Notes on Directing is a collection of insights gleaned over the career of British director Frank Hauser, who ran the Oxford Playhouse for 16 years and directed some of England's greatest actors in productions around the world. Collated and elaborated upon by Russell Reich, former artistic associate at Circle Rep, Hauser's Notes speak to the challenges a director will come upon daily, ranging over such topics as organizing the rehearsal period, helping actors create characters, communicating with designers and staging in an interesting way.

Hauser's Notes read more like gentle reminders for colleagues who, like him, have been around the block and have the scars to prove it... In a terrific pair of notes on identifying the strength of characters' wants and the resistance these wants must overcome, Hauser neatly describes an approach to help excavate and enhance the action of any scene...

Reading Hauser, at least as Reich presents him, is like sitting down for sherry with a slightly dotty, rather wicked and very droll Oxford don. He's ironic, frequently temperamental, occasionally acid-tongued, and utterly incapable of suffering fools. He has a refreshingly world-weary humor about the whole enterprise, as if to say, "It's just a play, darling..."

In an appendix, Hauser presents a reading list as good as any I've seen on the art of directing--titles that suggest that his mind is full of surprising interests and quirky delights that are surely more responsible for his 30 years of success in the theatre than his pointers about things like staging with triangles instead of straight lines...

The sources of artistic inspiration are elusive and strange. Art comes at odd hours and from unexpected realms. The best we can hope for is that we've created in ourselves the openness to see it when it comes, the discipline to hold on to it when it tries to slip away, and the skills to implement it for that brief moment we're in possession. In that last category [Hauser, especially, has] something to offer us all.