 I welcome you to the Cumana Festival in this conversation amongst the festival's directors and our wonderful moderator, Kwami Kwayama, the artistic director of Centre Stage Theatre in Bolton. When we were discussing this year about the panels, one of the impulses was to put together a conversation surrounding the topic of directing you play. We wanted this year's panels to be really focused on theatre artists and their perspectives. Here are the festival's directors, some of us, talking about directing you work, the developing of new work, and we'll see how this goes. This morning's conversation is being live-screened on new play TV, which has appeared-produced knowledge commons stewarded by Hal Brown, the centre of the theatre commons, and if anyone in the audience would like to participate via Twitter, you can use the hashtag new play, or if you'd like to follow the ongoing conversation surrounding the festival on Twitter over the next week, check out and act as an ATL look-out and look out for the hashtag humanifest. And when we hand this over to questions from the audience, please use the mic's going and people will be moving around. I'm going to ask everybody to quickly introduce themselves. Good afternoon, my name is Kwame Cremor. I'm from the cry of a kingdom by Jeff Clarbyson. I directed O-Roo-Roo-Roo-Roo-Roo-Roo, or Why I Don't Want to Go to Yoga Class with You, by Hillary Abaddon. I directed Sleep, Rock, Night, Brain, by Luca Snake, Rennie Gruff, and Anne Washburn. I went to the Delling Shore by Sam Marks. Please excuse me being inundated by technology, but I want to follow us on Twitter, so for all of those who are looking at us on live TV, if you have my hashtag or the hashtag that of course Les spoke about, please do send questions during when I open it all up. And please do, and I'll try and sneak the question in. I think as Les said, what we tried, we met downstairs, and we kind of went, ah, and then we had to go and stop, because otherwise we'd have had the whole discussion downstairs. Because we're all fascinated with each other's work and their mind, and of course we're all fascinated. And so, he says, I throw you. And so really what we're trying to do here, what we're going to try and accomplish really, is I'm probably just going to fire off the first question. And then we're just going to speak to each other really, and for the first 25 minutes, ask each other questions, and then after about 25 minutes, I'll bounce out to you guys, if that's okay. Is that okay with the house? Great, thank you. I ask that because five directors around the table may not really come and listen to everything that anybody else says. So I want to make sure that you encourage us, say, remember you said on the first day of rehearsal that my role was the biggest. You were my centre of my vision. So I said, I just want to kick off, and any of us can jump in and ask or say, Kwami, that was a really crap question, and rephrase it, and that would be fine. But the first thing that springs to my mind is, do we approach directing a new play any differently than if it were a classic or a revival that we saw five years ago? What goes to our minds when it lands on our desk? And I'm going to spin the mic that way. It's going to go to you. Yeah, I'm sure. Oh, you're asking me to review my choice. Just go a little bit stage left, if you'd rather. I have been very fortunate to spend most of my career directing new plays. I am maybe, I think yes, for the first time in my career, this summer, directing a play that might dain to be considered a classic, which is, wait for it, Steel Magnolias. So I feel like I'm going to approach every play like a new play for the rest of my whole career, because I was lucky to mostly come in here at Andrews Theatre approaching contemporary plays and new plays. For me, the most exciting part of that is that I feel like my main objective as a director is to dive in and figure out what the message the player is trying to send me. What is the message a player needs to send me so that I can then interpret it through my team and show it to the audience, which is a very exciting thing to do with the player in the room, but equally exciting, I think, to look at a play by Elodie Playwright that was first produced five years ago. I think that you approach new and old plays basically the same, fundamentally the same. I think the great thing about having a writer in the room is that you get to cheat in a way, because you can ask someone else, is this scene any good at all? Is it working, and you're not alone in your crisis of trying to make something? It's interesting, because I think, when you mentioned the word cheat, I find that very interesting, because sometimes with a living writer in the room, you can go on that line to not work, and you can just say, do you want to change anything? Where is, with the classic piece, and you go, I had that earlier on this year, I was doing Arthur Miller's adaptation of it, and there was a full stop, and I know this sounds really my uping, but there was like a full stop on a kind of word, that I went, it doesn't work, it just doesn't work. I can't get on the phone, I can't say, will you take it out, and three days later, the actors and myself, we actually discovered that it did work, and I know in my heart of hearts that if a new writer had been in the room and just had been convinced, what else can we possibly do? Yeah, I find that that question of what is my job, and what is the writer's job, I found I was doing a lot of new plays for many