Russian Theatre in Practice

The Director's Guide

Amy Skinner, Amy Skinner

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781474284431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theaterregie und& Theaterproduktion

Amidst the turmoil of political revolution, the stage directors of twentieth-century Russia rewrote the rules of theatre making. From realism to the avant-garde, politics to postmodernism, and revolution to repression, these practitioners shaped perceptions of theatre direction across the world. This edited volume introduces students and practitioners alike to the innovations of Russia's directors, from Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod Meyerhold to Anatoly Efros, Oleg Efremov and Genrietta Ianovskaia. Strongly practical in its approach, Russian Theatre in Practice: The Director's Guide equips readers with an understanding of the varying approaches of each director, as well as the opportunity to participate and explore their ideas in practice. The full range of the director's role is covered, including work on text, rehearsal technique, space and proxemics, audience theory and characterization. Each chapter focuses on one director, exploring their historical context, and combining an examination of their directing theory and technique with practical exercises for use in classroom or rehearsal settings. Through their ground-breaking ideas and techniques, Russia's directors still demand our attention, and in this volume they come to life as a powerful resource for today's theatre makers.

1

Innovative Practices: Stanislavsky Directs Chekhov and Gorky

Maria Shevtsova

Stanislavsky was an amateur, although anything but a novice, when Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko contacted him to discuss the possibility of founding a new type of theatre.¹ He had a considerable number of acting and directing achievements behind him with the Society of Art and Literature, which he had established in Moscow in 1888.² Nemirovich-Danchenko was an esteemed playwright whose now forgotten The Worth of Life won the prestigious Griboyedov prize in 1896 over The Seagull by his friend Anton Chekhov; and while he prided himself on being a literary man, he was also a teacher of acting at the Moscow Philharmonic School. As is well known, the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) was born from their eighteen-hour deliberations in 1897 on what, exactly, they would expect of a new professional theatre without the clichés, posturing and rhetoric dominating professional Russian theatre practice.³

Two opposing approaches to directing

Nemirovich-Danchenko had persuaded Chekhov to allow the Art Theatre to stage The Seagull after its humiliating flop at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. In fact, its failure was due to a misunderstanding in that the play had been billed for a benefit and, since such occasions generally anticipated lightness of tone, it was performed as an outright comedy. This did not sit well with Chekhov’s subtle composition, and the actors overacted, caught in their uncertainty as to what kind of play it was and how it was to be performed. Chekhov was loath to repeat the experience, especially in a fledgling venture like the Art Theatre, despite Nemirovich-Danchenko’s reassurances as to The Seagull’s literary merits, on the one hand, and Stanislavsky’s experience as a director, on the other. The Seagull was the last production of the Art Theatre’s first season in 1898, and its novelty was evident. The play was of an unclassifiable genre, and the stage work was nothing like anything audiences had seen before. Irrespective of the production’s various weaknesses – including Stanislavsky’s and Maria Roksanova’s performances as Trigorin and Nina Zarechnaya – the actors were less forced and more natural, and they worked towards a harmonious whole in which the stage design and all other scenic elements were integrated.

Uncle Vanya (1899), followed by The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), both of which Chekhov wrote especially for the Art Theatre, obliged Stanislavsky and the actors to work in unaccustomed ways even more. Chekhov’s story lines were not clear-cut; links between causes, effects and consequences were tenuous; and dialogue appeared fragmented – at times inconsequential and, at others, simply disconnected. His revolutionary dramaturgy relied on mood rather than event, on impression and association rather than firmly etched action, on the ambiguity of emotions rather than explicit passions. Furthermore, its social and historical markers were allusive, and so a far cry from the accurately detailed Tsar Fyodor Ioannich by Alexei Tolstoy, which inaugurated the Art Theatre, or the no less explicit The Sunken Bell, reprised from Stanislavsky’s earlier production of Gerhart Hauptmann’s play for his Society to close the MAT’s first season. It is small wonder that, faced with Chekhov’s innovations in The Seagull for the very first time, Stanislavsky did not know by which end to begin.⁴

