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p A theatre cannot be without a director,
for it is the director who plots the theatre’s creative path. Every single matter of stage art without exception depends on him, and it is he who bears the main responsibility for a production. He is to blame if the play is bad, if the acting is not genuine, if the audience laugh in the wrong places. He speaks for the whole theatre company, and his opinion is taken more seriously as a rule than that of any actor. He is approached with all sorts of questions connected with the production and is bound to give an answer. The director has numerous duties, but also considerable rights.

p The director must be a highly educated and extremely versatile man. He must know a lot about music, the fine arts, stagecraft, the technical side of the theatre, and even administrative and organisational matters. At the same time he may be perfectly incapable of writing a play, drawing, or playing a musical instrument, and may even be a bad actor. Hence the impression some people have that there’s nothing easier than stage direction. Indeed, practically any actor can direct a play. Many, many directors never had an academic training in stage direction, and we have often seen a self-styled director coming along and directing a very successful production.

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p Well then, is stage direction easy or difficult? The answer to that one is: it is easy if treated simply as a job, a craft, difficult if treated as an art.

p Clearly, even in the first case, there are certain things the director must know. He must compensate for his lack of talent with boundless energy and drive, if not outright cheek, for his lack of real skill by assuming a pose of boundless self-confidence, for his lack of imagination with a good memory. He may even enjoy the reputation of being a great expert among beginners. But his authority soon wanes and his successes are purely transitory.

p Before the Revolution some enterprising publishers brought out books that purported to teach one how to write verse. But it would be naive to imagine that a person who has learned to write verse is necessarily a poet.

p It is absurd to imagine that by reading numerous articles, books and brochures on how to direct a play, or by attending a fortnight’s course on stage direction-useful though these may be-anybody can up and become a good director. Unless a person has a natural talent for it, he will never make a director, however much he may “cram”. The best that conscientious work, a talent for organising, and a good education can do for a person is make him a useful “craftsman”. However, natural talent without knowledge, a good education or ability as a teacher and organiser gives scarcely better results than knowledge without talent.

p You cannot teach a person to be a director: the most you can do is help those with a latent talent for directing to cultivate their gift and bring it out by suggesting interesting ways of dealing with a particular situation and putting them on their guard against possible errors. Some qualities useful in stage direction can be successfully developed, widened and deepened through training. But a person who has no ear for music will never make a good singer. And a person who lacks powers of observation and imagination, a sense of humour, temperament, a sense of rhythm and so on will never make a good director.

p But if we insist on high artistic standards in our profession, it is surely about the most difficult there is.

However much people may argue about the role of the director, about the relative importance of director and actor, life has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that although the playwright is the supporting pillar of the theatre, and the actor is the main figure, as presenting the live embodiment of the essence of a work, nevertheless the fate of the theatre present and future largely depends on the director, since it is he who blends the various elements without which there is no theatre.

65 Scene from The Fox and the Grapes Natalya Tenyakova as Clea

p Some may accuse me of exaggerating the role of the director. I don’t think I am. It has already been clearly demonstrated in practice that such arguments are pointless, especially as the aim is not to minimise the role of the actor, since no problem of direction is of any use, or indeed of any interest, to anybody unless it is manifested in the live actor. Therefore to say that the main problem today is that of directing is not to assert the primacy of the director over the actor. This vexed question is really obsolete although we still find articles harping on about it, complaining about an imaginary attempt to exaggerate the role of the director. I don’t think there is ever any conflict between a good director and a good actor. But there is a conflict between a pedestrian director and a lively, creative company of actors. Just as there is a conflict between a director who is a real artist and a lazy, pedestrian actor.

p However, this is not a fundamental conflict between two theatrical professions, for neither of them could exist without the other.

p There is no essential contradiction here. The great trouble in the theatre begins as soon as there is an attempt to contrast the three main pillars of the stage-playwright, director and actor. Real theatre, however, is a harmonious partnership between these three pillars of dramatic art, with the director playing the role of a guide, organiser and navigator. That is why the question of responsibility is one that cannot be ignored.

p Not everyone is fully aware of this responsibility. Some directors feel rather like extras taking part in a crowd scene who, like forty others beside them, do not understand how important their own part is, supposing that everything depends on “the others”. We too are wont to automatically assume that responsibility rests with our neighbour, colleague or comrade, not fully appreciating the importance of what each of us is supposed to be doing at his own post.

p Theatrical art is not portable. The fact that a play has been brilliantly staged in Moscow is of small consolation to people in Smolensk. A new improved line of cutters may be introduced in numerous factories, and a new medicine can cure a patient in a hospital at Tiksi Bay just as well as it can cure one in Kirovograd. But a creative discovery of Pluchck or Efros, Yefremov or Ravenskikh can benefit large and small theatres throughout the country only in very special circumstances.