years, and then said, I need to start putting some classics in where I know that every problem I have to solve, because it is, it's easy to suddenly go, we have to take a look at this, and now I find I ask those writer's questions of changing much later in the process, because I fear that I'm just letting it do the work for me. Though I think, it's on, it's on, it's on. Though I think something that just doesn't occur to me as you're saying, that is I think there's this sort of funny assumption that when the writer is dead, the play works. Like I think, you know, hopefully many of the plays that we all direct the first productions of will be done down a hundred years from now, but the planet is still here, and it's not covered in the water. But you know, I do the honest part, that's not very good, but you know what I'm saying. And so I think, I think what's interesting is like you read some early, early works, like I just, I did a stage reading of this bizarre checkout play, The Wood Demon, which is like an early draft of Vanya, and this thing is so weird. I mean it's so deeply, deeply weird, and you see the sort of etchings of Vanya and the excitement, which sort of fascinates me, because so much of it just doesn't work at all. But it illuminates for you moments in Vanya that retain a kind of bizarre elliptical strangeness, and to me that's sort of thrilling, because I think you're always written to go, I think that to me like this my gift with what works feels like this continually elastic thing that we're kind of reinterrogating in terms of just like, what is that moment about for you? Or like how are you choosing to illuminate that moment? Feels like not going conversation whether the writer is alive or dead. I just want to let you know that when you spoke about the planet that Archivator Feed went crazy. I'm not sure what that said. I'm blessed. I think they're different. A personal process level of how I approach them, no, it all seems to me the same job. I think I, and personally I think I'm, I mean I have a very high level of ignorance about classic plays. Probably that my career has been based around this and it's somehow in my DNA of how, I just have a kind of big need to do them. I'm not quite sure that I have the same need to do classic plays. And I think I'm, I think directing is quite lonely. And so, and I would, and not having a dead writer I don't find particularly helpful because the conversation isn't happy. But the actual process and how I prepare for it I think is the same. I think there's an intimidation factor for me in doing classic plays because I think people think that these refined objects you know, that they're like perfectly polished stones or it's perceived somewhere as the big like that. And I actually think there isn't gangly and awkward as often as a new player. So that I personally find Shakespeare completely perplexing. And they're a real niche match of stuff. Several years ago did the glassman Andrew Berkeley and thought, well this is just very strange. You're seeing stomp. Do you know what I mean? They don't end, they just stomp. The dialogue is the dialogue right now. I think I find more personal pleasure in doing a new play. And I think I think it's kind of where I saw the photographer I think it is who somebody asked him why did he photograph, said he photograph because he wanted to see what the thing looked like once he photographed. And it's kind of personal level. I actually want to do the thing the sensible this is real analysis this is shaming. I want to do the thing to see what will happen to me during the process of doing it. As part of me wants to see which version of Les Waters will appear at the end of it. And what bit of me is going to go into play during the process of putting together? Guys, let's be real. I mean, is it a really good career choice directly to direct new plays? And let me frame it in that we all know at the end of the day no one knows what you've been to in your process no one has anything to compare it to. They don't know if you took that actor from that very teary, melodramatic interpretation to this beautiful nuance thing and of course none of you said that about any of the performances you had to negotiate. Nobody knows well. Nobody knows the decisions you made with your fellow collaborators. We are judged by the three mistakes we make rather than the 15,000 good ones that add into the process. If you do a classic everybody knows and everybody can see your work at his hand. For me, when I'm directing a new play I don't want my hand to be evident. Is it a good career choice? Should we be wanting to show off so that that Broadway producer can come and say all that big rep and say yes I love your hand coming through this great big show? I don't really want to take that into make sense at all. I think there's like some mid wiffery. Is that the answer? I mean it was no gender. No, no, but I guess what I mean is the line that gave a stride of the grave and a difficult birth. I think that all if we're trying to do these new things and they're brand new there's sort of like pie on your face frequently and that you that the ego has to somehow step to the side in a certain way so that it's I think that's what's so pleasurable about it is that you need to walk sort of in tandem with someone else like holding hands and that I think whether you think it's that or not it inevitably is that so I find it really pleasurable to be able to take myself out of the process more do you know I feel like as a director who plays my primary