In this terms directed project I wanted to focus on what I think is the hardest part of

constructing a show: the preproduction. As an aspiring director and playwright, a lot of

questions come in mind: on what to focus, from what perspective is it better to start looking at
a project, how to successfully be the director and the playwright at the same time without
doing more harm to the project than good? These are just a few questions that scare me when
I start to think about a new project and in this term, I gave myself time to try to answer them
with a little help from the teachers and from the research that I have done. But why do I feel
like the preproduction is, for me, the hardest part of creating a piece of theatre, and why do I
feel the need to prepare and to focus my essay on what I found regarding this part of the
process of creation? Well, as a director and as a playwright I feel that it is my duty to prepare
and to start the process with the right foot. I feel like the beginning of the rehearsals heavily
depend on what I do to make the actors comfortable and to make them feel that they are
starting on a well-paved road, the research that I do in the preproduction makes the team get
trust in me and in the project, and in general, I think that in the later rehearsals you can rely on
other people that are with you in the project. If you miss something like for example you
forget to think about how to link two scenes, there are other people there who can make sure
that everything goes as planned. You are a team and if you make mistakes there is someone to
cover your back. In the meantime, in the first part of the process, one who chooses to do the
directing and the writing is mostly alone and everything that goes as planned is his merit and
at the same time, everything that goes wrong is his fault. This is why I think that the
preproduction needs a little bit more precision. This is why I feel the need to concentrate my
research on this part of the process.
From what I have discussed with my colleagues from my team I understood that the show
should be something regarding how spirits from the past would talk and what would they say
to the children of this day. But I did not know how to approach this project. With what should
I begin?

Firstly, I wanted to know where to start. What should be the first idea that will make me want
to start working on the theatre piece? Where in my mind and in the mind of one creator of the
art is the difference between having just a vague idea about a project and starting to seriously
work on something? What is the first domino piece that starts the process? And if this last
question has multiple answers, what is the best answer that better fits for me? I think I found
the answer looking trough Katie Mitchell’s book „The directors Craft” (Mitchell, 2008). And
I think that the answer that I wanted is the story. The story is, for me right now, the most
important thing in a theatre piece. When talking about different aesthetics that theatre can
have, Katie Mitchell said that one should not be so lazy to make every project in complete
realism. She said that directors must be braver, but at the same time they should not choose an
aesthetic based only on their preference, but they should heavily consider the text and make
their decision based on the story. For example, she said that she choosed to make her
production of Chekhov's „The Seagull” (The Seagull, 2006) in an expressionist matter
because of a scene in the last act where the windows of Treplev`s room open because of the
wind of a storm that has to come and Mitchells reading of this scene is that in the same time
there is a storm inside Treplev`s mind because of Nina and that the windows, just like many
other external things in the play, happen because of the way that the characters feel. This is
why she chooses expressionism. And because of her explanation, I felt like I need to
concentrate on the story first. After that, based on what type of story I choose, I have to see
how do I create an aesthetic, dialogue, characters, spaces, and music to better serve the story.
But now the process seems a little less blurred and I know with what part of the project I
should start. But how do I start working on the story? What do I want it to be like and how do
I create one?

Since I started thinking about creating theatre, one of my biggest problems was: „How do I
know that a story deserves to be on stage?” and „What do I want to tell with my work?”. And
these questions found their answers in my research as I discovered a piece based on Homer`s
Illiad directed by the Slovenian theatre practitioner Jernej Lorenci (Iliad, 2015). It is a show
where everyone is affected by a tragic destiny and most of the characters end up dying and in
the very end, all of the actors start singing about how the characters die, about how all of the
actors that played the characters are going to die and, in the end, about how every member of
the audience is going to die. I felt that it was a beautiful way to remind everyone that death
and horrible things can and will happen to each of us. I think that this is a very smart way to
direct the story into something that the audience can use and learn from. 

I quickly applied this to my project and I started creating my own story: A group of children
is guided into a scary looking house by an old man with a lamp. In the halls, they meet
different ghosts from the past and the ghosts talk to them regarding things that they did
differently in the past. They talk about some things that they believed that were normal and
we, as a society, decided in time that we have to change our perspective on looking at these
subject. After talks about how people in history approached differently mental health,
women's rights, slavery, war, or animal rights, they arrive in a room where they find an old
and strange time machine. From it, people from the future will come and talk to the audience
this time about what they think that we, today, are doing wrong. Subjects like pollution and
human rights will be just a few of the things that they will probably bring up. In the end, the
children are encouraged to reflect and to say what they think that they or that their society
does differently then the future humanity might categorize as right.

All of the problems that I listed above are problems that tend to rely on the writing part, but
after the playtext is written I needed to answer a big question: how do I direct one of my own
plays? In Katie Mitchell's book, she only talks about how to direct a play that was written in
the past. How do I approach this? When do I stop working on the text and when do I say that
it is finished? When actors will improvise on my own playtext, what do I do? The answer
came while reading John Caird's „Theatre Craft” (Caird, 2010). In this book, John Cairds
does not approach this problem directly, but he talks about working with a living playwright
who is changing the text on the spot as you rehearse. And he advises directors to have a very
clear moment when you and your team are satisfied with the text and to stop improving it
right then in order to focus on the rehearsals. He says that while rehearsing if one member of
the team feels the need to improve a line, it is alright if the director allows it. But the team
should not try to get major changes at the text.
But one who tries to do directing and playwrighting at the same time might ask when to know
if a play is done? Or when is it done well enough? John Cairds has a really good list that I will
try to use to make this decision. I plan that when I feel like most of them are met, I will
change my mindset with one heavily focused on directing and rehearsing.

I think that in this terms project I succeeded to find a plan for most of the problems that I
taught I might have in the preproduction of a project. I found out that it is better for me to
focus on the story and on what the audience gets out of it, and I found out that if I decide to
direct and to write in the same project it might be better for me to separate the two processes
and to do them one at a time. I think that this realization will help me in the future project not
just in the first phase, but they will help me guide the whole show. I really like how I
managed to resolve these problems trough looking at other theatre practitioners work and
thoughts and I think I will adopt this method of researching the next time I feel like I fear
something in the theatre-making process.

Bibliography:

 Mitchell, K. (2008) The Director`s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre.

London: Routledge.

 The Seagull by Anton Chekhov (2006) Directed by Katie Mitchell [National Theatre,
London. 29 June]

 Iliad by Jernej Lorenci, Matic Starina, Eva Mahkovic (2015) Directed by Jernej
Lorenci [Slovenian National Theatre Ljubljana, Ljubljana. 6 October]

 Caird, J. (2010) Theatre Craft: A Director`s Companion from A to Z.

London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux