Stanislavski

An Introduction, Revised and Updated

Jean Benedetti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135470203
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Jean Benedetti's Stanislavski is the clearest and most succinct explanation of Stanislavski's writings and ideas, especially those in the Stanislavski's acting trilogy – An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role – a staple of every actor's library.

Now available in an attractive new edition, Stanislavski: An Introduction provides the perfect guide through the Master's writing.

1

FOUNDATIONS

Had Stanislavski been a ‘natural’, had his talent – some would say his genius – as an actor found an immediate, spontaneous outlet, there would be no System. As it was it took years of persistent, unremitting effort to remove the blocks and barriers which inhibited the free expression of his great gifts. His search for the ‘laws’ of acting was the result of that struggle.

Stanislavski’s career might be described as the painful evolution of a stage-struck child into a mature and responsible artist and teacher. He remained stage-struck to the end, adoring the smell of spirit-gum and grease-paint. His infatuation with theatre, with play-acting kept his mind fresh and open to new ideas to the very end. At the same time theatre was, for him, a matter of the highest seriousness, both artistic and moral. It was a disciplined activity which required dedication and training. What we receive as the System originated from his attempt to analyse and monitor his own progress as an artist and his attempts to achieve his ideas as an actor and meet his own developing standards, and it is all the more valuable for being born of concrete activity since the solutions he found were lived and not the result of speculation or abstract theory. The System is his practice examined, tested and verified. Although he received help along the way from actors and directors the System is essentially Stanislavski’s own creation. For, while others could define for him the results that were required, they could not define the process by which those results might be achieved. This he had to do for himself. My Life in Art is the story (not always accurate) of his failures; false starts and successes.

Stanislavski was born in 1863, the second son of a family devoted to the theatre. He made his first stage appearance at the age of seven in a series of tableaux vivants organised by his governess to celebrate his mother’s name day. When he was fourteen his father transformed an out-building on his country estate at Liubimovka into a well-equipped theatre. Later, a second theatre was constructed in the town house in Moscow. Stanislavski’s real début as an actor was made at Liubimovka in September 1877, when four one-act plays, directed by his tutor, were staged to inaugurate the new theatre. As a result of that evening an amateur group, the Alexeyev Circle,^* was formed, consisting of Stanislavski’s brothers and sisters, cousins and one or two friends.

It is at this date that Stanislavski’s conscious, artistic career can be said to begin. During the period 1877 to 1906, which he describes as his Childhood and Adolescence,^† he encountered the fundamental problems of acting and directing which he resolved as best he could.

He spent the day of that 5 September, according to his own account, in a state of extreme excitement, trembling all over in his eagerness to get on stage. In the event the performance was to produce more perplexity than satisfaction. He appeared in two of the plays, A Cup of Tea and The Old Mathematician. In the first he felt completely at ease. He was able to copy the performance of a famous actor he had seen, down to the last detail. When the curtain fell he was convinced he had given a splendid performance. He was soon disabused. He had been inaudible. He had gabbled and his hands had been in such a constant state of motion that no one could follow what he was saying. In the second play, which had given him so much more trouble in rehearsals, he was, by contrast, much better. He was at a loss to resolve the contradiction between what he felt and what the audience had experienced. How could he feel so good and act so badly? Feel so ill at ease and be so effective?

His response to the problem was crucial. He began to keep a notebook, in which he recorded his impressions, analysed his difficulties and sketched out solutions. He continued this practice throughout his life, so that the Notebooks span some sixty-one years of activity.^* It is characteristic of Stanislavski that he never shied away from contradictions or refused the paradoxical. He worked through them.

