New essay: Theatre directing since 1945
I’ve got an essay just out in Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato’s Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945. (More details on the ‘Writing’ page)
The book is intended for a wide audience. Dan and Jen describe it as follows:
British theatre underwent a vast transformation and expansion in the decades after World War II. This Companion explores the historical, political, and social contexts and conditions that not only allowed it to expand but, crucially, shaped it. Resisting a critical tendency to focus on plays alone, the collection expands understanding of British theatre by illuminating contexts such as funding, unionisation, devolution, immigration, and changes to legislation. Divided into four parts, it guides readers through changing attitudes to theatre-making (acting, directing, writing), theatre sectors (West End, subsidised, Fringe), theatre communities (audiences, Black theatre, queer theatre), and theatre's relationship to the state (government, infrastructure, nationhood). Supplemented by a valuable Chronology and Guide to Further Reading, it presents up-to-date approaches informed by critical race theory, queer studies, audience studies, and archival research to demonstrate important new ways of conceptualising post-war British theatre's history, practices and potential futures.
My chapter develops a history of directorial practice since 1945, arguing that directors have been able to assert their authority over the sector thanks to their operation at the intersections of art and finance, organisation and creativity. This analysis of the work of directing owes a great deal to Ric Knowles’ development of ‘materialist semiotics’ as an approach to analysing the ways in which material conditions of production and reception shape theatre as an art form, and to Stuart Hall’s readings of the politics of cultural production and reception more widely.
The essay focuses on three intertwined traditions of theatre directing in Britain in the post-war period:
the managerial and administrative position of the Artistic Director (key examples discussed are Michael Buffong, Stephen Daldry, Peter Hall, David Lan and Paulette Randall);
‘auteur’ directors whose work is to create theatrical ‘performance texts’ (I discuss Joan Littlewood, Simon McBurney, Katie Mitchell, Emma Rice here), and
directors whose artistry is to be found in what I call ‘social production’: the shaping of relations between people in public space (Geraldine Connor, Jenny Sealey and Lois Weaver are my examples).
By tracking this wide range of directorial practices, the chapter aims to expose the material conditions and social relations that shape creative practices in the theatre, and thus to analyse the multiple forces and interests that govern the sector. I summarise the wider purpose and significance of this approach at the end of the essay:
The director […] is both subject to and a producer of social dynamics that are unavoidably political, and frequently reassert hegemonic power. Even when directors attempt to resist this process, their directing is frequently reduced to a commodified exercise in identity branding that seeks to monetise creative processes. However, as demonstrated in my final examples, it is equally possible to construct spaces in which directing can assert itself as a social and political intervention. Through this analysis of recent British theatre history, then, I hope not only to have exposed the social relations that shape the sector’s creative practices, but to have contributed to a demand for a more politically-engaged conception of the role of the directors who govern it.
As may be clear from this, one of the key observations underpinning my analysis (which I have developed further in a forthcoming essay about working in the theatre for another companion volume) is that the second half of the twentieth century saw the theatre become increasingly formally institutionalised as a ‘sector’. In that context, I remain somewhat sceptical about the capacity for directors to make political interventions in ways that aren’t almost immediately foreclosed by their institutionalisation. (This is an argument I’ve made about Katie Mitchell’s directing elsewhere, but it by no means applies exclusively to her.) My basic view, therefore, is that any project to politicise cultural production (for example by using theatre-making to reshape sociality, as I argue Connor, Sealey and Weaver have done), must engage in institutional critique.
Anyone who’s been watching the recent ‘churn’ of artistic directors in major UK theatres may well have been thinking about the extent to which artists’ careers are shaped by institutions. Perhaps the rise of the director to become the pre-eminent artist of the western theatre during the post-war period marks the extent to which theatre was captured by the capitalist state, and maybe the restless movement of directors signifies that a further change is underway.
