Russ Hope - Directing Pantomime: Steve Marmion on Dick Whittington and his Cat

Directing Pantomime

Steve Marmion on
Dick Whittington and his Cat

Russ Hope

Foreword by Dominic Cooke

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

You know a conjuror gets no credit when once he has explained his trick, and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet)

I hold that the opposite is true.

Russ Hope

Foreword

Dominic Cooke

Of all theatre arts, directing is the most mysterious. Rehearsal rooms are, by necessity, private places. Privacy is essential to allow directors and actors to take risks, free from the self-consciousness that creeps in when an audience is present. What takes place between actor and director in the rehearsal process is informed as much by the particulars of their relationship as it is by the text and experience they bring to their work. Much of the process is unconscious and therefore hard to explain to a third party. Some of the success of a production is down to alchemy the magic that can happen when a group of individuals gather around a particular play at a particular time. This is one of the reasons why directing practice is so hard to communicate.

Books have been written by directors about their craft. Some of these are articulate and persuasive. Recently, Katie Mitchell and Mike Alfreds have anatomised their practices in two fascinating books, and I have heard young directors referring to these as influences on their own working methods.

However, no matter how structured a directors process may seem, when it comes to the meeting between actor and director in the rehearsal room, the skilful director will adapt their approach to meet the particular needs of the actor and scene they are working on. Pragmatism is an essential tool for any director and the way that a process is applied is as significant as the process itself. The personality, passion and obsessions of each director play a crucial role in bringing a text to life. Therefore, there are as many directing processes as there are directors, and each directors experience of a particular production is unique. This is one of the reasons that theatre flourishes there is no correct way of doing it. Directing is an art not a science.

This book reveals some of the diverse approaches to directing being used by young directors today. Russ Hope gives us unprecedented access to the rehearsal rooms and thinking of some of our most interesting young directors. Each director has a unique approach to their work, a particular set of values and a singular challenge in the play and space they are animating. Getting Directions documents this with a judicious mix of cold objectivity, sympathy and wit. The result is an incisive kaleidoscope of rehearsal-room practice which is a useful tool for directors to borrow from and a fascinating insight for the curious. I hope it interests and informs you as much as it did me.

This is the foreword to Getting Directions; the collection in which this chapter first appears.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted first and foremost to every director, artistic director, actor, stage manager, company manager, designer, marketer, usher and intern who let me into their rehearsal rooms and into the unfinished thoughts in their heads; their untidy first versions and ground plans not yet beautiful successes or heroic failures.

I am especially grateful for the freedom each director gave me to write and to prod as I saw fit. I remain amazed that they could be so engaged and interested in something peripheral to the sizeable task of making a theatre production.

Thanks also to Mark Shenton for the pep talk; to Andy Dickson at the Guardian for posting me a padded envelope stuffed with studies and raw interview tapes; to Rob Icke, Caroline Steinbeis and Steven Atkinson, whose interviews added to the general swirl; Louis Theroux, whose interview persona (the buffoonish Machiavelli) I stole wholesale; to my editor Matt for his guidance and his patience; to my partner Louise for guidance and patience of a different kind; and finally to the actor who hugged me, high on endorphins, having survived her first preview performance. Thank you for all you did, she said, and I looked down at the bottle of complimentary beer in my hand then at my laptop, which lay sapping the theatres Wi-Fi as it beamed the days notes into cyberspace, and felt acutely aware that, whilst the company proved itself each day in rehearsals and now onstage, I had yet to show my hand.

Im not sure I did anything, I said.

Yes you did, she said. You were here.

Introduction

It is 2005 and I am crouching in a lighting gantry, hoping I cannot be heard, hoping to remain unnoticed. I am in the studio theatre at the university I attend where, twenty feet below, the director Peter Brook is rehearsing with the actor Bruce Myers ahead of a workshop performance of a new piece.

I was looking for my phone, which I had misplaced during rehearsals for a student play, and as I walked across the lighting gantry, I realised that something was going on below. The piece is The Grand Inquisitor, from the chapter in Dostoyevskys The Brothers Karamazov in which Jesus finds himself in the Spanish Inquisition. Myers, as the high priest, interrogates an empty chair. If you are God, turn these stones into bread. I realise that, if I can stay quiet enough, I might stow away with them to Seville.

What I didnt know is that Peter Brook rehearses in French. It doesnt matter that the actor and the director are English, nor that the performance will be in English. I dont speak French. Not a word.

Brook says something to Myers. He speaks, unbroken and calm, for maybe five seconds, and Myers nods and speaks the line again: If you are God, turn these stones into bread. Before, it was a threat. Now, there is compassion within, and almost a longing for God to return. The actor appears to hold two contradictory ideas in his mind at once, and the poetry of that struggle reaches all the way up to the lighting gantry.

To this day, I do not know what Brook said that could have had such a transformative effect.

This book reinvestigates that moment, broadcasting the feed from the security camera in that often sacred place, the rehearsal room.

Each chapter documents the creative process for a production by a theatremaker at the forefront of a generation of British theatre. The account is part rehearsal diary, part essay and contains the most candid interviews you will read on the challenges of working as a professional theatremaker. Each account follows a production from its inception through pre-rehearsal meetings, rehearsals, the tech process and preview performances to press night. The productions are: a new version of a Greek play, two different approaches to Shakespeare plays, a Great American Play, an adaptation of a British novel, a pantomime, a plotless live performance by a devising company and an opera. At the end, there is a short section that offers a collection of principles to help the emerging director find focus, decide which projects to pursue, and create work that excites them.