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First printing 1972
__NOTE__ No copyright. [2]CONTENTS
5 19 33 44 47 63 73 85 96 128 144 159 178 219 237 252 264 274 283 307
About the Author
Introduction
Stanislavsky's Time
Civic Responsibility in Art
The Director and the Playwright
Stage Direction is a Profession
The Director and the Times
Theatre and Cinema
Reflections on the Classics
The Philistines
Towards the Conception
Genre
Realising the Conception
Work with the Actors
Method
Work with the Designer
Music in the Drama Production
Training the Company
Meeting with Shakespeare
List of Gcorgi Tovstonogov's Produc
tions
At one point in this book Tovstono-
gov writes: ``Speaking of the way rehearsals should be conducted, I feel
that one of the most serious diseases in stage direction today is
verbosity. We always seem to be talking non-stop.
``.. .We waste a tremendous amount of time on useless talk. As I see it, ideally our profession should be a silent one.
``.. .Very often, how I feel after a rehearsal, whether I feel satisfied or dissatisfied, depends on the amount of talking I have done. If I've done a lot of talking, then something's wrong: it means I've tried to cover up with words the fact that I am not sure what I want in a particular scene.''
There's a lot of truth in these words. Indeed, it is because Tovstonogov displays such inspired vitality at rehearsals and in all his everyday work, is so constructive in the complex business of staging a play - in giving real help to the actors and collaborating with the author, designer and composer - that this discourse on the job of the stagedirector is so interesting and useful. His views are convincing because they are so well substantiated, backed up with practical examples drawn freely from his vast experience in the theatre. They are all the more valuable in that Tovstonogov does not try to foist his opinions 5 upon the reader but, on the contrary, avoids the slightest note of superiority and dogmatism, and plays down his own ability and experience.
It is this humility, sincerity with himself and others, coupled with a high sense of professional responsibility that makes Tovstonogov's art so vital and startlingly original, that makes him stand head and shoulders above the many cock-sure mediocrities.
Paradoxical as it may seem, it is because he constantly casts doubt on the value of his experience, that we feel such tremendous respect for him and confidence in the correctness of his opinions.
One chapter of this book is entitled ``Stage Direction Is a Profession'' and is a plea for professionalism all the way. Tovstonogov examines almost every aspect of the director's work in his book, and stresses throughout the director's professional duty.
Tovstonogov makes no attempt to dazzle the reader with brilliant literary tricks, paradoxes and clever twists of style. He writes in a straightforward, honest manner of the hard effort that goes into producing a play, getting what he wants from the actors, and achieving a high level of dramatic art.
Tovstonogov is an extremely versatile director. He has tried his hand at all kinds of themes, genres and styles. Yet his productions all have one thing in common: they all deal with man as a member of society, are all in a major key, and all have a strong note of conviction running through them, the conviction that man is essentially good and strong, and that he is capable of reorganising life and making it good too.
This optimistic theme was naturally strongest in such heroic plays as The Death of the Squadron, The Optimistic Tragedy, and the story of Julius Fucik.
The Leningrad Pushkin Theatre production of The Optimistic Tragedy, for which Tovstonogov was awarded a Lenin Prize, was one of the greatest triumphs of the Soviet theatre. It was a triumph on every count. A. Bosulayev's magnificent sets created the impression of a road of battles and glory running into the distance through boundless expanses. Kara Karayev's original music was full of emotion and lyricism. The acting was first-class: O. Lebzak brought tremendous moral purity and humanity to the role of the Woman-Commissar, Y. Tulubeyev's Vozhak, the anarchist leader, had quite extraordinary evil force, and A. Sokolov as Siply was mercilessly acute.
But the main thing was the way all these individual ingredients were blended, so that instead of clashing with one another they merged to form a single monumental whole. They were welded together by the producer, who perceived in Vishnevsky's play the sharp realism of the 6 characters, the poetic convention of the framework and the deep, lyrical undercurrents expressed by the music.
Tovstonogov managed to give the authentic acting and the designer's poetic rendering of nature a truly epic sweep, so that the production, harmonious and uplifting, was in fact an optimistic tragedy.
For those who saw the production, the scene of the sailors' farewell ball where the terrible pain of parting was presented so poignantly or the episodes where the regiment is seen leaving for the front, are quite unforgettable. As the severe, majestic outlines of Leningrad's buildings float slowly past and away, and the endless road unfolds, leading into the distance, the spellbound audience are irresistibly drawn into the moving epic being enacted on the stage.
Tovstonogov visualised The Optimistic Tragedy as the strands of individual destinies interwoven perfectly naturally with the vast canvas of history.
A similar effect was achieved in Tovstonogov's production of Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned, where revolutionary ardour was blended with true humanity, mingled with lyricism. P. Luspekayev in the role of Nagulny combined child-like naivety and simplicity, authentic and life-like to the last detail, with tremendous integrity and devotion to noble ideas that gave him almost superhuman stature. T. Doronina as Lushka and Y. Lcbedev as old Shchukar were tremendously human. The whole production represented a superb synthesis of the epic and the lyrical, the social and the human.
However, Tovstonogov's repertoire includes other, very different productions, far removed from the heroic. In these too, he is to be found constantly searching for features that correspond to his convictions, his faith in life, and his constant desire to present it in a major key, in all its beauty and power.
Many of Tovstonogov's productions at the Gorky Theatre in Leningrad begin with a short prologue, added to the original play by the producer as a ``tuning-fork'' for what follows.
Thus When the Acacias Bloom begins with two smart, witty ``masters of ceremonies'' introducing the actors, establishing contact with the audience. The gay, festive ``parade'' serves to prepare us for a light-hearted, playful show.
While in the prologue to When the Acacias Bloom the stage lights are full on, for Sixth Floor they are all out but for a dim light in the gloomy corridor of Madame Marais' boarding house. Bertha, one of the tenants, gropes her way around, with tousled head and bleary eyes, only half awake. The silhouettes of people stretching are visible through the frosted glass of one of the doors, and a young woman trots blithely past on her high-heels, proudly bearing a chamber pot.
7Instead of being given a foretaste of a theatrical ``occasion'' we have an invitation to take a look at a slice of unadorned everyday life.
The Fox and the Grapes opens to the striking of a gong, at which the actors slowly make their way up the steps from the orchestra pit onto the practically empty stage. They walk seriously with fierce concentration as if mounting a rostrum to deliver a speech, to explain, argue and convince. We realise that we are about to witness a fierce battle of ideas, a philosophic debate, that the loud stroke of the gong, the concentration of the actors and the meticulous precision with which they take up their places on the stage are an invitation to listen carefully and seriously, and follow closely the meaning of what is about to begin.
