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We begin with a short and succinct piece in which Alan offers his thoughts on what the role of a director is.
Alan Ayckbourn discusses the role of the director
Stephen Joseph [Alan's most influential mentor] said something to me once when I did my first production for him. I went to him for advice. I was an actor and he'd asked me to direct a play, and I got very nervous. You suddenly realise how much energy you have to generate as a director. Actors tend to wait and see. And I said to him, 'What is the role of a director?' And he made one of the simplest and one of the most complicated statements that I've ever heard; he said, 'The role of a director is to create an atmosphere in which the actors can create', and indeed that's what I try to do. Take eight to ten different people, all with different temperaments and working styles; some work Stanislavsky, some work Brechtian style, some just blunder around and find things, and you have to somehow give them space to develop what they want to do and yet bring them together into some sort of unity.
My rehearsals are rather gentle affairs. I always think that if an actor feels that an idea is his own, he's much more convincing than when the idea is put in from outside, so I drop little seeds of ideas which they'll discover. And I suppose that in the perfect production, I don't appear to have done anything. Although I hope that later on the actors will say, 'Oh, I think he did quite a lot, but I wasn't aware of it at the time'.
