A theatre director or stage director is a professional in the theatre field who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a theatre production such as a play, opera, dance, drama, musical theatre performance, etc. by unifying various endeavors and aspects of production. The director's function is to ensure the quality and completeness of theatre production and to lead the members of the creative team into realizing their artistic vision for it. The director thereby collaborates with a team of creative individuals and other staff to coordinate research and work on all the aspects of the production which includes the Technical and the Performance aspects.
The technical aspects include: stagecraft, costume design, theatrical properties (props), lighting design, set design, and sound design for the production. The performance aspects include: acting, dance, orchestra, chants, and stage combat.
If the production is a new piece of writing or a (new) translation of a play, the director may also work with the playwright or a translator. In contemporary theatre, after the
playwright
A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays.
Etymology
The word "play" is from Middle English pleye, from Old English plæġ, pleġa, plæġa ("play, exercise; sport, game; drama, applause"). The word "wright" is an archaic English ...
, the director is generally the principle visionary, making decisions on the artistic conception and interpretation of the play and its staging. Different directors occupy different places of authority and responsibility, depending on the structure and philosophy of individual theatre companies. Directors use a wide variety of techniques, philosophies, and levels of collaboration.
The director in theatre history
In
ancient Greece
Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity ( AD 600), that comprised a loose collection of cult ...
, the birthplace of European drama, the writer bore principal responsibility for the staging of his plays. Actors were generally semi-professionals, and the director oversaw the mounting of plays from the writing process all the way through to their performance, often acting in them too, as
Aeschylus
Aeschylus (, ; grc-gre, Αἰσχύλος ; c. 525/524 – c. 456/455 BC) was an ancient Greek tragedian, and is often described as the father of tragedy. Academic knowledge of the genre begins with his work, and understanding of earlier Greek ...
for example did. The author-director would also train the
chorus
Chorus may refer to:
Music
* Chorus (song) or refrain, line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse
* Chorus effect, the perception of similar sounds from multiple sources as a single, richer sound
* Chorus form, song in which all verse ...
, sometimes compose the music, and supervise every aspect of production. The fact that the director was called ''didaskalos'', the Greek word for "teacher," indicates that the work of these early directors combined instructing their performers with staging their work.
In
medieval
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the Post-classical, post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with t ...
times, the complexity of vernacular religious drama, with its large scale
mystery plays
Mystery plays and miracle plays (they are distinguished as two different forms although the terms are often used interchangeably) are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the represen ...
that often included crowd scenes, processions and elaborate effects, gave the role of director (or ''stage manager'' or ''pageant master'') considerable importance. A miniature by
Jean Fouquet
Jean (or Jehan) Fouquet (ca.1420–1481) was a French painter and miniaturist. A master of panel painting and manuscript illumination, and the apparent inventor of the portrait miniature, he is considered one of the most important painters from ...
from 1460 (pictured) bears one of the earliest depictions of a director at work. Holding a prompt book, the central figure directs, with the aid of a long stick, the proceedings of the staging of a dramatization of the ''Martyrdom of
Saint Apollonia
Saint Apollonia ( el, Αγία Απολλωνία, cop, Ϯⲁⲅⲓⲁ Ⲁⲡⲟⲗⲗⲟⲛⲓⲁ) was one of a group of virgin martyrs who suffered in Alexandria during a local uprising against the Christians prior to the persecution of Decius ...
''. According to Fouquet, the director's tasks included overseeing the erecting of a stage and scenery (there were no permanent, purpose-built theatre structures at this time, and performances of vernacular drama mostly took place in the open air), casting and directing the actors (which included fining them for those that infringed rules), and addressing the audience at the beginning of each performance and after each intermission.
From
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas ...
times up until the 19th century, the role of director was often carried by the ''
actor-manager
An actor-manager is a leading actor who sets up their own permanent theatrical company and manages the business, sometimes taking over a theatre to perform select plays in which they usually star. It is a method of theatrical production used co ...
