Once he became established, Gilbert was the stage director for his plays and operas and had strong opinions on how they should best be performed. He was strongly influenced by the innovations in "stagecraft", now called stage direction, by the playwrights James Planché and especially Tom Robertson. Gilbert attended rehearsals directed by Robertson to learn this art first-hand from the older director, and he began to apply it in some of his earliest plays. He sought realism in acting, settings, costumes, and movement, if not in content of his plays (although he did write a romantic comedy in the "naturalist" style, as a tribute to Robertson, "Sweethearts"). He shunned self-conscious interaction with the audience, and insisted on a style of portrayal in which characters were never aware of their own absurdity, but were coherent internal wholes.