The Routledge Companion to Performance Practitioners

Volume One

Franc Chamberlain, Bernadette Sweeney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000038859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Schauspielerei & Vorsprechen

The Routledge Companion to Performance Practitioners collects the outstanding biographical and production overviews of key theatre practitioners first featured in the popular Routledge Performance Practitioners series of guidebooks.

Each of the chapters is written by an expert on a particular figure, from Stanislavsky and Brecht to Laban and Decroux, and places their work in its social and historical context. Summaries and analyses of their key productions indicate how each practitioner's theoretical approaches to performance and the performer were manifested in practice.

All 22 practitioners from the original series are represented, with this volume covering those born before the end of the First World War. This is the definitive first step for students, scholars and practitioners hoping to acquaint themselves with the leading names in performance, or deepen their knowledge of these seminal figures.

1
STANISLAVSKY (1863–1938)

Bella Merlin

1.1 Biography in social and artistic context

Introduction

→Actor↗Director→Husband←Director↖Father→Actor↙Director↗Teacher↑

The challenge for anyone tracing Stanislavsky’s biography is that the path isn’t linear. Sometimes he ditched an idea only to pick it up again years later; at other times, the preoccupations of his mature life can be traced right back to his childhood. He was full of contradictions and experimentations, and he was often an artistic maverick. One thing’s for sure: this is a man who was passionate about theatrical ‘truth’. His evolution as a theatre practitioner can be divided into four broad sections: the amateur years, the director dictator, round-the-table analysis and the final legacies. There are times when the work of the director dominated, then for a while the writer became central, and at other times actor training was foregrounded. Added to all this, there were political events in Russia which influenced and censored his choice of vocabulary, and various artistic ‘isms’ (including Naturalism and Symbolism) also played their part in defining Stanislavsky’s ‘system’.

The amateur years: 1863–98

Kostya Alekseyev

Born in 1863 into one of Russia’s wealthiest families, Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev was the second of nine siblings. Along with four brothers and four sisters, his childhood was spent at the theatre, opera, circus and ballet: arts and entertainment formed the family’s staple diet. It was no surprise when, in 1877, his father converted a room at their country house into a theatre, where the children produced plays for the guests’ entertainment. Here, at the age of fourteen, Kostya began writing up these forays into drama; his youthful eagerness to analyse his own work would, later in his adulthood, inform his acting ‘system’. By 1885 – aged twenty-two – his Notebooks were filled with increasingly sophisticated questions: ‘What is the physiological aspect of the role? The psychic aspect of the role?’ (Stanislavsky cited in Benedetti 1999: 23). Already he had made the vital connection between body and mind.

Kostya’s young professional life was spent in the family textile business, although his passion for theatre soon hurled him into a series of ventures, not the least of which was the Alekseyev Circle, his family’s highly acclaimed acting troupe. When the Circle folded in 1888, Kostya fuelled his love of performing by secretly appearing in a host of risqué amateur theatricals. To protect the family’s reputation, he adopted the stage name, ‘Stanislavsky’, after a ballerina whom, as a young boy, he had lovingly adored from afar. Before long, the ‘Stanislavsky’ cover was blown, when his father discovered him cavorting in a lewd French farce and immediately prompted him to legitimise his acting. Thereupon, Stanislavsky undertook his next entrepreneurial project, the formation of the Moscow Amateur Music-Dramatic Circle. Within months, this had given way to the far more ambitious Society of Art and Literature, involving fellow collaborators, Fyodor Komissarzhevsky (an opera singer) (1832–1905) and Aleksandr Fedotov (a director) (1841–95). Working with theatre professionals provoked in Stanislavsky a serious need to question his own acting.

An early glimpse of a ‘system’

His first major engagement with the Society was in 1888 taking the lead role in Pushkin’s The Miserly Knight. The experience threw up three concerns: What were the differences between ‘character’ acting and ‘personality’ acting? How could actors stimulate their imaginations and therefore their ‘creative will’? And how did actors ‘get inside’ the director’s ideas?

The first concern arose because Stanislavsky envisaged himself as a dashing ‘personality’ actor, and the Miserly Knight as a romantic lead; Fedotov, however, saw the role as a decrepit old man. Given that Stanislavsky was only twenty-five, this was clearly a case of casting against ‘type’. Not quite knowing what to do with the part, he adopted an externalised style of ‘character’ acting that he knew was really lacking ‘something’. This gave rise to his second concern: how to stimulate the imagination? In an attempt to find the ‘something’ lacking, he spent a night locked in the cellar of a castle. This experiment was his first intuitive understanding of what he was later to call affective memory, whereby actors find an analogous situation from their own experience that mirrors the character’s fictional life. In typical fervour, Stanislavsky went to an extreme. By setting up a real situation, he hoped that, once he returned to the rehearsal room, his memory of the gloomy experience would provide the elusive ‘something’ that was currently missing in his ‘Knight’. He was wrong: all he got was a cold (and his imagination seemed none the sharper). The third difficulty in his rehearsal of The Miserly Knight was that Fedotov had very specific results that he wanted him to achieve. Yet Stanislavsky had no method for personalising those results, and all he could do was mimic them. Although it was frustrating, the seeds of his ‘system’ had been planted: how was he to move from external result to internal process?

A production of Krilov’s The Spoiled Darling distracted him for a while that year. His leading lady was a charming actress, Maria Perevoshchikova (1866–1943), who also hid behind a stage name, that of ‘Lilina’. They fell in love, were married in 1889, and spent the rest of their lives as partners and workmates.

The distraction of love didn’t last forever. The internal/external acting dilemma arose again in 1896 when Stanislavsky played Othello. One of the biggest influences on his performance style was the great nineteenth-century actor, Mikhail Shchepkin (1788–1863). Shchepkin believed that the key to ‘truthful’ acting was to ‘take your examples from real life’. Following Shchepkin’s advice, Stanislavsky found a real-life ‘image’ upon which to base his interpretation of Othello – it was an Arab whom he met and befriended in Paris. He then set about crafting a ‘mask’ for himself based on the flesh-and-blood Arab acquaintance. The ‘mask’ was precise in its external detail, but inside there was nothing living, it was just an imitation. Othello threw up more concerns for the ever-questioning Stanislavsky: When does an actor ‘become’ the character? And how does the actor observe life and then turn those observations into ‘creative will’, or ‘inspiration’? Stanislavsky had tried to incarnate a ‘truthful’, psychological portrait, and yet nothing emerged but a skilful sculpture.

But why was Stanislavsky so preoccupied with the psychology of acting? Turning to the state of Russian theatre at the time soon explains his heartfelt frustration.

The state of the arts

Theatrical repertoire in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century was in a quagmire of stagnation. The Imperial theatres (those subsidised by the State) dominated Moscow and St Petersburg and, along with a smattering of privately owned venues, they operated under the beady eyes of Tsar Nicholas II’s censors. Their hawkish gaze kept a tight rein on any play whose subject matter might be deemed politically or personally subversive. ‘Safe’ theatrical fare consisted of melodramas and vaudevilles, hastily translated from the French and German originals, though occasionally an innovative piece of new writing surfaced. Describing his play, The Last Will, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858–1943) wrote that:

This play greatly pleased the actors. It was written as was said in those days, in soft tones; it did not offend anyone and revolutionised nothing; the chief thing about it was its excellent roles: big scenes with temperament and effective exits.

(Nemirovich-Danchenko 1937: 12)

Not only does Nemirovich admit here that the more timid the play, the more likely its success, but also he reveals the importance of the actors.

Russian theatre of the nineteenth century was actor-driven: the idea of a director shaping a production was unheard of. In fact, ‘The role of stage director was a very modest one; it had neither a creative nor a pedagogic content. Actors listened to him merely out of politeness’ (ibid.: 29). But there’s no need for a director when you already know what’s required of your acting. In a repertoire where melodrama predominated, actors were cast to a formulaic type known as an emploi. This meant that each performer specialised in a particular role, such as the romantic lover, the comic flunkey or the bumbling father, according to his or her personality and stature. This emploi then became the blueprint for any role that the actor played. The audience grew familiar with both the actor and the emploi, and began to expect it at every performance, regardless of the play. The result of the audience’s expectation was the development of a ‘star system’, as ‘actors lost their independence and went into the service of the crowd’ (Stanislavsky 1984: 105). The ‘big scenes with temperament and effective exits’ referred to by Nemirovich involved the star actors being ‘called out’ by the audience in the middle of a scene to come centre stage and receive wild applause. The remaining onstage cast froze, doll-like, until the adored actor had finished bowing, at which point the action of the play could resume. It was the playwright’s job to incorporate these moments into a script, and the more famous the actor the more effective exits would be required. Here, then, was no ensemble acting: here was a theatre dominated by a ‘star system’.

The situation was exacerbated by the frighteningly short rehearsal periods, which often resulted in actors simply not knowing their lines. And yet it was hardly their fault. At a time when leisure pursuits were limited, a rapid turnover of repertoire was a prerequisite of any business-minded theatre. Consequently, rehearsal time for a new production was a rarity, not a necessity. Quantity ruled over quality, leading to a situation where most performers had greater need of a prompter than a director. To save them from embarrassment, the prompt box was situated Down-Stage-Centre and sunk into the floor. It was not uncommon for much of a play’s action to be performed ‘DSC’, so that the actors could be prompted through their entire performance.