job is to listen well and to get out of the way and that is very pleasurable for me. My playmates are here, my drama trip is here a lot of my actors are here, do you know that? It's a pleasure to get out of the way of these very smart people who do their work. What about because the colour takes, go ahead Well it's also annoying there is an invisibility factor to it which is sort of great on one level because a lot of us although directors are quite shy but you do become yeah it can be annoying because you're invisible do you know what I mean? I mean if you and I were to do a film somebody would be able to be able to see what we don't and because that's usually not happening with a new play I mean well it isn't if you're doing it for the first time you can feel at once the director worse but you're sort of disappearing out of the equation that's the only negative side of it and sometimes the negative side is completely overwhelming but I'm going to shut up Go ahead I mean all that I was thinking and I think many of us are at this table because we are people who are I don't know if it's bigger but we are people who are interested in a kind of work in which our hand is invisible which we're creating an event that feels somehow actor driven but the funny thing that I'm just sort of thinking about as we're talking about this is that I actually think in any kind of work I think people who come to I think directing is one of the most difficult things for many people to perceive when you watch work whether it's I think in the case of significant authorship like written with people to an I will get an over show like you know what that guy is doing but I think it can be a difficult thing to perceive and all that I did want to say is that you know as a person who has mostly done new work as well I think when I go to see a show that Les has directed or you know that I see Andy Kaufman direct I do feel that I see what they're doing but I think it's a part of the story about the lens through which you are looking for the director's work and the question of what constitutes an invisible hand I just think it's also one of perception Talk to me guys about working with playwrights having playwrights in the room and I'm taking off my playwright hat now as a you know in a kind of way we've all said rather beautifully it's wonderful working with plays with shepherds of visions where we put our invisible hand in there to help them see their vision and help them but it's not always like that talk to me about the great times of work having a playwright in the room and some of the less great times and anyway without the playwright I'm talking about Andy Kaufman that's not here at all they're reaching right back into the other regions of our lives but I'm really interested in that time because there are times where you go I can see this very clearly and if you do this, this and this this will work and a playwright putting my playwright hat on no, my vision is this I'm amid this now I'm amid it all the time going on the different hats and talk to me about how we negotiate that, guiding the rewrite, guiding the vision it's in my background I mean not being of this country and training if you could call it that at the Royal Court Theatre where it was the writers had the right to be in the room and they claimed the right but what it was, we were doing new plays they were expected to be there they expected to be there so I've never had to kind of negotiate this curious thing you know people like should the writer be in the room no, they were always going to be in the room and it was their play and I don't write I have no nothing to say as a writer I would have nothing to say as an actor I would have nothing to say as a designer so what I can say is going through somebody else's work or running alongside it and then tricky bits what are the tricky bits I mean I think there's a misplaced notion about collaboration in a room we should all get on all of the time that would be nice we also nice to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony but it's not going to happen it's not going to happen so are they and I worked for years with the theatre group in England, John Starfield the most famous, if they're famous at all anymore now is for Carol Church was Cloud 9 which was the most intense collaboration and it was weeks and weeks and weeks of really bloody fighting between people a lot of people in a room with a lot of opinions and a lot of opinions about the text and there were times where somebody in the room would dig in and you have to back off there were bits where Carol just said yes I know you want that but I'm not writing that that or Max who was the director saying it's going to be like this so I and that could be viewed negatively that thing it was actually really exciting and really risky and a lot of very smart people in a room with a lot of talent throwing it around or throwing it at yeah I think Durantys have to respect on new work that the you know the players being through a process and somebody's written it and somebody's chosen these words and wants to say this and you know sometimes the bumpy bits will be that what's happening in the rehearsal room or the bit I intensely dislike is when you leave the rehearsal room and go on stage for the first time is that that for a director that first day in the room was like writing the first breath that's it just want to say that someone in the audience just wanted to ratify what you said and via Twitter said yes that we have forgotten to fight in the