By CRIPtic Arts Artistic Director, Jamie Hale.
I became a theatre director by accident.
I was taking a mixed bill to the Barbican, and was asked whether I was going to perform a new piece. I didn’t have a new piece to perform, and froze – so they (very reasonably) asked me what my role was. I said I would direct the mixed bill.
Five years later, CRIPtic Arts exists, and I’m directing a full-scale Romeo and Juliet back at the Barbican, where it all began. Somewhere along the way, I became a director.
Like many directors, I don’t have formal training or a background in directing – and for emerging directors, whether arriving in the role intentionally or accidentally, a lack of formal training and background can feel quite prohibitive.
I used to begin my work by apologising to everyone, making sure they knew I had no experience, but that I would do my best. I talked about “dramaturges”, to rhyme with “splurges”. After a particularly baffling day, I asked someone why we would want to put spikes in a stage, and didn’t that sound dangerous?
As I’ve developed as a director, I’ve learned that apologising for my own ineptitude doesn’t inspire confidence in me, that “dramaturg” actually ends in a hard “g”, not a soft “j”, and that a spike on the stage is a dot of tape to mark where someone or something goes.
Now, I’ve got an ethos and approach as a director that work for me – and clearly work for some others, given where I’ve had repeat work directing people’s pieces. I might feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’ve learned to pretend that I do. I’ve even won an OFFIE for Staging (for Transpose 2025 at the Barbican).
As someone who is maybe moving out of the emerging stage of their career – but is still close enough to that that they remember how it feels, I wanted to put together some advice for emerging directors – the kind of advice I wish someone had given me – so I turned it into this blog.
- Keep track of your work so you can evaluate it effectively
2. Know yourself and what you need to work
3. Build a space that supports the people working in it
4. Create a vision and establish how to communicate it to the people around you
5. Run rehearsals effectively, knowing what you need from the process
1. Know yourself and what you need to work
As a director, you will often have to bend what you need in order to work with the working styles of the other people on your team and get the best out of them. That need for flexibility on your part makes it even more important that you know what the non-negotiables you need to work with are, so you can build a team that is aligned with them, and you’re not, for example, someone who cannot work with mobile voicenotes, working with someone else who only works with mobile voicenotes.
As a neurodivergent person, cognitive flexibility is not top on my list of personal skills – so when I build a team, I need to take this into account, and I need to know whether the ways people need to work in order to succeed are aligned with the ways I need to work.
One of the ways of making sure you and your team are aligned is to write up how you work as a director, so that people can consider whether they fit with your style. “I’m new to directing”, you may think, “I don’t yet have a style”, but you can always write something up and test it – see if that style comes naturally to you. By sharing the way I work, I make an unexpected incompatibility less likely. The kind of information I share includes:
I work based on trust and transparency. Everyone is an expert in their area, and I will assume that if someone asks for something, they need it.
Creative access is core to my overall concept, and if I have to compromise or change any design elements at any point to make the show accessible, I will have to do so. I expect people on my team to know how Creative Access overlaps with their roles.
I am unlikely to pick up on subtext, hints, or implications. If you have a concern, you will need to raise it with me directly and explicitly. If you think I’ve ignored it, consider whether I haven’t understood it.
I will always try to build access time into timelines, because I know how unpredictable health can be, but I also know that the curtain will go up on the night, and the show will need to be ready.
I have a significant short-term memory impairment. If it’s not in writing, assume I may have forgotten. If you need to communicate something important, make sure my assistant has also been told, or I’ve noted it down.
2. Build a space that supports the people working in it
In directing, people’s perceptions of your mood and behaviours will set the tone of the space you’re in. You can counter that partly by taking active steps to create the space you want, from regular check-ins and discussions to laying out your ways of working. Ultimately, people will pick up on your behaviour, and that will shape their experience of the work and of you as a director.
That means you need to create the environment that you want to work in. If you are perceived as being professional, supportive, and calm, people will follow your energy. People choose to follow the director by consent; if the director doesn’t seem to trust themselves and their decisions, then the people around them are less likely to trust their leadership.
Make sure you have people who can be sounding boards for any big decisions, but also be prepared to bounce things off them and then make a decision as a leader. Indecisiveness as a director often means that you will start to lose control of elements of your vision as people choose to go in their own directions.
You are the one setting the norms around communication, so be explicit about:
1. How you want to communicate
2. What you need from people communicating with you
3. How you’ll make decisions when things are difficult
This way, people know what to expect from you, especially in moments where people’s visions or ideas conflict with one another.
Remember to prioritise the big picture. I find it very easy to get lost in details, and often they are far more diverting to be distracted by, but they are usually somebody else’s responsibility. If you’re working on them, are they detracting from the big picture that you need to spend time on as a director?
One of the things I find very challenging about directing is managing my own mood state. If I’m stressed and people pick up on that, they will also become stressed. This means I need to manage my feelings and understand when I’m likely to be communicating stress (even if I, as a neurodivergent person, don’t realise I’m doing that). From my experience, it’s worked best for me by moderating it with a discussion on stress or anxiety with trusted team members, rather than constantly communicating them to the whole team.
Finally, remember that looking after yourself is looking after your team. If you model not resting, not eating, and being flustered and exhausted, people will expect that you expect that from them also. If you model good balance, they are more likely to follow you in that, and it is that good balance that you really need from them, in order for them to be able to manage a sustainable rehearsal process.
