'The Producer and the Play'

by Kirk Woodward 

[As readers of Rick On Theater will probably know by now, Kirk Woodward, my friend and a prolific contributor to this blog (author of or contributor to 122 posts to date), including the post with by far the most views of all 1,120 since I started ROT, is an avid reader.  Many of his posts are book reports, as it were, or reports on his responses to various books on many topics.

[Well, Kirk’s back now with an examination of a relative oldie, Norman Marshall’s The Producer and the Play from 1957.  Marshall was an actor and ultimately a director with, as Kirk observes, “a sharp eye on his profession.”  He also had strong opinions about the theater in the United Kingdom, the Continent, and Russia/the Soviet Union of his day, as you’ll see.

[It’s worth noting that Kirk, among the other topics on which he’s blogged on ROT, has written a number of times on directing and directors.  See his posts “Directing Twelfth Night for Children” (16 and 19 December 2010), “Reflections On Directing” (11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013), “Evaluating A Director” (1 March 2017), “On Directing Shakespeare” (1 March 2019), and “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” (25 June 2019).]

Reading a collection of the theater reviews of the brilliant writer Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980 [see Kirk’s post on 29 September 2021]), I found a reference to a book, just published when he wrote about it, called The Producer and the Play (1957, republished with additional material in 1975) by Norman Marshall (1901-1980). It sounded charming and although it is out of print, copies can be obtained inexpensively, which I did.

Marshall was a director with a fine career in England, directing experimental and more conventional productions, working with the Old Vic, and instrumental in the establishment of the National Theatre of Great Britain. But he has a sharp eye on his profession and he provides a balanced and sometimes critical view of fashions in directing.

The word “producer” needs clarification. When the book was written (in England, so there are differences between my spelling and his in some quotations in this article), in British theater a “producer” was what we would call a director; the usage had substantially changed by the republication of the book in 1975.

Marshall points out that for a long time “producer” was an accurate word for a director, because the same person – for example, an actor-manager, someone who both ran a theater and starred in its productions – was likely to have a big share in both functions. In any case, in The Producer and the Play it makes sense for readers today to substitute the word “director” for “producer” wherever it occurs.

The Producer is not a comprehensive history of directing, even beyond the fact that it was written in the 1950’s. It does not consider theater in the Western Hemisphere at all; Marshall said that to do so would simply have made the book too long. So its focus is on directing in Britain, continental Europe, and Russia and the Soviet Union.

Also, with the exception of a part of one chapter, it doesn’t talk much about the methods that directors use to achieve their results. It is more a book about those results, then, than about how they are achieved.

Marshall organizes The Producer in terms of large themes: the early history of directing; experiments in directing; the Russian Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) and his approaches to directing; methods of staging the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616); working with different theater configurations; working with playwrights; working with actors.

This concentration on themes makes the book useful despite its age, because the principles Marshall describes as he goes along can be applied to the work of directors at any time. I would describe his general line of thought as something like this (my words, not his):

Directors can be plotted along a spectrum. At one extreme are the technicians, the directors who tell the actors where to walk and stand on stage and don’t do much else. These are the “journeyman” directors who see their responsibility as “putting the play on its feet.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the director who’s a dreamer, a theorizer, a visionary. This director may or may not be able to do the practical work of getting a play on stage. [Kirk affirms that this is the same as what Eric Bentley dubbed the director with a “Bright Idea.” That term is discussed in several past ROT posts: “The Glass Menagerie” (8 April 2017; that post’s afterword includes a brief discussion of Bentley’s phrase and refers to the essay in which he coined it); “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” by Kirk Woodward (referenced above in the foreword); “The Orchard” by Kirk Woodward (7 July 2022; another discussion in the post’s afterword)]

Marshall devotes a good deal of space to a discussion of Gordon Craig (1872-1966), whose theoretical works have had great influence but whose production designs were often impossible to achieve.

Between these two extremes, directors make a series of choices that range between carrying out the intentions of the playwright, and implementing their own ideas of how the play ought to be presented.

The effect of descriptions of hundreds of these attempts to transform plays is often comic, because a significant number of them are wild – as is also the case in our own day. The various approaches could go in two directions, toward less on stage than might be expected, or toward more, often much more. Both can make the mind spin.

Having some sort of director for a play – whether formally or informally – is, according to Marshall, a natural thing. “It is impossible,” he says, “even to get up a charade at a Christmas party without somebody taking charge and giving directions.”

But, he notes, “in the theatre, until about a hundred years ago, these directions needed to be only of the simplest kind, and did not require a specialist to issue them.” The American actor William Macready (1793-1873) astonished his casts by insisting on rehearsal, a thing they never did and over which they almost threw a strike. For decades what we would think of as “real directing” took place primarily in musical halls and “pantomimes,” elaborate British Christmas plays.

