The Directors Chair

(Revelation 4 & 5)

By Dr. Roy Clements

I shall never forget my first visit to the serious theatre. It was a school outing to the Old Vic where they were presenting Macbeth. It was a play in which I had a personal interest because I was to feature in my school's production of the same work later in the term. I didn't have a major part; in fact, I was to be an Apparition - conjured up by the three witches to give Macbeth some rather dubious political advice! I had no name; Shakespeare simply dubbed my couple of lines as the words of 'a bloody child'! But I was all-agog to see how the Old Vic was going to handle this demanding role.

When the moment I was waiting for arrived, I was so enchanted that for all I I knew they could have been real witches on the stage. The Old Vic succeeded in producing not only some most realistic thunder and lightning, but by some clever lighting effects involving fluorescent paint, they produced an extraordinary eerie atmosphere on stage, so that the bloody Apparition whose role I knew so well appeared to hang in a halo of light in mid-air. It was joyously creepy for all the hundreds of schoolchildren who were watching. And it began an interest that lasted the rest of my schooldays, not in acting, but in stagecraft, in the technical wizardry that goes on behind the scenes. I wasn't an actor for the rest of my school career, I was a backstage boy, trying to learn some of those tricks that the Old Vic had demonstrated.

Ever since those days, I have always rather begrudged the prominence which the narnes of actors seem to have on theatre programmes, or on the credits after a TV film, just because their faces are seen. Anybody who has actually worked on a play knows that the real genius, the real brains, are not out there in front of the limelight at all; they are behind the scenes and supremely, of course, in that canvas chair that De Milne made famous, with the word 'Director' written on the back of it.

That's where the real creative genius lies - where the lighting effects, the stage sets, the camera angles, the author's script, and the actors' performance are all welded together to make of all these diverse elements, a single dramatic whole. It is the director who really ought to occupy the centre of the stage, yet he never does, and as a result, audiences are rarely aware of the supreme control that he exercises over everything that is going on.

That backstage experience of mine helps me to understand a bit the meaning of the visionary experience that John records in Revelation 4 and 5. It was the Bard himself, wasn't it, who said that all the world's a stage and all the men and women players. According to the Bible's view ...   more »