Before The Idiot, the title page of Dostoyevsky's novel, yellow with age, printed in the old-fashioned script, is projected onto a small screen. One can almost sense the enchanting smell of old books in the theatre. And before every scene a new page is opened, a new page of the old book with the yellowed edges, taking the audience back to the time when Dostoycvsky wrote his impassioned work.
Tovstonogov manages to find his own formula for every play, for every author, his own special ``rules of play'' as he calls it.
Why did Tovstonogov decide on a light-hearted, ``theatrical'' method for N. Vinnikov's When the Acacias Bloom? The point is that in this play with its light humour, and lyrical, youthful note, many of the situations are somewhat artificial and the characters superficial, so that care over psychological authenticity and ``depth'' would be out of place. Tovstonogov adopts a tongue-in-cheek approach to some of the more naive points in the action, characters and dialogue, though perfectly good-naturedly, without any intention of getting at the author. He prefers plain fun, or light-hearted hints at something more profound to seriously presenting a storm in a tea cup.
Yet, despite his ironic attitude to the characters, Tovstonogov is charmed by their youth, by their youthful sincerity and vigour.
The producer's dual attitude is embodied in the two ``masters of ceremonies'', who run an original commentary on the action. One of them is a man, a wise, dispassionate and slightly mocking observer, the other is an expansive woman, who goes into rhapsodies over the characters of the play, unable to remain uninvolved.
The light-hearted, ``theatrical'' acting is perfectly suited to the play. The heroes are students, and in every room of their hostel there is laughter, chattering, friendly mystification and romping. Indeed the whole production is one delightful, scintillating, youthful romp, where everything seems to occur spontaneously, in an improvised manner, out of excessive exuberance, effervescence and imagination. It throbs with 8 the creative pulse of youth, sometimes humorously, sometimes magically turning the world upside down, making a holiday of a working day and turning the mundane into something quite extraordinary.
We are taken for a ride by Tovstonogov, designer S. Mandel and the whole cast, but what a delightful ride it is, and far from being offended we are quite enchanted, especially as this apparently casual romp has great theatrical precision, optimism and elegance.
Tovstonogov did not merely hit on just the right form for the play: he injected added irony and humour into it. I would even go so far as to say that, paradoxical as it may seem, his light-hearted approach is what enables us to take it seriously, as a serious work of art. Indeed, I can't help feeling that if it had been produced in all seriousness, then we, the audience, would as likely as not have adopted a tongue- incheck approach to the production.
Tovstonogov finds a completely different answer for A. Gehry's Sixth Floor. Both he and the designer, V. Stepanov, went for all-out realism. Tovstonogov's aim was to show that self-sacrifice and the purifying dream of happiness are to be found in the most mundane circumstances among the most ordinary people. Hence the way he begins by showing the unvarnished prose of life with all its incongruities, before going on to gradually reveal its hidden beauty.
All the sordid aspects and routine of everyday existence, both amusing and tragic, are represented here: the drab, peeling walls, the squeaking doors badly in need of oiling, and even the long loud flushing of the toilet, whither the tenants race one another of a morning.
Why is it that all the perfectly ordinary details of this joyless existence are so interesting, why is it that taken together they make real art, and delight us as real theatre (though of a very different kind from When the Acacias Bloom)?
Simply because it is all done so boldly and slickly according to the producer's well-defined intentions.
Tovstonogov brings all the events and conflicts in the play, and all the characters' feelings to boiling point, so that they simmer with passion, and the vigorous acting of many of the cast is just right to give the irrepressible joie de vivre of the simple French folk the play is about.
Daylight never penetrates the sixth floor, the same old light as was there in the prologue glows feebly, yet by the end of the first act the stage seems brighter, as if there were sunshine there after all. For we have found it in the characters' hearts.
Tovstonogov manages to overcome the sentimentality and shallowness of Gehry's play by intensifying all conflicts and emotions to the utmost, adding salt and dimension. If he brought an added irony to 9 Vinnikov's play, here he brings a passionate faith in the essential beauty and nobility of man that was lacking in the original.
A great contrast is provided by Tovstonogov's production of Guilherme Figueiredo's The Fox and the Grapes, where attention to detail is completely abandoned for a laconic statement of the essentials. Here the aim was to present the general idea and Tovstonogov went about it himself, dispensing with the services of a designer, producing an extremely simple decor---one might even say ``ascetic''---consisting of white flagstones and doric columns, against a background of the azure sky of Greece, with the temple of Delphi in sharply reduced perspective in the distance. The result is a remarkable elevated atmosphere-almost rarified-ideal for thought, and high, noble ideas.
The acting too is reduced to essentials, and there is nothing superfluous in gestures or delivery, just intense concentration on the sense of the scene, dialogue or monologue in progress.
Tovstonogov's production of Nicolai's Signer Mario Is Writing a Comedy adds new dimension to a rather slight theme by bringing out the clash between the world that is the product of Signer Mario's imagination and the middle-class world of his family life.
Signor Mario's play is about noble and base feelings, purity and wickedness, hope and justice, and so contrasts with the world he actually lives in that it is as though two different plays are in progress at the same time. Tovstonogov treats the whole like an intricate piece of music in which various themes and refrains, uniting whole scenes and dialogues, come and go alternately either harmonising or clashing.
Signor Mario (played by Kopelyan) and the creatures of his fancy life move and speak as if obeying an invisible conductor's baton in the harmonious world of the imagination. Tragedy, passion and struggle are all dimly perceived in an as yet hazy plot, in a vague aura of magic that shrouds the nascent work. Everything is perfectly real yet at the same time has an almost fairy-tale quality about it, and the simplest actions seem remarkable in the beautiful and incomprehensible miracle of their birth in the calm joy of Signor Mario's profound meditation. His characters, and he himself, seem to act in slow motion in a special clear atmosphere purified by the breath of humane thought. They act slowly and carefully as if weighing up the truth and correctness of their words and actions as they go along.
It is as though the producer has bewitched his actors. They are totally obedient to his will, following and obeying an inner melody which can be sensed but not heard, almost like sleepwalkers. One is reminded of the Pied Piper of Hamlin.
But this sweet music is interrupted by the cacophonic blasts of the middle-class world in which Signor Mario lives. His quarrelsome 10 vociferous wife, his unruly, boorish son, and his dull, sentimental daughter arc the eccentric philistine trio that constantly distract him from his creative meditations. When they start their noisy chatter, shouting and gesticulating, it is as if the room has been invaded by swarms of buzzing flies that cannot be warded off no matter how hard you try to slap them down. Signor Mario blocks his ears, shuts his eyes and tries to answer, to make them see reason, to calm them down. Then suddenly an idea flashes through his mind, some image of his future play, and he no longer heeds them. They carry on waving their arms about furiously, but Signor Mario, and we the audience with him, are no longer listening, and their mouths form soundless words. The audience rarely fails to applaud this clever device for showing the retreat of vulgar philistinism before the attack of creativeness.
