Bumping into a lady actor I worked with in my youth, she reminded me of my custom of telling my cast – whenever I wanted to work on after the scheduled finishing time for rehearsal – that we seemed to be “mining a rich seam”. Even then, I was quarrying for the pure gold of theatrical perfection. Shame... I’ve never quite found it.

But she made me start thinking about alchemy – mixing disparate elements.

According to my Oxford Dictionary, alchemy is... “the medieval forerunner of chemistry, based on the supposed transformation of matter. It was concerned particularly with attempts to convert base metals into gold or find a universal elixir or, figuratively, a process by which paradoxical results are achieved when incompatible elements combined with no obvious rational explanation: “his conducting managed by some alchemy to give a sense of fire and ice”.”

These days, as I bid farewell to my career in Theatre, as it fades gracefully into the sunset of my life, I discover an identification with those alchemists of a bygone age that is both piquant and poetic. Throughout my training and in every one of those dozens of productions, I was committed to a quest for perfection in all departments, that elusive pure gold with which to fashion a quintuple crown of team contentment, box-office success, Audience approval, artistic fulfilment and offers of more jobs as director. To begin my work, I rarely had more than the basest of materials, but soon learned how much advantage was afforded by the choice of a well-wrought and exciting script. Good material to work on became the earliest most essential ingredient in my developing alcomedic formula.

In one or two productions, my team came close to creating that nugget for which I searched. There was a touring production in which we all learned so much understanding of each other that I swear we could communicate telepathically. There was a four-hander for which a national newspaper concluded its crit with this phrase: “theatre of a new high level”. Then there was a learned lady who awarded us 98% in festival adjudication. Flippantly, I asked her what had happened to the other two per-cent. She flashed me a twinkle and said, “I will NEVER award 100% to ANYBODY! You are complacent enough.” Little did she know how much I worried about what had gone wrong, how little I cared about what we got right; that was gone, we’d done it, but there remained improving work to do on the faults. And faults there always were.

My cast and crew could revel in their success and I would never deny them their celebration. The Audience might be ecstatic. The newspapers might publish the most fulsome praise. But... always there was my private analysis in which complacency and self-congratulation were out of the question, in which the mistakes and missed opportunities had to be not only recognised and recorded but learned from and acted upon. Often, I discovered, the best ideas and problem-solutions occurred to me about three weeks after the production had finished its last possible performance. Always. my recourse, immediately after a new show was finished, was back to the laboratory.

So, here I am reviewing the length, depth and breadth of my career, aware that, while it comprised largely of dross (I never experienced the ‘glamour of show-biz’, just wallowed in its sawdust, sweat, tears and sheer bloody hard work), but here and there, occasionally, I spot the glint and glister of what might be pure gold. I carefully examine those specks in the hope that they are not ‘fool’s gold’ and that a formula for success may reveal itself. Perhaps, in this, I have stopped being an alchemist, having realised the hopelessness of my lifelong mission, and have become a prospector. Instead of experimenting with dross and base elements, I stand with my pan knee-deep in the fast-flowing stream of life at its ebb, sifting the sands...

At last I recognise one common factor, a recurring feature.

It is defined by the people with whom I associated myself.

Because we have pursued a transient sort of lifestyle, there have been three easily-identifiable periods when it has been necessary in a strange community to join a group of theatre-practitioners who do not know me, they have never heard of me. In my innocence, years ago, I imagined that a welcome would follow automatically from waving my certificates in their faces - together with my collection of programmes and clippings. Acceptance would follow immediately before adulation...WRONG! Unless the leading lights of whichever society I had chosen to fetch up in had actually seen my previous productions, nobody believed that I was even competent, let alone talented. Interpreted most cruelly, each set of luvvies felt threatened by my presence and insistence. More realistically, I know full-well that trouble will follow from releasing control of the group’s hard-earned assets to every passing self-proclaimed genius. Trust must be earned.