''. This would usually be a senior actor in a troupe who took the responsibility for choosing the repertoire of work, staging it and managing the company. This was the case for instance with
Commedia dell'Arte
(; ; ) was an early form of professional theatre, originating from Italian theatre, that was popular throughout Europe between the 16th and 18th centuries. It was formerly called Italian comedy in English and is also known as , , and . Charact ...
companies and English actor-managers like
Colley Cibber
Colley Cibber (6 November 1671 – 11 December 1757) was an English actor-manager, playwright and Poet Laureate. His colourful memoir ''Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber'' (1740) describes his life in a personal, anecdotal and even rambling ...
and
David Garrick.
The modern theatre director can be said to have originated in the staging of elaborate spectacles of the Meininger Company under George II, Duke of
Saxe-Meiningen
Saxe-Meiningen (; german: Sachsen-Meiningen ) was one of the Saxon duchies held by the Ernestine line of the Wettin dynasty, located in the southwest of the present-day German state of Thuringia.
Established in 1681, by partition of the Ernest ...
. The management of large numbers of extras and complex stagecraft matters necessitated an individual to take on the role of overall coordinator. This gave rise to the role of the director in modern theatre, and
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
would provide a platform for a generation of emerging visionary theatre directors, such as
Erwin Piscator
Erwin Friedrich Maximilian Piscator (17 December 1893 – 30 March 1966) was a German theatre director and producer. Along with Bertolt Brecht, he was the foremost exponent of epic theatre, a form that emphasizes the socio-political content o ...
and
Max Reinhardt
Max Reinhardt (; born Maximilian Goldmann; 9 September 1873 – 30 October 1943) was an Austrian-born theatre and film director, intendant, and theatrical producer. With his innovative stage productions, he is regarded as one of the most pro ...
. Simultaneously,
Constantin Stanislavski
Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski ( Alekseyev; russian: Константин Сергеевич Станиславский, p=kənstɐnʲˈtʲin sʲɪrˈgʲejɪvʲɪtɕ stənʲɪˈslafskʲɪj; 7 August 1938) was a seminal Soviet Russian ...
, principally an actor-manager, would set up the
Moscow Art Theatre
The Moscow Art Theatre (or MAT; russian: Московский Художественный академический театр (МХАТ), ''Moskovskiy Hudojestvenny Akademicheskiy Teatr'' (МHАТ)) was a theatre company in Moscow. It was f ...
in
Russia
Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...
and similarly emancipate the role of the director as artistic visionary.
The French ''regisseur'' is also sometimes used to mean a stage director, most commonly in
ballet
Ballet () is a type of performance dance that originated during the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century and later developed into a concert dance form in France and Russia. It has since become a widespread and highly technical form of ...
. A more common term for theatre director in French is ''metteur en scène''.
Post
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, the
actor-manager
An actor-manager is a leading actor who sets up their own permanent theatrical company and manages the business, sometimes taking over a theatre to perform select plays in which they usually star. It is a method of theatrical production used co ...
slowly started to disappear, and directing become a fully fledged artistic activity within the theatre profession. The director originating artistic vision and concept, and realizing the staging of a production, became the norm rather than the exception. Great forces in the emancipation of theatre directing as a profession were notable 20th-century theatre directors like
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko (russian: Владимир Иванович Немирович-Данченко; , Ozurgeti – 25 April 1943, Moscow), was a Soviet and Russian theatre director, writer, pedagogue, playwright, producer an ...
,
Vsevolod Meyerhold
Vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold (russian: Всеволод Эмильевич Мейерхольд, translit=Vsévolod Èmíl'evič Mejerchól'd; born german: Karl Kasimir Theodor Meyerhold; 2 February 1940) was a Russian and Soviet theatre ...
,
Yevgeny Vakhtangov
Yevgeny Bagrationovich Vakhtangov (also spelled Evgeny or Eugene; russian: Евге́ний Багратио́нович Вахта́нгов; 13 February 1883 – 29 May 1922) was a Russian-Armenian actor and theatre director who founded the ...
,
Michael Chekhov
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Chekhov (russian: Михаил Александрович Чехов; 29 August 1891 – 30 September 1955), known as Michael Chekhov, was an American actor, director, author and theatre practitioner. He was a nephew ...
,
Yuri Lyubimov
Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov (russian: Ю́рий Петро́вич Люби́мов; 5 October 2014) was a Soviet and Russian stage actor and director associated with the internationally renowned Taganka Theatre, which he founded in 1964. He was on ...
