Straight to the point

Given some basic wisdom, directing for the stage is rather simple. The wisdom is that: “The audience don’t care.” They don’t care where the characters “went to school”, or what memory the actor is dredging up to influence his performance; they just want to see a show.

The show they see on an opening night will consist of two things in existence prior to rehearsal: the actors, and the script. The actors don’t need to discuss the script, they understood it when they read it. They don’t need to zhuzh up their performance through elaborate analysis, they just need to show up and speak up — the subsequent performance will be appreciated on their ability to do so, and on the worth of the script. No performance can enhance a bad script, and a good one needs no help.

Prior to the Twenties, the director was known as the stage manager. It was his job to block the actors such that the audience could see them and hear them, and they didn’t trip over the furniture. “Louder, faster, pause here, don’t fidget while the other fellow is speaking”: these were the panoply of the director’s tools.

But the cobb salad of psychoanalysis and the method replaced the stage manager with the director. His job was to analyse the script psychoanalytically, and lead the actors in a month-long encounter group called the rehearsal process. None of it made any difference to the audience, save that the self-consciousness the charade engendered in the actor, transformed him from performer, to lay analyst. After all, anyone reading a play text understands it sufficiently to appreciate the interactions. And the better a play is, the less it needs a set — Shakespeare plays just peachily on the radio.

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So past simply staging, then, in his responsibility to the audience, how might the director (ex-stage manager) be of use to the actor? In one thing: a subtle alteration of the actor’s intention. The fellow playing Iago understands that he is going to avenge himself on his boss by falsely accusing Desdemona. The actor might play a scene revealing the false clues to Othello as “conveying a favour”; the director might suggest, rather, that he play it to “refute a false claim”. The words are the same, but the intention (known as the objective) is somewhat different, and the change will influence the performance subtly.

Note that in neither case is the actor asked to “feel” anything, or to “believe” anything, he is simply asked to reimagine the objective.

The Crispian speech in Henry V is the greatest in our language, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” It can be played as an exhortation to a crowd, or as a quiet pledge to fellow warriors. The determination of intention can influence performance. Inversely, when baffled by performance in human interactions we can seek clarity by determining intention. For example, Obama’s stated goal was “Hope and Change”; Harris’s seems to be “Joy”. The only intentions inferable from the slogans was obfuscation and the desire to seduce.

Our objective in the Second World War was the destruction of fascism. In Vietnam it was “to win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people — a task for which the Armed Forces were horribly ill-suited; and no one has creditably explained why we invaded Iraq to find “weapons of mass destruction”, which, even if they had existed, posed no threat to the United States.

Our Middle East objective, under the direction of Obama, Biden and Harris, has been opposition to the Jewish state, under the heading of adjudication of the conflict. But a conflict on which external rules are imposed is not a war, it is a duel — ultimate power, thus, displayed by neither party but by the referee. The very term “The Peace Process” indicates an acceptably interminable engagement. Peace is never brought about by a process, but through breaking one side’s will to continue fighting.

After our administration’s abandonment of Israel, the Netanyahu government has, correctly, decided to cease not only its subservience but its acknowledgement of “world opinion”, destroy its enemies, and, so, bring peace to Israel. For “he who dictates the terms of the battle dictates the terms of the peace,” as Napoleon said.

The Terms of the Battle, in stage language, are the Objective. Determined here not by a director, but by an interested referee. Those in the Middle East were dictated to Israel by America, in service to Iran, a criminal folly which led to October 7, and the ebullition of world antisemitism.

Now, various of the good-willed are calling for bookstores to boycott the works of Jewish authors who do not denounce the Jewish state. I was approached to sign a petition decrying this brutality, and to supply a quote. My heart sank, not at the savagery of Sally Rooney and the woke mob, but at the notion that a list of names could decrease savagery.

I, of course, signed the petition to fight antisemitism, but washed up short and queasy thinking of a quote.

I’ve always bragged that I could write in a car crash, but was unable to add my wisdom to this good cause. I wondered why, and determined this: it is pointless to “fight” antisemitism — it presupposes an ongoing (thus extendable) process.

Our objective should be to stop antisemitism.

As Jew hatred is a delusion, it cannot be stopped by any appeal to reason. No exhortation will convince, only the application of dissuasive force to those enamoured of brutality.

My responses have included visiting Israel, to show the flag, and voting for Republicans who will defund institutions permitting the violation of Jews’ civil rights, remove the institutions’ tax-exempt status, and prosecute those threatening and assaulting Jews.

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