His frequent visits to the theatre provided him with models and examples. At the Maly Theatre – his ‘university’ – as he called it – there were still the survivors of a once great company. He was also able to see foreign artists such as Salvini and Duse, who appeared in Moscow during Lent, when Russian actors were forbidden by the church to perform. The contrast between the ease, naturalness and flow of the actor of genius and his own desperate efforts, either gabbling inaudibly or shouting, either rigid with tension or all flailing arms, made a profound effect on him. They created, he could only imitate more or less well what others had done before. The attempt to discover in what the ‘naturalness’ of the great actor consisted is the seed from which the System grew.

Drama school

In 1885, at the age of twenty-two Stanislavski entered a drama school. The experience lasted three weeks. His rapid departure was caused partly by the fact that he could not attend full-time. He had finished his studies early and gone into the family textile business. He could not always get away from the office. More important, however, was his swift recognition of the fact that the school could not give him what he was looking for – a properly thought-out method of working, a means of harnessing his own natural creativity. Not only did the school fail to provide such a method, it could not even conceive that such a method existed. All his teachers could do was indicate the results they wanted, not the means to achieve them. At best, they could pass on the technical tricks which they themselves had acquired.

The young Stanislavski needed guidance and discipline badly. The greater barrier to his development as an artist was his image of himself as an actor. He saw himself continuously in dashing ‘romantic’ roles. It was what he himself defined as his ‘Spanish boots’ problem. Thigh boots, a sword and a cloak were fatal to him. Any progress he might have made towards truth and naturalness was immediately wiped out. He became a musical-comedy stereotype – all swagger and bombast. The only teacher at drama school who might have been some help to him, Glikeria Fedotova, left about the same time he did. He was fortunate enough to meet her again later, as well as her husband, at a critical moment in his career.

A theatre in decline

Russian theatre in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was in a poor state. There were the great stars of the Maly Theatre whom Stanislavski describes in terms of such admiration and affection, but they were mainly of the older generation and they were surrounded by mediocrity. The monopoly of the imperial theatres had been abolished in 1882. Thereafter commercial managements threw on plays to make quick profits. As Stanislavski remarked, the theatre was controlled by barmen on one hand and bureaucrats on the other. A few brilliant individuals shone here and there.

On the whole, observation of professional practice could only show Stanislavski what to avoid. In an unpublished manuscript he describes a typical rehearsal period. First came the reading and the casting of the various roles. Some discussion of the play’s meaning was supposed to take place but generally there was insufficient time. The actors were left to find their own way. Then came the first rehearsal.

It took place on stage with a few old tables and chairs as a set. The director explained the decor: a door centre, two doors on each side etc.

At the first rehearsal the actors read their parts book in hand and the prompter was silent. The director sat on the forestage and gave his instructions to the cast. ‘What should I do here?’ asked one actor. ‘Sit on the sofa,’ the director answers. ‘And what should I be doing?’ asks another. ‘You are nervous, wring your hands and walk up and down,’ the director orders. ‘Can’t I sit down?’ the actor persists. ‘How can you possibly sit down when you are nervous?’ replies the bewildered director. So the first and second acts are set. On the next day, that is to say the second rehearsal, work continues in like manner with the third and fourth acts. The third and sometimes the fourth rehearsal consist of going through the whole thing again; the actors move about the stage, memorizing the director’s instructions, reading their lines in half-voice i.e., a whisper, gesticulating strongly in an attempt to arouse some feeling.

At the next rehearsal the lines must be known. In theatres with money this may last one or two days, and another rehearsal is arranged where the actors play without script but still at half voice. The prompter, however, works at full voice.

At the next rehearsal the actors are expected to play at full voice. Then dress rehearsals begin with makeup, costumes and the set. Finally there is the performance.^*

This seems to have been a comparatively disciplined affair. More often than not the actors simply took over, ignoring the director, settling for what they knew best. An actress would move to the window or the fireplace for no better reason than that was what she always did.^† The script meant less than nothing. Sometimes the cast did not even bother to learn their lines. Leading actors would simply plant themselves downstage centre, by the prompter’s box, wait to be fed the lines and then deliver them straight at the audience in a ringing voice, giving a fine display of passion and ‘temperament’. Everyone, in fact, spoke their lines out front. Direct communication with other actors was minimal. Furniture was so arranged as to allow the actors to face front.

