By Robert Mshengu Kavanagh
Despite a fairly active acting experience in my early years, it was a long time before I began to think of directing. In fact, during most of this time I had never given a thought to directing, except once. I remember noting the problems we had with a professional London director who came up to direct an Oxford University Drama Society [OUDS] production of Hamlet in which I was taking part and thinking that an actor learns more about directing by working under a bad director than a good one.
In 1970 I came back from university in England to work in South Africa. Up to that point I had had a perfectly European introduction to theatre but it was at that point that all changed. The first fruit of that change was my involvement in what we called experimental workshop theatre. I was running what were intended to be ‘multi-racial’ acting workshops at the Institute of Race Relations in Braamfontein, Johannesburg. Two factors led to the workshop turning out to be not exactly as envisaged. The first was the nature of the theatre exercises and improvisations I came up with and the second was my insistence not only on ‘multiracialism’ but also on ‘multilingualism’ as well. The combination of the two led to the departure of the traditional white liberals, who said that ‘proper theatre was not about pretending to be frogs’ and who couldn’t stand being at a disadvantage when for once they had to listen to Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and Tsotsitaal in discussions they were no longer able to dominate.
As the leader of the workshop, I in effect came to be the director of the first production the workshop devised, namely Crossroads. This was the first time I found myself directing rather than acting – but what a different kind of directing from what I had been used to. Just as the play itself resulted from collective creativity so did most of the directing. My role as director was perhaps more that of a dramaturge than what is conventionally expected of a director – in other words, I led exercises and improvisations, watched from outside in the place of an audience, and then organised and structured the script and the performance.
From then on in the six years in which I worked in Johannesburg, I directed rather than acted. In fact, I was criticised for this as no-one wanted to forget I was white and most of the actors were black. However, this was the crucible in which I learnt much of what I know about directing, directing in our own African context. After Crossroads there came an adaptation of Ben Jonson’s comedy, The Silent Woman, which we called ZZZIP, Credo Mutwa’s uNosilimela, a one-hander with James Mthoba, uHlanga the Reed and, lastly, Survival. In all these productions, with the exception of the Mutwa play, the relationship between the actor and the director was one of creating together and the directing was basically similar to what I had done with Crossroads.
Then I left for Leeds and while there I acted in the Indian play, Hayavadan, by Girish Karnad, directed by the celebrated Indian director, Anuradha Kapur, when she was still a student. I also developed a one-hander with the hugely talented South African actress, Thandi More, called Prey No More, at the Almost Free Theatre in London. When Thandi left the production to tour in Holland, an equally gifted Kenyan actress, Wanjiku Kiarie, took her place. Another play I directed – by virtue of being the course teacher – was Bertolt Brecht’s Senora Carrar’s Rifles at a college of education near Leeds.
From there, there was more directing of student productions in Ethiopia with two exceptions, an innovative production of Macbeth in Amharic with professional Ethiopian actors and an acting part in Tsegaye Gebre Medhin’s Tewodros, again in Amharic, directed by one of the leading directors in Ethiopia, Ato Abate Mekuria. After that, there was over ten years of student productions at the University of Zimbabwe, lots of actor/directing in the political theatre group, Zambuko/Izibuko, and finally, CHIPAWO, the arts education for development organisation, working with children and young people, crafting and directing plays with children, teenagers and the professional New Horizon Youth Theatre Company.
In the world of theatre experience from which I initially emerged, namely the European theatre, ‘demonstration’ by a director had been taboo. The prevailing belief was that a director must analyse with the actors, discuss, explain, lead acting exercises and improvisations, assist the actor to express what the actor feels or assist the actor to find his or her motivation, like a midwife, let the blocking come from the actor and so on – any or all of this, but never, never, should the director show the actor how to act something; never, never demonstrate what the character in a particular situation, given the script, might be feeling or how he might behave – no, this was taboo.
But I will bet my bottom rand that all over Africa directors are doing exactly this. But how many would admit it? And why do they do it? And what is wrong with it? These are the questions I want to ask.
Why will they not admit it? Because the shadow of Western theatre, in particular realism, hangs over them. As with me, they have internalised a concept of the director which bans demonstrating or showing as a method of communication between actor and director. Though they may do it, they will never openly admit it and, when they do it, they may even feel guilty about it.
Now we come to the question, why do they do it? Why do I do it – initially guiltily but finally prepared to argue for it and explain why we do it, as in this short paper.
How many times have I found that working with an actor in South Africa, Ethiopia, or Zimbabwe, I explain and explain, we do exercises, we discuss and discuss, we try everything – but the actor just doesn’t get the feeling, doesn’t experience that epiphanic little moment when it clicks and away he or she goes and does wonders with it? Then I act it out for him – and the communication is electric. To do this a director does not even need to be a good actor. All the director needs is to feel it – and communicate it, not by talking and discussing, but in another more direct way, an emotional, one might call it, a visceral way.
