Don’t misunderstand me. I am not suggesting that every creative writer is a genius. Many are mediocre. If the creative artists can be described as dealing in perceptions then it must be conceded that many writers either mis-perceive or deal in dreary perceptions. For this reason all art must be open to questioning and criticism. But I am here trying to identify an extreme development in the theatre, one in which it is automatically assumed either that all new playwriting is faultily constructed, erroneously perceived and therefore a director or an actor can do to a play what they like; or the work is viewed as a kind of fertile little plot of land into which director and actor can plant their own saplings in the name of ‘self expression’. Little humility can exists among the interpreters. So extreme is this development that directors are refusing to direct the plays of living playwrights or plays that are tightly constructed leaving no room for them to impose their ‘concepts’.
Another essay could be spun around two other relevant but complex questions. First: reasonable arguments can be offered for revamping established, classical plays, though the question cannot be avoided: is not a classic new for someone in the audience and therefore a so-called ‘interpretation’ could easily distort and deny the classical playwright’s intentions for that person for whom that experience is a first? I confess, I’d like to direct a very trimmed version of The Merry Wives of Windsor to reveal the dark play that’s lost in all the ho-ho heartiness of the piece, but I would not pretend I was serving the Bard.
Second: many artists reject the notion that they are creating. Everyone, they observe, is claiming the right and the talent to be ‘creative’ but only God (or whoever) is creative, the rest of us are engaged in re-creating; recreating our experience of life, which process could itself be described as a kind of interpretation. If the writer, therefore, is interpreting, what is it that directors and actors are doing – interpreting an interpretation? Is this possible?
Another question: whose is the voice primarily we go to hear in the theatre? We surely don’t want to hear all the voices together, do we? We don’t want the stage to become like a meeting room in which everyone is shouting at the same time so that we do not know who is saying what; isn’t it important when we are watching a play to know whether we are hearing the playwright’s voice, the actor’s, the director’s, or the set designer’s?
Theatre people often behave as though theirs was the only artform in the world. It is not. Theatre’s art is just one of many. And just as painting is not primarily about paintbrushes or the nature of paint, as music is not about violins or the violinist, as novels are not about printing-machines or publishers, so theatre is not about actors, directors or empty spaces. Theatre, like all art, is about, or to do with, life; to be precise – the artist’s perceptions about life. That, when I read a poem, or a novel, or look at a painting or listen to music is the voice I want to hear. And that too is what I want to hear and understand when I go to the theatre: the voice of the playwright formulating his or her perceptions about life. The playwright is a fool who does not acknowledge debts to the team that helps his plays to stage, but theatres do not exist for the convenience of stage-hands or the greater glory of the actor, director, designer or critic, delighted though we may be when that glory has been earned. The audience’s raison d’être for attending theatre is the play. The raison d’être for the theatre team is to mount that okay for an audience as its intentions can best be realised.
“Oh,” cry the actor and director, “what about my voice, my right to say something, what about my point of view? Am I not intelligent? Don’t I too have perceptions about life? I may even have more interesting perceptions about life than you the writer.”
Perfectly true! They have rights, and they may have more interesting perceptions. But what is the most honest way to exercise those rights, to present those perceptions? Does a director have a right to rearrange or to cut a writer’s text so that the play is no longer communicating what the playwright wishes to communicate but instead is communicating what the director wishes to communicate? Imagine that I have created the character of an unfaithful wife shaping her to be presented as gentle, bewildered, and demanding of our pity. Has an actor the right to present that unfaithful wife on stage as a ruthless woman because she thinks unfaithful wives are ruthless women?
Let us for a moment accept the moral right of the director and the actor to interpret in the sense of imposing their own views, making their own comment, delivering the lines with the emphasis and melody they think the lines ought to have. Let us assume that the audience has given them the right. The director, you say, is an artist like Mr Wesker, and we want to know the director’s point of view. But his point of view on what?
