The Creative Pursuit of Persona: Finding Identity through Directing

Within the last decade, there has been a growing interest in theatre directing in Australia, in part due to an increasing number of universities offering courses in directing, in combination with the push for entrepreneurial enterprise by creative industries. In a competitive artistic industry that is rapidly developing, what attracts an individual to the role of the director and could it have something to do with the individual’s own pursuit of identity through this creative art form? Embarking on a profession in theatre directing, whilst exciting, can often be a daunting and experimental vocation. Renowned Australian director Gale Edwards suggests that, “being a director can be a very hard job: it’s lonely, it’s isolated, you are responsible if anything goes wrong, you are forgotten when everything goes right, you’re attacked by critics” (Ward, 27 November 1988, p. 11). Therefore, what is it about directing that gives an individual that sense of artistic expression that they might fail to find elsewhere? Is the work of a director, whether consciously or unconsciously, a reflection of the individual’s sense of self and therefore a reflection of her persona? Essentially, can directing provide a person with a sense of identity, family and belonging, and address the internal struggle that artists, who have in some way encountered cultural displacement, often experience in reconciling themselves with the world in which they are situated in?