Times have changed, a process that Marshall tracks, and it’s hard to think of a theatrical production that doesn’t have a director – but Marshall’s book illustrates that given enough time, people will try anything where directing goes, even doing without it. (An example is the three productions of Shakespeare’s Richard II by the British troupe Anərkē Shakespeare in 2018-2019).

Much of the history of directing can be described, using the terms loosely, as a struggle between “realism,” a more or less literal representation of ordinary ways of living, and, for lack of a better word, “anti-realism,” which, as Marshall puts it, “should not attempt to reproduce an exact image of the locale of the play, but must seek to give the illusion of imaginative truth, not actual truth.”  

Sometimes, however, the “struggle” was within a director. The German director Max Reinhart (Germany was and remains a hotbed of directorial ideas), who lived from 1873 to 1943, worked for a realism of scenic effects, but on a gigantic scale, to the point where they sometimes began to overwhelm the plays for which they were created.

At the same time he staged plays, for example by Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), that were unquestionably realistic – although Shaw himself preferred a bravura form of “realism” influenced by opera and by declamatory activities like public speaking, Marshall writes that Reinhart

was at heart a realist – but an imaginative realist. His best productions united a modified form of stylization with a realism which was merely literal.

Not all directors on the anti-realist side were so restrained. Attempts to create an “anti-realist” theater – which very definitely continue to our day – take us toward the visionary side of the directorial spectrum, some of them pretty far toward the extreme. Gordon Craig, already cited, called actors “puppets” and dreamed of a theater that could do without them. Craig called for

An art which will exceed in stature all other arts, an art which says less yet shows more than all . . . . I prophesy that a new religion will be found contained in it. That religion will preach no more, but it will reveal. It will not show us the definite images which the painter and sculptor show us. It will unveil thoughts to our eyes, silently – by movement – in visions.

Craig was inspirational for many theater artists, but clearly the “how” of his proposal is at best extremely vague. To create a non-realistic theater, though, directors did create productions that provide plenty of examples of daring, experiment, and plain old craziness.

Marshall is not a fan of extremes in direction.  His opposition is not absolute, although he does write, “I have never been able to discover any good, logical reason for [the] extreme anti-illusionist method of production.” He describes how early in his career he worked with a director who could not stand the regular trappings of theater:

At one time, in his determination to make certain that the audience was under no illusion that they were ‘spying on reality’, he removed the side walls of the proscenium so that throughout the performance the audience could see the actors waiting to make their entrances, the stage-hands standing about, the electricians at their switchboard, the prompter with the book in his lap, the furniture and props for the next scene stacked in a corner. 

What problem was this director trying to solve? Marshall writes that “I find it hard to believe that any audience ever becomes entirely unconscious of the fact that they are in a theatre watching an impersonation of reality.”  

Others, however, cared a great deal about that question. The German director Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), who greatly influenced Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), “was dressing his actors in harsh, angular costumes which were deliberately at variance with the lines of the human body, so that the players seemed more like robots than human beings.”  

Another example from a production Marshall saw, also about the work of a notable director, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940):

The actors, grotesquely dressed and made up as drolls and buffoons, somersaulted, swung on trapezes, and depicted excitement by means of handsprings and flip-flaps. Naturalistic speech was forbidden; they shouted, chanted, intoned, and chorused. The stage was bleakly lit in a glare of harsh, white light from floodlights hanging immediately above the setting in full view of the audience. As slapstick entertainment it was immensely exhilarating, though in the end one became wearied by its crudity and noisiness.

In discussing such examples Marshall makes an important point: many such instances of excess were appropriate at the time they were created, but sometimes were retained when their raison d’être had evaporated. For example, discussing a production by the German director Leopold Jessner (1878-1945), Marshall writes that

Jessner was greatly influenced by the work of the Russian [directors]. No doubt his elementary symbolism would have been an aid to the new Russian audience in the years immediately after the Revolution, but it was scarcely flattering to the intelligence of the Berliners and did great disservice to authors by over-simplifying characters and their motives.

Describing another such director, Marshall writes that

He was one of those [directors], familiar enough in England today, who feel they must ‘do something’ with a classic. Whether what they do is in accord with the author’s intentions matters little provided it is something nobody else has done with the play before.

Marshall points out that audiences simply were not always interested in experiences in theater meant to challenge them “for their own good.” Such experiences would not, and did not, last in an environment in which

the audiences, who plainly preferred those theatres where the acting was warm, human, and lifelike to those where the individuality of the actor was suppressed and the part he was playing reduced to an abstraction.

Marshall makes it clear how many of the theatrical innovations attributed to Bertolt Brecht were actually created by earlier directors, including minimalist scenery and the use of “white” lighting with visible light instruments:

Many features of [Brecht’s production of Mother Courage and Her Children] were simply the old, familiar anti-illusionist devices which the revolutionary theatre of the ’twenties used to enforce Meierhold’s dictum that “the actual world exists and is our subject; but this play and this stage are not it.”

