Interpretation: to impose or explain

INTERPRETATION to impose or explain Arnold Wesker When I last met Ian McDiarmid he was a discontented, although distinguished, actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company-one of the first since Ian McKellen to express public misgivings about the tyranny of directors. . . "There'sa tremendous mystique about a lot of directors and directing and I'm very happy to see that a lot ofit is just crap . .. " -Robin Thornber interviewing Ian McDiarmid on the occasion of his production of Moliere's Don Juan at the Royal Exchange, Manchester. (The Guardian 18 April 1988) In Europe we are living the end of the Modern Era; the end of individualism ; the end of art conceived as an irreplaceable expression of personal originality; the end that heralds an era of unparalleled uniformity ... -Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel Touring is always hazardous. But the National Theatre's trip to Tbilisi in Georgia last weekend with The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest turned potential disaster into downright triumph. The company gave seven performances in three days without scenery or costumes (stuck in transit) and in hastily improvised lighting. The result was a staggering demonstration of what theatre is about: the primacy of acting and language over spectacle and design. -Michael Billington, The Guardian 15 June 1988 62 The problem of what should happen when a director accepts to realize on the stage what has been written on the page-a process that is often called interpretation-is a very complex problem and one which raises principles of fundamental ethical importance. There can be no doubt that in the last seventy years directors have emerged who have changed the visual, audio and choreographic experience of the theatre. My own experiences of working with directors is mixed. The worst have lead to changes I should never have agreed to and resulted in disaster; the best have been rewarding and resulted in changes to text and structure which have enhanced the power and meaning of the play. But a madness is sweeping through European theatre, perhaps through world theatre. It is a madness which has elevated the role of the director above the role of writer. The stage has become shrill with the sounds of the director's vanity; it has become cluttered with his tricks and his visual effects. No play is safe from his often hysterical manipulations. The productions we are seeing claim attention to himself rather than attention to the play. The playwright's vision of the human condition has become secondary to the director's bombastic striving for personal impact; his text, his visual concepts, his rhythmic arrangement of scenes, his emotional tensions, his perceptions of human behavior, his unfolding of narrative action are cut, re-arranged, distorted, or ignored by the director and sometimes by the actors. A name has been given to this madness: credit-grabbing. And the madness is fed by what can be called "the fUhrer complex." We are no longer invited to see Shakespeare's King Lear, we are invited to see, perhaps, Strehler's King Lear. It is not Eugene O'Neill's Hairy Ape that was recently produced in Germany, it was Peter Stein's The Hairy Ape. Let us remind ourselves of something that is perhaps forgotten. The raw material of the playwright is his individual experience of life. This experience is a kind of chaos into which occasionally there shines a light, a tiny light of meaning. A small part of the chaos is identified, sometimes comprehended. The playwright gives this chaos a shape, an order. He calls it a play. And like a scholar he is handling what are called primary sources which no one else has explored. Those primary sources are his own being and experience which have not been touched before. We know what often happens to the works of scholars, rightly and inevitably: other people read their works of scholarship and write less formidable books based on them. They are dealing with what's known as secondary material. It's interesting, often important work, but it is not the same as the original work by the scholar who employed a more original quality of imagination and called upon...