Directing: Stanislavski

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The director's main task is to find meaning in the text and convey that meaning to the audience. The art of the director is to radically re-interpret the classic text in order to make it relevant for a contemporary audience. Adjudicate between these two different positions with reference to the work of two major theatre directors.

The director has become a very important part of a theatre performance. This has not always been the case. In the early years of theatre the director was seen chiefly as a manager, they were there to organise a performance and overlook the development of the play. The director's job was to focus on `the management' of a production to keep it moving forward. But this was soon to change, on May 1, 1874 the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen displayed a different direction style, which would go a long way to changing the role of the director forever. The Duke, on this date did not become the significant figure a director now is. His ideas helped to develop the role of the director who would soon become the fundamental factor to the success of a performance. The Duke's initiative allowed him to be more involved in the piece. Cole and Chinoy expressed the impact of the Duke on a performance in their book Directors on Directing.

"He was the artistic creator of each production. He designed the sets and costumes, but he went further and designed every movement and every position on stage."

The development of the director was a gradual process but each new director in the nineteenth and twentieth century contributed to the emergence of the director as the artistic creator of each show.

Is the role of the director to convey meaning from the text and to convey that meaning to an audience? Or is the art of the di...

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...ays. The director can choose what meaning he wants to convey to the audience, what meaning the set will have for the piece, what feelings the characters put across to the audience. An example of this is in Stanislavsky's version of The Cherry Orchard when he represented the character of Lopakhin to be the most psychologically complex, which Chekhov questions. This is significant because the author originally created the meaning in the text and Stanislavsky's direction techniques can alter the meaning of the whole piece. But if a director attempts to show the values the script holds he has less choice on how it is going to be performed and the director's choices shrink and there is a greater margin for error if the script is interpreted incorrectly. As a result, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard could really only be understood and performed perfectly by Chekhov himself.

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