DIRECTING

the art of coordinating and controlling all the elements in the staging of a play, opera, motion picture, television program, or radio script. The responsibility for this control is usually delegated to one person, called the director. The director did not become a dominant force in the theatre until the mid-19th century. Before then it was not uncommon for an experienced actor to advise the other members of a troupe. But with the rise of modern realistic drama came the need for someone to coordinate all the elements of a production from a perspective broader than that of a member of the cast. Madame Vestris in England and George II, duke of Saxe-Meiningen, in Germany directed plays in which they did not act, abandoning artificial, stagy costumes and demanding authentic sets and speech. On a tour of Russia in 1890, Meiningen caught the attention of Konstantin Stanislavsky, whose reforms of the crafts of directing and acting were influential long after his death in 1938. His name is inextricably linked to the psychological dramas of Anton Chekhov and to the actor's training technique known as the Stanislavsky method. The theatrical elements available to the director are the script and the acting of the players, as well as the decor, costuming, lighting, visual and sound effects, incidental music, andin a musical playchoreography. Using all these elements, the director shapes the overall production in order to leave the audience with an imaginative interpretation of what the playwright has written. Since the actors usually constitute the most important and the most variable theatrical element, an understanding of acting and of human nature are indispensable in a director. In most cases, the director does not tell the actors every detail of what he expects of them, nor does he control their actual performance. Rather, he stimulates their imaginations and gives them confidence in their own creativity, with the idea that they will begin by knowing less than he does about their roles and end by knowing more. Castingchoosing the actor to fit the roleoften is the sole responsibility of the director, since a single miscast role can ruin an entire production. In the rehearsal the director's skills as manager as well as craftsman become important. The actors must be integrated into the set and their physical movements blocked, or arranged. The director must compose a stage picture that gives the desired emphasis to the spoken word. He must also oversee the designers, stage technicians, and sometimes the choreographer and orchestra conductor. The direction of these disparateand often competingelements requires a broad and unifying vision that subordinates the parts of the production to the play as a whole. Modern film directors oversee the same elements that theatre directors do, as well as such technical factors as cinematography, editing, and sound recording. The first motion-picture directors did not realize the artistic control that these technical elements allowed; they simply filmed short vaudeville or circus acts and brief action-filled views of real life from start to finish without moving the camera. Soon, however, film directors learned to use camera placement and movement to focus viewer attention on a particular area or person, and they discovered that they could use editing to create narrative or dramatic effects. Later developments in motion-picture technology, such as the introduction of sound and colour, inspired further innovations in film-directing technique. Two techniques that are sometimes used to describe motion-picture directing styles are montage and mise-en-scne. Montage directors are primarily concerned with editing and the relationships of individual shots to one another. D.W. Griffith was one of the first directors to use montage expressively, as in The Birth of a Nation (1915). Theories of montage were further developed by Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s, especially Sergey Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. Mise-en-scne directors concentrate on the relationships between the elements within a shot and on the processes that precede the editing stage, such as camera movement, pictorial composition, lighting, and design. Directors known for their use of mise-en-scne include Orson Welles, Max Ophuls, Jean Renoir, and Mizoguchi Kenji. In most traditional Hollywood feature films, which are characterized by their fast pace and invisible editing style, both montage and mise-en-scne techniques are used, but montage usually dominates. Directing television programs for live broadcast presents a situation similar to that of working on the stage. The performance is continuous and cannot be stopped to correct mistakes. The director must edit from the control room as the program is being broadcast, making split-second decisions about when to cut from one camera shot to another. Television directors working on programs for future broadcast have the same basic functions as motion-picture directors, although they usually have less artistic control. The radio director's responsibilities, like those of the television director, differ for live and recorded material. In general, however, the director of a radio play needs an acutely sensitive ear to ensure that the actors' inflections and vocal rhythms produce expressive speech and that the total play with all its music and sound effects can be visualized clearly in a listener's mind. the craft of controlling the evolution of a performance out of material composed or assembled by an author. The performance may be live, as in a theatre and in some broadcasts, or it may be recorded, as in motion pictures and the majority of broadcast material. The term is also used in film, television, video, and radio to describe the shaping of material that may not involve actors and may be no more than a collection of visual or aural images. In the theatre there was for a time a confusion of terminology between British usage and that of the United States. The director (as distinct from an old-time actor organizing rehearsals of a play in which he himself appears) emerged during the 19th century, and, like his actors, he worked for an employer who engaged both on contract. The employer, in Britain, came to be known as the manager, while the person directing the action was known as the producer. In the United States the producer has always been the one who engages the actors and finances the production, while the artist who directs the actors and shapes the performance is known as the director. With the advent of films these terms were applied to the new industry, and the American usage eventually found its way into the London theatre. It has since been absorbed by British broadcasting and British regional theatres as well and is now applied generally, although the original British usage is found in many earlier books. The role of the director varies a great deal, not only according to the medium in which he works but also according to whether or not he works with actors. There is always common ground between directors of drama, whatever the medium, because their success depends not only upon knowledge of the specialized form but also upon understanding of acting and human nature. Traditionally the director is responsible to the play in the same way a symphony conductor is responsible to the score. In some experimental theatres that responsibility expands to include devising not only the performance but also the text of a play, partly through improvisations with the actors, with or without the collaboration of an author. In all directing there is a tension between content and form. Because there are many opportunities for jugglery with technical tricks, directors can be tempted toward virtuosity at the expense of meaning. In the musical theatre, for example, directors may attempt to compensate for a weak script by dazzling the audience with mechanically sophisticated sets and elaborate lighting designs. The justification for such measures is highly debatable; in any event, the value of immediate effect must be balanced against that of enduring significance, for the two are often mutually exclusive. Outside the Western world, the development of the director's power originally followed the Western pattern only in the performance of Western or Western-type plays, but, more recently, non-Western directors have come to have an influence on traditional non-Western forms. Indigenous Oriental theatre, as typified by the classical theatre of China and the No and Kabuki theatres of Japan, is rooted in tradition; its aim is not discovery but rather the perfect presentation of what was discovered long ago. In China's Peking opera before the Communist revolution, techniques were handed down from father to son for generations. In the N o theatre, and to a lesser extent in the Kabuki, the positions of the performers on their acting platforms and the precise timing of their stylized gestures and vocalizations have all been fixed for centuries. In such traditions a director in the Western sense would be superfluous. But the incorporation of modern lighting and film techniques has strengthened the director's influence generally, as can be seen in the Kabuki theatre, where such widely traveled artists as Ichikawa Ennosuke III have been controversial in Japan for their use of innovative techniques. Additional reading Many of the most useful guides to directing are biographical in nature, or they document productions of individual directors. A good, if partial, overview of the development of directing from the time of the Meiningen Players is Edward Braun, The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Grotowski (1982). Peter Hall's Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle, edited by John Goodwin (1983), presents an intensely personal picture of the role of the artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain; Harold Clurman, On Directing (1972), is a personal testament to the practical details of the discipline by one of America's most important directors; and A Casebook on Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, edited by John Lahr and Anthea Lahr (1971), documents the direction, design, intention, and reception of one of Pinter's most important plays. Jim Hiley, Theatre at Work: The Story of the National Theatre's Production of Brecht's Galileo (1981), is a complete documentation of a production by John Dexter. Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (1930; also available in later multivolume editions), is an analysis of the theatrical, as well as the obvious poetic, values to be discovered by anyone staging Shakespeare's plays. An important statement extending the Stanislavsky tradition to more experimental strains of the Soviet theatre and placing them in historical context is Edward Braun, The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution and the Modern Stage (1979, reissued 1986). John Willett, Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches (1984), is a thoughtful bringing together of the elements that shaped Brecht's ideas of theatre, from music and design to politics; Richard Schechner, Environmental Theater (1973), is a fundamental statement by a radical American director and theorist; and Twentieth Century Polish Theatre, edited by Bohdan Drozdowski (1979), examines the work of several influential avant-gardists.John Fernald, Sense of Direction: The Director and His Actors (1968), is a detailed examination of the way a director works with actors, including analyses of scenes from classic plays, showing how to approach them as a director; Elsie Fogerty, Speech Craft: A Manual of Practice in English Speech (1930), is a guide to what actors should be able to do and the mistakes they can make; Tyrone Guthrie, A Life in the Theatre (1959, reprinted 1985), presents personal revelations about directing and the theatre; G. Wilson Knight, Shakespearean Production, new ed. (1963, reprinted 1981), is a first-class complement to Granville-Barker's Prefaces; Richard L. Sterne, John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet (1967), shows how a great Shakespearean directed this play over a period of four weeks' rehearsal. Other works include Joann Green, The Small Theatre Handbook: A Guide to Management and Production (1981); Andrew McCallum, Fun with Stagecraft (1981); and Ann Pasternak Slater, Shakespeare, the Director (1982). John Bailey Fernald Ned Chaillet