Taking Direction from Dodin by Joe Hill-Gibbins

What’s the secret of getting great performances from your actors? At the end of February 2009, I travelled to St Petersburg with seven theatre directors from the Young Vic’s Genesis Directors Programme to ask Lev Dodin that very question.

We spent two weeks there with the iconic Russian director, who has developed god-like status since taking over the Maly Theatre 23 years ago. His stellar reputation is founded upon his ability to draw phenomenally deep and detailed performances from his acting ensemble.

Dodin’s first piece of advice to us was this: “Never ever ask an actor to do anything that you can’t do as well or better yourself.” For five years, the Young Vic has been running the Genesis Directors Programme to give a new generation of British theatre directors a deeper understanding of their craft. Dodin’s advice to anyone aspiring to be a director is to start by becoming a brilliant actor.

For many British directors, their acting credits stretch to a supporting role in the Nativity Play and a few mumbling, red-faced turns in workshops. At the Maly, the entry level requirement for directing students is to undergo five years of full-time training at the Maly’s theatre academy. And this training is about as intensive as you could imagine, with Dodin’s ensemble at times resembling a quasi-religious paramilitary organisation. Rehearsals frequently finish at 3 am. Famously, when Dodin adapted Dostoyevsky’s The Possesssed for the stage, the first run-through lasted 22 hours.

But then this hardcore training is essential as Dodin expects each of his directing students to be “as good or better” than everyone in what is frequently cited as the best acting ensemble in the world.

It seems that at the Maly, my policy of getting up and giving it a go once in a while to show willing just won’t cut it. In its current production of King Lear, which has played in major theatres around the world, two of Lear’s daughters are played by directors. Apparently Dodin believed Cordelia was too good an actor to be a director too and told her to give it up.

To an extent it’s not hard to see the logic in Dodin’s principle. In my experience, on bad days in rehearsals, actors and directors spend their whole time essentially saying to each other ‘you have no idea how hard my job is’.

I’m sure that every actor I’ve ever directed must have thought at some point, ‘well, if it’s that easy, you do it’. And for my part, there’s always a moment when I’m dying to leap out of my chair and say, ‘Look, it’s not that difficult. Do it like this.’ But, of course, I don’t. I’m from a generation where demonstrating something to an actor or giving a line reading is the absolute definition of bad directing.

At Maly, though, Dodin is known for regularly leaping onto the stage to demonstrate his genius. When King Lear was ill in rehearsals, Dodin stepped into the breach. In a rehearsal the Young Vic group and I observed for Lord of the Flies, Dodin stopped an actor in full flow performing the hunting of a pig in order to give a performance of his own – an elaborate ten-minute study of a KGB agent looking for finger prints on a water glass.

Good for him, I say. But could I get away with doing this in an English rehearsal room? I’m not sure the actors would be too impressed. “I’ll be playing Hamlet this afternoon. Watch and learn.”

Whether it is essential to be able to out-act your company, I don’t know. I hope not or I’m in big trouble. But what I took away from our time with Dodin, more than anything else, was the fact that directing is about putting yourself up there on stage, one way or another. Whether that means by getting up and acting in front of your company or by exposing some hidden truth about yourself and your life in your production. If you’re hiding behind anything – a writer, an actor, a table, whatever – then you’re not doing the job properly.

The secret of getting great performances from your actors is perhaps to lead by example and put yourself on the line.

This article was adapted from one written by Joe Hill-Gibbing for the issue of The Stage published on 5 March 2009.

Watch for more articles about this initiative on our web site, and find out more about the Young Vic Genesis Directors Project here...