According to Wikipedia, a theatre director "is a principal in the theatre field who oversees and orchestrates the mounting of a play by unifying various endeavors and aspects of production".

Which is obviously a very helpful description when someone asks you, "What exactly does a director do?", which is a question I get asked surprisingly often.

I say surprisingly often because, to me, people should be asking what writers do. Writers are the the ones who spend a lot of their time deleting and redrafting and reading things and getting distracted and researching a completely redundant potential plot line and then cleaning out the entire fridge and organsing all their New Yorker magazines in chronological order with the fiction editions in a special section to the right of the...

Never mind.

Anyway. Wikipedia also divides theatre directors into types. The dictator, the negotiator, the creative artist and the confrontationalist.

They all sound like wankers to me. None of which helps me answer "What exactly does a director do?"

Anyway, fat lot of good the internet is. I looked up acting and I got this:

“Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.”

Well anyone who has been on stage in August knows that isn't true.