p They say that oil is not really such a highly inflammable substance since it only catches alight at a certain temperature. I don’t know about oil, but I do know that cold hearts, unprepared, unwarmed by interest will not be set alight by any flying creative sparks.

p Every theatre, every director has the duty to find the solution on his own “home ground” to the problem of how best to bring the people 66 the high humanitarian principles of communism, how to touch the hearts of his contemporaries and really move them.

p I consider that the way the theatre is organised in this country is very largely to blame for the fact that the director has become more and more concerned with organisation and administration and less and less concerned with art. We are so busy with current matters, deciding all manner of problems connected with “output” and organisation, that we tend to lose sight of the very thing that makes us creative artists-we lose the ability to think imaginatively, which is the hallmark of our profession. Many of the productions of the last few years, as A. Popov aptly put it, have been remarkable for the conspicuous absence of the imaginative element.  [66•*  This comes about partly for the simple reason that no other profession gives so much opportunity for dilettantism as stage direction. It proceeds from the very nature of the art of the theatre, which is a collective art.

p In what other field could a man of average intelligence and cultureenter a professional group and be complete “master of the situation”? If he also has a good command of the rudiments of theatrical terminology and is aware of the actual conjuncture, he will generally have no difficulty in posing as a director. Say we have a good play, good actors well cast, a designer who has done a good job and created the appropriate scenery, a semblance of direction of all these components during the course of work on the production, and the whole is crowned with success. But what has this got to do with a profession? And what claim has it to be regarded as art, the creative expression of an artist in visual terms? Then the critic may well examine it all from the standpoint of real art. And the man of mediocre intelligence who heads the group of creative artists will be delighted to read where he was successful and where he failed from the point of view of the visual solution and will be convinced that he has communed with art, and not only communed, but has even showed himself capable of directing art.

p There are arts where the absence of a professional approach is immediately plain. It is thus in the fine arts, with the pianist’s art, or the very risky art of the acrobat. Yet in our profession one can go on all one’s life without ever becoming an artist.

p I repeat, the trouble has its roots in the very nature of theatrical art, which enables the director to treat his work in a non-professional manner. It is thus extremely important for the director to be highly conscientious about adopting a truly professional attitude to his work, so that time-serving and dilettantism are not mistaken for true art.

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p It seems to me that we should establish certain criteria, a code of creative laws, by which a person who does not meet the essential requirements of an artistic order should be excluded from the profession. And indeed we shall have to do so if we wish to prevent sham professionalism from continuing to penetrate the very essence, the very heart of the creative process of the theatre.

p Today the situation is far from satisfactory in our profession. And we ourselves arc to blame for neglecting its essence.

p Often the level of our professional discussions is such that any reasonably cultured person of another profession happening to be present at one of our meetings could easily participate without lowering the standard of the debate, and possibly even raising it.

p Try walking into a medical consultation. A great deal of what is being discussed will be well above you. But if those doctors were to attend one of our theatrical discussions they would be perfectly able to take an active part. Why is this so? For the simple reason that we are wont to discuss things in the vaguest and most general terms, at the level of the most ordinary argument. We merely give a running commentary on a play, without getting down to a professional analysis in concrete terms. Here too, we seem unable to get away from dilettantism.

p The director must be able to act on the artist’s human nature. He has got to be able to act in such a way as to rouse a response in the audience with and through the actor. The complex dual counterpoint of transmitting his own human feelings and those of the author via the feelings of another person, i. e., the actor, to a third party, the audience, demands a profound knowledge of human psychology and the motions of the human heart. Between the author and the audience stands a middleman-thc actor-who decides the success of the production.

p In order to succeed in this, we must devote our attention to questions of professionalism and skill as being of paramount importance.

p It seems to me that passionate involvement has largely been lost in our profession. In life and art there are things that inspire or disgust, arouse a burning desire to intervene on behalf of what we believe in. This is what I mean by passionate involvement, and every director should be “involved” in this way.

p We seem unable to accumulate, to carry over from one production to another the little grains of our creative achievement and temperament, the sparks of our spiritual fire. Today you may have done a production with which you are not at all satisfied, which just did not come off because you omitted to do something or for other reasons, but if only at a single rehearsal you managed to put something by, and carry it on into your next production, you will be making some progress.

