Systems of Rehearsal

Stanislavsky, Brecht, Grotowski, and Brook

Shomit Mitter

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134917105
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Categoría: Darstellende Kunst

The gap between theory and practice in rehearsal is wide. many actors and directors apply theories without fully understanding them, and most accounts of rehearsal techniques fail to put the methods in context.
Systems of Rehearsal is the first systematic appraisal of the three principal paradigms in which virtually all theatre work is conducted today - those developed by Stanislavsky, Brecht and Grotowski. The author compares each system ot the work of the contemporary director who, says Mitter, is the Great Imitator of each of them: Peter Brook. The result is the most comprehensive introduction to modern theatre available.

1
TO BE:

Konstantin Stanislavsky and Peter Brook

The actor must dig inside himself for responses, but at the same time must be open to outside stimuli. Acting was the marriage of these two processes.¹

(Albert Hunt paraphrasing Peter Brook in rehearsal)

Actually in each physical act there is an inner psychological motive which impels physical action, as in every psychological inner action there is also a physical action, which expresses its psychic nature.

The union of these two actions results in organic action on the stage.²

(Konstantin Stanislavsky)

STANISLAVSKY: TO BE

On 5 September 1869, the six-year-old Konstantin Alexeyev (‘Stanislavsky’ was a stage name) made his first stage appearance as Winter in a tableau vivant depicting the four seasons. He had been instructed to pretend to tend a fire represented by a candle placed behind some logs. As the curtain rose little Kostya, ashamed at having to make believe, actually prodded the candle which fell over and set fire to the cotton wool with which the stage was covered. The fire was put out but Kostya was unceremoniously carried to the nursery where he was severely scolded and cried bitterly. In his autobiography, Stanislavsky recalls being terribly embarrassed at having to beguile the audience; the act of actually overturning the candle was, in contrast, ‘completely natural and logical’.³ The lessons of this early experience are carefully noted: ‘the discomfort of unreasonable presence on the stage, and the inner truth of reasoned presence and action on it’, writes Stanislavsky, ‘control me on the stage even at the present day’.⁴ An action is meaningful only if it is real, and reality is a function of reason.

Over sixty years after his incendiary début, Stanislavsky, thinly disguised as the drama teacher Tortsov in An Actor Prepares, has another young Kostya (also an autobiographical figure) attempt to light a fire on stage. Kostya makes the mistake of asking for matches:

‘The fireplace is made of paper. Did you intend to burn down the theatre?’

‘I was just going to pretend,’ I explained….

‘To pretend to light a fire, pretended matches are sufficient …. What needs to burn is your imagination…. [L]et me see what you would do if my supposed facts were true…. [I]f acts as a lever to lift us out of the world of actuality into the realm of imagination.’⁵

Truth on stage is what the actor construes as real.

Both Kostyas face the same problem: they are obliged simultaneously to display their fidelity to two embarrassingly incompatible orders of reality. On the one hand they must imbue with truth the ‘fires’ their characters tend. On the other hand, sincerity demands that it also be conceded that the fires do not in fact exist.

In the case of little Kostya, this gap is bridged accidentally. As the cotton wool on the stage catches fire, the actor’s response can be real because the fire is real. The elder Kostya, unable to allow actuality to intercede on his behalf, must resort to more subtle means. The solution offered to him is that of Tortsov’s ‘magic if’:

It is as though he says to himself: ‘I know that everything by which I am surrounded on the stage…is all make-believe. But if it were real…this is how I would act…’. And from the instant that his soul is aware of the magic phrase ‘if it were,’ the actual world around him ceases to interest him, he is carried off to another plane, to a life created by his imagination.⁶

The expedient works in two stages. First, Stanislavsky emphasizes that the actor must acknowledge that the objects with which he is surrounded are only stage properties, fictional objects in a constructed world. This is a concession to actuality, a recognition of the literal truth of the situation on stage. The actor thus disarms the audience by establishing that everything is ‘clear, honest and above-board’.⁷ His concern is with truth, not artifice.

However, having made this gesture, Stanislavsky immediately goes on to dismiss all this as ‘crude’ and ‘having no significance’.⁸ What he is really interested in, we now gather, is the truth of the imaginary situation on stage—the truth of the world of the character. The concession to actuality is just a stratagem, a means of ensuring that the subsequent flight of the actor’s imagination into the circumstances of the drama does not explicitly refute the inescapable fact that the character is only a fabrication. Thus Stanislavsky gives the impression of having resolved the contradiction between the truths of actuality and contrivance by satisfying within the parameters of a single prompt their otherwise disparate claims. In fact the opposition is not resolved at all. The argument secures the release of the imagination not by orchestrating a union of truths but by obliterating the claims of one of the two positions through an elaborate and beguiling pretence of taking account of it. By acknowledging the claims of actuality, the ‘magic if’ denies it grounds on which to disturb the still waters of imagined truths. By then interpreting its ascendency as axiomatic, Stanislavsky’s actor may now construe as real what is blatantly unreal. Through a devastating combination of censorship and propaganda, the actor may make belief.

The ability of the ‘if’ to rid the imagination of the claims of actuality is concomitant with its ability to rid the actor-character of the burden of acknowledging the presence of the actor-self. Just as ‘if’ ignores actuality by pretending to take account of it, so also it suppresses the actor’s everyday self by viewing the character initially as ‘other’. Once that is done the actor can work solely in the world of the character without fear of being interrupted awkwardly by actuality. Thus the actor, by using ‘if’ in the first instance (‘If I was the character I would…’), can eventually work ‘without dividing his creative problems into “I” and “if I”’.⁹ Having set into motion the machinery of its mischief, the ‘if’ is withdrawn from what is then a pristine and unfettered condition of authentic, non-literal being. From a convenient but uncomfortable apprenticeship under ‘if I’, the actor graduates to the authority and energy of ‘I’.