However, in his search for bold expressive devices Tovstonogov never loses sight of the inner life and psychology of the characters. His watchword in everything he does is Stanislavsky's formula ``the life of the human spirit on the stage''. His constant urge to put across a subtle and accurate psychological image of the characters of a play was very much in evidence in his production of A. Volodin's Five Evenings.
In this production we find perfect authenticity in every minor detail of behaviour coupled with tremendous dramatic intensity.
The orchestra pit is covered to form an apron stage. A moving platform comes forward out of the darkness bearing a minimum of modest furniture such as one finds in the most modest home. Everything is brought as close as possible to the audience, enabling the most subtle psychological details to be observed. Although every minor detail is brought out, one never feels the hand of the producer, for everything seems ``dissolved'' in the actors themselves and the director merely ``lights them up'', helping to reveal the wealth of their inner livesfocussing the audience's attention on what he wants them to watch at a particular moment.
Tovstonogov is equally attentive to psychological detail in tackling a heroic drama like Korneichuk's The Death of the Squadron. Here he presents the triumphant force of the revolutionary masses and the certain doom of the Whiteguard forces not only, and indeed not so much, in striking epic crowd scenes, as in subtle psychological details in the characters' behaviour and relationships. The profound social theme is refracted through the prism of the characters' thoughts, views and feelings, treated with remarkable insight.
Y. Kopelyan is superb in the role of Baltiets. Although a small part, he manages to give it the patience bordering on heroism, the proud unbending will and complete conviction that epitomise the Communist, with no doubt as to the final triumph of his just cause.
11Lebedev plays Kobza the kulak, cruel, sly and boorish, and full of irony in his relation with other people, and especially his masters and the officer caste. He makes no effort to hide his contempt, but rather takes a pleasure in showing it wherever possible. On the other hand he is devious and two-faced with Gaidai and the rank-and-file sailors, trying to assure them of his support for the cause he realises will triumph/ Thus the social aspects of the play are presented from within rather than from without, through the characters' psychological make-up.
Acting in full accordance with the producer's wishes, P. Luspckayev in the role of the miner Gaidai does not so much insist on the anarchist illusions as on the tragedy of a man afflicted by doubt and suspicion, and lack of faith in the revolutionary awareness of the masses. His political error is presented with great penetration as an example of the way doubt in the people can corrode the spirit of an essentially brave and honest man and lead him to isolation and loneliness, and political blindness.
Tovstonogov's insistence on getting an actor fully exploit the psychological potentialities of a role, accounts for the very fine performance usually achieved under his guidance.
Y. Tolubeyev gave one of his finest performances in Tovstonogov's production of The Optimistic Tragedy, for which he was awarded a Lenin Prize. Tolubeyev's Vozhak combined generalised features with certain accurately chosen individual qualities, and the result was a fine plastic, sculptural unity. He gave the role great human and philosophical dimension, making it an embodiment of the evil force of hatred for mankind, doomed thanks to the contempt and anger of the • sane majority.
Tovstonogov and K. Lavrov found a very interesting psychological approach to the role of Sergei in Arbuzov's Irkutsk Story. In many productions of this play Sergei is a static, ideal hero, a paradigm of virtue. Valya and Victor change, but Sergei remains infallible, irreproachable. Tovstonogov and Lavrov got away from this static approach and gave us a Sergei whose character develops during the play. Sergei's love for Valya transforms him as well as her. At the beginning of the play he is honest and pure, but somewhat hard-hearted and turned in on himself, displaying youthful directness. He gradually changes to become more tolerant, more subtle and less emotionally constrained. It is no longer a question of Sergei magnanimously giving Valya the key to his spiritual treasure-house. In the course of their relationship he too is gradually enriched by her; she brings joy and spiritual generosity into his life. Thus the role acquired a new freshness, inner dynamism and truth.
12It was under Tovstonogov's guidance that Smoktunovsky's remarkable talent flourished to the full. His performance as Prince Myshkin in the stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot made theatre history. This production brought to the stage a whole world of evil and injustice, full of tragedy and suffering, and there in the middle of it all stood a man with a gentle, hesitant, slightly puzzled smile and clear thoughtful eyes making slight, helpless gestures with his fine, sensitive hands.
Smoktunovsky didn't ``do'' anything, he didn't ``act'' but merely looked tenderly, searchingly into his partners' eyes, listening intently and slightly anxiously to what they were saying, with a caressing, almost guilty smile on his lips, yet it was startingly, shatteringly moving to watch. Nothing tragic had happened, nothing out of the ordinary even. He had done no more than walk slowly across the stage, talk quietly, smile, or stand, lost in thought. But it produced an effect of such amazing purity and goodness that you could not help loving him and suffering at the presentiment that cruel life might extinguish this pure flame of humanity.
Prince Myshkin comes slowly forward to the front of the stage and stands for a moment deep in thought, glances nervously about him. For a second a shadow of anxiety clouds his face, then vanishes, and he walks back upstage as slowly as before. What's the explanation for the burst of applause from the audience, not at a lively exchange, a passionate monologue or a magnificent set, but at a slow walk, a second of meditation, a fleeting glance?
What was so extraordinary was the inner light that glowed in Smoktunovsky's Myshkin, the tenderness that showed in his pale face, that coloured every word, every movement. His gestures might be awkward and limp, somewhat feeble, but there was such amazing grace in this awkwardness, just as in the whole of his outwardly slow, monotonous, almost impaired movement on the stage there was a captivating rhythm.
Tovstonogov has gathered together a splendid troup of actors, all of them highly individual talents, yet at the same time speaking the same language when it comes to the essentials of their art. There is latiana Doronina with her verve and great feminine charm, Ludmila Makarova who is outstanding in lyrical and light, comic roles, the fine character actress Zinaida Sharko, with her vigorous, virile talent, Yefim Kopelyan, Yevgeny Lebedev, with his rare gift for ``metamorphosis'', the delicate, sensitive Nikolai Korn, the strong, vivacious Pavel Luspekayev, the highly imaginative Sergei Yurski, and the original talent of Vladislav Strzhelchik, Kirill Lavrov, Vladimir Kuznetsov and many others.
Tovstonogov is convinced that the theatre offers practically unlimited scope for expression and this accounts for the way he is constantly ex- 13 perimenting with new devices and techniques. This is perhaps best illustrated by his bold experimental production of The Defiant Ones, based on a film-script by N. E. Douglas and H. J. Smith.
