By CRIPtic Arts Artistic Director, Jamie Hale.
I never expected to become a director, and when it happened, I think other people were as startled as I was that I became one. Since then, I’ve been on a journey, moving from apologising for existing in the world as a director to confidently taking on increasingly large projects and trusting in my vision to carry me through.
As a director, one of the things that sustains me is a set of principles (for lack of a better word), principles that carry me and my work through my role as a director. I’ve attempted to think and write them out as an ethos, for other people to think about and better understand my practice or their own – but in doing so, I need to also acknowledge that I inevitably fall short on many of these principles all the time.
There’s a question that often comes up at some point in the directing process on any project: ‘What are we doing about access?’
That’s a very telling question, because it assumes that access is a category of tasks, a list of things to be completed, or a phase that we can enter and exit. It suggests that at some point, the directing and development of the show will be done, and we can focus on making it accessible. The fact that this question gets asked at all nowadays is incredibly productive and really speaks to a shift in the way theatre thinks – that access is considered and deemed necessary in any way.
However, it’s also not how I work, and it’s not what I believe. I don’t wait until a particular point to consider access – I believe that approaching directing and approaching access are the same thing; they’re not parallel tracks that I’m managing simultaneously. If the show is not accessible, my creative vision has failed. It’s not that the access provision has failed, it’s not that the consultant has failed, and it’s not that the budget has failed. It’s that my own individual vision requires a degree of creative welcome to everyone in the space. And fundamentally, I expect that of others as well – that they have considered how their work could welcome and include all audience members, not just the cardboard cutout of a standard, non-disabled audience member that they’re expecting.
What I’ve tried to do in this blog is lay out clearly what I value, how I work, and what I ask of the people I work with, as a way of sharing my ethos, but also of encouraging other directors to consider their ethos and how they might want to share that with people. When I’m putting together a rehearsal room, these beliefs and ways of working are the beginning of everything.
Before we get into the creative work, we have this space, and we have the relationships, the working culture, the assumptions about how decisions get made, and the ways people treat each other. I take that very seriously because I think the quality of the work depends on the space being built with the values that it requires.
I haven’t yet come up with a set of values I’m certain about, but I’ve got something of an idea, some working principles that I am reaching the point of being confident to share:
Open curiosity
This is the first and hardest thing I try to establish and maintain, especially if we’re under pressure. What I mean by this is about the room holding a genuine willingness to not yet know the answer to the questions we’re addressing. Creative problems, particularly in accessible work, rarely have obvious solutions, and the instinct to reach for easy answers is understandable but costly. Holding an open curiosity means being willing to sit with the difficult questions, treating someone else’s perspective not as an obstacle to one’s own perspective, but as new information you didn’t have. It means a willingness to change your mind, including about things you’re emotionally invested in. I try to hold myself to this as much as anyone else in the room – my instincts aren’t neutral either, and, however naturally inflexible I am, I try to remain open to having them revised.
Integrity and accessibility
I put these together because they belong together. Integrity, for me, is about staying true to what a piece is actually for, not drifting under pressure into something that feels safer, easier, or more convenient. At the same time, it’s also about staying true to what my principles are as a director, to holding to this ethos whenever things are at their hardest. Accessibility is a clear test of that integrity – it’s easy to claim to be making work for everyone, but when it becomes costly or complicated to do, it’s easy to start making exceptions. If my work doesn’t welcome everyone, I want that to result from a deliberate and considered decision (e.g. a decision to provide BSL interpretation but not to fully deliver the play bilingually), rather than me simply letting things slip.
Access conversations shouldn’t be separate from creative decisions, but part of the same conversation from the same beginnings.
Collective responsibility
Not everyone has to agree – I don’t look for that, expect that, or ask for that – and nor would I want it, as disagreement can be valuable and generative. What I’m asking for instead is that we share ownership of the outcome, and that we recognise that just as we came together to create a successful, accessible show of which we should all be proud, so are the failures shared. That requires trust, and trust requires that people communicate openly when they have concerns, instead of using strategic silence to protect themselves when they disagree with something. It requires that when something isn’t working, someone will say so – to me, not just to a colleague in a corner. It also means that I take responsibility for my decisions. When I make a decision, I should explain it instead of expecting people to work without that reasoning, on my behalf. This vision is something collective, even when the decision-making sits with me, and I think that distinction only works if I’m transparent about it.
Care
This principle is the one that often gets treated as decorative – as a nice thing to say before getting on with the real work. However, this isn’t how I want the idea of care to sit in my processes. I don’t want people to be burning out silently, with concerns going unspoken because nobody was making space for them. I don’t want spaces where the pressure to deliver a show overwhelms the basic responsibility we owe each other. The work that comes from those rooms is almost always worse – the pressure and the burnout of the process are reflected in the final product.