Brecht felt that more traditional kinds of staging act as a sort of “narcotic” for audiences, putting them in a dulled trance state. Marshall comments, and I agree, that

I have never seen an audience remotely resembling Brecht’s description, though perhaps they are to be seen on the first night of an excessively boring play.

One of the things I like about Marshall’s book, though, is that he is eminently fair to the directors whose work he describes. After his comments about Mother Courage he continues,

It was very like the best kind of naturalistic acting in the English theatre. It was controlled, exact, economic in the use of gesture, devoid of any suggestion of over-playing, but vividly effective.

He carries this even-handed attitude throughout the book.

His discussion of the “system” of acting, and its impact on directing, developed by Konstantin Stanislavski is fascinating because it traces the shifts and turns of Stanislavski’s thought over the years, variations that were not clarified by the books he wrote. Marshall writes that his books

Have been so much written about and talked about that it is generally believed that they were the basis of Stanislavski’s “system.” This misconception has resulted in [directors] and actors with an insufficient understanding of his teachings wasting an appalling amount of rehearsal time in woolly, confusing discussions, and using up their energies outside the theatre in irrelevant games of make-believe.

Again, Marshall roots Stanislavski’s approaches to acting and directing in what was happening in his time, pointing out for example that the “realism” of some his productions was a way of trying to make it possible for actors to perform in the way he wanted:

Stanislavsky believed that if the actor was constantly picking up and handling trivial, everyday things, the casualness and seeming unimportance of these little bits of business would not only subconsciously influence his movements and gestures but would also make him instinctively aware of the falseness of a stagey inflexion or intonation.

I could easily devote an entire article to Marshall’s insights on Stanislavski’s work. Similarly there is a book’s worth of insight in the two chapters he devotes to the many ways Shakespeare’s plays have been staged, beginning with their original productions at the Globe Theatre in London – about which we know very little beyond drawings and inferences in scripts.

After a period of neglect, Shakespeare’s plays began to be performed in “acting versions,” in which “the texts were cut and rearranged to avoid constant changing of the elaborate scenery that was now being provided for them.” This cutting and rearranging was ordinarily done by the lead actor of the production:

The English theatre was so wretchedly poor that the public had become accustomed to going to the theatre because of the star rather than the play, and they demanded to see as much as possible of the star during the evening.

Whole speeches or even scenes were cut in order to allow pageantry and spectacle. A reaction set in in the late 1800’s, urged on by the drama criticism of Bernard Shaw, instituted by the Elizabethan Stage Society of William Poel (1852-1934) and other amateur groups, and in the early 1900’s professionally solidified by three productions by the director Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946), a close associate of Shaw’s.

As the Twentieth Century proceeded, a decidedly unornamental style of Shakespeare production took over, typified by the Old Vic company, whose process Marshall describes as “Use all the bits and pieces of scenery you can lay your hands on and then fill in with curtains.”

Today productions of Shakespeare’s plays use a myriad of approaches, and as Marshall points out, “any new form of stagecraft . . . must inevitably at first seem over-obtrusive simply because of its novelty.” Costuming a play in “modern dress” instead of period costume began around 1925 as something practically scandalous, and today a play by Shakespeare may be “set” in any time period from prehistoric to light years from now.

“All too often,” Marshall writes, the director’s “inventiveness is used not to enhance the author’s meaning but merely to surprise the audience or to satisfy his own wayward sense of humour,” “a dogged determination to be original at all costs, even at the cost of the play,” in what the writer T. C. Worsley (1907-1977) describes as the “Wouldn’t it be fun (just for a change) school of production.”

Marshall devotes much of his discussion of Shakespeare’s plays to the question of how his verse should be spoken. He feels that special training is a necessity, that it is not possible simply to speak the verse in an everyday way (the prose is another story).

Regarding the famous, maybe even over-famous speeches in Shakespeare’s plays, Marshall points out that “the opera singer does not attempt to sing a famous aria in a way it has never been sung before: he simply strives to sing it better than it has ever been sung before, with “proper regard for its sense and its rhythm.” He gives numerous examples, of course, of the opposite.

I have mentioned that Marshall himself is a director, and one observation about Shakespeare production in particular that he gives is one that perhaps it might take a director to make:

The most important members of the audience at any Shakespearian performance are those who are seeing the play for the first time. These are the people the [director] should have in mind all through his rehearsals.