Sets were as stereotyped as the acting: wings, back-drops taken from stock, doors conventionally placed, standing isolated in space with no surrounding wall. The costumes were also ‘typical’. When Stanislavski attempted to have costumes made to specific designs he was told, with some asperity, that there were standard designs for character types and would continue to be. There was no sense of a need for change or renewal. The amateur theatre reflected the practice of the professional, only worse.

If Stanislavski wanted models or guidance he would have to look back a generation or so earlier, to the great days of the Maly Theatre when artistic standards had been set and discipline imposed by two men of genius, the actor Mikhail Shchepkin and the writer Nikolai Gogol. The actors Stanislavski so admired were impressive not merely because they had talent but because they had been trained at this school, where the first steps had been taken towards a genuinely Russian theatre and the creation of a genuinely Russian style – Realism.

Shchepkin

Mikhail Shchepkin (1788–1863) was born a serf on the estate of Count Wolkenstein. It was common practice among members of the Russian aristocracy in the eighteenth century to create companies of actors composed of their more talented serfs. These serfs not infrequently received an education at the same level as the children of their masters.

The prevailing acting style was even more conventionalised than during Stanislavski’s youth. Actors sang their lines in a high declamatory tone. According to Shchepkin’s Memoirs,

The actors’ playing was considered good when none of them spoke in his natural voice, but in a totally artificial tone, when the words were delivered in a loud voice and when each of them was accompanied by a gesture. The words ‘love’, ‘passion’, ‘treachery’ were shouted as loudly as possible but the facial expression did not add to the effect since it remained invariably tense and unnatural.^*

On making an exit it was obligatory to raise the right hand. Moreover, it was considered impolite for an actor to turn his back on the audience so that all exits had to be made facing front. Members of the cast spent a great deal of time, effort and ingenuity in devising methods of getting off stage without infringing this rule.

Conventions of staging were equally rigid. The acting area was divided into two parts, upstage to downstage, one mobile, the other immobile. The immobile area, where the actors posed impressively, was reserved for the aristocratic characters, whose house was represented on that side of the stage. The mobile area was the province of characters coming from the outside world, the lower orders, whose manner of delivery was more agitated, i.e., less dignified. Alternatively, the stage could be divided horizontally, from left to right; principal roles downstage, supporting roles centre stage, minor roles upstage.

These were the conventions in which Shchepkin, who displayed talent early, was educated. In 1810, however, he saw Prince Meshcherski in a comedy by Soumarov, The Supposed Dowry. The prince’s acting style was quite different from the rest of the cast. There was an almost total absence of gestures and his delivery was natural. Shchepkin records in his Memoirs that he was not, at first, impressed. This was not ‘acting’. This was too much like real life. And yet, there were impressive moments.

It is curious, but despite the simplicity of his playing, which I considered an inability to act properly, when, as his part progressed, there was any question of money you could see how his soul was wracked and, at that moment, we forgot all the other actors. The fear of death, the fear of losing his money were striking and horrifying in the prince’s playing and were by no means diminished by the simple style in which he spoke.^*

By the end of the performance Shchepkin was asking himself whether the prince was not right and he, wrong.

Some time later he found himself playing the same role and not succeeding. He could not speak naturally on the stage; his declamatory habits were too ingrained. It was no good trying to imitate the prince if he could not create the internal process by which Meshcherski had achieved his results.

An accident came to the rescue. One day he was rehearsing Sganarelle in Molière’s School for Husbands. He was tired and running out of energy and began ‘ju...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• A Brief Chronology
• Introduction
• 1. Foundations
• 2. The Growth of the ‘System’
• 3. Writing the ‘System’
• 4. The Method of Physical Action
• 5. The Progress of an Idea
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Index of Topics