier, Thomas, 6, 13, 70, 84–85, 84, 98 and actors, 74, 83–89, 98 An Enemy of the People, 85, 86 Hamlet, 83–84 Richard III, 83–84 and Stanislavski’s ‘system’, 87 storytelling, 86–88, 99 Oswald, Peter, 165 Ouspenskaya, Maria, 46 Out of Blixen (Tickell), 80–83, 151– 52, 154–55, 166, 166–67, 170, 171–72, 172, 175–76, 179–84, 183, 187–88, 197

270  Index P Pappelbaum, Jan, 71, 196 Pavis, Patrice, 4, 13, 14–15, 72, 199–200 PECMA flow model, 74, 79, 99 Pendleton, Austin and rehearsal, 117–19, 142 Tribes, 109, 117–19 performance, 27–28, 74–75, 117–19, 203 and audiences, 18–19, 206–7, 231–32 events, 18–19, 27–28, 234 variability of, 22–23, 49–52 and the vernacular, 201 performance score, 90–91, 117, 118–19, 140, 143–44 Périclès, Prince de Tyr (Shakespeare), 54, 78 Persona (Bergman/van Hove), 95–96 personality of actor, 74, 83–84 of director, 15, 19–21, 23 Peter Grimes (Britten), 203 Phaedra(s) (Warlikowski), 214–15, 236 physicality, 164, 165, 181–82, 200–1 Pirandello, Luigi, Six Characters in Search of an Author, 93–94, 199 place, 131–32, 143–44 Planchon, Roger, 10 play/games, 53–54 playtext adaptation, 153–54, 167, 169–174, 185, 210 analysis of, 5, 41, 45, 48–49, 115–17 and authority, 10–11 in devising, 160, 174–77 and improvisation, 41 reading of, 75–76, 100 sectioning of, 121–23

playwrights, 10, 156–57 and devising, 160, 166–67, 174–77 pleasure, 24, 27–28, 111, 172–73, 216, 222 point of concentration (POC), 50, 59 politics/political theatre, 10, 12–13, 84–85, 99, 157–58, 164–65, 229–30 Popescu, Petru, Amazon Beaming, 154, 167, 170–71 positionality of director, 73 of researcher, 30–32, 107, 109–10, 141 Producer, creative, 160–61 producer-autocrat directors, 10 producer-instructor, 5 projection (audiovisual), 17, 141–42, 205–6, 214, 224–25 props, 197–98, 203–4, 210, 213–14, 229, 232–34, 236–37 puppets, 229, 230–31, 232–34 Pushkin, Alexander, Eugene Onegin, 96–97, 216 R race, 9 Radford, Mike, 19–20 Radosavljević, Duška, 150 Raine, Nina, Tribes, 109, 117–19 Rand, Ayn, The Fountainhead, 109, 136–38, 137, 141, 197–98, 213–14, 245 Rattigan, Terence, The Deep Blue Sea, 120–23, 208–9 Rawlings, David, 9, 20–21 reading and acting, 8, 75–76, 80, 100 and kinaesthetics, 125 as physical process, 100 of playtext, 75–76, 100

Index

realism, 4, 74, 117, 121, 197, 206–7 Rebellato, Dan, 10–11, 12–13 Red Room, The (company), 157–58 Regie tradition, 6 rehearsal, 17–18, 39, 77, 88, 107–45 and action, 138–39 and character biographies, 115, 121 and events, 119, 121–23, 124–25 experimental, 132–35 and improvisation, 129–31 and intention, 119–23, 124–25 and movement, 135–36, 139–41 and neuroaesthetics, 124–25 and objects, 181 observation of, 30–32, 89–92, 107, 109–10, 141 and performance, 117–19 and place, 128–36 and playtext analysis, 115–17 and scenography, 138, 203–4 and space, 128–36 Reijn, Halina, 141 reputation, 12, 14–15 reward, aesthetic, 27–28, 111, 216, 222 Reynolds Hapgood, Elizabeth, 45–46 Richard II (Shakespeare), 72–73 Richard III (Shakespeare), 83–84 Riotous Company, 153, 162–63, 164 Divertimento for Rope and Strings, 165 Out of Blixen, 80–83, 107, 151–52, 154–55, 166–67, 170, 171–72, 172, 175–76, 179–84, 183, 187–88, 197 Scherzo for Piano and Stick, 165 Roman Tragedies (Shakespeare/van Hove), 204, 205–6, 207 Royal Shakespeare Company The Tempest, 17 Troilus and Cressida, 13 Russian Theatre Federation, 76