3. Create a vision and establish how to communicate it to the people around you
Part of being a director is being the person who is expected to have the vision for the piece and to be leading and supporting the rest of the team through enacting that vision.
It was an embarrassingly long time before I really understood what the vision for a piece even meant. Slowly, I came to realise that it meant something about the essential meaning that you were finding in it, and what you were doing to bring forth that essential meaning.
For example, I watched an excellent Hamlet that was set in a psychiatric hospital, and there have been many iterations of Romeo and Juliet that have focused on gang violence. The director finds a theme, pulls it out, and then interprets the work through the lens of that theme. You could do Arthur Miller’s All My Sons as a great political epic, but you could also do it as a very tight, intimate family play.
It is all about where you emphasise sound, lighting, set, movement, performance, and more. All of these different elements come together to allow your specific story of a piece to be told. However, you are not doing all the telling of it yourself. This is why it gets difficult, because you are building a design team (set, sound, lighting designers, and perhaps video and caption designers) whose role it is to bring this vision of yours to life.
Therefore, you need to have a vision. You need to understand what story you found inside the piece and how you want to tell that story to work with people.
Very frustratingly, whenever I have asked people for advice on working with designers, I have been brightly told, ‘Well, every director does it differently.’ What I wanted to know was: how could I do it? How could I have a model?
I am not there yet – but what I am working with currently is giving the designers a real picture of my ideas through various fragments, including Pinterest boards, scrapbooks, soundtracks, writing, script notes and edits, R&D footage, and more. The hope is that these fragments, along with a written-out explanation of what I am looking for and looking to do, will allow them to design something that fits.
So, my advice is that once you have got your vision internally, doing something as multimodal as possible is really vital, so that people can understand your vision in as many ways as possible.
4. Run rehearsals effectively, knowing what you need from the process
You will usually have somebody else who is responsible for actually structuring the rehearsal process, but ultimately, they are structuring it to meet your needs. You need to be very on top of the way it is being structured in case things are happening that don’t suit you. You must ensure that you have the time you need during the rehearsal process to do everything required.
You will need to ensure that by the time the show goes into tech (the stage before performance), all of your actors are ready to go, everything is worked out, and the show can then be focused on technically.
What do you need in order to run rehearsals effectively?
Your timeline requires you to work out what you’re doing, with whom, and on which day. Call sheets involve determining who is being called for each day; while a producer is more likely to handle this, you should stay on top of it. “Calling” someone or a “call sheet” does not mean telephoning them, but simply refers to the list of people who have been told they need to come to the theatre at a specific time. This ensures that only the people you need are present, rather than having everyone there all the time.
During the rehearsal process, your focus will be pulled in many directions. These will include (amongst many others), performers – lines, accents, and movement; accessibility – integrated BSL, captions, and audio description; and logistics – entrances, exits, and props.
It is easy, particularly if you are not from a technical background, to focus solely on the performances, but you also need to be on top of the set, sound, and lighting, as those team members will need you as well.
As you run the rehearsal room, remember that you are in control and everyone else needs to turn to you. If you are stressed and melting down, it will be much more challenging for your team to trust that you have everything together. If possible, have people you can talk to privately while you are stressed, but outwardly try to emanate a sense of confidence and reliability.
I strongly advise being very clear about expectations and deadlines. If you give people extensions earlier in the process, it can cause significant problems later when essential tasks remain unfinished. This means you must be able to say no, probably in several hundred different ways. Trust your judgment regarding the times it is important to simply say no to someone.
Be careful not to be over-ambitious or overstretch yourself, and don’t let your team do that either. Try to keep everything within the scope you worked out at the beginning, rather than letting it spread indefinitely.
Finally, remember to manage your time well: avoid saying “Let’s do that later,” as later often becomes never or takes time away from other tasks; either do it now or accept that it won’t be done; do not assume time will appear out of nowhere, especially as you get closer to tech; and ensure your rehearsals do not overrun into tech time, as just as actors need rehearsal time to perform, your tech team need their slot to run tech and be ready—so make sure you are prepared to let them use it.
5. Keep track of your work so you can evaluate it effectively
If you were lucky, this big piece of directing work was funded, and you now have to write a return for your funder, talking about what you did, how it went, what you learned, and what you’d do differently next time. If you’re unlucky, it wasn’t funded, but at least there’s no evaluation to do.
Just kidding. The point of evaluation might look like it’s for funders, but actually, the point of evaluation should be for you to think about from your perspective in your process – considering what went well, and what didn’t.
As I go through a project, I always keep a notes document tracking things that went particularly well or particularly badly. This ensures that when I next direct, I can do something very different and really make a change as a result of what I’ve done.
As well as writing up what you think went well and went badly, why not try to talk to some of the other people on the project (even if very informally)? This helps you understand how they experienced it and where they felt there are areas for growth and improvement, not necessarily just with your practice, perhaps with the wider project, but perhaps with your practice as well.
Any feedback or reviews are worth storing there as well, because you may well need these when applying for funding in future to show how the work went and what the uptake of the work was.
It may seem silly or futile to keep these notes at first, but I can assure you that I have built on them year by year and they’ve had a huge positive impact on my work as a director, letting me learn, reflect, and grow.
Remember, directing should be fun. All these elements – they’re there to help you build confidence and work more effectively – but what’s true for me, and worked for me, may not be true for, or work for, you.
