Maria Shevtsova and Christopher Innes
Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre
Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 288, paperback and hardback.
ISBN-10: 0521731666
ISBN-13: 978-0521731669
Hardback:
ISBN-10: 0521888433
ISBN-13: 978-0521888431
Insightful, in-depth and evocative, this is a collection of conversations with nine of the most innovative theatre directors of our time in Europe and North America: Eugenio Barba, Lev Dodin, Declan Donnellan, Elizabeth LeCompte, Robert Lepage, Simon McBurney, Katie Mitchell, Peter Sellars, Max Stafford-Clark.
All these directors have developed their own, highly individual theatre language across a wide range of practices from opera, dance, epic spectacle or hybrid and multi-media performances, to verbatim theatre or small-scale interventionist theatre, and have been influential, nationally and internationally, in a variety of ways. The length, depth and scope the discussion distinguishes this collection from others, each director providing a fascinating insight into his/her particular working processes. The book reveals the complex world of directors and their creative relationships with actors, in rehearsal and performance, and with playwrights. Each conversation is framed by an introduction to the work of the director, a detailed chronology of productions and an indicative bibliography to inspire further reading and research.
Review
The introductory essay by the editors (who are also the interviewers) gives an interesting account of the personal and thematic links that emerged during the interviews, which took place between 2004 and 2007. The interviews are extensive and detailed, each piece running over about thirty pages, and the questions are a nice mixture of the formal and spontaneous, giving the interviews a conversational cadence in places, and impression of candour on the part of the interviewee, and trust in the interviewer and the process.
The value of these interviews lies in the detail created by the emphasis on each director’s latest work. This gives them a drive and immediacy created by the focus on praxis which complements the more reflective elements of each piece.
Alison Jeffers, New Theatre Quarterly, 26:1, February 2010, p.91.