Thus the value of ‘if’ is that it allows you to ‘achieve a complete merging of yourself and the character of your part’.¹⁰ This is for Stanislavsky the highest condition to which an actor can aspire—a temporary but total transformation into a received order of being. As Stanislavsky wrote of one of his earliest successes as an actor in the role of Rostanov in Dostoevsky’s The Village of Stepanchikovo, ‘I live the life of Rostanov, I think his thoughts, I cease to be myself. I become another man, a man like Rostanov.’¹¹ At the very end of his career, in a rehearsal of Tartuffe, Stanislavsky still holds that ‘Art begins when there is no role, when there is only the “I”’.¹² The product of the sublimation of (‘if I’ into ‘I’ is a state of unperturbed veracity-in-fiction, ‘to be’.

There is of course an irony about using the ‘magic if’ to generate the condition ‘I am’ in this way: the ability of the ‘if’ to neutralize the mutually exclusive opposition between fiction and actuality is contingent upon the resolution of yet another conflict of irreconcilables—the actor’s credulity and the fact that the ‘I am’ is inescapably a product of contrivance. If the actor’s sense of truth is an essential prerequisite for an action to be deemed real on stage, then the actor’s growing awareness of the strategic underpinning of the ‘if’ is likely eventually to erode that truth. Veracity cannot reliably be sustained by a device as fundamentally opposed to it as subterfuge.

Stanislavsky’s solution to the problem is to invoke a secondary inversion designed to disarm the ‘if’. Just as the ‘if’ muzzles actuality by recognizing it, so also the ‘I’ now undermines the ‘if’ in the very act of using it. For instance, when Stanislavsky declares that ‘the actor’s belief in his own action places him on the path of truth’,¹³ a subtle shift of emphasis is implied. There is something about the conviction with which Stanislavsky speaks of the ‘path to truth’ that suggests that for him the actor’s belief is not after all a matter of expediency, merely a means to an end, that of convincing the audience of the truth of something that is ‘actually’ untrue. There is as well a further sense in which the actor, through his belief, creates reality in the theatre. In his biography of Stanislavsky, David Magarshack observes that for Stanislavsky ‘the actor had to believe in what he did or said on stage and that truth on the stage was merely what the actor believed in’.¹⁴ The absence of the audience in Magarshack’s equation suggests too that the relationship between truth and belief is not causal as much as symbiotic. Trivially, an action is true because the actor believes in it; far more importantly, the actor is able to believe in the action because it is true. Stage truth displaces actuality by becoming it.

The impulse to realism in Stanislavsky then seems not entirely to have been based on a desire to imitate reality. Rather, it seems to be born of an overwhelming urge to engender nature, to beget an order of reality which we cannot possess in life, a reality which we desire precisely because it is ‘other’. In all great art the life of the human spirit is realized, but in the theatre a person can become that reality, literally embody it. This, for Stanislavsky, is the essence of theatre—to become another. ‘Anybody can imitate an image’, he writes, ‘but only a true talent can become an image.’¹⁵ Of his success as Rostanov, Stanislavsky concludes, ‘then I had talent, for in this role (although it was almost the only one) I had become Rostanov, while in my other roles I merely copied and imitated the necessary image’.¹⁶ Stage art for Stanislavsky is not mimesis, it is metamorphosis. The aim is not merely to convince but to create. The subject is not life but its transcendence.

An implication of the notion that stage reality is a product not of imitation but of creation is that actors must really feel the emotions and sensations of the characters they depict. The actors’ belief, generated by their imagined sense of reality in a situation, is not in itself sufficient guarantee of their capacity to evoke ‘life’ on the stage. Their work must be founded on the pulse of their emotions which alone can signal the obliteration of the gulf which divides character from actor. Imagination implies an otherness which is precisely what art frees us of. Merely to imagine is to imitate, whereas to feel is to become.

Stanislavsky’s insistence that actors should feel what they portray creates a problem in that there is no reason to suppose that their emotions should on demand coincide with those of their characters. The profound difficulty of the actor’s task arises out of this obligation to create in a manner that is true to both personality and text—the one aspect of which is familiar but to be transcended, the other ‘other’ and to be embodied. This is the challenge of the actor’s situation:

How does it happen that one artist creates a character under circumstances given him by another artist?¹⁷

STANISLAVSKY: TO FIND THE FACE CONSTRUCTED IN THE MIND

In Creating a Role, Stanislavsky maintains that ‘in the language of the actor to know is synonymous with to feel’.¹⁸ Only by feeling something can actors be satisfied that they are intimate with it with a fullness that approaches the required condition of being that thing. In the alchemy of drawing reality from representation, the actor’s problem is therefore primarily that of knowledge. If to know is to feel and to feel is utterly to be, then to know is, by logical extension, to be. To know more about a character is to experience it more fully and eventually seamlessly to become it. Stanislavsky’s answer to the question, ‘What is the actor to do about the portions of the play which do not evoke the miracle of instant intuitive comprehension?’ is that ‘All such portions must be studied to disclose what materials they possess to incite him to ardour.’¹⁹ In the slippage between the terms ‘ardour’ and ‘comprehension’ lies the assumption that the one really is the other. The chapter ends with a section entitled ‘The Appraisal of the Facts’. The phrase is explained: ‘to appraise the facts is to take all the alien life created by the playwright and make it one’s own’.²⁰ Awareness and possession are one.

Most people who have some experience of teaching would probably agree that students best understand the things they have previously had reason to question. A question sets up a framework of contextual interest to which the answer may be referred so that, through its discovered relationship with its relevance, it is better retained in th...