Directing the Comedia: Notes on a Process

What is it about the directorial process that makes it so difficult to reconstruct? Many directors have given us their reminiscences in writing, and many more have been interviewed about their experiences. Nevertheless, in any academic discussion of the directorial process in theatre, these accounts are at best second-hand evidence recalled in retrospect; generally impressionistic, they are based on memorial reconstruction of a dynamic enterprise that is over by the time it is discussed. They are founded on experience too, of course, but they are selective, and may even be distorted, as anything based on memory is subject to be. In the academy such accounts have value in that they reveal the director's conceptions, but how can we determine if those conceptions were reflected in the practice? Brecht is probably the best example to illustrate the disparity between theory and practice. In a way, I seem to be arguing against my own position in this essay, since most of the points I shall make rely on a “memorial reconstruction” of plays I directed some years ago. But my discussion will assure the reader that the problems addressed here are described after consulting the “bad” (inevitably!) videos made of the performances, as well as adhering always to the playwright's text.So far, those individual accounts about directing plays referred to above have been unable to describe scientifically the creative process itself. This is why, perhaps, when we research theatre at the university, in much the same way as when we research other academic subjects, the tendency has been to adopt methodologies from other disciplines, such as literature or history, or even psychology. For example, the strategies evolved for reading the literary text have been widely applied to reading a playtext, strategies that can exclude, for example, those emotional and memorial mechanisms of response that only the staged play can elicit.It is surprising, to say the least, that Theatre Studies, as an academic discipline, have evolved thus far when, to a large extent, basic theatrical processes (the rehearsal is a case in point) have not been observed and described scientifically.