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S Salinger, Justin, 59 Say It With Flowers (Churchill/Stein), 31, 109, 111–13, 130–31, 132–35, 133 Scenes from a Marriage (Bergman), 140, 198, 209–12 scenography, 4, 10, 77–78, 156, 195–237, 246–47 active design, 226 and actors, 16, 198–99 and artistic vision, 199–200 and audiences, 202–3, 209–10 boxes, 195–96, 215 and collaboration, 17, 235–36 costume, 182–83, 203–4, 205, 217, 219 definition, 17–18 and devising, 179–84 and directors, 17 écriture scénique, 10 and empty space, 198–99, 217, 230 geography, 143–44 and illusion, disruption of, 231–32 and installations, 203–4 kinetic space, 216 lighting, 17, 141, 184 make-up, 219–20 and mise en scène, 199–200, 234 and ‘monumental’ space, 214–16 and movement, 237 narrative, 208–13 naturalist, 197 and neuroaesthetics, 201–3 and objects, 236–37 and performance, 202–3 as process, 202–3 posterior, 208–9 props, 198, 203–4, 210, 213–14, 229, 232–4, 237 realist, 197, 206–7 and rehearsal, 138, 203–4

272  Index set design, 16, 17, 52, 236–37 and sight/seeing, 201–3 sightlines, 128 and sound, 209, 220–22 and space, 213–18 and spatiality, 200–1, 203–4, 234, 236 and technology, 17–18 and the vernacular, 201, 228–30 and time, 199, 213–14 and vertical lines, 215–16 totalising, 223–25 video projection, 17, 141–42, 205–6, 214, 224–25, 229 Scherzo for Piano and Stick (Riotous Company), 165 Seagull, The (La Mouette, Chekhov), 84 Seneca, Phaedra, 214 set design, 16, 17, 52, 236–37 Shakespeare, William, 1 As You Like It, 200–1, 217, 227, 230, 231–32, 233 Cymbeline, 218 Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar), 92–93 Hamlet, 83–84 Macbeth, 1 Measure for Measure, 17–18, 78, 217–218 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 200–1, 227, 230, 231–32, 233 Périclès, Prince de Tyr, 54, 78 Richard II, 72–73 Richard III, 83–84 Roman Tragedies (van Hove), 204, 205–6, 207 Sonnette (Sonnets), 97 The Tempest, 17 Troilus and Cressida, 13 Shaw, Fiona, 60, 70, 72–73, 97, 101 Sidiropoulou, Avra, 6 sight and seeing, 76–79

and audiences, 195–96, 205–206 and neuroaesthetics, 25–26, 201–3 sightlines, 128 site-based theatre, 17 Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello), 93–94, 199 sketches, 90 Smart, Jackie, 151 Societas Raffaello Sanzio, Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar), 92–93 Sofia, Gabriele, 8 Sonnette (Sonnets, Shakespeare), 1, 97 Sophocles, Antigone, 138–39, 141, 211–12 sound, 18, 24, 60–61, 80–83, 156, 248. See also music binaural, 155, 173–74 hearing, 24, 60–61, 80–83, 155 and neuroaesthetics, 221–22 and scenography, 209, 220–22 underscore, 209, 220–22, 237 space, 143–44, 199, 213–18 Spacey, Kevin, 4 spatiality, 200–1, 203–4, 234, 236 speech, 5, 8, 219 Stafford-Clark, Max, 40, 48–49, 62, 63 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 4–5, 23, 39–48, 142–43 Active Analysis, 41, 45, 47–48, 59–60, 63 An Actor Prepares, 45–46 An Actor’s Work, 46 Method of Physical Action, 41, 45, 47, 63 A Month in the Country, 46 ‘system’, 4–5, 39–48, 61–64 Tartuffe, 47 Stanislavsky Electrotheatre (Moscow), 1–3, 2 Starr, G. Gabrielle, 19, 26–27, 27–28, 29, 41, 44

Index

stars (actors), 14 Station House Opera, The Other is You, 158 Stein, Gertrude, Say It With Flowers, 31, 109, 111–13, 130–31, 132–35, 133 Stenham, Polly, Julie, 247–48 Stephens, Simon Birdland, 197, 202–3 The Trial of Ubu, 57–58 Steppenwolf Theatre Company, 109 Stewart, Catrin, 127 Stoff (concept), 84–85 Stone, Simon, Yerma, 195–96, 221 storification, 73 storyboarding, 90 storytelling, 86–88, 99 Strasberg, Lee, 46–47, 248. See also Method Acting Strindberg, August A Dream Play, 114 Miss Julie, 247–48 Strong, Mark, 140 subjectivity, 41, 73 substitution, 82–83 surrealism, 93–94 sympathy, 78 Szczęśniak, Małgorzata, 214–15 T Tachalet, Koen, The Fountainhead, 109, 136–38, 137, 141, 197, 213–14, 245 targets (Donnellan), 53–54, 54–55 Tartuffe (Molière), 47 technicians (as actors), 228–29 technology, 5, 17–18, 173–74, 186 film, 141–42, 203, 214 sound, 155, 173–74, 184, 209, 220–22