rehearsal room I think that's I think that's it I simply wanted to echo that I feel my best work comes from a place of healthy and rigorous creative tension and conflict which is not to say that I stoke the fires of tension at all but simply to say that I want to work with people, writers, designers and actors who have strong opinions and who have that there's rigorously working out with me in conversation and that I think successful collaboration doesn't mean that it looks like everyone's being nice all the time I also create work with a company and I probably got into the worst fights with those people worst fights and I've got with members of my family and we sort of managed to get through them and I think to me that all these sort of danger of creative conflict is that if it becomes if it begins to feel personal you can shut down and stop listening so I think the question is sort of how do you stay open in the face of what you hope is kind of useful creative conflict that I think is sort of inevitable I've found too that in the best circumstance there's a waiver that frequently I know my things where it's like oh I don't want things to go fast I don't want things to do this and then I've been in the room with writers who will say it would be great if that pause was actually a pause gravely go in silence gravely go into the things that I don't naturally make me super uncomfortable which I find is actually really good that each play I do with I have someone else in the room they actually say to me I don't want to look at that a lot of times you know we hide from the things we are afraid of in ourselves that it's useful if I'm a writer who can call me out of that it would be remiss of me I think with six directions around the table to not ask us all to just shuffle along one seat because I've just got a tweet that says as much as it's lovely to see your face Kwami the camera I'd like to see the faces of the other panellists so why don't we just sweep you out because the camera's there and if I go here actually then I think there's even more there we go, let's see one more and then my camera can actually see that how I hope that you see that I've paid for it it's not just here for show um guys you know I say this it's really easy for us to say you know tension is great in the room and I think it is tension is great to have in the room it's great so we're listeners listen to me about that time and we've all happened of course not here but we've all had it when you actually are doing this new play and know it's going to be in Turkey you know you go okay I won't play through this and I don't think I can direct us out of this and I don't think I can direct us out of this at one point what did you do then apart from well I would just go to the airport and fly back to England and and talk to me if you've not had that in your life that's wonderful but if you have how could you negotiate being in a room motivating those actors getting the play to be the best that it could possibly be and even then preparing the writer for what we know might be a little bit of a refried has anybody had that? and it was the worst because I fully drank the Kool-Aid you know what I mean like you're in the room you're making it work you're like this is going great this is going great and it was first preview and first preview and suddenly when you have that moment of seeing the play with other people in the room and you're like oh all those people see and I suddenly saw the actual play that was happening which was like oh this is not working in the way that we have been telling ourselves that it is a really tricky process because I think we all discovered it very late in the game and then had to go back into rehearsal and say okay well how are we going to try to fix this in a way that feels active and feels of what we're doing but it I didn't see it I didn't see it coming in a blind side of me seeing it through other people's eyes I'm not sure really what the answer is to this I mean I've certainly directed shows and thought I've got it wrong that actually I've gone into one direction with something and it's come really late in the process and I've done stuff where I thought you know who really should be directing this is that person well there's always somebody in the room who's carrying there's always somebody in the room who has more knowledge about the thing than anybody else do you know what I mean I mean I was thinking previews that something will happen when you watch actors they now know more about this thing that I'm ever going to know because I don't perform and I'm not in that dialogue with an audience trying to identify who that person is you know or ask the people in charge for their advice on it which I think as a director is sometimes very difficult to do because you have to cope and people have put you in charge whatever that means that's the thing and you have to fulfil that obligation and I think particularly my early career I was so frightened of doing that that somebody wouldn't kind of say oh God he's hopeless which I was so I didn't ask and there are people there to ask I know that relatively early but actually I learnt it when I was a playwright before I became a director and a lot of wonderful directors were called Angus Jackson and congratulations on your Olivier nomination because you want to he called we were doing a play at the National of the Town and he called Nick Heidner in very early in the rehearsal like two weeks into the six or seven week process and I was like oh my God you're