It is not that Stanislavsky’s theatre experience had deserted him but that it was challenged, and his initial bewilderment fed Nemirovich-Danchenko’s belief that Stanislavsky had little knowledge of literature. Indeed, this was the assumption on which the two men had agreed their division of labour for the MAT, which was to cause friction in the near future: Nemirovich was in charge of literary decisions – the choice and interpretation of plays and discussion of them with the company – and, in the event of Stanislavsky’s disagreement, he had the veto on them; Stanislavsky had the upper hand on matters of staging, on which he had a corresponding veto. In actual practice, their blueprint did not work out quite so neatly, especially as Nemirovich-Danchenko began to overstep the boundaries of his remit.

Stanislavsky had gone along with Nemirovich-Danchenko’s assessment of his alleged literary deficit, but his production plan for The Seagull, as later for the remaining plays of the Chekhov quartet, showed a fine instinct for textual analysis when it was to be put to use on the stage. Nemirovich-Danchenko was suitably impressed, writing to Chekhov that the blocking was ‘very bold’;⁵ later, he extolled Stanislavsky’s ‘fiery and highly gifted imagination’.⁶ In the meantime, when rehearsing the play while Stanislavsky continued to work on the ‘score’ – the term Stanislavsky used rather than ‘plan’ – he tempered anything that might interfere with the half tones he deemed to be quintessentially Chekhovian.

The Seagull, then, was an initiation into a dimension that Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard were to expand but which Stanislavsky had not previously encountered; that, in fact, no one at the MAT had met before, not even Nemirovich-Danchenko who may well have seen the literary value of The Seagull immediately (as he was to see it in all of Chekhov’s plays, with marked reservations about The Cherry Orchard) but whose full scenic potential he had not grasped, unlike Stanislavsky who had, and quickly, while he was writing the score. In other words, embedded in the MAT’s deep engagement with Chekhov were two opposing directorial approaches that would soon encompass Maxim Gorky’s very first plays The Petty Bourgeois (Meshchanye) and The Lower Depths, both mounted in 1902.⁷ By the end of the Chekhov and Gorky period – Chekhov died in 1904, while the last MAT Gorky première was Children of the Sun in 1905 – the divergence between the two directorial approaches was more than clear.

Their divergence can be put simply. Stanislavsky’s premises were those of an actor-director while Nemirovich-Danchenko’s, for all his hands-on work with the MAT actors as a director, were those of a writer-director for whom the word as such, the author’s word, pre-empted and determined staging. As a consequence, the author’s word had priority over any scenic needs perceived by a director or, for that matter, by an actor. Stanislavsky’s croaking frogs during Treplev’s play within the play in The Seagull, for instance, or the scraping sound of a mouse during Masha and Vershinin’s unspoken avowals of love in The Three Sisters irritated Nemirovich-Danchenko beyond measure: they were Stanislavsky’s fanciful additions to the author’s texts – ‘caprices’ was Nemirovich-Danchenko’s word. For Stanislavsky, by contrast, invented details like these, much like cuts in dialogue or repetitions of phrases, were devised by and for the theatre, which had to be identified by its integrity as a unique, separate but not autonomous, art.⁸

This did not mean that Stanislavsky downgraded the text and its precisions and complexities as such. On the contrary, as his scores show, he paid close attention to dramatic texts, developing his scenic vision from them. What Stanislavsky’s approach indicates is his concern with the non-said beneath and beyond the words on the page (he was to call it the ‘subtext’) and how this could be communicated through body language – stance, gesture, movement – and through sound, light, colour and other sonic and visual means. The latter group also materialized the words on the page by denoting (or only implying) time, place, situations, circumstances and social conditions, all of which provided more than a stage setting: they suggested the feeling, atmosphere and innuendos of the not-said and, too, of the not-done, like the invisible love affair between Masha and Vershinin. The strongest outward sign of their love was the sound of ‘tram-tam-tam’, made joyfully in Stanislavsky’s production. Stanislavsky’s appeal to the sensory expression of meanings that were generated by performance, however excessive this expression may have been (Chekhov famously derided the abundant sound effects of The Cherry Orchard), was always motivated by his sense – a sixth sense – of the stage.

