The Faults You Choose to Let Go
A directing problem about attention, triage, and the things you decide not to fix
It is the dress rehearsal. If you have just come out of a summer intensive, yours may have been the fourth afternoon of a five-day project, in a hall that had to be cleared by six. Mine is an auditorium, and an observer – a friend of the production, genuinely on our side – crosses it to lean in beside me. “Just so you know,” they say, “someone mentioned they couldn’t quite see the sailor at that bit on the left.”
I thank them. I say I’ll keep it in mind. And underneath the thanks, entirely unfairly, I feel a hot little flare of irritation at a person who has done nothing but try to help.
I know to be suspicious of that flare. It is too quick, and it is aimed at the wrong target. They are right. You probably couldn’t see the sailor at that bit on the left. So why does it land like an accusation?
The vital few
Every director works against a clock, which means every director is in the business of triage. You cannot fix everything, so you don’t try. You learn, slowly and mostly by getting it wrong, that the things you could improve are not equally worth improving. A small number of changes carry most of the payoff. The rest are real, and visible, and you leave them.
This is the Pareto principle wearing rehearsal blacks.1 The arithmetic doesn’t survive contact with a rehearsal room, but the shape of it does: the returns on effort are radically uneven. Some changes lift everything around them. Others tidy one corner and eat the afternoon. The craft is choosing between them. Which handful of moments, given your last hour, will raise the whole performance?
That under-rehearsed performer in the chorus does not need me to drill them, alone, in front of everyone, on the Monday before opening. The gain is small. The cost is enormous: their confidence, the room’s mood, the ninety minutes I don’t have. So I let it go. On purpose.
Which is why triage isn’t the same as optimisation. I am not only asking what produces the biggest return on stage. I am weighing that against confidence, relationships, energy, and what this company will still be capable of on Friday night.
When the clock is five days
Over five weeks with a professional cast I can have both. I can fix the sailor on Tuesday and still leave the performer alone until Thursday, because there is enough time for the two decisions not to compete. Over five days and a less experienced cast they compete constantly. Every note I give is subtracted from somebody’s nerve, and there is no Thursday to move it to.
So on an intensive the vital few are almost never about the stage picture. The change that most raises Friday night is usually whether the person who nearly didn’t come back on Wednesday morning is still standing in the line-up, and whether the group still believes it can do the thing at all. Sightlines, in that arithmetic, come a long way down.
Which means the list of faults I am knowingly leaving gets longer by the day. By Friday afternoon it is enormous, every item on it is real, and I have chosen almost all of them. A director walks into the dress of a week-long project carrying more deliberate omissions than they would after five weeks of rehearsal, and carrying them on less sleep. That is the position from which the well-meant note arrives.
Why it stings
The trouble is that my decision to leave that fault is completely invisible.
From the outside, a fault I have chosen to accept looks exactly like a fault I have failed to notice. Deliberate and careless are outwardly identical. Every director carries a run of these invisible omissions by the time the dress arrives, and not one of them shows.
So when someone leans in to tell me the sailor can’t be seen, they are not questioning my competence, though that is how it lands. They are doing something more awkward. They are making my invisible choice visible and handing it back to me with no clean way to own it.
The observer and I are making different judgements. The observer is asking: can I see something here that could be improved? I am asking: of everything I could improve before we open, where will the next ten minutes do most good? The sailor may well be obscured. But noticing an imperfection and deciding whether it deserves scarce attention are different acts, and only the first is available from the stalls. She sees an improvement going begging. I see the improvement it would displace.
There is also the matter of having to reopen a case I had already closed. I have spent judgement on the sailor once. The note, entirely innocently, asks me to spend it again. Late in a process, that is why benign comments can feel so disproportionately tiring.
And I can’t simply explain. “I know, I’m leaving that on purpose” sounds dismissive of someone trying to help. Often the honest version is worse, because the reason I’m leaving it is to protect somebody: the exhausted actor, the one who’s barely made rehearsals, the person for whom one more note tonight would be one too many. I can hardly say that across the stalls. So the well-meant note arrives as a demand to repair something I had already, quietly, decided to accept, and there is nowhere for the feeling to go except that unfair little flare.
Not every fault needs a note
Experienced actors generally understand an unwritten rule of the rehearsal room: you do not give other performers notes. That is the director’s job. This is partly practical, but it is also protective. A performer who can be corrected by everyone in the room very quickly feels judged by everyone in the room.
Giving one person that much authority obviously has its dangers. Directors can behave like tyrants. But the authority isn’t really theirs to own. The company has, for practical purposes, entrusted them with making the hundreds of small decisions that would take forever if each one had to be discussed by everyone.
A note withheld is not necessarily a problem unnoticed. The director may already have seen it. They may be waiting to find out whether the performer solves it for themselves. They may be trying something else first. Or they may have decided, quite consciously, that this fault is going to stay a fault, because there are better uses for the time that’s left.
There is an art, too, in recognising when a question has actually been offered to the room. If I am working something through with one performer, I may want them to stay with the problem rather than have five other people solve it for them. When I do want everyone’s thinking, I try to make the shift explicit: “Okay, let’s open this to everyone.”
Outside rehearsal rooms the conventions often run the other way. In plenty of professional cultures, spotting something and saying so is a mark of engagement, expertise and generosity. The instinct is: I’ve noticed something that might help, so I should mention it. Nothing wrong with that. It is what a good colleague does.
But seeing what could be improved is comparatively easy. Knowing what is worth improving is the craft. The first needs a pair of eyes. The second needs some sense of everything else competing for the same attention.
This is where Pareto stops being a productivity slogan. If the returns on effort are uneven, then every additional note is not simply another useful piece of information. It is another candidate for scarce rehearsal time. A room where everyone is invited to identify faults generates an ever-expanding snagging list, and because each individual note may be perfectly valid, declining them makes the director look defensive. The work is deciding which imperfections earn attention and which have to be allowed to remain.
The sting in the tail
Which brings me to the part we must never forget. If letting go and giving up look identical from the outside, they can look identical from the inside too. A tired director at the end of a hard week can tell themselves they are nobly choosing the vital few when they have simply run out of road and stopped caring. The invisibility that makes the discipline hard to defend also makes it easy to fake to yourself.
So leave room for the fact that not every noticed fault requires action. Some omissions are chosen, some are tolerated, some are provisional, and some simply haven’t climbed high enough to be worth anyone’s attention. None of that requires us to pretend a fault is a deliberate artistic decision. But every so often we do need to check that the thing we’re calling strategy isn’t fatigue in a good coat.
Nobody in the auditorium can see which of those you did. The only person in a position to ask is you, and the question is not whether the sailor can be seen. It is whether leaving them there was a decision.
To cite this article:
Burns, B (2026) The Notes You Can’t Answer. The Philosophical Theatre Facilitator: www.philosophicaltheatrefacilitator.substack.com
© Brendon Burns 2026
Sources:
Juran, J.M., 1975. The Non-Pareto Principle: Mea Culpa. Quality Progress, 8(5), pp.8–9.
Pareto, V., 1896–97. Cours d’économie politique. Lausanne: F. Rouge.
In common usage the Pareto principle is the eighty-twenty rule: most of the return comes from a small share of the effort. The ratio is folklore, and the principle isn’t really Pareto’s – Joseph Juran built the management version and later admitted he had named it after the wrong man. Juran also coined the phrase I have borrowed for the section above, then revised it, changing the trivial many to the useful many on the grounds that the remainder is not worthless, only lower priority. Which is more or less this article, arrived at from the other direction.