Shakespeare for community players Author:Roy Mitchell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV REHEARSAL No two directors follow the same method of rehearsing a play. The procedure varies widely, but three general systems are recognisable.... more » The first is the anarchic style of the old school, which consists in distributing the parts and permitting each actor to interpret his r61e with no more than a passing thought of the ensemble. As a book for amateurs of the last generation naively reirfarks : " It is advisable to get some friend—artistic if possible—to sit in the centre of where the audience will be when the critical night arrives, and to request him to stop the rehearsal when the actors get into a confused mass " J Does any one wonder that people ceased " to take amateurs seriously " t Diametrically opposed to the sauve qui pent technique is the method of some latter-day directors, who study the text in detail, decide upon the minute points of reading, movement and stage business, and then endeavour to force their human material into the scheme which they have imagined. This scheme presupposes the co-operation of perfectly plastic actors, who do not exist even in the best professional ranks. The day of Mr. Gordon Craig's uber-marionette may come, but it is still a long distance off. The third method is such a compromise between the two preceding as will serve to interpret the soul of the play, at the same time suiting the treatment to the limitations of the cast. After all, the actors are the medium of the artist of the theatre just as much as steel and stone are the medium of the architect, and he would be a foolish architect who designed for steel and tried to execute his plan in stone. The most successful director lays out his general scheme of treatment, and then composes as hegoes, plotting out the movement and evolving his finished work little...« less