In the case of Uncle Vanya, both Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko put the production before their differences. Stanislavsky’s actor-and-performance perspective and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s author-oriented one converged in Uncle Vanya, creating such a unison of mood and tone not only between the actors’ performances but also between them and the entire stage composition that even Aleksandr Kugel, the MAT’s harshest critic, barely found fault with it.⁹

Stanislavsky had contributed to the success of Uncle Vanya by his sterling performance of Astrov, but he had also resorted to his ‘caprices’ by writing vignettes into the production that were not to be found in Chekhov’s text. Take this one, for example. When Serebryakov and his wife prepare to leave the estate in Act IV, he kisses everyone including his wife, forgetting that she was going with him. No sooner does he realize his mistake than he waves it away with his hand. Stanislavsky saw possibilities for humour in a situation that, in the closing scene of Act III, was fraught with tension, and he had suggested these actions to the actor in the role. As Marianna Stroyeva observes, embroidered moments such as these had introduced a comic tone not obvious in The Seagull, and this brought a new awareness that Chekhov’s characters were capable of stoic resistance against their suffering instead of submitting to it.¹⁰ Stanislavsky’s insight allowed him to heighten the resilience and hope filtering through Sonya’s closing speech.

Stanislavsky’s and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s respective positions on directing throw into relief the seminal practices of the MAT’s Chekhov–Gorky period and just how much they had overturned the theatre conventions of their time; and they were to affect world theatre throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These two factors – the one internal to the MAT’s definition of itself in Russia and the other external in its inspiration, impact and influence outside Russia – need to be recalled since, having made history, the MAT’s pioneering actions for the modern era can all too easily subside into history and be taken for granted or forgotten.

What were these innovative practices? First of all, the MAT established the principle of a theatre’s close artistic collaboration with writers. This new theatre understood that it could not sustain its claims to newness without contemporary material; nor could its box office survive on classics alone. It found a contemporary playwright in Chekhov, as it was to do in Gorky, a popular prose writer whom Chekhov had convinced to write plays for the company. Second, the MAT fostered its relationship with these writers to ensure that it received a succession of fresh scripts capable of encouraging the company’s creative growth – a model that the MAT attempted to maintain during the turbulent 1920s and 1930s, with mixed results. Chekhov quickly became the house playwright, which the MAT hoped Gorky would also do (this did not eventuate), and the bond between the company and its dramatist, who wrote parts in The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard with specific actors in mind, had a twofold effect: it stimulated the MAT’s commitment to ensemble acting, as well as its efforts to perform in that seamless, free flow which, in several years to come, Stanislavsky would define as ‘organic’. Gorky’s plays for the MAT, although of a different character to Chekhov’s by their plebeian milieu and front-on depiction of social reality, as Gorky knew it, sustained these goals.

The third innovative practice, then, of the Chekhov–Gorky years concerns acting. A new theatre required new actors, and Stanislavsky looked to the development of the MAT actors as he questioned his own way of acting while he came to grips with the vanguard drama of his day. The process for Stanislavsky, as he went from Astrov among the intelligentsia of Uncle Vanya to Satin among the disenfranchised, the poor, the outcast and the homeless of The Lower Depths, was one of learning how to embody the everyday life (byt) appropriate to given protagonists and endow them with believable emotion. The everyday was peculiar to the new drama – also in other countries of Europe, Henrik Ibsen’s version being particularly familiar to Stanislavsky – and the theatrical ‘tricks’ that, to Stanislavsky’s mind, were nothing but cheap tricks were wholly inadequate for the unassuming tasks of truthfulness set for the stage when everyday life appeared on it.

It is from Stanislavsky’s search for a transparent theatre that emerged the fourth decisive practice – that of the modern director, the orchestrator-conductor who pulled all the strands of a production together, as in a symphony, necessarily involving all the players at work. Stanislavsky had garnered his directorial experience at the Society for Art and Literature, largely in the tyrannical style of Ludwig Chronegk, who had commanded the company of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen.¹¹ His vision of the MAT as an ensemble company called such antecedents into question. Furthermore, his encounter with Chek...