Fifteen Eighty Four

Can editing an encyclopedia of stage directors be anything but an impossible task? Simon Williams (UC Santa Barbara) and I were invited to consider such an undertaking just under a decade ago; Simon had just published an encyclopedia of stage actors and acting, and this felt like a sensible next stage. We soon realised, however, that trying to identify 1000 directors that together could capture a sense of how stage directing has evolved across the globe over the past 300 years was never going to be easy. Who has made a difference in a national and/or international context? Do you give space to those who have already been subject to significant academic attention or try and fill in the gaps, and feature figures who have remained on the margins of theatre scholarship?  And what to do with the ‘outliers’ – those who took up aspects of what is now understood to be the directorial role while dramatists or actors? Working with an advisory board of regional editors who joined us on this endeavour, we grappled with these questions, drawing up an initial list of directors that could then be the subject of further conversations with potential contributors. This board has played a crucial role, generously sharing expertise and advice. With an advisory board of 18, 138 contributors and an editorial assistant, this really has been a team endeavour.

The list continued evolving for close to eight years. Covid arrived and archives closed their doors. Changes in stage practice brought new figures and companies to the fore – Agrupación Señor Serrano (Spain); Jamie Lloyd (UK); Caroline Guiela Nguyen (France); and Bashar Murkus (Palestine), to name only a few. But identifying directors through the countries in which they were born, trained or work only provided a partial indication of their impact. Many of the directors in the volume have cultivated a transnational approach to making theatre, touring stagings across festivals and venues. Lola Arias, for instance, is known as much for her stagings at Berlin’s Gorki Theater and Theater Bremen as for the work undertaken at Buenos Aires’s Ricardo Rojas Cultural Centre in her post-university years. Directors are featured for contributing in different ways: Janet Badian-Young has established a professional infrastructure for theatre in the Gambia; Josette Ciappara has trained multiple practitioners inMalta; Alfredo Castro may be best known in the West for his work as a screen actor in Pablo Larraín’s films but his founding of Teatro La Memoria in Chile offered an important model for political theatre that proved urgent defiant and resonant; Maria Irene Fornes was an Obie-award-winning dramatist whose sensitive productions of her own plays blurred any separation between writing and directing.

The featured directors work across different traditions and genres. Some in applied theatre and theatre for development (Rose Mbowa, Sandy Solomon Kwesi Kwansah Arkhurst); some in opera (David Pountney, Barrie Kosky), some in dance, fusing choreography and direction (Pina Bausch, Crystal Pite). Directing is shown to be a multifarious function, a role understood differently across different contexts and cultures. The different names through which directors are known – Intendant, Regisseur, Metteur en Scène, Artistic Director – acknowledges the different ways in which the roles have evolved, and the different responsibilities held within certain understandings of the role.

This is an encyclopedia that addresses gaps but that in and of itself also has gaps.

Yes, there are directors from Australia to Zambia featured but Costa Rica, Panama and Sierra Leone are not. Managing that paradox has been a constant of the nine years of editorial work on the volume. Whether researching directorial approaches in West Africa or the journeys through the translation of Stanislavsky’s writings in China, the volume has sought to look at transnational currents that have shaped how directors’ ideas and productions travel, ever cognisant of the limits we were working within. At times, Simon and I were reminded of Theodor W. Adorno’s observation that ‘the finished work is, in our times and climate of anguish, a lie’. The volume cannot be comprehensive or complete, it remains a work in progress – something that we hope others will build on when they consider the evolution of the director as a key agent in theatre-making,

Stage directors have passed away while preparing the volume – and this has involved reassessing their legacy – not easy when a director like Mike Bradwell, founder of England’s Hull Truck theatre company, dies while while we were working on second proofs.

Directors are often invisible from the stage productions they are responsible for creating; it is the actors and designs that the audiences engage with when they attend a performance. This volume tries to understand what they do and, crucially,  what makes their work distinctive.

Indeed, in an age of Wikipedia where information is available at the click of an internet browser, I have asked myself what this encyclopaedia offers that a Wikipedia entry doesn’t: effectively it’s the evaluation of why a director matters, what their legacy is and what distinguished their work or style. It’s that element of critical evaluation that allows for patterns and motifs to be identified, for influences to be charted. A complex ecology of influences and collaborations emerges: directors seeing each other’s productions; directors training directors; directors reading the writings of other directors; directors collaborating; directors producing the work of other directors; directors referencing the work of their predecessors.

As with The Wooster Group’s 2006 recreation of the John Gielgud/Richard Burton 1964 Hamlet in which the film of that production is mirrored by the contemporary performers, this is a book filled with ghosts – directors referencing the work of others, plays that emerge again and again through translation and adaptation. The history of directing is one shaped by the intersection of past and present, and so this volume provides a snapshot into these intersections and their impact on the ways which theatre is made, documented and researched.