Caring for ourselves and for each other is a crucial part of creating something rigorous and ambitious, because to do that, we have to be in a space that feels safe to make ambitious work from. Concretely, this means that I want people to communicate about their needs before they become crises. I always try to notice when something is wrong, and ask about it directly – but I won’t always realise. This means care is something we all owe to each other, bidirectionally, not just something that can be provided outwards from the centre.
Our audiences are also part of deserving care. When we’re inviting disabled audiences, it’s into a space that is often hostile and exhausting, and that responsibility to care for them runs through every decision we make. This is why we need things like content notes, relaxed attitudes to entry and exit, and consideration of sensory needs in sound and lighting, for example.
How I Direct
As a director, I try to bring an ethos to my approach that can be explained and is predictable, so my behaviour surprises nobody. I always aim to follow this consistently, but rarely succeed.
I trust people to do their jobs. I don’t mean this as a management philosophy, but as a practical position. I don’t have the expertise or inclination to tell a lighting designer how to light or a BSL interpreter how to interpret, and I always try not to do that. What I need from the people around me is clarity about where their expertise sits, where it has limits, and what they need from me to work successfully. This includes honesty about capacity, uncertainty, about moments when they’re working with something new to them. I will always try to support people effectively when I know what’s going on, but I can’t do that if people are performing competence where they’re actually uncertain.
I try to manage what we ask of one another. Requests to one another can affect the wider team, and every production involves a constant stream of decisions where meeting one person’s needs or preferences has implications for others – for timelines, budgets, the experience of the audience, and the workload that a colleague has. When someone’s making a request that sits in that territory, I need to understand what’s necessary and what’s desirable for them to complete their section of work in line with the vision for the show. Both of these are legitimate and have different weights. I’m trying to make fair decisions across a complex set of competing needs, and can only do that if I understand what I’m being asked to prioritise.
Communication is part of the work; it’s not a supplement to it.
Creative processes can go very wrong, not just due to some kind of dramatic falling out or catastrophic error, but also due to an accumulated silence. People who notice that something isn’t working and assume someone else has seen it. People who have a concern but don’t raise it because they don’t know if it’s their place, or because the culture of the room doesn’t feel safe enough to speak. I want rooms where neither of those are true – where people can raise their thoughts, concerns, workload, and confusion, where people can foresee problems and share them. If something is going so wrong that it needs to be addressed before we can continue, then I need people to say that explicitly so we can pause the process as soon as reasonably possible.
I will not always agree with their concern, but I will always take it seriously and explain my thinking. Once a decision is made, we commit to making it work. This doesn’t mean that we suppress our disagreement or pretend we agreed when we didn’t; it means that we didn’t go on to relitigate decisions through passive resistance or ongoing complaints. The moment to challenge a decision is before or during the decision-making process. Once the decision is made, the productive question is how we make it work as well as possible.
Interpersonal conflict is not avoidable, and I’m not trying to create a room where nothing difficult ever surfaces. It will always come up – and conflict, when handled well, is often where the most useful creative conversations happen. What I don’t tolerate is conflict that becomes aggressive or migrates into the social fabric of the group and damages trust. If someone has a concern or a criticism about someone’s work, they should come to me directly, not have side conversations with colleagues.
Obviously, people will form friendships and natural affinities within a team – that’s healthy, and I’m not trying to control that, but they should be conscious of who is and isn’t in the room when conversations happen, and not use social space to speak negatively about people who aren’t there. This matters especially if they’re employed by an organisation where their words can be taken to show an institutional opinion.
When conflict does happen, my approach is not to try to immediately find a group resolution, but instead to speak to everyone individually, trying to understand not just the surface of the disagreement but the stress levels and unmet needs, the thing that made a small friction into a larger rupture. Doing this helps us bring people together to find shared ground if that seems productive. Once I understand the situation, I can make a decision, explain it transparently, and we can move forward from that point. I never expect that the decision will feel perfect to everyone – I expect us to act in good faith from it.
Access is not a ‘bolt-on’
An accessible performance is one where every element that shapes the narrative, characters, and audience experience has been creatively evoked in a way that every audience member can find and take meaning from it. When I say accessible here, I don’t mean that it just has some access provisions attached, or that some audiences can access parts of it with assistance; I mean that, as far as possible, the meaning, emotional texture, and storytelling are made accessible to everyone in the room in forms that work for them. This is a higher and more demanding standard, and is one I try to work towards.
