First of all, he plays "Rodelinda" absolutely straight, skipping the campy antics that other directors impose on Handel in the name of saving Baroque convention from itself.
You could compare Dylan's fluidity to the often bewildering metamorphoses that stage directors impose on Wagner operas variations that the composer may not have explicitly desired but that the works themselves seem to demand, not least because of their dreamlike sense of time and space.
Local drama students give deliberately bad performances with relish, while a director imposes 21st-century theatre methods to Puff's bewilderment.
So far, all of the National's artistic directors have imposed some kind of signature on the place.
Like many of his era, he met his nemesis in John Birt and the rolling revolution the authoritarian director general imposed in the early 1990s.
The Polish director has imposed a surreal ambience that widens its emotional distance from characters who are viewed with the same clinical detachment as the moths fluttering around the lamps inside the crumbling manor house.
The word "auteur" is no longer much applied in Hollywood, where only a few film directors can impose their artistic vision without interference.
Still, Mr. Alden is not a director who imposes some arbitrary take on a work.
The director, Phyllida Lloyd, imposes a dashing urgency on the events: from the first beat, the play explodes before us.
Thus the director can impose his ideas on nature and, taking what savours of the ordinary, can, in the way he handles it, render it extraordinary.
He had assembled eight supporters to join us, including Al Amin Kimathi, the Human Rights Forum director, an imposing man in his 40s with a white skullcap, gray beard and white dishdasha.