There are many problems involved in producing a stage version of a film, but Tovstonogov succeeded because he made no attempt to vie with the cinema, as regards authenticity and pace, but instead concentrated on the characters themselves and their inner lives.
V. Stepanov's sets were rather stylised making use of highly expressive imagery, but the behaviour of the characters who talk quietly from the front of the stage in close proximity to the audience is perfectly natural and realistic in every detail.
Tovstonogov's production served to prove that the theatre is a suitable medium for many things that we had hitherto thought of as exclusively reserved for the cinema. Our interest was sustained during long silences, when two characters sat passing a cigarette back and forth between them, or eating and drinking together without a word, for the simple reason that it was all part of a genuine expression of complex human relationships.
The subject-the way two men, a white man and a negro, forget their mutual hatred in their common misfortune, and the best human feelings gradually triumph in their hearts-is treated in a virile, adult manner without a trace of sentimentality. Kopelyan plays the white man Jackson as possessed of a cynical, cruel, unreasonable sense of superiority, and boundless egoism. He makes no attempt to tone down the role with hints that this man may after all be capable of nobility of soul, and this serves to make the final denouement all the more convincing.
The production abounds in psychological ``discoveries''. In the fight scene, for example, the sad, sorrowful eyes of the Negro Gallen (played by Pavel Luspekayev) are unforgettable, as he goes to hit Jackson not because he wants to but because he has to.
With his penchant for deep, bold, and sometimes even paradoxical psychological strokes, Tovstonogov has struck some very interesting new notes in his productions of the classics. He never treats the classics as museum pieces, attempting to ``restore'' them or simply touch them up, but manages to find in them something totally new and unexpected.
His production of Griboyedov's Woe from Wit was highly controversial, but there is no denying that his treatment of the events of this immortal play is so absorbing, so psychologically justified and convincing that one is prepared to forget everything one knows about it and enjoy it as a totally new experience. It is exhilarating and fresh as if it had just come straight from the author's pen, with all the surprising novelty of a true work of art. Tatiana Doronina as Sophia, 14 Kirill Lavrov as Molchalin and Sergei Yursky as Chatsky give wholly original performances, based on an inspired understanding of the director's brilliant, unique interpretation.
In Maxim Gorky's The Barbarians Tovstonogov synthesises the almost tragic dynamism of the characters and their behaviour with the slow, lazy pace of events. The monstrous contradictions, the comic and tragic realities of life in tsarist Russia, are worked up to a high pitch of tragicomedy. The ridiculous lurks in the tragic, while one has only to scratch the surface of the tragic to find the ridiculous.
The characters are at once perfectly authentic and believable and rather fantastic in their twisted psychology. Everything about their lives is stained with pettiness and triviality. Even the most violent passions are really of the most trifling nature, as uninspiring as the characters themselves-Monakhov, that provincial Mephistopheles, played by Lebedev; Tsiganov, the empty, cynical descendant of the ``superfluous man'' (Strzhelchik), and the pathetic petty tyrant Redozubov (Politseimako).
Luspekayev's performance in the difficult role of Cherkun was likewise based on the theme of an ideological impasse, the futility of a life of unbridled egoism.
Luspekayev plays a man who is on the whole a very attractive character, intelligent, strong-willed and unable to accept weakness and falsehood without protest. He is potentially a hero, but, alas, his energy, intelligence, will and honesty are all wasted for the simple reason that he doesn't know what to do with them, where he is going. He is ideologically paralysed, and all his fine qualities turn sour and instead of enriching life serve only to embitter and corrode. All his energies are directed towards asserting himself and lead to cruelty and philistinism. In the long run all his efforts are either aggressive or futile.
Strzhelchik gives an equally original interpretation of the role of Tsiganov. Here we have the sorry, pitiful successor to the long line of ``superfluous men'', combining features of Pechorin, Yevgeny Onegin and Childe Harold, the sad consummation of their plight, in whom romanticism has given way to cynicism and Pechorin's fatalism to total scepticism and moral bankruptcy.
The whole production has a highly charged emotional atmosphere and throbs with tension. Yelena Popova's Anna is highly strung and oversensitive to injury, while Katya (Zinaida Sharko) is as sharp as nails with her stinging, impassioned protest.
Nadezda Monakhova is usually played as a passive character, waiting patiently for the great love her heart yearns for to dawn. Here another surprise was in store for us, for Tatyana Doronina plays her as a passionate, frankly demanding woman, who expects beauty, heroism 15 and passion from life. When we are told that she is ``a dangerous woman'', we understand this to refer not so much to her womanly charms as to her strong, uncompromising and rebellious nature, and her contempt for the vulgarity of the life she sees around her.
Her clear blue eyes are not languid but bright, enquiring and trustful, and her great dignity of bearing and outward calm conceal a passionate soul.
One of Tovstonogov's greatest triumphs was his production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. He interprets the play as a drama of fine, sensitive, intelligent people, who move like planets, each in his own orbit, as though lacking the energy to help one another escape the impasse of their lives. Throughout one senses the question being asked: Where does the borderline come between delicacy, high-principled ``non-interference'' in other people's lives, and self-centredness?
Many of the monologues are treated as painful confessions, representing a plea for help, while the other characters move away and try not to listen but concentrate on themselves. This subtly orchestrated production is full of merciless criticism of inactivity as being really no more than apathy, thanks to which the characters allow one another to lose themselves and enable the arch-enemy, philistinism, to triumph.
A documentary film, Dress Rehearsal, was made of the way rehearsals on this production were carried out. We see all the preparations for the dress rehearsal, the actors making up, the wardrobe mistress bringing round the costumes, the scenery being put up, and finally the three bells announcing the beginning of the performance. Then we are shown the birth of the production, so to speak: the first discussion round the table, the first rehearsals of separate scenes, the first runthrough. We are given the opportunity to watch the production in the making. The film brings us the atmosphere of life in a fine theatre, a serious, highly intellectual atmosphere. This is an extremely important point. Even in those painful moments of search for the best approach, and in moments of failure and frustration, or in those nervous moments before the curtain rises, the cast never lose control of themselves. They keep their sense of responsibility, their professional tact and restraint at all times and in all things-in their behaviour, in working things out, in their attitude to their partner, and last but not least in their humour.
