Treading the Boards

By Edwin Thomas

ONE HUNDRED years ago, directors did not exist. Quite simply, a group of actors would get hold of a play, rehearse it, and perform it themselves. Nowadays, in the eyes of the theatre owners and the men with the money, directors are omnipresent and as important, if not more so, than their actors. This is all well and good, but let me expand. There are some great directors around, both in Oxford and on the national map. But I am talking about the bad ones, and there are plenty.

Let us consider the role of a director: practically, they help stage the play (blocking and lighting). Elsewhere, they aid the actors and give guidance. So far so good. The problem comes when they try to do more — when they attempt to provide their own personal angle — in other words, when they seek to interpret something which does not need interpreting. The truth is, interpretation kills.

Far better, as an audience, to discover something for oneself than be forced to identify with a single personal take on the action. Does not the joy of theatre come when we watch a play like Henry V and say, “Fuck, that’s just like Iraq”, and not when we witness two tanks steamroll across the stage? Ian McKellen once played Richard II very obviously as Mussolini, and immediately the joy of the play, the relevance to the current day that is so subtle in Shakespeare, was lost.

And this is not all. With interpretation comes everything we hate in performance — simple things like mumbling, an inability to hear, lack of energy, the feel of something being under-rehearsed, and actors not listening to each other. All for one simple reason: an ignorance of the text and individual scenes in favour of making the play as dark or as ideological as possible, or as full with ironic undertones as one can humanely get.

Sam Mendes, Stephen Pimlott, and all the other great directors work the actual text, and rather than cloud plays in their own literary criticism, seek only to play the play, get the most out of their actors, and let the audience do the rest

18th May 2006