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p It is very difficult to nourish this something, irrespective of success or failure, to draw the correct conclusions from an unsuccessful production. Mainly because it is not flattering to one’s vanity. It is always so much more natural to seek the reasons for failure elsewhere, in the actor, the play, or even the audience (how often we recur to these scapegoats!) and it takes courage to face up squarely to one’s own blame. They say it is alright to make mistakes as long as we learn by them and try not to repeat them. But it does take tremendous willpower and moral strength to look the truth straight in the face and learn from it.

p But apart from involvement multiplied by inspiration we also need cold calculation. Perhaps in no other profession is it so necessary to combine the qualities of Mozart and Salieri. One can imagine an actor who has more of the former: but in our profession the two should be harmoniously combined.

p There exists a general misconception of stage direction as being a profession for those with the wisdom that comes with age. We have very few directors working independently who are under thirty. Why is it that we should consider that in order to be a director a person must have years of experience behind him?

p Stanislavsky said that you cannot train a director, that you must be born a director. This being the case, quite different time scales for the acquisition of experience and the development of an aesthetic platform apply to a director by vocation and a talentless director. There is no reason why a twenty-two or twenty-three year old director should not be a fully-fledged artist of the stage, capable of producing a masterpiece. Your writer, playwright and critic all need to have experience. Yet Gogol was only twenty-two when he wrote his Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, Griboyedov was twenty-seven when he wrote Woe from Wit, Dobrolyubov died at the tender age of twenty-five, Schiller wrote The Robbers at twenty-five, Eisenstein was only twenty-seven when he made The Battleship Potemkin, Vakhtangov staged his best productions before he was twenty-six, Blok wrote his Poems on the Lovely Lady at twenty-four, Sholokhov wrote the first part of And Quiet Flows the Don at twenty-three, Rakhmaninov wrote his opera Aleko at eighteen.... “But they were geniuses!” some will explain. Indeed, they were, but we set ourselves the highest standards.

p For Eisenstein to be able to make The Battleship Potemkin at the age of twenty-seven, it was necessary for people to have faith in him. There were no doubt reasons to inspire such faith. There is no reason to suppose that young people today are any less talented than those of preceding generations. It surely cannot be that they are not producing things that justify our having faith in them.

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p This is all very important since talent (paradoxical though it may seem) “dries up”. It is important to do something at the age of twentythree which, while quite possibly turning out to be a mistake you’ll regret at the age of thirty, is nevertheless something you ought to have behind you. Otherwise you cannot expect to do much worthwhile at the age of thirty.

p A weakness of many directors is their inability to think imaginatively. They may have this ability but be unable to apply it in their practical work.

p I once came across a young director who talked wonderfully, in a most interesting manner and most graphically, in visual terms, about a scene he was going to create. Yet when he showed it to me, it was really quite pathetic. Everything he had told me was locked in his imagination and was quite conspicuous by its absence in the actual scene. The man obviously had a fine visual imagination, but though he thought in visual terms he was unable to embody it in plastic, scenic images. He saw everything in literary terms and was quite blind to what his eye should have been focussed on.

p Nor is this an exceptional case. This is a typical weakness. It is an inability to translate a solution that is subtle, interesting, imaginative, yet literary, into scenic terms.

p One of the main qualities a director must possess is a strong sense of spectacle. It is the sine qua non for a member of our profession. No matter what work we take, even if it be a psychological drama by Ibsen or Chekhov, this sense of spectacle is absolutely essential, however remote the plays of Chekhov and Ibsen may be from our concept ot. what constitutes a spectacle.

p What is the essence of the stage-director’s profession? What constitutes its greatness, its difficulty, its charm and mystery, its limitations and power?

p For centuries, of course, the function of director was performed by the playwright himself or the leading players. Everything was plain and straightforward. How and why the post of director developed as a separate function, and how and why the director came to assume such an important position in the theatre we shall leave to the historians and theoreticians of the theatre. They know more about that than I do. But, be that as it may, the fact remains that the director made his appearance in the theatre and assumed a leading role. The twentieth century is the nuclear age, the age of artificial satellites, cybernetics and . .. the age of the stage direction. Once upon a time one could speak of the theatre of Shakespeare, Molierc, Goldoni or Ostrovsky in the literal sense of theatres run and directed by them. Today our Ostrovsky Theatre, our Chekhov Theatre or our Gorky Theatre arc 70 merely named after great playwrights as a sign of our respect and esteem. Once upon a time you had your Komissarzhevskaya’s theatre or your Sarah Bernhardt theatre, effectively run by the great actress in question. Today it’s Jean Vilard’s theatre, Peter Brook’s theatre, or Piscator’s theatre. Of course it’s not a question of the actual name of the theatre. The official name may be Mayakovsky Theatre, but people call it Okhlopkov’s theatre after the stage-director, and likewise after a visit to the Comedy Theatre people are wont to say “I’ve been to Akimov’s theatre”.

p A director who is worth his salt will justify this general recognition of his highly determinative and even decisive role. But. . .

p The real greatness of our profession lies not merely in the ability to dispense with all barriers and create freely and boldly, submitting only to social duty and smooth or turbulent flights of fancy. The director’s real freedom lies not in the passion of imagination he displays in creating a devastating impact on the boards, arranging light or water phantasmagoria, enlisting in his production the means of the cinema, or a symphony orchestra, making impressive use of the revolving stage, expending hundreds of yards of materials, tons of steel fittings and enormous quantities of timber.

