When did directors become more important than playwrights?

April 20, 2007 6:33 AM

When did directors of plays and operas start the practice of overtly imposing their own visual interpretation of the play at the expense of the stage direction of the author? These days if you go to see a Shakespeare play, it's even odds that it's set in modern times, or the early 20th century, or what have you. Were there 19th century (or earlier!) productions of Shakespeare that set his plays in what were then "modern times"? At what point did staging old plays become just as much about the director's vision as the playwright's?
posted by dfan to Media & Arts (17 answers total)

At what point did staging old plays become just as much about the director's vision as the playwright's
At the point when audiences stopped going to old plays because they couldn't connect with (or understand) them.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:44 AM on April 20, 2007

dfan, your question sounds very axegrindfilter-ish.

Stage directions were not in the original Shakespeare plays. They were, and often still are, simply records of what the play's first performance ever looked like. In other words, the director would have written them anyway.

And also, criticizing modern productions of Shakespeare for being anachronistic is intensely silly. After all, his plays (Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, etc. etc.) are more often than not set in times and places very distant from 17th century London, and yet he never made the slightest effort at verisimilitude. Deliberately! So modern productions may be annoying, but they're certainly remaining true to the legacy.
posted by nasreddin at 6:54 AM on April 20, 2007

Response by poster: Yeah, I regret the title - I didn't know how to sum up the question in a sentence. I actually have no problem with modern productions of Shakespeare and do not find them annoying. I am simply interested in the history of the function of the director.
posted by dfan at 6:55 AM on April 20, 2007

Performances up until the 20th century were always limited in some way. For example, in Shakespeare's time, women couldn't take to the stage, so men played the female parts. Swearing or cursing wasn't allowed, hence the references to things likes 'sblood, which was short for Christ's Blood. More recently, here in Britain, the Lord Chamberlain's permission was needed for all professional performances up until 1968, and he was a very strong censor—nudity wasn't allowed, and everything had to be kept 'decent'.

It was really the 1960s that theatre directors started to interpret plays, rather than simply perform them. The freedom from the Lord Chamberlain's censorship drove much of this forward. We should add in the whole 60s rebellion thing too. Then we have postmodernism, which began to get traction in the 70s, and in which the text became of secondary importance to the method...

Reading about Peter Hall is a good place to begin your research on this topic. He's the one who started the ball rolling on non-traditional Shakespearean performances.
posted by humblepigeon at 7:12 AM on April 20, 2007

Pretty much since the beginning, really--it happened in the 17th and 18th Centuries, at least.
posted by MrMoonPie at 7:14 AM on April 20, 2007

I would imagine it was born out of the timelessness of the works themselves. Their enduring qualities make them endlessly reproducible, and that endless reproduction makes following the exact same stage direction that's been covered so many times before, well, boring in some circles.

I'm not saying there's no place for classics after a certain period of time (that's nonsense, they're classics for a reason). I'm just saying I can only watch Romeo and Juliet so many times before I want to see John Leguizamo pirouetting through a fire fight in the opening scene.
posted by wmeredith at 7:18 AM on April 20, 2007

there's a long tradition of anachronism in art: as far back as the middle ages, artists rendered biblical and historical scenes in contemporary (well, their contemporary) clothing. it becomes really obvious around renaissance times, when you see all these virgin marys in corsets and chemises and petticoats.

i imagine that the impulse to set plays in alternate settings is a variation on that same "remixing" impulse.
posted by thinkingwoman at 7:21 AM on April 20, 2007

I don't think it's a question of "more important" so much as "trying something new". If every single production of Hamlet was identical, why would anyone go more than once? But if you use the play as a medium for a new message...
posted by DU at 7:30 AM on April 20, 2007

The director is a fairly recent innovation in theatre. Theatrical production has been around for millennia, and for most of that time, the production was coordinated by the actors or by the lead actor. A separate director, working on a unique vision, "scenography" design, is less than 200 years old.
posted by cptnrandy at 8:33 AM on April 20, 2007

Also, nobody owns the rights to Shakespeare's plays. You can edit them however you like. More modern playwrights can set all sorts of rules about what directors can and can't adapt.
posted by Watery Death at 9:01 AM on April 20, 2007

