LET'S BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING:

Okay, let's get one thing straight. I'm not a theatre person.

Having said that, I don’t really know what a theatre person is. But I have heard rumours that they prefer to wear black (T-shirts, polo necks - even in extreme cases throw-over knitted shawls) and that they say things like “Blocking” and “Up-stage left” rather than “Go and stand over there.” However, other anecdotes that they call each other darling and kiss both cheeks in public are clearly exaggerated and I give them no credence.

I must be careful, of course, how much I imply any criticism of “theatre people” as I run the risk of alienating my entire potential readership before reaching page two. But then again, perhaps other theatre people like you don’t consider themselves to be theatre people either, thus by default making me a theatre person. Are you following me so far? Me neither. Let’s start again.

I think what I’m trying to say is, I don’t really think of myself as a typical theatre person. My early experience of the theatre was unorthodox, and it has remained so ever since. I first realized I was interested in producing drama when my primary school class was asked to present an original sketch to the parents at some end of term gathering. Usually a very shy and reticent child, I instinctively jumped in to fill the void, announced that I was appointing myself unopposed as writer/director, held auditions, sorted the actors from the carpenters, and produced a strangely off-the-wall piece involving a red telephone box (they were all the rage in those days) and a long queue of characters waiting to use it. It purported to be a comedy. You can only imagine the thrill that sizzled through this nine year-old boy, waiting anxiously in the wings, as for the first time ever he heard adults actually laughing at things that he had written – things that he had meant to be funny.

I remember very little about the sketch now, but I do recall that even at that age I had a very practical approach to the business of staging a show. For example, one boy had a good face, but one of the silliest voices I had ever heard. I cast him as a mute.

Fast-forward to University. The new recruits were thrown together at Spode for a few days to get to know a little more about Shakespeare and each other, and for the last night’s entertainment we broke into four groups and were told to write and perform a spoof of Hamlet to entertain the masses. Again, I remember instantly morphing from a quiet, bewildered youth, genuinely lacking any real confidence in my ability to keep up in this rarefied academic atmosphere, to the group leader. I had the sketch written in under an hour and this time, with the unanimous agreement of my colleagues, even cast myself in the lead. And then we made them laugh. English students. University professors. We made them laugh a lot. And it was the best feeling in the world.

That wasn’t the last time I acted. More out of long Summer holiday boredom than burning desire, I joined a Dudley-based am-dram sometime into my second year at University. They were casting for a play called Ritual For Dolls. I got the part of a clockwork monkey – a non-speaking role. Occasionally throughout the performance I had to bang a drum. I like to think I took direction well, and gave the performance my all. But nobody laughed. To be fair, nobody was supposed to, but it wasn’t the same. From that moment I gave up acting and decided to concentrate on writing and directing.

Fast-forward again, to a village hall, and the presentation of the annual farce by local am-dram Highley Entertaining. I was in the director’s chair. After all, I was new to the village, I had a degree in English, and no-one else wanted to do it. I won’t name the play, for reasons that will become obvious, but I think it might have had the words Benefits and Fringe in the title, though not necessarily in that order. Unlike Ritual For Dolls, this was supposed to be a comedy, so people should laugh. It was my job as director to maximize those laughs. Well, I tried suggesting a different inflexion here and there, a more dead-pan delivery, a cocked eyebrow, a faster pace, a slower pace, some ad-libbed visual business, but still there were certain sections weren’t working as well as I would have liked. It began to worry me that perhaps I was a rubbish director, that my inaugural production would fail, that I would become the laughing stock of the village because no-one laughed, and I would have to sell my house, change my name, and die in poverty.

Then it hit me. The play wasn’t very funny because the script wasn’t very funny. Perhaps I was also a rubbish director, but at that moment I had to find a solution that didn’t involve doubting my own abilities, and so I decided to re-write a few lines. Well, more than a few lines actually. Whole chunks of it. Yes, I know it’s not allowed. The actors told me so. They looked on in awe as I scrubbed out whole pages and gave them “new bits” I’d typed up the night before. Including a new ending. As a mark of respect to the original authors, I kept the title.

I like to think I won the actors over rather quickly. They liked the new bits, preferred the new ending, and were thankful not to have to learn the chunks I’d scrubbed out.

Of course, as an “official” playwright myself now, I live in fear of some other little cocky runt popping up fresh from university and re-writing my plays to make them funnier. But I suppose I asked for it.

Directing

Ask any adjudicator, and they will tell you that you should never direct your own play. This hoary chestnut has grown from the simple but fallacious belief that no-one can do two things well. Let’s put this in context. An adjudicator (let’s assume it’s a woman to save me getting into all that clumsy “his or her” stuff) has just witnessed the most appalling dross ever to torture an audience, and she now has to stand and pass judgment. The writer, a local man well-known to the adjudicator for his indifferent acting and different directing, is sitting wide-eyed in the front row, breathing heavily, eagerly anticipating the critique. What does the adjudicator do? Does she stand up and knock the stuffing out of the man, humiliating him so devastatingly in front of his peers that he goes straight home and uses the hoover pipe to connect his mouth to the car’s exhaust? No. No matter how deluded and annoying the individual, that would seem a little harsh. On the other hand, does she praise the work, thus encouraging the man to persist with his endeavours, and in the process both ruin her own career as a serious adjudicator and possibly send some of the audience running for their own hoover pipes? Rock and hard place.

