Experimental Theatre

From Stanislavsky to Peter Brook

James Roose-Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415009638
• eBook ISBN: 9781136092527
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

`It is a pleasure to read. Well-written, free of cant, impressively wide-ranging. The book is really an introduction to the avant-garde.' - John Lahr

1  Introduction

To experiment is to make a foray into the unknown – it is something that can be charted only after the event. To be avant-garde is truly to be way out in front. Each of the key figures in this book has opened up the possibilities of theatre as an art and for each of them experiment has implied something very different. For Stanislavsky it meant the importance of the actor, whereas for Craig the actor was practically dispensable, the emphasis being upon the scenic possibilities of theatre. Meyerhold and Reinhardt stressed the importance of the director; Appia the use of light. Brecht, like his master, Piscator, was concerned to explore the didactic nature of the theatre. Artaud, like Stanislavsky, came to believe that theatre should reflect not the everyday reality of naturalism, but rather those intimations that are beyond the reach of words. Much that was foreseen by the early pioneers has come to be realized in the American modern dance, while the theatre of Alwin Nikolais represents in many ways a synthesis of Artaud's concept of a non-verbal theatre and Craig's idea of moving abstract masses. Finally, like Copeau, Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook and Eugenio Barba have gone back to the essence of theatre, to the live relationship of actor and audience.

Of necessity, much has had to be omitted. If the role of the dramatist is not examined in this book it is not to depreciate the role of the author, far from it, but because there tend to be many more books written about the contribution of the writer, from the realistic plays of Chekhov to the socially and politically orientated dramas of Shaw and Brecht, and the work of such modern dramatists as Ionesco and the whole school of the Theatre of the Absurd with its major contribution to the development of the drama, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, each of whom has, in the words of Virginia Woolf, attempted to write ‘about silence, about the things which people do not say’. It is precisely with this area that the avant-garde theatre of the 1970s and 1980s has come to be concerned.

Increasingly in this century, psychologists, painters, sculptors, writers, poets, dancers, have been concerned with the attempt to build a bridge between the known and the unknown, between the conscious world of the ego and the unconscious world that lies within. Yet the theatre has always lagged behind.

Although our knowledge of the psyche is still extremely limited, our own experience, at least, should convince us how all too easily we are possessed by moods, troubled by strange dreams and nightmares, become unreasonable and unpredictable in our behaviour. We have the impression that at bottom we know ourselves scarcely at all. Increasingly we are aware of other selves within the self. ‘My selves the grievers’, says Dylan Thomas in a poem, and Emily Dickinson,

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,

One need not be a house;

The brain has corridors surpassing

Material place . . .

Ourself, behind ourself, concealed,

Should startle most;

Assassin, hid in our apartment,

Be horror's least.

But how to express this reality that is within? How, for example, to express the reality of a dream? Julien Green, the American writer, in his journal, remarks of one dream,

It was intensely real, far more so than everyday life .... This confirms my belief that a man who dreams is sometimes a far more gifted artist than the man who is awake. Words cannot express the length of time passed in a vision that lasted seconds.

And of a recurring dream he says that it brought ‘a feeling of happiness such that human speech cannot give the faintest idea of it’.

Throughout the first half of this century painters in particular understood this need to create a language that would, in the words of Franz Marc, ‘break the mirror of life so that we may look being in the face.’ Marc, like Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee, sought to give expression to the mystical content of art. Therefore’, wrote Kandinsky, ‘the artist's eye should always be alert for the voice of inward necessity.’ In this way, and this way alone, as Paul Klee observed, could ‘the secretly perceived be made visible’.

In the 1930s Antonin Artaud declared that

the theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams .... I say that there is a poetry of the senses as there is a poetry of language and that this concrete physical language is truly theatrical only to the degree that the thoughts it expresses are beyond the reach of the spoken language.

Artaud's concept of a non-verbal theatre was to be developed first by such pioneers of the modern dance as Martha Graham who created a whole new form of theatre. Her works, which she described as graphs of the human heart, often bewildered audiences. As Robert Horan observed, in Chronicles of the American Dance, if her audiences were sometimes distraught at the imagery she used, it was because they were so ill-prepared to face the psychological reality which is the basis of her art. They were confronted with a form of theatre that sought not merely to entertain but to make demands.

At the climax of Virginia Woolf s novel, Between the Acts, the actors appear with bits of mirror and glass in order to portray the twentieth century. ‘And the audience saw themselves . . . the hands of the clock had stopped at the present moment. It was now. Ourselves.’ For several centuries the theatre in the West has held the mirror up to nature, but now the mirror seeks to reflect something else. The empty space, of which Peter Brook has spoken, is, in fact, the space within. As the manager of the Magic Theatre in Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf explains to the hero,

It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its own being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I help you to make your own world visible. That is all.