Marshall shows a similar kind of insight in discussing types of stages. For example, in theater-in-the-round, in which the audience is seated around all four sides (it’s not usually actually “round”) of the playing space, some plays gain by such close proximity to the audience but

There are often practical difficulties which make some plays ineligible for this sort of production – for instance, if a staircase or a window is an essential part of the action, or if it is necessary to have a high piece of furniture, or an upright piano, which would obscure the view of the stage from a part of the audience.

The quest for novelty in staging may sometimes exceed the bound of common sense. Marshall notes that

Nowadays so many hard things are said about the “peep-show theatre”, as it is often contemptuously described, that one marvels how it has existed for nearly three hundred years and that so many masterpieces have been written for it.

An ever-present danger for a director, Marshall makes clear, is doing either too much to a play in production, or too little. “The creative [director] can often turn a thin play into a rich entertainment, but he can be a menace to a good play,” Marshall writes. Concerning classic plays from earlier eras, he offers this practical advice:

So it is the [director]’s task to make the most of the scenes and characters which age has not withered and to use the rest as material out of which he re-fashions something to the taste of his audience. What he cannot profitably use, he must, whenever possible, discard.

There is a great deal more of value in this stimulating book; I have tried to provide a sampling. It continually raises the question, “What is the right way of directing?” and resists any easy answer. Directors are in a sense a mid-point in which a number of factors meet – a play, actors, designers and technicians, but also history, culture, and trends and tendencies in theater itself.

One of the excellencies of the book is that it helps us realize – and I admit I had not – that when a director tries something “new” the odds are that the director is reacting to something, responding to it. None of the remarkable oddities that Marshall describes developed in a vacuum. They were responses.

The word “new” is in quotation marks because the chances are good that whatever the director’s approach, someone has tried it before, or a version of it.

So the search for novelty is not “the answer,” and neither, necessarily, is doing a thing the way it has always been done. A director perhaps is a person who tries to do one thing well, and then the next, and so on, using common sense and anything else they bring to the experience, knowing that their work will always be, quite literally, work in progress.

[Even casual readers of ROT will have noticed that many of the topics covered by Norman Marshall in The Producer and the Play and on which Kirk has reported here, have also been mentioned in some of the past posts on this blog.  I won’t cross-reference them—because, first, there are too many such posts and, second, this one’s not about my opinions or other people’s, it’s about Marshall’s ideas and Kirk’s take on them—but ROTters who’re interested can spot-check the many play reports or examinations of theatrical practices. 

[The point is that Marshall focused, at least in Kirk’s reading, on many theatrical issues that continue to be present on the stages of the 21st century, even 50 years and more after he wrote about them.  I think, for example, of Marshall’s thoughts on directors who put “less on stage than might be expected, or .  . . more, often much more.”  Have a look at my reports on an Off-Off-Broadway production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from a troupe called the Pointed Stick Theatre as an example of the former set-up and Washington, D.C.’s Folger Theatre’s shipboard Much Ado About Nothing for the latter).

[In a different vein, when Kirk cited Marshall’s quotation of Vsevelod Meyerhold that “the actual world exists and is our subject; but this play and this stage are not it,” I thought of what I wrote in my essay on Tennessee Williams’s “Plastic Theater” concerning painter Hans Hofmann’s advice to his students.  Hofmann (1880-1966), an Abstract Expressionist, was an influence on Williams and he held that “an artist mustn’t simply copy nature, but must create an artistically imagined reality which requires the careful and deliberate manipulation and juxtaposition of the elements of the artwork.”

[ROTters will most likely know that I’ve posted quite a few articles on experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), including both descriptions of his productions, examinations of some of his stage techniques, and, most recently, a biographical profile on him.  Some of what he did in production or advocated in his artistic philosophy aligned with some of the ideas Marshall wrote about in The Producer. 

[For instance, Kirk quotes a description of an “anti-realistic” production on which Marshall worked with “a director who could not stand the regular trappings of theater.”  I observed that Shapiro often applied to some extent many of the same techniques that Marshall disparaged, as I note in several of my reports on his productions.  Finally, in the last paragraph of the post, Kirk states that perhaps directors know “that their work will always be, quite literally, work in progress.”  This was a firm notion of Shapiro’s, who viewed all his shows as productions in progress.  A performance, he affirmed, was a “snapshot” of where the company was at that particular moment—but not definitive.

[A further note about the name of the theater profession in question here.  Max Reinhart would have been called a Regisseur, the German word for a theater director.  It’s borrowed from the French word régisseur, which literally means someone who administers, manages, organizes, or is responsible for something. 

[(The German word Direktor, from English, refers to the head of a company or an agency.  Dirigent is a more Germanicized word with a similar meaning, and is often used to mean the conductor of an orchestra or the captain of a sports team.  Despite their similarity to ‘director,’ neither word is used to mean the artist in charge of a theater production, film, or TV show.) 

[The Russians use the same French word, режиссер (rezhisser) for the theatrical position.]