The British Theatre Guide: The Concept

School & Youth Theatre

The Concept

There must be almost as many different ways to approach directing a show as there are directors! Everything depends upon the personality and - to an extent - the experience of the director concerned. Some have everything worked out in detail before they get to the first reading, others work totally off the tops of their heads, and there are all stages in-between. This is how I do it!

When it comes to moves, I'm an off-the-top-of-my-head man. I haven't the faintest idea what I'm going to do until I am faced with putting my actors onto the stage (or rather, onto the rehearsal room floor) at the first blocking rehearsal. I might (might!) have a couple of pictures in my mind of certain key moments, but I generally have no idea of how I'm going to get to them. I'm just not that good at visualising how something is going to look: I have to see it in front of me. That's why I'll often spend ages setting something up and then horrifying my actors by saying, "Sorry! That's awful! Can we start again, please?"

I have a friend, an excellent director, who has everything worked out in minute detail long before the first rehearsal. He has beautifully detailed set drawings - all to scale - and even, when he has time, makes a scale model of the set, with little (also to scale!!!) cut-out figures representing the characters. Every move is planned and the distance travelled worked out. I call him anal-retentive and he believes I'm so disorganised that someone else actually directs my shows!

What I do plan - very carefully indeed - is the concept of the production.

Perhaps I can best explain this by an example: the show, in fact, which I am working on at the moment - Toad of Toad Hall.

Now you may say, "What's he talking about? The concept of Toad of Toad Hall? It's a kids' play. What is there to be conceptual about?" But think! What happens in the play? Basically a very silly person, Toad, has his home stolen by a bunch of common yobs, but Badger, Rat and Mole help him get it back by defeating the yobs at their own game - in a fight. Even though Toad is silly - and, to be honest, brings most of his trouble on himself - he has to be helped against the Wild Wooders partially because, as Badger says, "I knew his father. I knew his grandfather. I knew his uncle, the Archdeacon", but partially because Toad, for all his faults, is "one of us".

Is there any better illustration of the class distinction of the 1920s than this? The minority middle classes (only four of them) defeat the hoards of the great unwashed! In truth, Toad is a political play: not, I believe, that Milne set out to make it so, or that Kenneth Grahame deliberately wrote a political story. No - the politics are implicit, in the basic assumptions shared by the writers and their (original) audiences. But they are there.

Nowadays this is an out of date message. I'm not saying that Britain is a classless society - that is patently absurd! - but the kind of class-consciousness expressed in the script (which sees the middle and working classes as almost different species) is as out of date as the clothes of the period. There are, however, modern resonances: I see the Wild Wood and its inhabitants as a metaphor, not for the the present divisions in society between the haves and have-nots, the North-South divide, or the waged and unwaged, but for the darker side of society, which is also the darker side of each individual.

Ask anyone in Britain what they are most afraid of, and the answer is likely to be crime. There is a perception that the chances of the average person being the victim of crime, and especially of violent crime, are greater than they have ever been. I say perception because the figures seem to me to be, quite frankly, contradictory. The lies, damned lies and statistics syndrome! What matters is that this is what people think, whether it is true or not.

People see - or think they see - violence everywhere. I certainly see the violence in my own nature and that of other people. For me, this is the dark side represented by the Wild Wood, and this is how I will be playing Toad.

So what? you may ask. If that's how you see the play, what difference does it make? The words are still the same; you can't change them; so what's the point?

The point is, that it defines how I am going to stage the play. For example: I am going to work on a thrust stage, audience on three sides (one of the great advantages of not having a pros arch stage - I can configure it how I will!), and the audience will be the wild wood. I'm getting the design team to make the house look as wood-ish as possible, I'm going to light it in dim green light, and the Wild Wooders will conceal themselves in and emerge from the audience. The Wild Wooders themselves will be dressed to suggest (and only to suggest - I'm not using a sledgehammer!) the frightening side of society - the skinheads, goths, bikers and other "outsiders". The edges of the warmly lit stage define the edges of "our" society and all beyond is dark and threatening. On the stage is light and in it we must preserve even the young and foolish (Toad himself). In preserving it, however, we act just like those we are trying to preserve it from, and at the end, when Badger and Co. celebrate their victory, the green light will start to creep onto the stage.

You think I'm wrong? Possibly. I lay no claim to infallibility. But I have a framwork around which I can structure my production so that it says something more than "Here is a nice little play for children". Because all the best children's stories have a similar structure. Look at Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: the dark side isn't denied by the happy ending. Charlie may get the chocolate factory but the horrible kids and their equally horrible parents are still treated pretty viciously, and we are expected to approve of it - and we do! But, at the end of the day, is Willie Wonka all that different from them?

So! that's my concept! It's not just airy-fairy theorising either: it will determine setting, lighting, costumes, characterisation, moves - everything. And yes, I'll tell the kids all this. I'll encourage them to develop a movement vocabulary which expresses this and it will permeate every aspect of the production.

Personally I can't work without a production concept. It informs every aspect of the production: without it, I feel, the actors are just going through the motions - full of sound and fury, signifying nothing!