Great directors at work : Stanislavsky, Brecht, Kazan, Brook /

Jones (New Mexico) approaches his subject, an investigation of the working techniques of four directors, with the admirable ambition of revealing the process connected with this area of theatrical art. Examining Constantin Stanislavsky directing The Seagull and Bertolt Brecht directing Mother Courage, Jones comes close to fulfilling this intention, only because the directors in question left such extensive explications of their work. In dealing with Elia Kazan directing A Streetcar Named Desire and Peter Brook directing Marat/Sade, Jones finds himself reduced from insight to anecdote as he attempts to stretch Kazan's sketchy notes and a variety of interviews with Brook and other participants in and observers of Brook's work into the equivalent of Stanislavsky's mise-en-sc;

This scholarly and detailed work attempts to create an understanding of the process of directing by intensive study of four important productions. Jones shows how the notes Stanislavsky made on The Seagull before beginning rehearsal shaped his 1898 production into a seminal example of realism. He describes the detailed workbook Brecht prepared from three different stagings of Mother Courage and Her Children from 1948 to 1951. Elia Kazan's 1947 A Streetcar Named Desire is studied as a commercial production that retained artistic integrity. Peter Brook's Marat/Sade exemplifies experimental theater generated by workshops. Larger collections will find this a valuable addition to the literature on directing. Susan Thach Dean, Fine Arts Div., Chicago P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

To imitate Jones' directors, you would need to be handed the original script of Chekhov's The Seagull, Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (along with Marlon Brando), or to be Brecht mounting his own Mother Courage in several productions over 20 years, or to have the Royal Shakespeare Company at your complete disposal for a year. This is a rich lode Jones is mining, of great directors producing original works of great genius. First, though, he asks, what exactly does a director do for a living? (Full-fledged directors, like orchestra conductors, first appeared about a century ago.) Well, they ""enliven contemporary works, peel the wallpaper off the classics, and show action, word, and character in all their presentness."" Thus, ""1880-1980 is the third great age of Western drama, an era comparable or superior to the eras of Sophocles and Shakespeare in such respects as duration, number of productions, cultural reverberation, and artistic achievement; and the same century has been the century of the director."" Jones studies his directors mainly by texts they've produced: a puzzled Stanislavky's vast preliminary notes for The Seagull, in which he invented the subtext or spiritual thread that needed to be produced physically on the stage; Brecht's three-volume modelbook for productions of Mother Courage; Kazan's notes for directing Streetcar and his energizing ideas for helping the actors grasp the spine of their characters; and Peter Brook's workshop investigations of Antonin Artaud's theater of cruelty, and their role in the famous production of Peter Weiss' Marat/Sade. Among the wonderful moments that Jones revives is Brando's gifted but unpredictable genius in playing--reluctantly--a brute completely strange to his own sensitive beatnik soul. Not ground-breaking, but jampacked with lore and readable headstuff. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.