Directors and Designers Summary

In the article "Directors and Designers" Pamela Howard talks about the actual roles of directors and designers and how that contrasts with the ideal roles. She starts off the article with a bold statement saying how "the excitement that should be in theatres is found only in baseball parks, arenas, stadiums, and racecourses" (p. 25). This leads into the different roles people take in order to make a play exciting. It logically includes the director and designer working together as one to become a single creator of the work. In the early 1980s, Howard spoke about how hardly any designers were also directors, except for Philip Prowse and the Glasgow Citizens Theatre. They discovered their own style of theatre, they produced plays that could only be seen in Britain, and brought in daring actors and young designers right out of college. The main ideas in the article show two people or groups coming together to make a form of theatre more enjoyable. Howard spoke of the directors and designers in terms of royalty. She said that the director was the master while the designers were the servants. In her opinion, however, directors need to find a new direction in order to end the master servant relationship. Whether it was Prowse and the Glasgow Theatre or Vladimir Mayakovsky and the director Frantisek Zelenka, Howard showed the teamwork and power that needs to be shared in order for a play to recieve the excitement it should from the audience.
-Vanessa Parga