The Village of 12 Nights
Excerpts from A Director’s Diary
October 2nd 2025
Theatre is something natural like a forest or an ocean. Human beings, who grow from the Earth, have a consciousness and a procedure to journey us through our own minds to the divine and celestial. Theatre finds its origins in this practice.
The structure and meaning of language generates symbols and landscapes in the imagination; this is a unique human ability; rare and meaningful.
To bring shape and meaning to this landscape becomes an aspiration. How to manifest a crystallisation of effort and insight, how it drives us!
Fluent and disciplined artists seek this, and likewise the unschooled perhaps clumsy also seek to realise their voice in the chamber of imagination; the theatre. This pursuit is for some a life’s dedication, for others a hobby, but the duopoly of inspiration and freedom attracts the meek and the mighty. Theatre is for all.
In relation to the task of creating a work with the Glass CeilingCollective I sit at the four cornered intersection of art, personal development, community growth and fun. Theatre requires discipline and a certain technique and being mindful of parameters I strive to strike a balance. My results are mixed, and I continually question the outcomes.
My fear at present is that I’m making it too tight. Experience has proven to me that when something is tight, meaning well rehearsed, you have a structure that will allow you to break through, discipline underpins freedom. In the spontaneity of the moment, the interaction with your fellow actors, the life of the music, the cauldron of energy a live audience brings enables each moment to be open, spontaneous, slightly unpredictable and a bit dangerous. But I worry that when this aspiration can fall flat, and the work becomes laboured, heavy handed. When this happens the performance loses the unique quality that these people bring to the experience of telling the story of The Village of 12 Nights. We have written a lot of text, around 6000 words. Is this too much? Perhaps I should have left things more open ended, less structured. I’m afraid I will override what might naturally be more more charming, more engaging.
Technique 1.
Moving constantly amongst the actors are three Stage Keepers, a role from the Elizabethan theatre, that would now be called stage crew. From my reading I surmise that the Elizabethan stage keeper had more presence onstage than a modern stage manager, to the extent that they would shift characters around, prompt, and usher exits and entrances. In our rehearsals for The Village of 12 Nights we have experimented with two stage keepers, dressed in black with iPad in hand marshalling and prompting the actors. In the Noh Theatre this figure is called Koken. It is working well, and I am able to choreograph and ‘direct’ the stage keepers to promote fluidity and coherence.