D.W-P.: What is your advice to young directors?
RC: First of all, to ask themselves, what is directing? Directing most of the time is telling someone else’s story. The director must keep in mind that they did not write the story, but rather as a team, we are retelling a story that a librettist has adapted, and a composer has put to music. The director’s job is to try and understand what it was they wanted to do before deciding what it is he or she wants to do. If the director doesn’t understand or at least attempt to understand this, the danger is that the production will turn out to be a graffito over the work, rather than an interpretation.
As we know, a story changes every time it is retold. That is also the basis of theater. And it requires the presence of an audience for the retelling to become an act of theater: someone to watch it, to share it, to try and understand it, to be touched or appalled