In writing about contemporary figures I have tried to avoid making any critical judgments, being more concerned to catch something of the essence of an artist's work. I would agree with Henry Moore that ‘what really counts is the vision a work of art expresses, that is, the quality of the mind revealed behind it, rather than the way it is done.’

In his journal, Isamu Noguchi, the American-Japanese sculptor, writes,

I wanted other means of communication – to find a way of sculpture that was humanly meaningful without being realistic, at once abstract and socially relevant. I wanted to find out what sculpture was fundamentally about. Sculpture, I felt, had become a captive, like the other arts, to coterie points of view.

If one substitutes for the word ‘sculpture’ the word ‘theatre’, this sums up exactly my own feelings and reflections during the latter half of the 1960s. Increasingly I came to see the importance of taking time out to search and re-search. It seemed to me, at that time, that the drama in England was merely repeating itself in varying styles of naturalism, and that it was being saturated with words.

I had first begun to experiment with non-verbal forms of theatre in 1955-6 when I was invited to join the faculty of the Julliard School of Music in New York ‘in order to explore the possibilities of integrating music, dance and drama’. As a result of the work I did there, I was invited by Alwin Nikolais to found a school of drama at the Henry Street Playhouse in New York where he was based. Instead, I returned to England and, in 1959, started the Hampstead Theatre. The stresses and strains of mounting ten, sometimes more, productions a year, under-staffed, over-worked, and for seven years without subsidy, left little time for experimentation outside the narrow confines of particular productions. By 1968, however, the theatre was established; I was able to hand over to a successor and concentrate my energies upon establishing at Hampstead an experimental workshop with a permanent company. The company was called Stage Two, because I regarded it as the second stage in the development of the theatre. I managed to raise enough money to subsidize the experiment for just over a year. For a year the actors trained and then gave a ten-week season in London of two works: Dreams, and Deaths and Entrances, followed by a short tour. In spite of generous praise from critics, it proved impossible to raise further finance, and the venture folded. Since then my own explorations have continued in workshops here and abroad, especially in America. Some of this work I have touched on in Inner Journey, Outer Journey (Rider, 1987) and will be examined in more depth in my next book, Journeys of the Heart. The first edition of this book was published in 1970. A new edition appeared in 1974, followed by several reprints. In 1984 the book appeared in a major new edition, twice as long as the original, and rewritten from start to finish, incorporating much new research that had accumulated as I continued to study, read about, experience, talk with and, above all, listen to others. I am convinced that if one is a practitioner of the theatre it is an essential part of one's task to see and know what is going on in all the arts. We have much to learn from one another as well as from the lessons of history.

For this latest edition I have added a final chapter, bringing the book within sight of the end of the twentieth century.

2 Stanislavsky's Life in Art

At the turn of this century Russia was a land of giants. From the 1890s onwards was a time of volcanic eruption in the arts, bringing in its wake an entire social, religious and ideological upheaval – the emergence of a new society. A roll-call of that period catches some of the excitement – Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Chaliapin, Diaghilev, Pavlova, Karsavina, Nijinsky, Bakst, Benois, Fokine and, of course, Stanislavsky.

Constantin Stanislavsky is the great patriarchal figure not only of the Russian theatre, but of theatre throughout the Western world. Of all the pioneers he casts the longest shadow. Great as were his achievements as director and actor, however, his most important contribution lay in the light he threw upon the technique of acting. His ‘system’, based upon the observation of good acting practice, has been developed and adjusted according to the needs of different temperaments and nationalities. It was never intended to be a rigid system: ‘Create your own method,’ he would say. The Method, as we know it, is merely the result of his system first taught in America by two of his protégés, Michael Chekhov and Richard Boleslavsky, and subsequently adapted to the needs of the American actor by Lee Strasberg and other members of the Group Theatre. The greatness of Stanislavsky lies as much in his own flexibility as in his adherence to the cardinal principle of inner truth on the stage. His legacy was, and remains, the Moscow Art Theatre. Kenneth Tynan, describing the giants at the Maly Theatre playing with a selfless economy and precision reminiscent of a group of chess champions at a tournament, records:

At the Moscow Art Theatre, ripe in years, robust as oaks, beaming in their beards and their supreme authority, the masters play together as Stanislavsky taught and as they can still teach the world. The joy of seeing master craftsmen working in unison, with the humane poetry and not just the neurotic trimmings of naturalism, is something I had never known until I saw these perdurable players. This is Stanislavsky without Freud, physiological acting without the psychiatric glosses beloved of so many American ‘Method’ actors; it has subtlety and absolute inevitability . . . The power and the glory of Soviet theatre resides in its older actors, who are by far the finest I have ever seen.