The noble grandeur of our profession, its power and wisdom lie in deliberately restricting oneself, holding oneself in check. The limits of our imagination are set by the author, and crossing them should be punished as betrayal of the author. It is finding the only genuine, the only really appropriate solution for a particular play, valid for it alone, finding the true measure and nature of a play’s conventions, and being able to put on another person’s play as if it were one’s own-such is the noble and most difficult duty of the director.

p I am afraid my thesis concerning the leading role of the director may be understood by some as a claim for unbridled despotism on the part of the director. I should therefore like to make the following short but substantial addition to what I have just said.

p I certainly do consider the director to be the central figure in a theatre, but everything depends on how you understand this assertion. One must on no account confuse artistic will with despotic imposition of personal taste.

p In my younger days I worked with only one aim in mind-to attract attention. The plays and the actors were merely material for me, with the aid of which I tried to show the world what I thought about it. Gradually, as I gained experience and skill, the following question 71 arose: have I the right to offer the public my own views, attitudes and sentiments without first establishing whether they are of interest to others, to people in general?

p Definitely a director’s individual personality, his own social and artistic views should find expression in a production. But one must know how to express them and make sure one has the right to do so. Thus, one must first of all realise that the public does not come to the theatre to see clever novelties and innovations by the director, but above all because they are interested in Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, Ibsen or Moliere, Chekhov or Gorky. The director’s success depends on his ability to understand and interpret the playwright accurately, and in a contemporary manner. For then the public will be interested not only in Shakespeare, but in Brook’s Shakespeare, not merely in Moliere or Rozov but in Blanchon’s Moliere and Efros’s Rozov, and so on. Real theatre, Theatre with a capital T, is a tandem of playwright and director. The modern director must be first and foremost the best “reader” alive today. His tremendously important role derives from the ability to get as close as possible to the author’s intentions, not from continuous exploitation of his gifts for production which, however great they may be, will sooner or later be exhausted.

p The director’s creative freedom is “restricted” not only by the author, but by the actors, and the whole company. The most original interpretation by the director is not worth a sou unless it is embodied by the actors. Actors transmitting the author’s intentions and the director’s interpretation become the creators of a production and not mere interpreters.

p Edward Gordon Craig’s dream of actors that arc little more than glorified puppets is fortunately quite impractical for the theatre. Just as the most perfect robots can never be a substitute for the genius of Praxiteles, Mozart or Shakespeare, so even the most perfect superpuppet can never move audiences as Martynov or Elconora Duse, Vcra Komissarzhcvskaya or Nikolai Khmelyov did.

p I have never experienced the need to free myself from “bondage” to the play, from dependence on the actor or responsibility to the public. I often argue with them, but always as an ally, never as a slave, as a devoted friend, but never as a master. And I do not feel in any way confined by so doing, as if sacrificing my freedom. On the contrary, confining one’s imagination to a certain framework is the main difficulty and at the same time the most rewarding aspect of the profession of stage direction.

p The only school and method I recognise in the theatre is that of Stanislavsky. He was the only one to have based his system entirely on organic existence, on the laws of nature. Unfortunately there has 72 been a tendency to artificially divide him into Stanislavsky the theoretician and Stanislavsky the practician. The most empassioned artist, eternally searching and bold to the point of being completely unprejudiced has been canonised as an obstinate supporter of dreary naturalism. Yet even the most “unruly” of his followers-like Meycrhold, Vakhtangov and Mardzhanov-were developing his teaching even when they thought they were setting up a rival school, opposing it. Stanislavsky did not stand still, and were he alive today, I am quite sure hewould be the most modern director, without having to alter any of his laws of the nature of creative work, which he did not invent but simply discovered.

p The director is often compared to a source of creative energy, the rays of which are diffused in all directions-to actor, playwright, and spectator. I rather see him as the point of intersection of time, poetic idea, and the art of the actor, that is of public, author and actor, a prism focussing into one beam all the components of theatrical art, receiving all the rays, refracting them and thus producing a rainbow.

p Whatever the author’s theme-be it the slough of provincial Russian life, as in Gorky, beauty defiled and a world where goodness becomes unnatural, as in Dostoyevsky, or the comedy inherent in everyday situations, as with the Georgian writer Dumbadze-the theatre should always bring people the joy of perception and knowledge of the world. 1 am not prepared to accept as theatre that which is totally lacking in noble humanistic principles. I refuse to serve it and T don’t believe that it is of any use to people or that it has any future at all.

The theatre has come through thick and thin in the two and a half millennia of its existence. It has had just about every disease and it has survived them all. And it will continue to survive, as long as we do not dissolve the alliance of author, actor and audience. It is the director who cements this alliance and holds it together. For some this does not seem to be enough. For me it is everything.