exposing all of our weaknesses and he said no I want him to tell me where I'm going wrong so I can fix it very quickly and that really helped me I carried that all the way through as a jobbing director and now as an artistic director I call other people into my process very early so I can identify the things that I don't see Anybody else on that? I guess all I was in the zone is I also think you get this moment ideally you're having conversations with your designers all the way through but I was going to speak to the idea of getting other people to take a look and I just think there's also this sort of when you get your designers to be a part of the conversation and I think you have a chance to begin to make the thing with a different set of tools or that are permitting access to or framing up the thing in a way that maybe can address some of the things you're grappling with feels like a useful moment I'm going to go up to the audience now as I've been reminded actually by the good old fashioned hand waving roughly come on I've told you but actually I'm going to go straight to actually thank you so if you grab one or two of those thank you I'll put my mic around if anybody wants to and we'll be back soon to answer those questions but even before I go to the audience I'd like to acknowledge that the question that's probably about to be asked or at least I'm edging it in that way is Julie there Julie has asked a question on Twitter and I'd like you to ask that first question there's a mic coming to you right now I'm not loud enough for all of you You guys have been so articulate and awesome and no one has actually talked about looking with a dramaturge on a new play and I'm wondering if you could address that a little bit and I know you all know that I'm a dramaturge don't worry about hurting my feelings I'd actually love to have not his answer on that Who wants to take that? Thank you This is actually what I was just about to say before when I let go before me was You see what I'm saying I didn't come out that I wanted to I'm having doubts in the process the first person I talked to is a dramaturge that's for me the dramaturge is the person in the room who way more than I can can see from the audience's point of view I feel like as a director perhaps because I started as an actor I tend to sort of lose myself in the world of the play really quickly and have a hard time stepping back and seeing it from the outside the whole thing from the outside so that's one way in which I really really depend on dramaturges and I'll say Julie, one piece of advice you gave me very early on relates also to a conversation we were having is that when we were working on 359 with Mark Bell you came into the room and you were like you two are being too nice to each other Very good, thank you Anybody else want to chip along? Shall I go to my question? Let's go to another question When do I see a hand? I actually saw a hand directed behind That was my question Two for the price of one I'm doing well here One for doing that Thank you, there's a question of that gentleman There's a rather handsome grey sweatshirt With the fashion brown My mother will appreciate that Excellent I recently saw a third or fourth production of Duncan Macmillan's Lungs I don't know if you're familiar with it It's a brilliant script but it's also 99.9% dialogue virtually not even scene changes not even the indication when there's a huge shift That was achieved in its initial production in Washington DC because Mr Macmillan wasn't back in rehearsals What I'm very curious about is when you get a script like that and it's the third or fourth production and you don't have any access to the playwright other than perhaps email How do you cope I don't know maybe you embrace that maybe you resent the fact that there's no help in there How do you deal with a script when you don't have access to the playwright but it's still a new work that's still finding to let Who wants to take that? Let me jump in first if I may I did see that production in DC and it was wonderful I think that again using two hacks after the first or second production once it's been acclaimed in a kind of way it's fine for other people to interpret it in any which way because you're already covered even if you fly in to see it you can kind of go up and down and it was your mistake and here's my New York Times review to say that I was one so there was some playwrights who hold on to that their work to the grave I tend to worry about that I think you've already made your statement I think directorially I think one has to look at one's audience and where you are exactly what part of the country you're in what part of the town you're in what is the taste of that audience of that particular playhouse and then find one's own you know I think like lesson I think like everybody said every time you're approaching a play for me are how to be invisible but yet how to serve it how to make it unique to my production but how to not bastardise it so that it looks like it's my interpretation of it so I think there's a very delicate way of negotiating that I had that with Mountaintop which of course is having 19 productions and I had to try to find my own interpretation of it that also served my audience in Baltimore and it served primarily Catoe's vision I don't know if anybody else wants to jump in go ahead in my other life I have a theatre company called Theatre 502 and we do all second productions regional premieres so I do this a lot and we have two of those premieres now so I think