The film conveys a feeling of intense creative activity, concentration, and profound, inquiring thought. What we are observing is the process of comprehending life, and we are reminded of a laboratory where the complex processes of human behaviour and relationships are studied under the microscope and experimented with, where ideas are prepared, and the laws governing those unexpected ``reactions'' which are what 16 makes the theatre so irresistibly convincing and fresh. Yet there is nothing unnaturally ponderous and overserious about the film's approach. The scriptwriter, director and cameraman have not worked in grim earnest with furrowed brow, but have taken a delight in capturing all the fun and humour they could spot. After all, everything is equally important in the theatre-grasping the author's ideas and style, trying on costumes, searching for a suitable frame for Baron Tuzenbach's spectacles, and the vigilance of the prompter safeguarding the integrity of every Chekhovian comma.
Naturally, Tovstonogov is the central figure in the film. All the threads of the narrative lead to him, for he is the creator, inspirer and organiser of the whole process we are watching. We may have seen Tovstonogov's productions on the stage. Here we are given a chance to see how he goes about his work. We know him as a strong-willed, firm man who has built up one of the finest theatre companies in the country. But watching him at work, we are struck not by a show of great authority and strong, despotic will, but above all by his boundless patience and tact. He docs not order people around and shout at them, but rather coaxes them, talks things over patiently, putting his ideas over as suggestions and trying to persuade them to agree with what he considers best. He lives through every moment of the performance from where he sits. As the actor recites a monologue, he sits completely absorbed in it, his lips moving, following every word, and his face assuming all sorts of different expressions as if he is testing for himself every note, every phrase of the monologue. He is completely wrapped up in it, concentrating fiercely, passionately, and yet mentally, creatively alert. One seems to grasp the special chacrri of his personality ---his conviction, the way he gives himself heart and soul to his work, arid lastly his cultivation, which may well be what gives his theatre its special style.
I feel this remarkable film is extremely interesting and useful to many people-to both theatre lovers and actors, novices and veterans alike. For it arouses interest in, and respect for, the theatre and all those who work in it, and provides a graphic illustration of what we call real theatrical art, Theatre with a capital T.
One could go on and on describing and analysing Tovstonogov's numerous other productions-Stein's The Ocean, Volodin's My Elder Sister and many, many others. Every one of them :has its triumphs, its defects, and its unique features which set it apart, yet they all have something in common, and that is the modern idiom of intelligent, vital theatre.
Tovstonogov has a way of expressing the most exciting ideas in the special language of the theatre. His productions have a convincing 17 power of dynamism and struggle, and reveal well the dynamics of actions and events, the power that brings life and movement to the theatre.
One never expects any of the antiquated theatrical devices from the actors of the Gorky Theatre-such as declamation, exaggerated character-acting, and slick, polished but glib recitation. Tovstonogov has made a real team of them, encouraged them to develop an ability for profound psychological penetration, without which serious modern theatre is, in my opinion, unthinkable. Moreover, it is not a question of making curious ``excursions'' into the labyrinths of the mind and wallowing in a psychologist's paradise: both producer and actors investigate the mind in order to present big, important ideas more thoroughly and convincingly.
The most interesting thing about Tovstonogov's art is his talent for combining range and scope in a production with tremendous attention to minute psychological details in the characters. His is thus a very special kind of theatre, where the actors' aesthetic convictions and approach to their work are unified.
In every production at the Gorky Theatre one feels the producer's will guiding the performance firmly and insistently in a particular direction.
The producer's will has nothing to do with despotism. When sensibly and correctly exerted, far from restricting or hindering, it unites the creative efforts of everyone participating in the production into a firm artistic whole.
By his treatment of a particular play, Tovstonogov is expressing his own attitude to life. His lively creative thought, his attitude to the dramatist and the play in question, testify to his active approach to life. The clarity and incisiveness of his scenic solutions reflect the clear-cut, positive nature of his views and convictions.
Tovstonogov's creative will helps him express the outlook of a modern Soviet artist in the theatre, the firm belief that life and man are essentially good, that they can, must and will be good. While adopting a different approach and different methods in each new play he stages, his message remains basically the same bold, life-asserting theme.
One chapter in this book ends: ``I am simply describing how I work, and saying what I think about our profession.''
I am convinced that many people will find his description both interesting and useful.
B. Lvov-Anokhm
[18] __ALPHA_LVL1__ INTRODUCTION
Thirty-five years in stage direction is
a long time in that in this time I have worked on over a hundred
productions. Yet it is not so long when I think of all the outstanding
dramatists whose works I have not yet attempted and the various
genres I just have not managed to get round to-I have done very
little Shakespeare, for example. So perhaps my best productions
are still to come and it is too early to draw up the final balance
sheet. It is in this light that I would prefer to regard the present
book.
The book was written in a somewhat unusual manner. The material includes articles written at various times for periodicals, talk and lecture notes and shorthand records of work with directors at theatres in the provinces. The examples I give belong to different periods of my work. When the third edition was being prepared, I wondered whether I ought to revise it, but finally decided to leave it as it was. The book covers a comparatively short period in the life of the Soviet theatre, and it naturally reflects my own personal tastes and views.
There are many theatres and many directors in this country, and, inevitably, not all of my colleagues will share my views on the contemporary theatre, my ideas about the director's role and the essence 19 of our profession. These views will no doubt find even more opponents abroad. Various theories of the theatre, which tend to grow like buttercups, have always found adherents, sometimes gifted ones. All directors who take their profession at all seriously are searching for new scenic forms, joining a search that has been going on for 2,500 years. In our profession, one cannot reasonably expect to ``convert'' anybody with books or articles. A production is another matter. Productions can sway people's convictions. But not all of them do.
The director's job is to produce plays. It is the theatre critic's job to write about them. But, with all due respect to theatre criticism, it must be admitted that we do not always see eye to eye. The director and the critic see the stage from a rather different standpoint, and there are some things in our profession of which only we ourselves can speak-and do so in a different manner from the adepts of theatre criticism. This is what moved me to take up the pen.
For a number of reasons, this book makes no claim to offer incontravertible truths. To begin with it is based on examples that are more familiar to the Soviet than to the foreign reader. Few of my impressions of dozens of productions seen in Britain, France, Poland, Germany, the USA and other countries have been reflected on these pages. Secondly, there are certain important aspects of the director's job that I have either not mentioned at all or only touched on briefly. Thirdly, nothing stands still in life: everything is in a constant state of flux, and that includes my own views. I cannot guarantee that in a couple of years' time I won't do a production that contradicts everything I have done to date and affirms principles that at present I firmly reject. Nor is it simply a matter of discarding old views. From year to year, from production to production, I am gradually developing my basic views to their logical conclusion by experiment, through the process of trial and error. These experiments and explorations are directed towards the most complicated and interesting thing in our art-finding the ideal form for the contemporary production, the best means of arousing fine feelings in people and helping to affirm justice and noble, humanitarian ideals.