The director is a fairly recent innovation in theatre.
This is very true. The concept of a theatrical production as the work of a single artist is more or less isolated to the last 100 years. The concepts have further changed in regards to how plays are interpreted visually. Audience in the past went to hear a play, modern audiences go to see them. A huge shift in theater has taken place over the last century focusing both on the play as a visual medium and the stylistic work of a single mind. So yeah, look to around 1915ish to start to see the advent of modern director driven theater.
Also there is the good point of when should a Shakespeare play take place historically? Should Julius Caesar be staged in Elizabethan England or Imperial Rome? Who’s to say?
posted by French Fry at 9:28 AM on April 20, 2007

I think the answer you're looking for is "the modern era", which started roughly with Ibsen about a hundred and fifty years ago. Directors didn't "interpret" because:

1) "Visual interpretation" is a moot point when you've only got natural light and candles to work with.

2) (As nasreddin said) Playwrights weren't using significant stage directions and therefore it was impossible to betray their un-stated intent.

3) There was no such thing as a "director" or "direction":

Less than a hundred years ago the director was only an ideal projected by disgruntled critics of the chaotic Victorian theater. He did not even have a name, for the terms "director", "regisseur" and "metteur en scene" had barely begun to acquire their present theatrical meaning.... When the director finally did appear toward the end of the nineteenth century, he filled so pressing a need that he quickly pre-empted the hegemony that had rested for centuries with playwrights and actors.... By blending diverse arts into a single organic image he gave birth to the complex modern theatre. (from "The Emergence of the Director" by Helen Krich Chinoy, the opening essay in "Directors on Directing")

posted by tsmo at 9:31 AM on April 20, 2007

Be sure not to overlook nasreddin's comments about anachronism in Shakespeare. Shakespeare set his plays all across Europe, and throughout history, but made little effort to keep these characters "true" to their historical selves in terms of manner of speaking, customs, etc. This suggests to me that Shakespeare was less concerned about "keeping it real" than about telling a particular story independent of the trappings of the stage. Therefore, presenting Shakespeare's plays in new and different ways (only in the settings, costumes, and context, not editing the plays themselves) is not really the result of arrogant directors, but is rather a part of a long tradition dating back to the playwright himself. Some of these attempts at contextualizing the plays in non-Elizabethan settings are very successful, while others are too much of a stretch, but there is little in the plays themselves that dictate how they should be staged. Yes, there are originalists who are trying to restore Elizabethan pronunciation and staging, but I'm not sure that their efforts are necessarily taking us back to a "true" Shakespeare. A good introduction to these "original intent" efforts can be found in Ron Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars (at the moment, I can't remember the specific chapter about this, but look for the one on Peter Hall). For more about the way Shakespeare's plays have been viewed throughout the centuries, see Stanley Wells's excellent Shakespeare For All Time.
posted by arco at 9:47 AM on April 20, 2007

Important detail I left out above: in Julius Caesar, one of the more dramatic moments early in the play involves the tolling of a clock late at night. A clock… that chimes in ancient Rome. All theater is an interpretation of fantasy and reality anyway. we can't dig old bill up and ask him how he'd like it. Good shows is good shows I say.
posted by French Fry at 10:06 AM on April 20, 2007

Also, remember that before the "modern age" of theater when directors began to play a more prominent role in productions there were even more egregious examples of imposing one's viewpoint onto Shakespeare's plays. At least modern directors usually keep to the text as written (with minor modifications and edits for content and time, which is another long tradition in Shakespearean performance).
posted by arco at 10:33 AM on April 20, 2007

Before you had directors, you had actor-managers. (This site also notes the rise of "historically accurate" Shakespeare productions.)
posted by thomas j wise at 11:26 AM on April 20, 2007

Also, there are lots of old plays with deceased authors -- far more than there new plays of interest to tastemakers. Having a director with a reputation creates a something/someone to publicize -- a timely "hook." Such areputation is probably not going to be given to someone who directs without fingerprints. S/he's either going to be a fabulous visual stylist, or great with actors, or a deconstructionist of the original text.

To my mind this is a good thing. I don't think there's a shortage of plays done "straight," and I think it's good for the dramatic ecosystem to see radical takes on well-known ideas.
posted by blueshammer at 11:10 AM on April 23, 2007