that something you just said was really smart and what I've learned as we first started to do this was that there was a sort of like a chip on my shoulder about not reading the press from the premier productions I'm not going to do it now they did it so I don't want to read the reviews I'm going to look at the pictures I don't want to see any of that but I finally realised that that was stupid that there was a lot to be learnt from looking at another director's interpretation without worrying about how it was going to colour my own very good while we look for the next question let's move along so we get somebody else to press up I'm not there with a rather smart new blazer so it's just coming to you just so that everybody at home can hear your question thank you so much for waiting I'd like to get back to the description of a new play when it's a turkey I think I get nervous hearing new work described that way one of the things I've come to learn about producing a work is that they're not all going to be successful in the first production and I've come to accept either as producing or directing that sometimes failing makes the play even stronger for that even more important production the second production so I'd be interested in hearing can you take the fear of failure when you're directing and working with a writer on a new work because I find that pretty scary but yet exciting to fail and make play stronger over to you guys I mean this is my former life as a person from the royal court the court mantra was we have the right to fail and failed spectacular so you know I don't know is this play taught anymore I mean every blonde wrote this extraordinary play called the same which is one of the greatest plays ever written is really unpalatable I mean it hasn't seen that I mean nauseating it's one of the greatest plays it's recognised as one of the greatest plays in England and it played to 13% and was revived shortly after and played to like 20 and was revived because the theatre stood behind it and were champions I there's a to quote a line from Guinness a person with many problems I have to say I'm sort of addicted to the fear of it I like it I like the terror of it I like where it's going I don't like fear I'm going to shut up I like that thing that you don't know what it is and it could be and it is usually I mean things are messy I wish we wouldn't think that a great play wasn't messy do you know what I mean I like the ones that seep out of the edges of the thing that isn't you can't put in a box or whatever I think it's interesting it's rather wonderful in particular where it gets a second production and I think that's the risk if you birth it well and it is received well hence our fear then it has the chance you are giving it the legs to have a second and a third production if it's a new playwright and it's received badly the chances of that are small if it is a famous and big chested and broad-shoulded playwright that can have people believe in them and say yes I know it didn't work the first time we can just do production 2, 3, 4 and 5 until it does work then that's easier I think it's how one negotiates the fear of failure and then hope that it will in fact perpetuate that forward motion is terribly difficult to negotiate because it's not in our hands so I'm terribly pleased that you as a producer are interested in the long game and not the short game and how do we persuade others to do that not just the ones and the twos thank you for that there's a question there for the gentleman there in the pink shirt if I can get a microphone let me see if it looks pink for you the gels thank you so much and I know I have my back to you man so you can't give me the wrap up but I am looking at my and just so that the camera can see me more follow up to the last question in directing a new work or maybe any work do you ever consciously or unconsciously think about if I do this with this play the audience will not like it and will react negatively and even though it may be an element of the play itself do you ever think in the new work if we go in this direction or if I make these decisions nobody's going to come see the play even though it's a good play who wants to take that let me drop in but I think it's a great question in my humble opinion this is a question that comes before most artists of colour that if I say this will it alienate my majority, possibly majority audience if I represent this truth will it be accepted by the majority or will it not be accepted and therefore confined to the dustbin of misinterpretation and it's a wonderful dilemma that I certainly as an artist of colour negotiate with every single line that I write or every single line that I direct or every character that I direct when directing a new piece it is a very tough world negotiating the understanding of the majority of for instance America up until 2042 I would say too that I think in sort of the same way Les was saying about liking the messy plays that I feel like when I go into something as a director I'm thinking about how to best attack that and I find it really dangerous for me to say like oh but will people like this because I'm not sure that I think my jobs do things that people will like because I also think it's naive to think that I know what they'll like and I think that that majority becomes a sort of big beige thing so I sort of say like what does this thing want and then I'm going to try to do what the play wants and then put it in front of people bravely which is terrifying but I think it's