I am also extremely concerned with the problem of training our successors, actors and directors alike, and questions of interrelation and interaction between the theatre and other art forms.
In our age of fantastic achievements in science, technology, and engineering design, the reverberations of which are felt by us in the theatre, it is difficult to predict what the theatre of the future will be like. Whereas certain advances in chemistry, engineering and building techniques have found application in theatre buildings, stage machinery, and scenery, the achievements of physiologists, biologists and psychol- 20 ogists, who are persistently exploring the secrets of man's mind and nature, have hitherto remained beyond the fringe of our practical work. Who can tell how we shall select and train directors and actors, distribute roles and produce plays, when science reveals to us the mechanism according to which the emotions arise, the nature of theatrical talent and the laws governing audience response?
But for the time being we dispose of no theory of stage work more perfect than Stanislavsky's system. All my experience has convinced me of this. I profess adherence to Stanislavsky's teaching, and as far as possible try to apply it in my work, instill it in my pupils, attempting to suppose how Stanislavsky would have developed it, were he alive today.
Here, in this introduction, I should like to dwell briefly on what I consider to be most important in our practical work, on Stanislavsky's system and its lasting importance for the development of Soviet and world theatre.
My extensive travels in this country and abroad, my countless visits to the theatres and numerous talks with actors, directors and other theatre folk, have convinced me, much to my distress, that many, many people misunderstand the great teaching of the reformer of the Russian stage.
There are several reasons for this. One is that at one time only a small circle of people were familiar with Stanislavsky's writings. A great deal of damage was done by popularisers and followers with a lop-sided view, knowing only a part of his system, some particular stage of his life. Perhaps Stanislavsky himself was partly to blame, since he did not always manage to describe his system in the most precise literary terms. One cannot expect a genius to be a Jack-of- alltrades, after all.
But the biggest mistake of which students of Stanislavsky are guilty is to identify the system with the practice of the Moscow Art Theatre at all stages of its emergence and development. This is not to say that we should value Stanislavsky the practitioner any less than Stanislavsky the theorist. After all, it is his practice-the productions he staged and the roles he played, his achievement in creating a fine theatre company from a group of enthusiastic amateurs and young actors -that convinces us of the truth of his teaching. Nevertheless, Stanislavsky and the Art Theatre are not one and the same thing, and it is wrong to confuse Stanislavsky's system with his activity as a producer.
The relationship between Stanislavsky and the Art Theatre was somewhat ambiguous. He was by no means satisfied with everything in the theatre he himself had founded. On several occasions he seemed 21 on the point of breaking with it. Before the Revolution he tried to found a new theatre together with Meyerhold. He set great store by his First Workshop, the first theatre studio dedicated to the system. Later he transferred his sympathy to the Second Workshop and still later to the Third Workshop (Vakhtangov's studio). Shortly before his death, Stanislavsky founded yet another workshop, where together with a group of actors from the Art Theatre he produced Moliere's Tartuffe as an exercise in his new ``method of physical action''.
At the same time, it cannot be denied that the truth of the system found its fullest confirmation in certain Art Theatre productions, and that it was there that Stanislavsky did his best work as a director.
Stanislavsky's dissatisfaction was typical of the eternal searcher and explorer.
Stanislavsky ``diverged'' not only with the Art Theatre, but with himself too. While claiming that his system was universal, he applied it most successfully with the plays of Chekhov, Tolstoi, Gorky and Turgenev, i.e., in works of psychological realism and domestic drama. Gogol and Shakespeare, judging by the results he achieved, resisted the system, while Schiller, for example, was quite alien to Stanislavsky the director. Among Soviet dramatists he was attracted only to those who continued the traditions of the Russian classics.
However, it by no means follows from this that Stanislavsky's tastes as regards repertoire were limited to Chekhov and other kindred authors.
Unfortunately, such experimental productions as Warm Heart and The Marriage of Figaro, in which the normal Art Theatre manner was quickened by sharp, grotesque form, representing a tremendous advance in the existence of the actor on the stage, remain little known to this day. They have not received the careful attention they deserve as productions that provide a key to understanding the live Stanislavsky, as opposed to the ``canonic version'' of Stanislavsky that circulates so widely today. It is here that Stanislavsky conducted his search for new forms of the realistic theatre, where the principle of psycho-physical acting, the psycho-technique really came into its own, bursting forth in a free play of unrestricted fancy and grotesque, and superb choice of conventions for the work in question. It was here that Stanislavsky solved the problem of genre, the author's ruling idea and the nature of the feelings.
Stanislavsky's work as a director is really a subject apart, one that has hitherto been little studied. Yet it is a fascinating and most instructive subject, and Stanislavsky undoubtedly deserves an important place in the history of the theatre as a director. And yet, it is a long time since his productions were seen on the stage, and were we to see 22 them today we could hardly expect to understand an artistic phenomenon and judge it properly outside the social and artistic context that engendered it. Of course, not all Stanislavsky's work as a director belongs to history. A great deal is valid and necessary for us today. Stanislavsky's teaching belongs entirely to the present-and to the future.
Stanislavsky created a theory, his famous system, which lay the foundations for a science of theatrical art. Its universality has been confirmed by his students and successors, talented actors and directors of our own multi-national Soviet theatre, and of theatres all over the world. Their name is legion. Some of them may not even know of Stanislavsky's system as such, and yet, unwittingly, they obey the laws Stanislavsky discovered.
It is widely held that Stanislavsky's theory is refuted by Bertolt Brecht's theory of epic theatre. But it seems to me that this is the biggest misconception of the century in the theatre. To begin with, as Brecht himself declared, his theory was created from the standpoint of the playwright and not the director so that the two theories are not strictly speaking comparable. But anyway, there is nothing fundamentally contradictory about them.
This is not to try and gloss over the differences between Brecht and Stanislavsky. These two outstanding theatrical figures of our century did, of course, differ considerably in their views. But it is to take a superficial view of both Stanislavsky and Brecht to try and contrast their systems. Brecht's alienation effect does not imply rejection of the laws of organic life on the stage, the logic of the action, character, and so on.
Brecht lived on twenty years after Stanislavsky's death. After the Second World War the didactic theatre came into its own, requiring new forms of communication between the theatre and the audience. Brecht sought the laws that would help activate this relationship and imbue it with the power of modern ideas, without detracting from its psychological basis. In order to ``alienate'' oneself, one must first have something to be alienated from, and here we .are inevitably brought back to the laws of organic unity of the physical and psychological life of the actor, discovered by Stanislavsky. This is borne out by productions I have seen, and especially the superb acting of Helene Weigel, Ernst Busch and many other outstanding players of the Berliner Ensemble.