Whatever thread one takes up in the history of twentieth-century drama leads back to Stanislavsky. The most austere figure of contemporary theatre, Jerzy Grotowski, acknowledges his debt to him: ‘His persistent study, his systematic renewal of the methods of observation, and his dialectical relationship to his own earlier work make him my personal ideal.’ In his thinking, Stanislavsky anticipated many of the major developments in theatre. Through all the vicissitudes of fashion, however, he retained his belief in the essential creative power of the actor as the only source of vitality for the theatre.

Stanislavsky felt that the director of a theatre which was to fulfil a ‘cultural mission’ should have a first-hand and expert knowledge of all the elements of theatre: he should be familiar with it from the actor's, director's, producer's and administrator's points of view. One rarely comes across all these qualities in one person – but they were combined in Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. ‘He was that director of whom one could dream. It seems that he had also dreamed of such a theatre as I had imagined and sought a man such as he imagined me to be.’

His meeting with Danchenko in 1896 was to have a profound influence not only on the theatre in Russia but throughout the world. From it sprang one of the most important events in theatrical history. By founding the Moscow Art Theatre, both Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko were rebelling against the conventional, declamatory style of acting; against a star system which prevented the development of an ensemble style of acting. ‘Like all revolutionaries’, wrote Stanislavsky, ‘we broke the old and exaggerated the new.’

At the time, Nemirovich-Danchenko was one of the best of the younger Russian dramatists, and was considered to have inherited the mantle of Ostrovsky. He had shared the Griboyedov Prize with Chekhov who had submitted The Seagull. Because it seemed to him that Chekhov's play was immeasurably superior to his own, he declined his half of the prize in favour of his rival. With the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre it was his idea to include The Seagull in the first season, and it was he who suggested that Stanislavsky should direct it. In Anton Chekhov the Moscow Art Theatre found a dramatist whom they were uniquely gifted to interpret. As Stanislavsky said, ‘Chekhov gave that inner truth to the stage which served as the foundation for what was later called the Stanislavsky System, which must be approached through Chekhov, or which serves as a bridge to the playing of Chekhov.’

By 1904 the plays of Chekhov, Gorki, Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Maeterlinck, as well as the exceptionally high standard of design, acting and directing, had made the theatre a success. Diaghilev, writing on ‘The Originality of the Moscow Art Theatre’ in his publication The World of Art, observed that because of its proven success and popularity this company could risk innovations in the theatre which with any less well-established group would have been condemned to ridicule.

In spite of their success, however, Stanislavsky was filled with doubts. He felt that they had become trapped by the very realism they had set out to achieve. Compared with what was happening in the other arts, in the new painting, music and sculpture, the theatre seemed antiquated. It was during this period that he came into contact once again with Vsevolod Meyerhold, a former member of the company, who had created the part of Konstantin in The Seagull and had left in order to start up his own group in the provinces. Like Stanislavsky, he was seeking something new in art, something more contemporary and modern in spirit.

The difference between the two men lay in the fact that while Stanislavsky strained towards the new without knowing how to realize it, Meyerhold believed that he had already found it but was unable to realize it through lack of means and opportunity. Since the daily rehearsal and performance schedule of a repertory theatre provided no room for experimental laboratory work, Stanislavsky decided to help him. He opened the Theatrical Studio where, with a group of young actors, Meyerhold was to be free to carry out his ideas. The principle of the new studio was that realism and local colour had outlived their usefulness and no longer interested the public. The time for the unrea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Stanislavsky's Life in Art
• 3 The School of Realism
• 4 Meyerhold and the Russian Avant-garde
• 5 Taïrov and the Synthetic Theatre
• 6 Vakhtangov's Achievement
• 7 Craig and Appia – Visionaries
• 8 Copeau – Father of the Modern Theatre
• 9 Reinhardt, Piscator and Brecht
• 10 The Theatre of Ecstasy – Artaud, Okhlopkov, Savary
• 11 The Contribution of the Modern Dance – Martha Graham and Alwin Nikolais
• 12 Further Experiments Today – in America
• 13 Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson and the Bread and Puppet Theatre
• 14 Anna Halprin and the Dancers' Workshop
• 15 Grotowski and the Poor Theatre
• 16 Grotowski and the Journey to the East
• 17 Eugenio Barba and the Third Theatre
• 18 The Mountain with Many Caves: Peter Brook, Alfred Wolfsohn and Roy Hart
• 19 Towards AD 2,000
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Recommended Further Reading
• Index