Joe Lichtenstein

My job has always required constant attention. Listening to what is being said. Watching what is actually happening. Noticing when the two diverge. Seeing where a performance loses energy. Where somebody begins to push. Where something true suddenly becomes performative. Where confidence becomes effort.

Where a pause is doing more than another sentence could. Then giving the note that changes it. Sometimes the note is large. Very often it is tiny.

An actor might enter a scene with complete confidence, but the person standing opposite them changes the balance. I once asked an actor to consider that, however confident his character was, he was speaking to someone he found genuinely intimidating. It was a very small adjustment. The confidence remained, but now there was a slight trepidation underneath it.

The whole scene changed. In another production, an actor was playing a devastating moment with all the emotion visible on the surface. We worked gradually on taking it inward. The performance became less demonstrative and more deeply felt. When he played the scene again, it felt as though the pain had travelled through his whole body.

The audience could feel it too. The same diagnostic problem appears in leadership. A CEO may not need more presence. They may need less visible effort, a different rhythm, more warmth, greater stillness, or simply the confidence to leave a silence alone.

Since 2014, I have run rehearsals with accomplished actors, given detailed notes throughout rehearsals and performances, and worked closely with individual performers to develop their work. I have adapted direction to different performers and maintained performances across long runs. Directing requires an understanding of the whole performance, even when working on its smallest details. The rhythm of a scene. The relationship between performers. The intention behind a line. What the audience is actually receiving.

The skill lies in recognising what needs attention and finding the precise direction that changes it.

• Grace Pervades — Associate Director, Theatre Royal Haymarket, 2026. Director: Jeremy Herrin.
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold — Associate Director, @sohoplace, 2025–26. Director: Jeremy Herrin. Production details
• Beginning — Associate Director, National Theatre (Dorfman), 2017; Ambassadors Theatre, West End, 2018. Director: Polly Findlay.
• A View from the Bridge — Assistant Director, Lyceum Theatre, Broadway, 2015. Director: Ivo van Hove.
• Fiesta — Writer and Director, Havering Changing in association with Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch, 2023. Production details

Theatre CV — United Agents

I am also a fine artist and animator. I have been making hand-drawn animation since I was thirteen. The process is slow. A large charcoal drawing is altered by hand. A frame is photographed. Something is erased. Something else is added. Another frame is photographed. Again and again. I write the films, draw them, animate them and edit them myself, working with actors and musicians where the work requires it.

The disciplines are different, but the practice underneath them is remarkably similar. Look. Change something. Look again. Notice what changed. Repeat. Painting, animation and theatre have all trained the same part of me. Attention.

Logeion grew out of that practice. It is not a coaching framework dressed in theatrical language. The principles come from rehearsal rooms, from making performances, from watching them change, and from seeing repeatedly what actually works in front of an audience. Private Direction brings that practice to a different kind of performer.

A senior leader. A consequential room. Something at stake. And a performance that needs to work.