Word: stagecrafter
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Much of what Guthrie said was reworked from the talk, "An Audience of One," which he delivered in London before the Royal Society of Arts five years ago. This lecture was printed in the highly informative anthology Directing the Play: A Source Book of Stagecraft. Those interested in more of Guthrie's ideas or in the opinions of many other eminent directors can find them here...
...bits in the performance which seem to be handled with minor competence. Fredrick Marker's direction fails to sustain any pace or rhythm, or to hold the play together in the light of any unified continuity or insight. His production even lacks the basic and most simple elements of stagecraft, failing to recreate the electric atmosphere of a "tragic" court martial in large part because almost none of the cast have any sense of military bearing or authority. They look and act more like hoods in an all-night card game than naval officers struggling with a very difficult question...
Displaced Narrative. In portraying its altogether central figure, the play resorts, as perhaps it must, to peculiarly centrifugal stagecraft. There are too many episodes that, if vivid, are sketchy, hurried, discontinuous, that seem flashes of ethnic scenery rather than stretches of dramatic mileage. Mister Johnson not only concerns a man who cannot keep to the road; it unfolds its story with almost no road to keep to. It comes off a kind of displaced narrative: as Mister Johnson emerges neither native nor British, Mister Johnson emerges neither novel nor play. But if too fragmented and saltatory, it yields...
Equally inventive is the staging, with outsized venetian blinds manipulated like a kaleidoscope to vary the settings and change the scenery. Stagecraft, however, can only do so much: the orchestra plays, the screens shift and slide, the old scenery is miraculously whisked away within a second, and then back you are again, stranded in Virginia City with Irra Petina, Paul Valentine, and Miss Miele's lyrics...
...awareness of the cultural context of a literary work . . . Further, the American student is often allowed to collect his 'hours' of English courses in a quite arbitrary fashion, and may get his degree on the basis of a course in Donne, a course in Elizabethan stagecraft, a course in Yeats and Eliot, a course in Joyce, a course in the modern American novel, and some courses in 'creative writing' - having read nothing of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, or Keats ... It is also true that, as a result of a rather scholastic training in critical methodology, he often...