(Russia),
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter, known for his innovative work in film, radio and theatre. He is considered to be among the greatest and most influential f ...
,
Peter Brook
Peter Stephen Paul Brook (21 March 1925 – 2 July 2022) was an English theatre and film director. He worked first in England, from 1945 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, from 1947 at the Royal Opera House, and from 1962 for the Royal Sha ...
,
Peter Hall (Britain),
Bertolt Brecht
Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...
(Germany),
Giorgio Strehler
Giorgio Strehler (; ; 14 August 1921 – 25 December 1997) was an actor, Italian opera and theatre director.
Biography
Strehler was born in Barcola, Trieste; His father, Bruno Strehler, was a native of Trieste with family roots in Vienna and die ...
, and
Franco Zeffirelli
Gian Franco Corsi Zeffirelli (12 February 1923 – 15 June 2019), was an Italian stage and film director, producer, production designer and politician. He was one of the most significant opera and theatre directors of the post-World War II era, ...
(Italy).
A cautionary note was introduced by the famed director Sir
Tyrone Guthrie
Sir William Tyrone Guthrie (2 July 1900 – 15 May 1971) was an English theatrical director instrumental in the founding of the Stratford Festival of Canada, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at h ...
who said "the only way to learn how to direct a play, is ... to get a group of actors simple enough to allow you to let you direct them, and direct".
A number of seminal works on directing and directors include Toby Cole and Helen Krich's 1972 ''Directors on Directing: A Sourcebook of the Modern Theatre'', Edward Braun's 1982 book ''The Director and the Stage: From Naturalism to Growtowski'', and Will's ''The Director in a Changing Theatre'' (1976).
Directing education
Because of the relatively late emergence of theatre directing as a performing arts profession when compared with for instance acting or musicianship, a rise of professional vocational training programmes in directing can be seen mostly in the second half of the 20th century. Most European countries nowadays know some form of professional directing training, usually at
drama school
A drama school, stage school or theatre school is an undergraduate and/or graduate school or department at a college or university; or a free-standing institution (such as the Drama section at the Juilliard School); which specializes in the pr ...
s or
conservatoires, or at universities. In Britain, the tradition that theatre directors emerge from degree courses (usually in English literature) at the
Oxbridge
Oxbridge is a portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge, the two oldest, wealthiest, and most famous universities in the United Kingdom. The term is used to refer to them collectively, in contrast to other British universities, and more broadly to de ...
universities has meant that for a long time, professional vocational training did not take place at drama schools or performing arts colleges, although an increase in training programmes for theatre directors can be witnessed since the 1970s and 1980s. In American universities, the seminal directing program at the
Yale School of Drama
The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University is a graduate professional school of Yale University, located in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1924 as the Department of Drama in the School of Fine Arts, the school provides training in e ...
produced a number of pioneering directors with D.F.A. (Doctor of Fine Arts) and M.F.A. degrees in Drama (rather than English) who contributed to the expansion of professional resident theaters in the 1960s and 1970s. In the early days such programmes typically led to the staging of one major thesis production in the third (final) year. At the
University of California, Irvine
The University of California, Irvine (UCI or UC Irvine) is a public land-grant research university in Irvine, California. One of the ten campuses of the University of California system, UCI offers 87 undergraduate degrees and 129 graduate and p ...
,
Keith Fowler
Keith Franklin Fowler (born February 23, 1939) is an American actor, director, producer, and educator. He is a professor emeritus of drama and former head of directing in the Drama Department of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts of the Univer ...
(a Yale D.F.A. and ex-producer of two LORT companies) led for many years a graduate programme based on the premise that directors are autodidacts who need as many opportunities to direct as possible. Under Fowler, graduate student directors would stage between five and ten productions during their three-year residencies, with each production receiving detailed critiques.
As with many other professions in the performing arts, theatre directors would often learn their skills "on the job"; to this purpose, theatres often employ trainee assistant directors or have in-house education schemes to train young theatre directors. Examples are the
Royal National Theatre
The Royal National Theatre in London, commonly known as the National Theatre (NT), is one of the United Kingdom's three most prominent publicly funded performing arts venues, alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Opera House. I ...
in
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
, which frequently organizes short directing courses, or the
Orange Tree Theatre
The Orange Tree Theatre is a 180-seat theatre at 1 Clarence Street, Richmond in south-west London, which was built specifically as a theatre in the round. It is housed within a disused 1867 primary school, built in Victorian Gothic style.