The essence of Stanislavsky's system cannot be accurately summarised. To claim that my interpretation of it is correct would be unmodest to say the least. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to refute some of the more widespread misconceptions of the system.
23The root of these misconceptions held by theatre people who reject Stanislavsky, as I have realised from many meetings and conversations with foreign colleagues, is that Stanislavsky's name and teaching are associated with naturalism. Many leading Western directors and actors refer to Stanislavsky with respect, but as though he belonged entirely to the past. They see Stanislavsky as a man who created a system that was progressive for his time but only appropriate for productions of plays of a certain trend-Chekhov, Ibsen, Hauptmann and other realist dramatists of the turn of the century. Many of them regard him as a ``Russian Meiningen'', or a ``Russian Antoine''. Accordingly, in their opinion Stanislavsky's school represents a special development of the ideas of fimile Zola's naturalism for the theatre, and since naturalism is today an anachronism, the same goes for Stanislavsky and his ``system''.
It is true that Stanislavsky was strongly influenced by the Meiningen Players for a time and, as was only natural, subscribed to some of Antoine's ideas at an early stage in his career. It is also undeniable that Stanislavsky based his experiments on contemporary drama at a time when naturalism was in vogue. Stanislavsky himself admitted his enthusiasm for naturalism at one time. But this was a very short period in his work in the theatre and his system was conceived and developed after he had become disenchanted with naturalism and broken with it. Moreover-and this is a most important point of all-unlike the Meiningen Players and Antoine, Stanislavsky was primarily concerned with the inner meaning of works and emotional authenticity as opposed to external form.
I have only made this short historical excursion for the purpose of confuting a widespread misconception. The system (to be more exact, the system in its early, incomplete form) emerged at a time when the theatre was working on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, Ostrovsky and Turgenev. The first steps of the new system were also tested in the plays of Moliere and Goldoni. Its merits were brilliantly demonstrated in Vakhtangov's production of Gozzi's Princess Turandot, perhaps one of the outstanding productions of the century.
But the system was not born overnight. Stanislavsky was quite prepared to radically revise his views of how rehearsals should be conducted, and this revision sometimes amounted to categorical rejection of what only recently he had been ardently advocating. Stanislavsky spent years on his book on the system, constantly rewriting pages and whole chapters, and it did not appear until after his death. (Only the first volume, An Actor Prepares, was published in his lifetime.) Only a small portion of his writings are included in the eightvolume Collected Works. Shorthand records and recordings of his 24 rehearsals, annotated scripts, and his lessons with actors and students of the theatre workshops, are preserved in the archives of the Art Theatre and the opera theatre that bears his name. A great deal only survives in the memory of those who knew him.
Many popular pamphlets and books about Stanislavsky unfortunately give a lop-sided view of him, and provide fuel for his critics.
The idea that Stanislavsky was a naturalist is no more than a myth. The conviction that Stanislavsky's teaching is only applicable to a certain narrow range of plays and only of use to those who profess tothe most narrow realist credo, is based on the most deeply ingrained fallacies. It is my studied opinion that if every artist were to ``discover'' the real essence of Stanislavsky for himself, this, far from hindering, would actually facilitate the implementation of the most bold and personal creative intentions, and would help bring about a general, and possibly unprecedented, flowering of theatrical art. I should like to feel I am making some contribution here, however modest. Indeed, that is the main purpose of this book.
I had the good fortune to see many productions by Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko and their talented pupils. The most inventive director in the world might well envy Stanislavsky his brilliant, bold imagination. In my time I have worked with many actors trained according to the system, and their brilliance and apparently boundless versatility, their ability to play parts of the most diverse periods, dramatists and styles, is for me ample confutation of criticisms of the system as a collection of acting devices only appropriate to naturalist domestic drama.
One of the terms of the system that tends to be completely misinterpreted in the West is ``living the part''. When Stanislavsky spoke of the ``inner vision'', the inner visual images formed in the actor, in his imagination, he was not calling for some mystical, complete reincarnation of the actor in the role involving total rejection of his own ``I am''. The ``system'' actor is not a spiritualist medium, and ``living the part'' is not going into a trance.
The few seconds when the actor is fully transformed into the character he is playing, those felicitous moments-rare even for the geniuswhen the subconscious comes into play, are the greatest blessing in dramatic art, for nature is the supreme artist. Stanislavsky was perfectly aware how capricious and uncontrollable inspiration is and how difficult, almost impossible, it is to control the feelings. After long experiments with himself and other actors, Stanislavsky devised a method of teaching this psycho-technique and a method of working on a part that created the most favourable conditions for inspiration to arise. He proposed proceeding from the conscious to the sub- 25 conscious, bringing the conscious to exert an influence on the subconscious.
Stanislavsky never violated the creative nature of the actor, insisting that he evoke in himself exactly the same feelings as in the character he was playing. Stanislavsky claimed that the truth of the passions could be attained through authentic feelings, feelings that were not identical to, but similar to and consistent with the feelings of the characters in the play. ``Metamorphosis'' for Stanislavsky certainly had nothing to do with the transmigration of souls!
At the earlier stages of his work on the system, Stanislavsky sought an answer to the questions that were perplexing him from psychologists, philosophers and even yoga experts. Later he was to renounce not only such terms as ``ray emission'' and ``ray absorption'', but his whole idealist interpretation of the spiritual processes. He gradually came round to the opinion that the feelings are associated with man's material, physical nature. The system finally crystallised when Stanislavsky realised that man's psychological and physical life are inseparable, as is reflected in the name he gave to the culmination of his system--- ``the method of physical action''. Of course, this term, `` physical action'', does not reflect the concept adequately. But Stanislavsky was deliberately stressing the physical rather than the psychological, as being more tangible, amenable and tractable.
As I see it, even that outstanding director and theorist of the theatre Bertolt Brecht was somewhat baffled and misled by the terms ``feeling'' and ``metamorphosis''. I am quite sure this is why his theory is contrasted to Stanislavsky. Only at first sight do such concepts as `` alienation'' and retention of a critical distance rather than total absorption of the actor in his role appear to be the antithesis of Stanislavsky's terms. Stanislavsky himself does not regard complete ``metamorphosis'' to be possible: in choosing actions, constructing a logical chain of actions, a line of behaviour, the actor is guided throughout not by his subconscious but by an idea, an objective.