a good way and for me All that I was just going to add personally I find that lately some of the work that I've been doing seems to challenge audiences based on experimented form or style more than it does by virtue of its content actually and that has been a sort of interesting and challenging thing to negotiate and I guess my thought process has mostly to do with my sense of to what degree do I feel like that aspect of the play has integrity and is it pursuing something that I'm genuinely interrogating with interest and that I sort of can get behind and believe in and then hopefully I'm trying to find my way into that in order to illuminate it in a way that people who may be challenged by it from a formal perspective can ultimately in some way or another find their way into or be totally alienated by but maybe in a way that's useful as a theatre-going experience but it's interesting isn't it because in a kind of way all that we've said makes total sense but if it's a new playwright their career depends on the decisions that we make you know we can intellectualize but that playwright is sat there going if this gets reviewed well I can make a living and I can stop serving food and but don't I can stop having to beg and write every application that there's going so what is our responsibility to make the play the best thing that it can be and give those writer or that writer the chance of existing in this most beautiful of worlds that we all exist in I think I actually try to make them responsible for it actually in a way because I think it's less about saying you know good and bad and it's about saying look these things are blueprints for life they're blueprints for a kind of life that we're going to populate the stage with on this particular day and so I want to try to understand as best I can what that brand of life is that a particular writer wants and I feel like that's all I can hold myself accountable for whether it's good or bad I can you know is it honest is it honest to what they want and in the case of saved that's what he wanted he wanted what he wanted there can we just say thank you to Jamil Jude who I'm being a lovely compliment on Twitter I won't suffer grand eyes by reading can we move on we've got one more shift so we've got everybody one more revolution of course it shows my linearity as a director I just keep on going it one way every director is like no I want us to cross we always have debates about criticism and new work and new things to be killed but I'm curious because we're talking about directors and your roles what is the effect of the press on how you guys do your job and your reviews of new plays and I feel like the director is the scapegoat or the lead actor is the scapegoat and it doesn't feel like a holistic conversation about the play because clearly the credit couldn't have been in the room the whole time I understand the process so back to the beginning of the panel you guys are about to use your invisible hand and what your role is and I'm curious we all love the reviews when they're good we use them in our portfolio and you've talked about your fabulous you have it, you wave it your choices, but do you think that it affects the conversation we have about new work and who's responsible for what pieces of the process I think it is hard to see the director's hand sometimes in New York I know a lot of directors who I think are directors and dramaters, I know directors who work with dramaters there's so many people and you feel like we get a sense we the outsiders, we the watchers and reading reviews that we really understand what a director does there are three questions in everything it wasn't saying that one okay then as you begin and then we can be responsible it's very easy and I have a very odd relationship with with reviews as a playwright I never read them so I probably read one never, never listen online I read three and I intend not to read them because if they're great you inhale and you try to do that again and if they're bad it knocks out that you want to write for at least a few months so I tend to not want to do that in Brooklyn for instance I don't know any reviewers personally I don't go to opening nights I deliberately not become part of that kind of club as a director as an artistic director of an institution it's my duty to read the press because it's part of negotiating what it is your offering is and so it becomes very it becomes very hard I think to not listen to that very loud noise that is the reviewer I think we're finding and none of the show lets you you can confirm a note even that in the world of the internet where there's a review and then there are 20 comments underneath them that kind of is a really interesting world to be living in and of course the 20 comments don't add up to the one bad review that you might have wrote or the one great review but how are we as the audience and as practitioners often we go oh have you read that review have you heard about that play we haven't gone over to wherever it is in the country to see oh yeah I heard it's not very good and then we take it as gospel how do we educate ourselves in the theatre world to actually review reviews and to make sure that we understand them and can contextualise them not just for us but for our audiences as well I'm at a wonderful thing at centre stage this year where two of the shows that have got the greatest reviews have taken the smallest amount of money and one of them that got almost slaughtered took almost the most listening to the audience and