- A book by a director whose experience has enabled him to speak with extraordinary clarity about an enterprise which can be extremely difficult to get right: theatre directing. This is beautifully distilled advice.
- Handbooks on directing can be densely written and/or obtuse; the good news is that this one isn't. Its advice is bite-sized, a bunch of notes to consider and apply in the rehearsal room, with room in the margins for your own annotations.
- It's handy, therefore, for the vast majority of theatre directors whose busy working lives are such that they don't have time to wade through complex texts. Read this one on the tube or on your coffee break. You can pick it up and put it down twenty times and still follow the plot. Because it's bite-sized, you remember the advice more clearly afterwards too.
- The main virtue of this book is that it steers clear of saying stuff that sounds cool but means very little in practice.
