The Director

Abstract

The planning and presentation of a play is controlled by the director or producer (the terms are synonymous). He must decide on the overall style of the production, its visual impact and meaning. What he sees in his imagination has to be translated into action on a stage. He will conduct rehearsals at which the moves, exits, entrances and so on are practised and the actors and actresses guided towards the full realisation of their roles and an understanding of their relationships to other characters. It was only in the late nineteenth century that the job of director was particularly identified. In earlier times the organisation was generally in the hands of the leading actor (called an actor manager) who arranged the production to show off his own individual gifts. There is a particularly vivid description of Mr Crummles, an actor manager in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby.