Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 157
and military officers, with the image of Lenin smirking
at them from above? And should the poster’s typeface
be old-fashioned or modern? Should a few Cyrillic
(Russian) letters be used to emphasize the play’s Russian
setting? Should the colors be primary or pastel,
earth-toned or black-and-white, distressed, fragmentary,
or faded? Should the design of the poster be clean or
grimy, bold or subtle, abstracted or detailed? Should the
mood be hopeful or despairing, the style elegant or grim?
Answers to these questions point the director toward a
possible core concept.
A tagline can also be helpful by condensing the
concept to a single, direct statement. A tagline may be
social (“this is a play about tyranny”) or philosophical
(“a play about self-knowledge”). It may signal a specific
interpretation (“a play about a man who cannot make
up his mind”) or invoke an invented dramatic genre (“a
revenge melodrama”). A director may state the core concept
in terms that are psychological (“a primitive ritual
of puberty”), historical (“a play about fratricide in the
Middle Ages”), imagistic (“a play about swords, sables,
and skulls”), or metatheatrical (“a play about playing”).
And sometimes the director can define a basic tone, such
as sad, heroic, or royal, or a basic texture such as rich,
cerebral, or stark. Diverse as these examples may seem,
they all fall within the range of possibilities for conceptualizing
the same play, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
The High Concept A high concept is another matter
altogether. When a director uses a high concept, she
places the entire play within a context not hinted at in the
script. By doing so, a contemporary director can make
a familiar play surprising—even astonishing—by introducing
highly unexpected insights into character, story,
or style. In its most simple form, a high concept may
mean nothing more than moving a play out of the period
in which it is set and placing it in another: for example,
resetting Molière’s seventeenth-century Tartuffe from
the Catholic-oriented France of the playwright’s time
and placing it in the Islamic-dominated, contemporary
Middle East (as French director Arianne Mnouchkine
did in 1995), or producing Macbeth as if taking place
in a hospital ward during Russia’s Stalinist era, as British
director Rupert Goold did in 2007 with Sir Patrick
Stewart in the title role, or as Robert Ashford staged it
in 2013 in a deconsecrated church in Manchester, with
Sir Kenneth Branagh as the overly ambitious Scot. But
today mere physical relocation hardly makes a play
astonishing or even surprising. High concepts can alter
the play in a more abstract way, as well, as when a director
“deconstructs” a work by highlighting its artifice and
focusing on a few expressive elements rather than a unified
whole. (This is a similar philosophy to “postmodernism,”
as discussed in the chapter on design.) Ivo van
Hove has become a master of such high concepts. His
recent Angels in America emphasized the idea of nakedness
by featuring a nearly bare stage, a record player, and
a soundtrack of David Bowie songs. None of these are
included in the play, yet they bring out new resonances—
even the playwright, Tony Kushner, remarked that it was
moving and in its own way true to the play.
Like it or not (and there are many who do not), audiences
and critics today are much more likely to admire
and remember productions by high-concept visionaries
such as Robert Wilson and Peter Sellars (American),
Peter Brook and Katie Mitchell (English), Ariane
Mnouchkine and Dominique Serrand (French), Peter
Stein, Thomas Ostermeier, and Frank Castorf (German)
and Andrei Serban, Mihai Maniutiu, Silviu Purcarete,
and Gábor Tompa (Romanian) that aim for unique and
revelatory revisions of major theatrical works.
Such productions captivate audiences worldwide by
transcending conventions and presenting profound, moving
theatricalizations. High-concept theatre also avoids
the potentially museum-like traditions of realistic staging.
A director known for brilliant high concepts will also discourage
prospective attendees from declining to see his or
her latest production of, say, King Lear on the grounds that
“I’ve already seen it,” since they can be pretty sure they
will never have seen anything like this production of it!
Most productions of classic plays in the twenty-first
century, not just in experimental theatres but in the theatre’s
mainstream, seek high concepts. Directors and
directing students are inevitably drawn to them, and
audiences and critics, though sometimes skeptical, are
almost always intrigued. These days, “What is your concept?”
is very likely to be the first question a colleague or
a reporter asks a director engaging in a new production
of a well-known play.
Arriving at a high concept is no easy task. Once
selected, the concept must “work” for the entire play.
If Othello is set in World War II, what does the actor
(or the property designer) do with Othello’s “Keep up
your bright swords” line? How much can freshness add
to a show without diminishing—or even obliterating—
it? And how does the high concept actually improve
the play, at least for its intended audience? What new
ideas, readings of the text for the actors, and images
for the designers does the high concept arouse? A concept
should never exist purely for its own sake. It must
always serve the play. Serious research and a comprehensive
knowledge of the entire script are essential for the