Theatre director

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A director providing instruction

A theatre director or stage director is a director/instructor in the theatre field who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a theatre production (a play, an opera, a musical, or a devised piece of work) by unifying various endeavours 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 realising their artistic vision for it. The director therefore collaborates with a team of creative individuals and other staff, coordinating research, stagecraft, costume design, props, lighting design, acting, set design, stage combat, and sound design for the production. If the production he or she is mounting is a new piece of writing or a (new) translation of a play, the director may also work with the playwright or translator. In contemporary theatre, after the playwright, the director is generally the primary visionary, making decisions on the artistic concept 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 utilize a wide variety of techniques, philosophies, and levels of collaboration.

The director in theatre history[edit]

In ancient Greece, the birthplace of European drama, the writer bore principal responsibility for the staging of his plays. Actors would generally be semi-professionals, and the player director oversaw the mounting of plays from the writing process all the way through to their performances, often - as was the case for Aeschylus for instance - also acting in them. He would also train the chorus, sometimes compose the music and supervise every aspect of production. The term applied to him, didaskalos, the Greek word for "teacher," was indicative of how these early directors had to combine instruction of their performers with staging their work.[1]



From Renaissance times up until the 19th century, the role of director was often carried by the so-called actor-manager. 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 companies and English actor-managers like Colley Cibber and David Garrick.

The modern theatre director can be said to have originated from the staging of elaborate spectacles of the Meininger Company, large scale theatre productions staged by Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen. The management of large numbers of extras and complex stagecraft matters necessitated an individual to take on the role of overall coordinator.[3] This gave rise to the role of the director in modern theatre, and Germany would provide a platform for a generation of emerging visionary theatre directors, such as Erwin Piscator and Max Reinhardt. Simultaneously, Constantin Stanislavski, principally an actor-manager, would set up the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia and similarly emancipate the role of the director as artistic visionary.

The French regisseur is also sometimes used to mean a stage director. This is most common in ballet. A more common term for theatre director in French is metteur en scène.

Post World War II, the actor-manager 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 Vsevolod Meyerhold, Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Yuri Lyubimov (Russia), Peter Brook, Peter Hall (Britain), Bertolt Brecht (Germany) and Giorgio Strehler (Italy).



Directing education[edit]



Styles of directing[edit]



See also[edit]


  2. ^ Brocket, op.cit., p. 96
  3. ^ Russel Brown, John (ed): The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 334

External links[edit]