listening to the viewers the thing that we have to negotiate with and we have to train ourselves and train our audiences in my opinion I don't know really what to say I mean the thing is so complicated there's an artistic director they have to be read need to know the perceptions of the press on the work on a personal level I find them very very very difficult to deal with just because they're good they're never good enough do you know what I mean? he said it was wonderful why didn't he say amazing negative they're deeply hurtful and I never have how long have I been in this game 35 years I've never had any satisfactory way of negotiating that and as as an artist in growth sorry that's horrible on many levels I know I am sat next to you I don't find them I find it very difficult to identify the ones that I think are helpful for what actually I do and I don't for the main part look at them for that I look to colleagues my mentor Mac Stafford Clarke and whether actually whether my family would be proud of it and the reviews and it's it's complicated and it's very complex and I think it's very hard for a lot of people even in the profession to identify somebody would say this is badly directed and we think actually that's a performance or it's in the wrong context or actually that's a pledge do you know what I mean? how you pull it apart there's a question in there gentlemen then thank you so much sir one minute in the microphone is coming to you while that is doing Jim there's all good plays should do shall we find ourselves back to where we were thank you this is a question that several of you personally know so you can decide if there's anything embarrassing about it and deal with it I saw two productions both of which I thought worked both by the same director each different from the other one was done here a couple of years ago directed by Sean Daniels it was Peterson Noctribe's Bob and it was extraordinarily elaborate production my feeling at the time was that I kind of liked it but thought that the elaborate this is the production was not called for by the script and that it was probably put in by the director to help several play the second one was done at Jeeva Theatre in Rochester directed by Sean Daniels all different people except for the set designer much scaled down much smaller production seeming to me the closer to what the script must have been to I haven't read the script I never got a chance to talk to him about why he made these changes and how he thought about them but they indicate something that we haven't really talked about here which is that the director's approach to dealing with the author's script may not be a single thing it may be a developing thing and I don't know you would have better than I what's to be learned from this example but the second production was strikingly smaller and more intimate and in a smaller theatre I can say it's interesting working here as we're sitting on the side of the dining shore a play that was not written to be performed in the round so what we are doing to make that play work we have a whole different set of dynamics that are not necessarily in the script like there's a staircase in the script that those three stairs are representing so I think if suddenly we were doing it in a huge proscenium I would approach staging dynamics in a different way and I think in the case of Bob there's this huge space that you have to fill what that means versus when you can look at something intimately I mean I sort of love that when you can do multiple productions because you keep learning about I would keep that whole first scene and then I would get rid of that whole table just like the things that you learn and watching it over again Anybody else? I think that Mary's right that sometimes the decision is based on the space you're in but also sometimes the director sometimes you just have to see something sometimes you just have to try something to learn whether or not it works you can imagine whether or not you think it'll work till the cows come home but until you actually see it until you actually see the actors try it sometimes you just don't know I also think very honestly I've directed only one play more than once and I did two productions of Andy Baker's The Aliens and it also is a thing where like Sean was probably a different person and you know I was a different person when I directed The Aliens the first time or the second time and I think there is undeniably something different they can bring to it be it in terms of sensibility or just like what is your human connection to the story you're telling that is an ongoing evolution and I would say what I got from that because I think that's absolutely all right is it made me think about trust about how much one trusts the text the first time out and whether one needs to adorn it in order to to punch out and actually having seen it and lived with it whether that director or just even me with the other plays can actually trust the words to do the work for me rather than the adornment and that's a good lesson for me to think about as I step into the next two new plays I'm about to direct it's now about one minute to one of them I'm getting a smile from my facilitator as I write up I'd just like to thank everybody for contributing wonderful questions but most importantly I'd like to thank all of you not only for working in this field of new plays which we don't often get the praises and the joys but I really want to thank you for doing that for us all doing it and supporting for this panel