The Performance Behind the Performance

While publishers moan that their readers have deserted the bookstore for the box office and theater owners wail that their patrons have left Sophocles for Seinfeld, the Omnivores are shouting to be heard. You know the Omnivores: the guys and gals who go to the movies every Friday night, see a couple of dozen plays and musicals every year, always have a book next to the clock-radio, and are known to spend, say, 12.5 hours with the remote every week. The film nuts, the speed readers, the gals who gobble up any high-quality entertainment.

Wendy Lesser is such an Omnivore. As a literary critic and founding editor of the Threepenny Review, she has been cataloged by the marketing types as a Print-Eater. Yet as one of the Print-Eaters who occasionally finds herself in the theater, Lesser, on a summer night in 1993 at the Royal National Theatre in London, sat through a performance of a 50-year-old play, J.B. Priestley’s “An Inspector Calls.” Her delight and subsequent need to explore the rest of the oeuvre of the play’s director, Stephen Daldry, found its outlet in “A Director Calls.” Although her discoveries may prove banal to thespians whose taste in theater books runs more to classics such as Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space,” “A Director Calls” serves as an excellent guide for theatergoers of other persuasions into the Masonic wizardry of stage directors.

Lesser wisely resists trying to reproduce the wonder of that evening in London. Instead, she attempts to make us understand intellectually--with a dry and deadpan delivery that would make Bertolt Brecht proud of her--how a director like Daldry can create such a wonder.

One of the clear answers is that Daldry came of artistic age in an England that survived the ravages of Thatcherism with its theater intact. He rose up through a vibrant system of regional theaters and made his first splash in the London fringe at the Gate, where he became known for filling the minuscule stage with astonishing numbers of actors. As artistic director of London’s Royal Court Theatre, he was the recent beneficiary of a 16-million-pound grant from a national lottery system that spins the suspended disbelief of millions of gamblers into the renovation of great theaters such as Covent Garden and the Royal Court.

But Lesser dwells less on the English garden than on her selected flower. Of particular interest to her is Daldry’s ability to blur the line between the stage and the audience, and then walk that line like a virtuoso. She focuses on how Daldry and his design team play up the artificiality of the theater, dropping the house curtain so low that even the top crumples to the floor, shining bright spots on the audience, forcing it to become as much a part of the inspection as the inspector (or, as in Daldry’s 1995 revival of Ron Hutchinson’s IRA drama “Rat in the Skull,” as much a part of the interrogation as the interrogator). This kind of post-modernist fare (and Lesser plays out the redesign of the Royal Court as a metaphor for his redesign of the actor-audience relationship) may be just the thing for Print-Eaters.

But when Lesser abandons theory for the strut-and-fret detail of rehearsal, the book widens its interest and finds its real strength. A long chapter that follows Daldry’s work with the four actors of “Rat in the Skull” is a casebook in the Art of Persuasion. Two of the actors especially, John Castle and Tony Doyle, are tremendous subjects: one the kind of actor who speaks the same language as the director, the other the kind who argues every direction every step of the way. Lesser’s description of Daldry’s gift at leading these actors from first reading to opening night, with “his combination of authority and flexibility, openness and strength,” ought to add reams of appreciation to any theatergoer’s understanding of the peculiar role of the director.

The British director Tony Tanner once said that 90% of what he tells actors is “faster, louder . . . but of course you can’t say that!” In transcribing much of what Daldry says, Lesser undoubtedly reports what is said by directors all over the world. But she provides a service far more important than mere hagiography of a single director. She plays a terrific Virgil for theatergoers who have abandoned all hope of understanding, yet want to know why they get such a kick from that particular hell we call the theater.