Unnecessary choreographic embellishment ... a still from Iph at the Mercury theatre, Colchester. Photograph: Robert Day
Over the last few weeks I've had the odd experience of seeing several productions where the director has got in the way of the play. First there was Jonathan Moore's revival of The Revenger's Tragedy in Manchester. He not only went for sensory overload by adding a great many aural and visual flourishes but also included an extended dumb show at the start that offered an Irish Catholic back-story. The dumb show is entirely redundant, however, because in the straight-to-the-point opening speech Middleton gets Vindice to supply all the information that the audience needs with quite remarkable economy.
Subsequently, Sue Lefton's production of Iph offered unnecessary choreographic embellishment while Timothy Sheader's Romeo and Juliet at the Open Air featured irritating tableaux, underscored music and half a tonne of bleeding confetti. It's like trying to watch a play with the director jumping up and down in front of you doing semaphore and saying "Think this! Feel this!"
Now as regular readers will know, I have no difficulty with acts of creative vandalism. I'm no purist; in fact I admire a director who takes a view, particularly with classic texts, and demonstrates their genuine passion for a play. Neither do I have any difficulty with directors whose style is distinctive. The productions of John Tiffany, Emma Rice and Declan Donnellan are always instantly recognizable and none the worse for that because the decisions taken, whether you agree with them or not, are always in service of the play itself. The chairs in Marianne Elliott's St Joan, the dancing in Katie Mitchell's The Women of Troy or the physical stuff in John Tiffany's Black Watch are not about a director saying "look at me, look how clever I'm being". They feel organic, as if they have naturally evolved through rehearsal rather than simply been imposed as an eye-catching concept.
The work of Tiffany, Mitchell, Rice and others reflects a seismic shift that is taking place in British theatre. Increasingly, creative authority is no longer vested just in the writer but established on the rehearsal room floor. What makes these directors' experiments different from the European idea of director as auteur, however, is the element of collaboration in the creative process. Here, all those involved in creating a work also jointly own it. I think that audiences recognise this instinctively when they see it, and are equally beady-eyed when what is being put in front of them is no more than decorative embellishment that happens to use the fashionable tools of dance and visual theatre.