T ...
and the
Donmar Warehouse
The Donmar Warehouse is a 251-seat, not-for-profit theatre in Covent Garden, London, England. It first opened on 18 July 1977.
Sam Mendes, Michael Grandage and Josie Rourke have all served as artistic director, a post held since 2019 by Mi ...
on London's
West End, which both employ resident assistant directors on a one-year basis for training purposes.
Styles of directing
Directing is an art form that has grown with the development of theatre theory and theatre practice. With the emergence of new
trends in theatre, so too have directors adopted new methodologies and engaged in new practices. Interpretation of the drama, by the late twentieth century, had become central to the director's work. Relativism and psychoanalytic theory influenced the work of innovative directors such as
Peter Brook
Peter Stephen Paul Brook (21 March 1925 – 2 July 2022) was an English theatre and film director. He worked first in England, from 1945 at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, from 1947 at the Royal Opera House, and from 1962 for the Royal Sha ...
,
Ingmar Bergman,
Peter Stein, and
Giorgio Strehler
Giorgio Strehler (; ; 14 August 1921 – 25 December 1997) was an actor, Italian opera and theatre director.
Biography
Strehler was born in Barcola, Trieste; His father, Bruno Strehler, was a native of Trieste with family roots in Vienna and die ...
.:)
Kimberly Senior, director of ''
Disgraced
''Disgraced'' is a 2012 play by novelist and screenwriter Ayad Akhtar. It premiered in Chicago and has had Off-Broadway and Off West End engagements. The play, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, opened on Broadway at the Lyceum The ...
'' on Broadway, explains her role as director by saying “I get to take things that were previously in one dimension and put them into three dimensions using my imagination and intellect and people skills.”
Once a show has opened (premiered before a regular audience), theatre directors are generally considered to have fulfilled their function. From that point forward the
stage manager is left in charge of all essential concerns.
See also
*
Artistic director
An artistic director is the executive of an arts organization, particularly in a theatre or dance company, who handles the organization's artistic direction. They are generally a producer and director, but not in the sense of a mogul, since the ...
*
Dramaturge
A dramaturge or dramaturg is a literary adviser or editor in a theatre, opera, or film company who researches, selects, adapts, edits, and interprets scripts, libretti, texts, and printed programmes (or helps others with these tasks), consults auth ...
*
Improvisational theatre
Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv, is the form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted: created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the dialogue, a ...
*
Method acting
Method acting, informally known as The Method, is a range of training and rehearsal techniques, as formulated by a number of different theatre practitioners, that seeks to encourage sincere and expressive performances through identifying with, u ...
*
Presentational acting Presentational acting and the related representational acting are opposing ways of sustaining the actor–audience relationship. With presentational acting, the actor acknowledges the audience. With representational acting, the audience is studiousl ...
*
Regietheater Regietheater (German for ''director's theater'') is the modern practice of allowing a director freedom in devising the way a given opera or play is staged so that the creator's original, specific intentions or stage directions (where supplied) can b ...
*
List of film and television directors
*
List of opera directors
This list of opera directors is a list of notable stage producers and directors who have worked, or are working, in the opera world.
* Christopher Alden (born 1949)
* David Alden (born 1949)
* Neil Armfield (born 1955)
* Lucy Bailey (born 1962) ...
*
List of theatre directors
This is a list of theatre directors, living and dead, who have been active in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Arabic Speaking
*Fouad Awad
* Mohammed Al Shanfari
Belarusian Speaking
* Ihnat Bujnicki
* Mikalai Khalezin
Bengali speaking
*Montazur ...
*
Stage Directors and Choreographers Society
The Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), formerly known as Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SDC), is an independent national labor union established in 1959, representing theatrical directors and choreographer ...
(SDC)
References
External links
INSTED: International Network for Students in Theatre DirectingWorking with amateursSociety of Stage Directors and Choreographers
{{Authority control
Directors
Theatrical occupations
Theatrical management
Stagecraft