In the 1970s, there was reputedly a competition between Hollywood screenwriters to create the most expensive scene description ever written. The winner? "The fleets meet." These three crisply economical words would have cost at least tens of millions of pounds to see on screen – although might be cheaper now because of CGI.

In theatre, too, there is frequent tension between images that are easy to imagine but difficult to execute. The modern winner among challenging stage directions is generally held to be "They cross the Andes", in Peter Shaffer's 1964 play The Royal Hunt of the Sun, which is said to have driven the producer Binkie Beaumont into a blizzard of incredulous bitchery at Shaffer's visual ambitions when he read it in the script.

Beaumont, though, came from a tradition of realistic theatre, in which, if the script asked for a drawing room or living room, the designer created exactly that. More visionary theatrical figures – such as John Dexter, who eventually directed the premiere of Royal Hunt at the National theatre – understood that, on stage, mountains, seas and rivers can be indicated by strips of cloth or light (or even nothing more than the audience's imagination).

And even the most notoriously difficult stage directions in Shakespeare – "Exit, pursued by a bear", when a character is chased off stage, and "Hermione slowly descends", in which the statue of an apparently dead character comes to life – are actually less daunting than they look. Both occur in The Winter's Tale, which suggests that, in what was almost certainly one of his final plays, the dramatist was either impatient to test the limits of staging or secure in the audience's acceptance of pretence.

Demanding though these images appear, few theatregoers, except possibly at the more generously funded German state theatres, expect to see an actual animal or a medically exact resuscitation: they know that there will most likely be an extra in a bearskin and an actor trying to stay as still as she can until she hears the cue. Even when, in a recent The Winter's Tale in Britain, the Red Rose Chain Theatre Company teased the audience with the possibility of a real bear, it proved, in no surprise to those familiar with council safety regulations, to be another illusion.

Another concern about stage directions, especially among actors, is that they limit the possibility of reinterpretation. The American playwrights Arthur Miller and Edward Albee both prefer to give detailed instructions for the movements and gestures of performers and also for the sounds they should produce: so-called "state" or "speech" directions. For example, opening Albee's The Goat (2002) at a random page, I came across a run of five successive speeches notated: (not amused), (genuine surprise), (prompting), (innocent), (controlling himself). Even more prescriptively, Miller often specifies not just a character's style of talk but also how they walk.

This is evidence of how intensely the writers hear and see the situations, but the actor Warren Mitchell told me once in an interview that he had requested a rehearsal script for Miller's The Price with such nudges removed, fearing that they would restrict his instincts as an actor. I have also heard of actors appearing in Albee plays working from similarly edited texts. Perhaps revealingly, dramatists who used to be actors – Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn – tend to leave much more leeway for their casts.

In this, Pinter greatly differed from the man who was otherwise his literary mentor: Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) liked – especially in later works such as Footfalls (1975) – to specify the look, sound and pace of performance, sometimes even drawing diagrams in a manner reminiscent of dance notation. The writer's estate is notably strict on the preservation of these intentions, as director Deborah Warner and actor Fiona Shaw discovered in 1994 when they were rebuked for changing the moves in Footfalls, although Beckett's heirs later failed in attempts to prevent a female Waiting for Godot.

As admirers of Beckett have observed, this intransigence results in a dramatist remarkable for his originality now trapping presentations of his work in the past. Ideally, apart from action that drives the plot, stage directions should be a suggestion: indeed, some have suggested that the academic study of playscripts is questionable because the text is merely a template for something that happens elsewhere.

In 1980, for example, Howard Brenton wrote in The Romans in Britain the 11 words: "The THIRD SOLDIER holds MARBAN'S thighs and attempts to bugger him." The questions of where on stage this should occur, how graphic the attempt should be and in what light are left to each production. Observing director Michael Bogdanov's interpretation at the National theatre premiere, a representative of the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse believed that he had seen something obscene, and initiated a criminal prosecution later withdrawn in court.

As Bogdanov discovered, you can't control what theatregoers see, but nor should what they are shown be controlled too closely by the text. In 1967's What the Butler Saw, Joe Orton's stage direction allows an actor playing a copper the modesty of entering "wearing only underpants and the [police] helmet." Most performers, though, have concluded, as Jason Thorpe does in the current London production, that it's funnier without the knickers. Perhaps some playwrights and their estates could benefit from getting theirs in less of a twist about how a set of written directions is visualised.