After thirty years of directing plays around the world, I am putting some thoughts about the craft of directing plays into a series of Podcasts.  This is number one.....

Introduction

What's the first thing a director should do when preparing a production?

1 Read The Play

2. Know Where You Are Going

Why are you doing this at all?  The Big Why?

3 Cooking, Love, Theatre And Harold Pinter

What is the purpose of research?  What are you looking for and the dangers of cat videos.

5 Why Research Matters

Finally you start casting!  What are you looking for?

6 Casting Introduction

A step to the side for a moment to ask What is theatre?  What is unique about the live event and why have we told stories through drama for millennia?

7 What Is Theatre

I try to explain how and why I run auditions the way I do, and what I am trying to learn from  actors as I meet them.  And I can't help but get a bit outspoken about how other people do it...…!

8 The Audition Room

Casting Directors:  The Good, The Bad, and The Celebrity.  What Casting Directors are for and how to get the best out of them.

9 Casting Directors

You do a great audition and you know the director but you don't get the part: How did that happen?  The painful alchemy of casting.

10 How I Choose Actors

What is a 'Name', why do we need them, and what do you do with them in the casting process?

11 Deploying The 'Name'.

Finishing the subject of casting with some of the weirder experiences of a director.  Awkward moments with Ayckbourn, celebrity casting meetings go  south and the rights and wrongs of getting naked in auditions....

12 Casting Anecdotes

You've finally got into the rehearsal room.  What on earth are you going to do?  Start by asking some fundamental questions.  Who am I?  And Who is rehearsal for?

13 Who Is Rehearsal For

How do you create the most creative, safe atmosphere in the rehearsal room?

14 Make Failure Your Ambition

The Director who thinks her or his job is to have the answers is an idiot.  How to use the power of questions to build ownership in the rehearsal room.

15 Questions Not Answers

Directors have different approaches to working through the text in rehearsal.  Here's mine: Plywood and organic gardening and not a mixed metaphor in sight!

16 Plywood And Organic Gardening

Its all on a 'need to know' basis - who needs to know what in the rehearsal room including some advice from the Master, Harold Pinter.

17 Mind Your Own Fucking Business

Leaving your cast and crew at the end of the rehearsal period with full ownership of their production is a vital goal of the process which is far too often overlooked.

19 Ownership And Making Yourself Dispensable

'Blocking' is notionally the way directors move actors round a stage.  What does it mean and how do you achieve it in a way that works and sticks?

18 To Block Or Not To Block

Is Directing an Art or a Craft?  What does Style mean in theatre?

20 Art, Craft And Style In Theatre

Our minds are on how we can make the world a less racist place.  What contribution can a director make? We can and should do better.

21 Race

The art of Time Keeping and why it is a vital part of your rehearsal room.

22 Sorry Darling I'll Use You Tomorrow

Be rigidly disciplined about your structure and utterly flexible in your sensitivity to your team's needs.  Good for rehearsals and good for any sort of leadership...

23 Play Is The Best Way To Learn

Directors who assemble a team of people to do what they tell them, are wasting their most valuable creative resource; collective imagination and experience.

24 Don't Be The Smartest Person In The Room

Being a good Project Manager is one of the most creative parts of the job and yet so many Directors ignore it.

25 Learn To Print The Tickets Dear Boy - Director As Project Manager

Your job is not to teach actors how to act.  The Director as Acting Teacher is part of a recent construct to legitimise their power.  Just concentrate on doing your job properly; rehearse the play and trust that the people in the room can act - isn't that why you cast them?

26 Should Directors Teach Actors How To Act

Ignore the relationships with your Stage Management team at your peril; they are the lifeblood of the rehearsal room and the production.

27 Stage Managers And Why Theatre Doesn't Exist Without Them

This is always a personal preference for Directors but this is a window on how I prepare the text for rehearsal.

28 How To Divide Up The Text

Understanding how to dissect text to identify the difference between plot, story and narrative is a key skill in theatre but in so much more.  Narrative is talked about all the time now but who actually knows what they mean by it?

29 Time Place Action And Narrative

Understanding how the theatre space works is as much about the architecture of the auditorium as it is about the layout of the stage.

30 Sit In The Cheap Seats

Sweat the simple stuff; understand the basic craft before you move onto the 'exciting' bits.

31 Find The Catch For The Bonnet

Understanding how Breath creates Energy in performance is a vital piece of knowledge for a Director.  As in life, Breath is everything on stage.

32 Breath Is Energy

Knowing what ideas NOT to show in the final performance is as essential as exploring those ideas through rehearsal.

33 Know When To Shut The Bonnet

If you don't have the passion to fight for your play, its characters and its writer, don't bother.

34 Direct Angry

'Making the Icons' is a phrase used by a Greek actor I directed, and is a no-bullshit journey through the craft of directing for theatre.
I am a theatre director, screen and play writer and have been making theatre round the world since the early 1990s.

Making the Icons

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