Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY ACT III: THE LEADERSHIP ACT

Good theatre directors develop a vision of the play through the interactions of rehearsal. In order to allow the innovative ideas and entrepreneurial behaviours to take flight, directors must hold back any pre-emptive vision of their own. The director Sam Mendes has commented on the need ‘to go into it with as little as possible’ and ‘to make as few decisions as possible when you begin the rehearsal process’. Another director and RSC associate, Tim Supple, describes his attempts to ‘dilute’ the decision-making process in rehearsals, encouraging the actors to accept ‘a situation where the attitude of not knowing is embraced’. In our terms, the director must lead from the middle.

There are exceptions to this of course, from Alfred Hitchcock's famous claim that ‘actors are like cattle’ to Mendes’ acknowledgement that working in musical theatre on Broadway or the West End, ‘you have to basically make the work in your head before you start rehearsal’, an approach to rehearsal he describes as ‘my least favoured way of working’. But generally, working in a collaborative medium, theatre directors cannot afford to be dictators.

Leadership in rehearsal begins through a process of promoting ideas upwards and linking to other people, ideas and realities outside the rehearsal room. A vision of the play emerges through these interactions, and only then does the director move on to ‘sussing’ or distilling that vision and mapping out its ...