What she does, therefore, is grab at chestnuts, no matter how hoary, and start tossing them from the stage into the audience. She starts by saying what a challenging opening to the festival it was, and then spends a few minutes discussing the merits of the props (dead giveaway – if the adjudicator starts talking about how well-chosen the cushions were, or spends more than twenty seconds praising the make-up, or the lighting, you can be sure the acting was dire). Finally, fearing it can not be put off any longer, she pronounces that a writer should never direct his own work, thus implying that this is the sole reason we have all just witnessed a total bag of shite. She points out one or two problem areas to support her thesis, the man nods thoughtfully and appreciatively, accepting that maybe on this occasion he has taken on too much. Her reputation remains intact, he remains alive.

Of course, had a really good director been let loose on the local script, it would still have been a bag of shite – albeit possibly a pacier bag of shite and therefore better because it’s over quicker – but then the adjudicator could have taken refuge in another old chestnut, the one which states that she was only there to judge the performance, not the play. Quite why directors should be so easily absolved of blame for choosing a crap play I’ll never know. It’s a bit like saying “I’m only here to judge how you sprinted, and will pay no attention to the fact that you chose entirely of your own volition to strap a bag of potatoes to each foot.” I wouldn’t mind if the choice of play was forced upon the entrants – “Right, you bastards, here’s your sow’s ear, see what you can make of it.” That at least would be a good test of skills and ingenuity. But, let’s face it, that’s not the way it is, so where’s the excuse? Surely the choosing the right material, whether it’s for a festival or a home audience, is a fairly important part of the procedure?

Directing a play essentially involves making a series of decisions, and choosing the right raw material has to be one of the most important. If you get that wrong, it will certainly at best mask or muddy whatever directing skills you may have, but frankly it should also reflect on your judgment. You should be docked points for it directly at Festivals. (I must mention this idea to my good friend Chris Jaeger, who at the time of writing is the Chairman of the Guild of Drama Adjudicators. He would no doubt relish the idea that anyone choosing a Tristram play in future should automatically start with minus fifteen.) After all, choosing a lousy play is a far bigger mistake than making an actor stand in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s tantamount to making all the actors stand in the wrong place, and say all the wrong words, from beginning to end.

So, back to the plot. Should writers direct their own plays? Well, that depends on two things. It depends if the writer is a good writer, and it depends if the writer is a good director. He or she could be either, neither, or both. Perhaps it’s less common to find someone who’s good at both, but the skills involved are certainly not in any way mutually exclusive. If it’s a bad play, then no-one should direct it. If it’s a good play, and the writer’s a good director, then in theory there’s no-one better to direct it. Isn’t it supposedly the director’s job to interpret the wishes of the writer? That makes the writer pretty handily placed to do it justice.

Incidentally, the notion of actors directing themselves is another kettle of fish altogether. We can all see the logic of advising that someone who cannot literally adopt the point of view of the audience shouldn’t ideally direct proceedings. But having said that, a good but partly handicapped actor/director is still a far better bet than a bad director.

Over the years I’ve always directed the premieres of my own plays, but that’s not because I think I’m the best man for the job. It’s just that no-one else was around to do it. I did once hand one of my plays over to another director, and the results were not pleasant. But that’s just because I was unlucky – he simply turned out not to be a great director. So what went wrong? Well, being the playwright, of course, I would start by defending the director’s choice of material. I’d like to think that the script wasn’t the problem. But as I said before, directing is simply a series of decisions, big and small. Good directors get all the big decisions right, plus as many of the smaller ones as they can before time or budget runs out. This particular director got one big decision completely wrong. The play, The Secret Lives of Henry and Alice is a fairly complex two-hander, and calls for virtuoso performances from two very experienced actors playing a variety of characters. So, after choosing the play, that’s the director’s next most important decision - choose the right two actors. Get them wrong – or even just get one of them wrong – and the whole piece falls apart. Nothing else works. None of the decisions you make about props, clothes, lighting, music, or anything else matters one jot if the wrong two people are on stage. It’s the same for all plays, of course, to a greater or lesser extent, but it’s so much more acute a problem with a two-hander.

Trust me on this.

1. Choose the right play.
2. Choose the right actors.
3. Everything else is easy.

I know that sounds facile, but it’s amazing how many people overlook one or both of those first two vital stages, and then work in vain trying to rescue their production from the abyss. Try making a nice cake with rancid eggs. Could a top chef do it? No. But the point is, he wouldn’t try. He’d go and buy some more eggs. There’s an old proverb about a good workman not blaming his tools. That’s because he doesn’t have to. A good workman uses the right tools.

So what if you simply haven’t got access to two actors who are good enough? Then choose a different play. One with less pressure on each part. No-one in the audience will see, or care about, all the problems you had in rehearsals, or the difficulties posed by the text. They will just pop along and see a production which either works, or doesn’t. And it’s a director’s job above all else to make it work. If it doesn’t work, it’s the director’s fault, not the actors’ or the playwright’s. It’s only the actors’ fault if they don’t do what they were asked to by the director, and if it’s solely the playwright’s fault then his play won’t be performed, which serves him right.

I’ve been lucky enough with my productions to have good actors at my disposal. Good actors make things easy. They make the director look good, and the writer look better. Which is great if they’re both me. Of course the reverse is also true – good writing and good directing will always make an actor look better to an audience. And let’s always remember that it’s the audience perception that counts. Back to our chef analogy, a typical audience member cannot separate the acting from the directing from the script any more than you can separate out the individual ingredients of a cake once it’s been baked. It’s now just a cake – a simple matter of taste – and they’ll either wolf it down, or have a polite nibble and leave it on the side of the plate.

Okay, that's quite enough for one session. I'll be back next time with some unorthodox thoughts on acting. In the meantime, please feel free to leave any comments below, and enjoy some of the goodies in the new members-only VIP zone of the website:

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