The ‘star system’ also impacted on the design of a show. Designers were still unusual in most theatres, and the rapidity of the repertoire’s turnaround prohibited anything more ambitious than the recycling of old productions. Sets were dragged from the store, with stock canvas backdrops depicting dining rooms, gardens, or parlours, reappearing regardless of the genre or form of the play in question. As for costume design, this was determined by the leading actresses, each of whom was expected to supply her own wardrobe. Should the leading lady choose to wear crimson in the third act, then woe betide the female juvenile if she decided to wear red! An actress’s acclaim lay in direct proportion to the voluptuousness of her wardrobe; therefore, money was vital and that often meant relying on a wealthy patron. As one actress of the time declared: ‘How could you have a career without a wardrobe. What is an actress without costumes? She is a beggar; her route to the stage is cut off’ (Velizarii cited in Schuler 1996: 31). Wealth and wardrobe swung an actress’s fate: acting processes were the last consideration.

For all their influence, the professional acumen of the ‘stars’ was questionable. Before the monopoly of the Imperial theatres was abolished in 1882, actor-coaching was rare. Even when training programmes did become established, ‘many actresses and actors firmly rejected the idea that acting was a learned skill’ (ibid.: 39). So how did young actors acquire their craft? By imitating the great performers, of course! Even Stanislavsky confessed that his usual practice as an amateur was to copy blindly his favourite artist of the Imperial Maly Theatre. He memorised every bit of business in the great actor’s interpretation of a role, learning the full range of his gestures and intonations, and leaving Stanislavsky’s own directors with nothing to do. After all, he had already ‘acquired’ his performance, albeit second-hand. But how else could young actors learn when there was no written ‘manual’ that might help them? Thus, a type of performance evolved in which shouting, exaggerated gestures and simple characterisations were all ‘larded with animal temperament’ – and that was considered ‘full-toned acting’ (Stanislavsky 1984: 40). The artistic climate into which Stanislavsky emerged as a theatre practitioner was fairly bleak: a chaos devoid of coherent stage pictures, design concepts, directorial decisions, trained professionals and ensemble companies. Under these conditions, and without an acting ‘A–Z’, Stanislavsky began his process of ‘revolution’.

The theatrical revolution

Stanislavsky’s theatrical revolution began in earnest with his famously long conversation with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko on 22 June 1897. Nemirovich was an award-winning playwright and teacher at the Philharmonic School and, on his instigation, the two men met at the stylish Moscow haunt, the Slavyansky Bazaar. Having been struck by Stanislavsky’s acting, and knowing of the family’s wealth, Nemirovich invited him to discuss the prospects of founding a new theatre. His intention was to harness the talent of his own pupils with Stanislavsky’s amateur colleagues; at the same time, he couldn’t disguise the fact that he had an eye on those Alekseyev roubles.… The meeting lasted from 2 p.m. until 8 a.m. the following morning, during which time the two men heatedly debated artistic ideals, staging techniques, discipline and ethics, organ-isational strategies, future repertoire and their respective responsibilities. The only major hiccup was Stanislavsky’s refusal to jeopardise his family’s fortune. Nonetheless, the pioneering discussion forged an alliance and, by the summer of the following year, the first season of the fledgling Moscow Art Theatre was deep in rehearsal, with Stanislavsky serving as an actor and director.

His main artistic concern was that the new company should explode the emptiness of traditional theatre practice; instead, plays should be infused with psychological content. The troublesome question was whose task was it to create that psychological content: the actors or the directors? Knowing no better, Stanislavsky began with the Director.

The director dictator: 1891–1906

Where the ideas came from

Stanislavsky’s directing strategy involved a ‘production plan’, which he created by filling a play-text with a myriad of details that he thought out before rehearsals began. The details concerned every aspect of the play: how to move, how to act, where and when to change positions (a little like working out the ‘blocking’), even the kind of voices that he thought the actors should use. Once the production plan was prepared, the actors then had to carry out his directions with total and unquestioning precision.

The summer of 1898 wasn’t the first time Stanislavsky had used a production plan. He had in fact developed this practice out of two formative encoun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Stanislavsky (1863–1938)
• 2 Meyerhold (1874–1940)
• 3 Copeau (1879–1949)
• 4 Laban (1879–1958)
• 5 Wigman (1886–1973)
• 6 Chekhov (1891–1955)
• 7 Brecht (1898–1956)
• 8 Decroux (1898–1991)
• 9 Ohno (1906–2010) and Hijikata (1928–1986)
• 10 Littlewood (1914–2002)
• Index