Stage Directions

Some time ago I wrote about interpretation. Today, a note on stage directions.

Stage directions are the enemy of interpretation. A lot of mid 20^th century playwrights go into enormous lengths to describe the scene (or actually, the set), what the characters look like, even where they move and how they speak a line (“slowly, with a growing sense of dread” or some such prescriptive nonsense.) To be fair, often these descriptions and moves come from the stage management's prompt copy of the original production.

Regardless of who has written such stage directions if – as a director or actor – you are faced with such a script, go through and cross them out! They will get in your way. How the actor playing the character delivers a particular line should emerge from the rehearsal process not be dictated by a playwright who imagined that line delivered in a particular way.

Of course, plays like Doctor Faustus feature very few stage directions – or indeed scene divisions - and those that are there are often added by a stage manager or print setter. You have to look in the script for clues as to location and delivery. Which is what you should be doing anyway, every time.

Marlowe & the original audience

Elsewhere on this website, you can see me talking about the need for the director to understand the world of the play. The world of the play is also, of course, the world of the playwright.

A lot has been written and speculated about the short, murky life of Christopher Marlowe. Was he an agent, a spy, a projector? Did he really die in Deptford aged 29 or was it an elaborate cover up? Whatever, it is clear that the man who wrote Act 1 scene 3, had a very sophisticated understanding of negotiation, bluff and double-bluff. Working the first dialogue between Faustus and Mephistopheles with the actors who will play them, it’s like a game of poker. What Faustus asks for first, the next; what Mephistopheles offers, what he withholds.

That may reflect Marlowe’s personal world view and experience. What about the original audience’s experience and expectations. When I was researching the play, I came across the following quote from Paul Taylor, the Independent’s theatre critic, on the context in which the play was originally performed:

“a world where the plague killed off many adults in their prime. In those circumstances, 24 years of assured life might not seem such a paltry bargain. Moreover, theatres were meccas of disease and had to be closed down during epidemics. To see the original performance of Faustus in a public playhouse may well have felt rather lke seeing a play about 24 hours of indestructibility performed in a New York or San Francisco bathhouse in the mid-1980s, when the true panic of Aids had kicked in”.

Interpretation

The A level Drama specification talks a lot about a director’s interpretation. At a macro level, I suppose that means “Let’s do Romeo and Juliet and make the Capulets white and the Montagues Asian” – or whatever. (By the way, surely the whole point of the feud in Romeo and Juliet is that no one can remember why it started? If you make it animosity between the families about race, you’ve got West Side Story. Which is one of the great pieces of 20^th century theatre but the poignancy of the tragedy in Romeo & Juliet is that no one remembers why the feud was going on in the first place.

So, yes, the director’s concept (which I’ll write about soon) is important. It may throw light on the play or it may be gratuitous and imposed on the text, but it’s important.

But, at a micro level, it’s worth remembering that, as an actor, you interpret every time you open your mouth. You interpret every time you chose to move. You make a choice. That’s interpretation, pure and simple.

The importance of hearing a play read

Plays exist in 3 dimensions. Everything communicates meaning. Tone of voice, gesture, expression, proximics (that’s the distance between performers). And that’s before you get onto set, costumes, lighting, sound and how they add to the atmosphere. Making decisions about all those things, bringing them together, putting them together – is both the interpretation of a play and the end of the creative process.

Plays are written to be heard and seen, not read. Me, I find reading plays difficult, especially plays with complex language and long speeches. So I get a group of actors together to read them early in the creative process. The reading of Doctor Faustus was very helpful – not least because of the insight the actors bring when we’re chatting after the reading. The comic characters, as one actor pointed out, do what most of us would do if we had access to magic: use it to get rich and have lots of sex. Or dream of it. Another pointed out that most tragic hero’s don’t make their fatal mistake until well into the play, whereas Doctor Faustus makes his crucial decision in his first speech in his first scene!

The one about the design meeting

Hello, and welcome to the production blog of Doctor Faustus, the 5th Present Moment production. I'm Joss Bennathan, artistic director of Present Moment. I hope that this blog will be useful and interesting for teachers and students who are coming to see the show (Stratford Circus, Jan 12 - Feb 6 2010) or studying the play. Maybe it will also be interesting to anyone interested in understanding a production process.

We've be in pre-production for some time now. I'll write about that at a later date. But I'm going to write about what's happening now - there will be flashbacks later.

So - just had a very productive design meeting. David Crisp and I have worked together plenty of times before. We share a verbal short hand by now. He is resident designer at Birmingham School of Acting where I usually direct once a year. This is the first Present Moment show he has designed.

We have met and discussed the design for Doctor Faustus before, and spent some time just standing in the space where it will be performed. (In the education pack that goes with the show, you can see some of the images that inspired us. Sometimes it’s hard to know why an image works for you. Just let it. Don’t censor your imagination.) But now the time has come when we need to start making definite decisions.

A couple of days before the meeting, I annotated the script and sent it out to the creative team – explaining – or trying to – how the transformation of space and people might work.

Doctor Faustus, like many plays of its time, doesn’t specify where many scenes are set. Some have had stage directions added in (his study). Others can be worked out from how the first line of a scene sets the stage. But a lot of the time it ‘s about the collective imagination of the the actors, the director, the designer. It's about finding a location which will enhance the mood of a scene or help make the scene and play as clear as possible.

Any design meeting is a combination of artistic and practical issues. What will the set cost? When will it be ready? I want to have it in rehearsals so I can play around with how it works. I don’t want to say too much about the set at this stage but I’m excited about the possibilities!