Can Theatre Directing be TAUGHT?

Sometimes you write a piece and that's that: you do the research, write it up, and the thing feels finished. The article, however imperfect, captures a moment or a point of view. Job done. Case closed. Then there are the others: the ones when it feels like you aren't so much writing a story as unravelling a jumper. You tug at that part, and an entire skein follows. You ask a small, half-accidental question, and get an enormous answer that sets you off on an entirely different direction. It's one of the delights of journalism.

One quotation, provided by Peter Hall and printed in A Better Direction, has stuck in my mind. "How much better we might have been," Hall writes, "had we been properly trained." But the difficulty – and something the piece rests on – is that no one can quite agree what being "properly trained" means. Some people think it's the best thing in the world for a young director to pay his or her dues in a regional theatre. Others suggest that assisting established directors is the way to learn (interesting, though, that even Rupert Goold had mixed feelings about his time at the Donmar). There's another school of thought that the fringe is the best place for emerging directors to cut their teeth. Probably there are even a handful who still reject the idea that directing is something that can be taught at all (you suspect that long-suffering actors wouldn't fall into this category). Maybe the answer is that all of them have their place.

Hovering behind all this, as ever, is money. Even the RTYDS exists on a hand-to-mouth basis, raising funds from year to year with no guaranteed future. Universities, of course, are about to be forced into a handbrake turn in the way that they're funded, and no one knows what the effect will be on students or the colleges themselves (especially given that it's arts courses that ministers seem least impressed by). The arts themselves are experiencing painful cuts, and regional theatres, reliant on council funding, are closest to the abyss.

So, another truism about journalism: the more you read and research, the more questions you have. Are you a director, young or not-so? How did you get where you are? What should happen in the future, especially if money is tight? More schemes like the RTYDS, or fewer? I'd love to hear what you think.