The Oxford Concise explains what is meant by the viscera as ‘internal organs in the main cavities of the body, especially those in the abdomen’. Visceral, that which relates to the viscera, is defined as: ‘relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect’.
Another way of putting it is that such communication with the actor can be ‘electric’ – and that suggests to me a neural connection, a connection somehow with the nervous system. As an actor I know that it is possible to forge such connectivity with an audience and I know the same can be said about directing. I know I can forge it with actors.
In the fields of advertising, communication and applied art forms a lot of research is going into non-verbal or emotional communication. Scientists and researchers refer to three main forms of such communication – visceral, behavioural and reflective. Don Norman, founder of the Design Lab at the University of California in San Diego in the US sums up: “These three levels, while classified as separate dimensions of the emotional system, are linked and influence one another to create our overall emotional experience of the world” – and this includes communication with each other and communication with actors [https://www. interaction-design.org/literature/ article/norman-s-three-levels-of-design].
I am not going to pretend to evaluate or even understand some of this research. Why I am referring to it is that theatre is communication and theatre workers, including directors, need to recognise the possibilities of communicating with their actors beyond the intellectual and verbal. One attempt to describe the role of the theatre director suggests that the ‘director’s biggest job is not only to hone in on a specific reading, but to work with the actor in order to communicate effectively how that reading relates to the overall character and the themes of the work’. The same authors see the main communication problem for the director as that involving ‘a lot of nuance that can be difficult to put to words’ [https://lionhearttheatre.org/the-role-of-the-director-in-the-theatre]. For them the difficulty relates to ‘putting it to words’. They still restrict communication between the director and actor to verbal or intellectual communication. But the director has a lot more than words at his or her disposal.
Talking and discussing – in other words, the process of eliciting understanding through words and ideas – is a process of communication which is intellectual. Improvisation and exercises can be – if the director knows what he or she is doing – emotional. This is done through a process of eliciting understanding and feeling experientially and sometimes emotionally. But there is another element which can be missing in the intellectual and emotional processes, another element which can and should play a part in the communication process – and that is the visual. It is a cliché that visual experience is far more impactful than words. What the audience sees, has a much stronger effect on it than dialogue. So why not the actor? A feeling can be intensified or ‘identified’, in other words, ‘focussed’, if it is visual.
For this to happen, one has to assume that the director understands and feels what he or she is hoping for at any given moment in the play. If that understanding or feeling is demonstrated or communicated physically and visually and the actor is able to grasp it, it is then up to the actor how he or she expresses it. But the director needs to communicate his or her expectation, understanding or feeling in the first place for the actor to develop it in the actor’s own way. As director I have found on a number of occasions, where all else has failed, that I can communicate to the actor what I feel about a character or a dramatic moment by ‘showing’, ‘demonstrating’ or ‘acting out’ what I mean. Communication of this kind takes place in an almost tangible way, a little like blue tooth. By showing the feeling or the understanding, by making it visible – on the face and in the body – by acting it out, an emotion, a vibration, is generated, as I say, like an electric current. As I act it, I, the director, feel it and I know that the actor feels it in just the same way as I do – a bit like that moment when a man and a woman both recognise simultaneously that they are attracted to each other. It is a powerful moment of communication. It is as if communication takes place neurally. It is as if the director’s emotional perception is plugged directly into the actor’s nervous system. From there the actor, having felt it neurally, never looks back. “O, so that’s it,” the actor says. “Why didn’t you say so all a long?” That is exactly it. What I’m trying to say is that there are other ways of ‘saying it’ than speaking. Once this kind of communication takes place, the actor – fully, physically, emotionally and intellectually – is possessed by the moment and develops it in the way he or she interprets it.
I do not believe that I am the only African director who has experienced this form of communication with the actor. It is not a theory I would tout in other parts of the world – though I wouldn’t rule it out. Grotowski or Artaud might have been going down relatively similar tracks. But on our continent, in Africa, I feel sure it must ring a bell with many directors. Is it that we often find ourselves working in languages which are not mother tongue? Is it because sometimes we find it difficult to explain a concept verbally where an emotional, visual or neural connection is more effective. I leave that up to others to determine.
It is also possible that my own experience is idiosyncratic but if there are directors out there – as I suspect there are – who share my experience, let them be bold. We need to write our own theories – of acting, directing, playwriting etc. – and explain and defend them – and practise them with confidence. Communication between the actor and the director is not, cannot be, uniform. There is not only one way. If we find that we communicate differently, let us not doubt ourselves but instead continue with our practice – and then also write our own theory.