However, shows don’t fully achieve this, and certainly none of my shows have, or (I anticipate) will. The range of human experience and need is too wide, resources are too finite, and some creative choices include access trade-offs that can’t be entirely resolved. I don’t describe a standard we will meet, but one that we are always grappling towards – and the direction of that reach and that work matters as much as how much we achieve.
The question I always ask myself is “how far have I gone with accessibility, and have I honestly acknowledged where I couldn’t”? Do I know who’s still excluded, and why?
And with accessibility – BSL interpretation, captioning, audio-description – these are things we try and build into shows as they exist, and as a part of the creative language of the show, just as movement, sound, and lighting design are. A BSL interpreter isn’t just there to translate the show for a subset of the audience; they are performing, therefore they are a performer, and those performers need to be choreographed with the same care as everyone else on stage, cognisant of their impact on the piece. When we treat access provisions as afterthoughts, the audience experiences them that way; when they’re part of the creative work, the work is better for it.
This means we need to embed access as early in the process as possible, not just at the point where the design is finalised, and the timeline is under pressure. Every conversation needs to include the access question of “how does this work for everyone in the room?” so it never becomes just a checklist item and stays part of every decision.
Everyone needs to understand how access fits practically into their area of responsibility – what does this staging choice mean for someone with low vision? How does this design work when it’s being described in audio instead of seen? Does the way we’re using sound create barriers for audience members with divergent auditory processing needs? These questions don’t have clean answers, but are questions we need to ask.
If a design element of the show prevents the show from meeting the commitments to access that have been set, it will be changed or removed. I think it’s always important to be clear about this and acknowledge that, however far into the process we are, and however much has been invested in specific elements – I will kill anyone’s darlings if I have to – even my own.
I know that’s a significant commitment, but I make it because the alternative is to treat access as something we weigh in tension with the work, and accommodate when convenient, rather than treating it as part of the work, a central part. This excludes audiences. When access and another creative priority are in conflict, access has to take precedence. That is not a position I take reluctantly – I’m proud to have it – and it’s not a principle subject to revision under pressure – or at least, I do my best to ensure that.
I’m also conscious that the burden of access work in this industry falls disproportionately on disabled creatives. This is both in the fact that we often believe that we should incorporate it in our work in the first place, and the pressure that others place on us to know everything there is to know about making accessible work. Being expected both to navigate disableism in the room and to lead accessible practice is an unreasonable weight, and reproduces the very inequity we work against. I am committed to trying to structure my creative work in ways that address this, planning early so access isn’t left to be solved at the last minute by the people most affected by it, resourcing it properly, and distributing the responsibility across the team. Everyone on a show needs to understand why it matters and how to contribute to it, and is expected to carry some of the load of delivering access. At the same time, I’m conscious that even where it falls short, what I work to produce is far more than most non-disabled led pieces of work.
The relationship between directing and access
I wrote about directing and access as separate sections because that’s the structure we often think in, but the argument running beneath both coalesces. The values I talked about at the outset of curiosity, integrity, collective responsibility and care aren’t general principles applied to access as a special case, they’re the conditions that make genuinely accessible work possible. If people don’t communicate openly, access cannot be effectively embedded, because access problems surface late and require difficult and honest conversations to solve.
A team that treats access as someone else’s job will produce work that reflects that – the show will show that access was managed rather than creatively constructed. If we treat access as a constraint on the creative vision rather than part of the creative vision makes worse art. Accessibility also makes the directing better. It insists on clarity about what the work is communicating and to whom. It holds the creative vision accountable to its stated intentions in a way that is both uncomfortable and generative – pushing it further and encouraging it to grow.
I’m working towards accessible theatre not as a category, not in terms of work that meets a standard, but work that is unambiguously welcoming for as many of the people attending the theatre as possible.
Living my values
This blog is an attempt for me to be transparent, because I think it’s useful for people to understand how different directors have a vision and have ways of working, and because I’d rather the people I collaborate with know what to expect from me before we are in the room together, not after. There’s always a gap between aspiration and practice – this is very much about how I try to work, not the finished state I arrive at. There are conditions – my own unmet access needs, compressed timelines, under-resourced productions, the pressures of processes going wrong – all of these things make it harder for me to live up to what’s written here. I’ve never managed it as well as I’ve wanted to, and I’m not immune to the pressures I’m asking people to resist. I try and hold myself accountable to these principles, and hope others will hold me to account also.
I know this is a lot to ask of the people around me, and it’s a lot to ask of myself. It’s setting a high bar in terms of communication and the ways we work, and I try and apply the effort and the seriousness this deserves. Because if I’m not trying to make work for everyone, then the work that I’m making is doomed to failure from the beginning.
