Directing Adaptations: Nikolai Foster on Great Expectations

Directing

Adaptations

Nikolai Foster on

Great Expectations

Russ Hope

Foreword by Dominic Cooke

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Epigraph

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction: On a Lighting Gantry

Nikolai Foster: Great Expectations

Epilogue: Asking Better Questions

Other Titles

About the Author

Copyright Information

This material was first published as part of Getting Directions: A Fly-on-the-Wall Guide for Emerging Theatre Directors by Russ Hope.

‘You know a conjuror gets no credit when once he has explained his trick, and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.’

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet)

‘I hold that the opposite is true.’

Russ Hope

Foreword

Dominic Cooke

Of all theatre arts, directing is the most mysterious. Rehearsal rooms are, by necessity, private places. Privacy is essential to allow directors and actors to take risks, free from the self-consciousness that creeps in when an audience is present. What takes place between actor and director in the rehearsal process is informed as much by the particulars of their relationship as it is by the text and experience they bring to their work. Much of the process is unconscious and therefore hard to explain to a third party. Some of the success of a production is down to alchemy – the magic that can happen when a group of individuals gather around a particular play at a particular time. This is one of the reasons why directing practice is so hard to communicate.

Books have been written by directors about their craft. Some of these are articulate and persuasive. Recently, Katie Mitchell and Mike Alfreds have anatomised their practices in two fascinating books, and I have heard young directors referring to these as influences on their own working methods.

However, no matter how structured a director’s process may seem, when it comes to the meeting between actor and director in the rehearsal room, the skilful director will adapt their approach to meet the particular needs of the actor and scene they are working on. Pragmatism is an essential tool for any director and the way that a process is applied is as significant as the process itself. The personality, passion and obsessions of each director play a crucial role in bringing a text to life. Therefore, there are as many directing processes as there are directors, and each director’s experience of a particular production is unique. This is one of the reasons that theatre flourishes – there is no ‘correct’ way of doing it. Directing is an art not a science.

This book reveals some of the diverse approaches to directing being used by young directors today. Russ Hope gives us unprecedented access to the rehearsal rooms and thinking of some of our most interesting young directors. Each director has a unique approach to their work, a particular set of values and a singular challenge in the play and space they are animating. Getting Directions documents this with a judicious mix of cold objectivity, sympathy and wit. The result is an incisive kaleidoscope of rehearsal-room practice which is a useful tool for directors to borrow from and a fascinating insight for the curious. I hope it interests and informs you as much as it did me.

This is the foreword to Getting Directions; the collection in which this chapter first appears.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted first and foremost to every director, artistic director, actor, stage manager, company manager, designer, marketer, usher and intern who let me into their rehearsal rooms and into the unfinished thoughts in their heads; their untidy first versions and ground plans not yet beautiful successes or heroic failures.

I am especially grateful for the freedom each director gave me to write and to prod as I saw fit. I remain amazed that they could be so engaged and interested in something peripheral to the sizeable task of making a theatre production.

Thanks also to Mark Shenton for the pep talk; to Andy Dickson at the Guardian for posting me a padded envelope stuffed with studies and raw interview tapes; to Rob Icke, Caroline Steinbeis and Steven Atkinson, whose interviews added to the general swirl; Louis Theroux, whose interview persona (the buffoonish Machiavelli) I stole wholesale; to my