So (until we came to our present location, when I really could not be bothered to start the acceptance routine all over again in the face of the most pretentious poseuses I have ever seen) I grabbed every opportunity that was offered to prove myself reliable, cheerful and possibly a little talented. I swept and cleaned the places, shifted scenes, built sets, ran props, designed things, sold tickets, reluctantly auditioned and always leapt at a chance of being Stage Manager. Covertly, in the run-up to directing jobs, I observed my fellow members; I made decisions as to which ones I would like to work with as actors. Certainly, I made particular friends of potential Stage Managers and technicians who would be welcome on our team.

Which brings me to the real crux of my analysis and I think it confirms an observation that the most competent actors are the easiest to direct. It has usually been the self-appointed ‘stars’ of both sexes (so it’s unfair to call them ‘prima donnas’) who have given me problems. Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s the way one handles people that delineates the difference between being a good director and being a bad one; it is most satisfying to drag a praiseworthy performance out of an uncooperative pretender, but oh so much more so to extract more than the envisaged potential of a well-written character by working with someone of true talent and training. Good actors are far more demanding of the director, but for the right reasons of fulfilment, not the wrong ones of self-gratification.

And I’m beginning to identify little sparkling gems among the dross that occur whenever I spotted a previously unsuspected talent, revealed it, gave it its opportunity to shine and helped to develop its sparkle. Often it meant no more than providing that opportunity to glisten for someone reticent and modest. Nobody else except they and me need ever know how much time was spent out of rehearsal, coaching, coaxing and polishing. How smug I have secretly felt, from time to time, to cast a ‘new’ actor in a leading role in preference to the loud lout who had done it all before, who always got the part and who had no need to try... but now they must.

Quite often one is left with no choice but to cast the obvious members, some of whom did not even audition and have to be persuaded personally. (God, how I hated such telephone calls, knowing their likely repercussions.) In later years, I found myself spoiled for choice, but the memory lingers of scraping the barrel in search of the right warm bodies.

One assembles the base elements of brilliant material, practical design, exciting publicity gimmicks, careful scheduling of the entire production, its setting and rehearsal, before one recruits willing people with whom to fill each vacancy, then the work begins, the teamwork. It was 1986 when I was last required to compile my Theatre CV and there were 92 entries on it, including about seventy as director. It was then that I tried to retire from directing in order to concentrate on writing and teaching (but mostly to make way for the new generation of directors) (there are only just so many productions to go round). The tally of directing jobs now stands at something over eighty and I can see which ones I should never have undertaken. But most of them were a joy to work on and always the true satisfaction emanated from a knowledge that I had run a happy production, I had headed up a contented team, maybe because I had afforded them a bit of excitement together. In amateur Theatre, one should avoid subjecting one’s loyal team-members to uglier pressures than the ones they have to tolerate at work. But work they must... happily and rewardingly. Truly appreciated.

Each production was an experiment...

The most outstanding level of success became possible when I knew which actors to put alongside which other actors. Frequently, it was the least obvious juxtaposition of people that achieved the best results. Often, I found myself fending off angry reactions, voices raised in protest against my choice. Aye, that’s when the alchemist has to stand his ground – when the purists feel affronted; they cannot understand the craft of the theatrical alchemist, they have no faith or imagination.

But it was me that had the discipline and the resolve to practice that craft even when the doubters’ insults were flying like deadly missiles. It was me that had the discipline and the love for my team-members, all of them, jointly and severally.

“A process by which paradoxical results are achieved when incompatible elements are combined with no obvious rational explanation”... just director’s instinct.

I have mentioned all of the most essential ingredients in this report to you. Somewhere among the dross and the experiment might lurk a recipe for pure theatrical gold. Or perhaps we will achieve more success by continuing to sift the sands.

What a sad reflection it is on today’s society that the current generation will assume that I am advocating the application of sex and authoritarianism (or sado-masochism) when I nominate Love and Discipline as the first and most important elements in any young director’s quest for theatrical perfection. But Love and Discipline are the essential base elements; it has taken me fifty years to learn that.

If you want the latest update on events in Malcaster, you’d better e-mail me.

Jonah was a very experience director, teacher and writer who sadly passed away in February 2006. He was also the author of the highly successful "Playmaker - The Craft of Directing Plays (The Way I Seen It)".