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video projection, 17, 141–2, 205–6, 214, 224–25, 229 temperature, 56, 58–59 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 17 text adaptation, 153–54, 167, 169–74, 185, 210 analysis of, 5, 41, 45, 48–49, 115–17 and authority, 10–11 and devising, 160, 174–77 embodiment of, 8 enunciation of, 8 and improvisation, 41 reading of, 75–76, 100 sectioning of, 121–23 thea, concept of, 11–12, 100 theatrality, 11–12, 100, 139 theatre configuration, 195, 198, 201–2 theatre festivals, 10–13, 167 Theil Have, Mia, 81, 164–65 Out of Blixen, 154–55, 166, 172, 181–82, 183 Penelope X, 164–65 Theory of Mind (TOM), 29–30, 39, 96 Thiarai, Kully, 9 Tickell, Paul, 80–83, 151–152, 154–155, 160 Out of Blixen, 166–67, 171–72, 175–76, 179–84, 183, 187–88 time, 151–53, 199, 213–14 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford), 77–78 Toneelgroep Amsterdam (TGA), 13, 109, 136–42 Toporkov, Vasili, 47–48 training, 161–62, 164, 226–27 Tregubova, Maria, 227 Trevis, Di, 15 Trial of Ubu, The (Stephens), 57–58

274  Index Tribes (Raine), 109, 117–19 Trimingham, Melissa, 232–34 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 13 Tuminas, Rimas, 96–97 Eugene Onegin, 96–97, 216 Turgenev, Ivan, A Month in the Country, 46 U underscore, 209, 220–22, 237 V van Hove, Ivo, 6, 13, 95–96, 140–41, 206, 220–22 Antigone, 109, 138–39, 141, 211, 211–12 The Fountainhead, 109, 136–38, 137, 141, 197–98, 213–14, 245 Long Day’s Journey into Night, 205 Obsession, 198, 211–12, 220 Persona, 95–96 and rehearsal, 107, 136–42, 143 Roman Tragedies, 204, 205–6, 207 Scenes from a Marriage, 140, 198, 209–12, 212 and scenography, 198, 203–6, 209–13 A View from the Bridge, 140, 205, 220 Van Kraaij, Peter, 138–39 Vasiliev, Anatoly, 2, 5 vernacular design, 201, 228–30 Versweyveld, Jan, 138, 141, 196, 198, 203–4, 204–5, 211–13 The Fountainhead, 213–14 Roman Tragedies, 207 Scenes from a Marriage, 209–10, 212

video projection, 17, 141–2, 205–6, 214, 224–25, 229 View from the Bridge, A (Miller), 140, 205, 220 Visconti, Luchino, Obsession, 198, 211–12 vision (artistic), 20–21, 24, 185, 246–47 of actors, 76–77, 79 and collaboration, 70 and hierarchy, 157–59 and scenography, 199–200 vision (sight), 25–26, 76–79, 82–83 and audiences, 195–96, 205–6 and neuroaesthetics, 25–26, 201–3 voice, 5, 8, 219 W Warlikowski, Krzysztof, Phaedra(s), 214–5, 236 Warner, Deborah, 69, 70, 78–79 Richard II, 72–73 and Shaw, Fiona, 73, 97, 101 Weigand, Jon David, 91 Whyman, Rose, 42–43 Wilson, Robert, 70, 89–90, 100 and actors, 71–72, 89–92, 100 Danton’s Death, 89–92 Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera, 89–90 Krapp’s Last Tape, 218–20, 222 Sonnette, 97 women directors, 7, 9, 248. See also Cracknell, Carrie; Housley, Kirsty; Hunter, Kathryn; Lloyd, Phyllida; Mitchell, Katie; Mnouchkine, Ariane; Warner, Deborah Wooster Group, The, 13, 159 workshops, 89–92, 167

Index

writers, 156–57 and devising, 160, 166–67, 174–77 and directors, 175–76 Y Yerma (Stone, Simon), 195–96, 221 Young Vic (London), 128, 195–96, 198 Yukhananov, Boris, 1–3, 2

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Z Zeki, Semir, 8, 24, 25–26, 29, 123–24, 197, 201–3, 215–16 Zeldin, Alexander, Love, 206–7