And then we come to the final topic. The topic of directing. The toughest. Let’s dive right in!

Conceptual integrity

In the writing part, I told you something about the infinite resources of dreamland. However, did you know that there are a thousand dream-lands? Each unique. With it’s own different style and atmosphere? Well there are. So, in my opinion, the first task of a director is to let the actors in, into his dreamland. Or rather, the writer’s dreamland. Meaning the actors must understand the world in which they will be acting. Each actor must understand who they are. Their every action, mentality should match the one that the writer first imagined. Otherwise things will go different. And a different story will be told than the one originally planned.

So, one role of the director is to be the guardian of conceptual integrity. Everyone involved in the play should know exactly what is going on. How to achieve this goal? Well, a detailed document is an effective means to achieve this goal. However, it shouldn’t be so detailed that it becomes so long that nobody reads it… So, one needs to strike a balance between explaining important things and leaving out unimportant things. However, I’ll not go into the details of how to write this document because it’s a big topic altogether.

So, the main point is, maintain the conceptual integrity of the plot. And let everyone involved understand it’s ins and outs.

Being the character

Here, for the most part, I’m assuming that the writer and the director are the same people. However, if they are not, the writer should be at least a co-director. Otherwise the conceptual integrity will surely be compromised. Especially, in this part. The next part is, to make the actors understand their character. And to do that, the director and the actors need to have an conversation about the character.

I think that I did pretty well in these matters and I’m gonna describe what I did. The first question I asked to each actor was, how do you imagine your character. How does your character think, act and move around. But, because we were short on time, I didn’t have enough time to exhaustively have these discussions. However, by God’s grace, whatever happened, happened pretty well. So, I’m content with it.

The ease of understanding

This point goes along with the third point I made about writing. The checklist of assumptions. Basically, don’t make many complex scenes. Also, make everything easy to understand for the audience. Ditch the realism and logic in the favor of understandability where you need to. Meaning, let the audience see bizarre things that do mean something and they can easily understand instead of the showing them real things that are perfectly sensible and real, but hard to understand.

The narrator can do some magic in this part, however, too much use of narration will make the play weak.

I think, these are the main points that one needs to remember when one directs a skit. However, except for the second point, the other two can be applied in any other discipline as well. I know that it applies into programming. It’s from there these points are coming. Not the other way around.