As much, if not more, damage has been done to Stanislavsky's teaching by the misinterpretation of his famous statement that the actor has always to make use of his own feelings in creating a role as meaning that the actor must always play himself. This idea has always had an appeal for lazy and untalented actors, and it is they who have declared in the name of Stanislavsky that transformation is hereby abolished. People who lack any natural gifts are wont to reduce any theory or teaching they come across to their own level, simplifying it and singling out those statements that seem most readily intelligible, ignoring all the rest. Reducing the whole system to the division of the play into ``pieces'' and ``objectives'', they have eviscerated Stanislavsky's teaching, 26 producing their own feeble version, that bears as much resemblance to the original as interior decorating does to art. They have chosen to interpret Stanislavsky's idea that you shouldn't ``act'' anything as an excuse to do nothing, to just simply be themselves, and ``act naturally''. But it was not Stanislavsky who equated truth with simplicity.
The system was based on the realist traditions of Russian acting, on the acting of Shchepkin, Mochalov, Martynov, the Sadovskys, and the most outstanding European actors-Salvini, Eleonora Duse and others -none of whom ever equated life and the stage, demanding an exact, mirror-like reflection of reality. Stanislavsky was not seeking simply the truth, but the artistic truth.
Having made Stanislavsky a naturalist, the next step was to ascribe to him indifference to form. There are people who seriously believe that the grey, blurred, amorphous nature of many productions is to be explained by the fidelity of their creators to Stanislavsky's teaching. It is beyond me where those who praise or condemn Stanislavsky for neglect of form got this idea from.
Stanislavsky was indeed opposed to certain theatrical forms, regarding them as obsolete or contradicting the content of a play, the author's style. In other words, Stanislavsky was opposed to all ossified forms and rubber stamps. He was all in favour of forms akin to real-life forms, but never regarded a play as a copy of life. Although many of his productions were based on the ``fourth wall'' principle, he attached the greatest importance to the nature of the imaginary fourth wall, as a major compositional feature. His choice of form for a production was never made simply on the basis of external features calculated to produce an effect. For him form was more than the tempo-rhythm and plastic aspect of a production: it was dictated by the standpoint he had chosen to adopt, in both the literal and figurative sense.
Those who saw his productions were constantly amazed by his inexhaustible inventiveness, the wealth of external forms, the variety of his mise-en-scene$, decorative devices, and so on. Stanislavsky was opposed not to form as such, but to superfluous form, form at the expense of the content, form that blurred the meaning of a play.
Another tenet of Stanislavsky's teaching that has fared little better is his thesis that in playing a bad character one should seek his good points.
This has been interpreted by some, often for non-artistic reasons, as an appeal for dispassionate objectivity, for civil and political indifference. In actual fact, Stanislavsky was simply warning against simplification and conforming to set patterns and stock features. In art intended to penetrate the depths of human nature, the ``life of the human spirit'', as Stanislavsky put it, the truth of evil is no less important than the 27 truth of good. Adherence to simple, straightforward logic can lead the actor to produce masks instead of full-blooded, live characters in all their human complexity. Even the person dominated by a single passion is not all that simple and straightforward. A complicated, contradictory nature does not necessarily mean doubts, hesitations and inner conflict. But if a brave man does not have to overcome danger and a good man has no difficulty in struggling with evil, then what value do bravery and goodness have, and can they be convincing?
Seeking good in a bad character does not mean imparting nobility to the scoundrel or revealing base motives behind noble actions. It is simply that lago is not all perfidy, and the kindly Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot is not all sincerity: there is much more to them than that. Showing positive features in a bad character is a fine device for illuminating a character in depth. The ``generosity'' of the miserly Harpagon or the ``modesty'' of the boastful Malvolio are not generosity or shyness ``in general''. Revealing features that appear to contradict the ruling passions of characters is simply to highlight their essential nature.
The law of contrast is an eternal law, and Stanislavsky was not the first to apply it in the theatre. But he had his own way of referring to it, which was not perhaps quite ``scholarly'', and this has enabled the ``scholastics'' to play with his words and distort them, making the impassioned artist a mere indifferent observer.
Shakespeare referred to the theatre as a mirror of nature/ Gogol regarded it as a rostrum from which a lot of useful things could be addressed to people. Stanislavsky, like many of his predecessors, saw the theatre above all as a school of morals and instruction in ethics, as a social force. He considered the free play of passions and characters unsanctified by a noble idea as an idle pastime that debased art. This being so, we must regard his idea of the objective and super-objective as the basic tenets of his system.
I do not intend to go into the meaning of these concepts here, since .anyone who is interested can easily refer to the appropriate passages in Stanislavsky's writings. But I consider them absolutely fundamental, so much so that it is inconceivable for me to put on a play without having decided in advance why and for whom it is necessary. Moreover, I ascribe my occasional failures to a mistaken interpretation of my own or the author's super-objective.
I am perfectly aware that an idea, however noble, significant and wise it may be, is not by itself enough to create a work of art. There are infinitely more good ideas than there are good productions. The old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions is fully 28 applicable to our work in the theatre. But on the other hand, the most superb skill and inventiveness on the part of the director is not worth a brass farthing if it serves base, anti-humanitarian aims.
Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko held that the audience comes to the theatre to commune with Shakespeare, Dostoycvsky, Chekhov and so on, and that the stage-director's job is to translate the author's thoughts from the language of literature into the language of the stage. Some directors regard fidelity to the author as imposing intolerable restrictions on their creative freedom. Not so Stanislavsky. And yet Stanislavsky never restricted the stage-director's role to that of the conscientious ``translator'', indifferent to what he is translating. The teaching of the objective and especially the super-objective places the director ``above'' the play, as it were. The time in which the director lives, his personal civic and aesthetic views, determine his attitude to a work, his interpretation of it, and the form of scenic embodiment he chooses. Enthusiasm for a play and its author, far from hindering the director, helps him-providcd he is a genuine artist-to achieve an unexpected, bold interpretation of the work.
Naturalist directors, it is true, tend to adopt a servile approach towards a play. Stanislavsky was far too original and independent to content himself with the role of ``translator'' of the dramatist. In his best productions we saw not only Chekhov, Moliere and Goldoni, but Stanislavsky's reading of them. He ``died'' in the actors, but not in the production as a whole, which bore the mark of his own unique personality. Thus, to the joy of communing with the author was added the joy of communing with the director.
Many of those who accuse Stanislavsky of a servile attitude to the author typical of the naturalist school are people who have not taken the trouble to even read his works, let alone try and understand them. Life has shown that the majority of Stanislavsky's opponents, eventually, sometimes after decades, came round to admitting that he was right.
I was fortunate enough to attend ten rehearsals conducted by Meyerhold, where he ``fought with his own formalism''. They were brilliant director's improvisations on themes from his previous productions. What had seemed unjustified in the actors' performance was extraordinarily apt when demonstrated by Meyerhold himself, and nobody felt that the vivid and highly unusual form of the mise-en-scene was at all contrived. After one of these demonstrations, the audience, consisting of actors and directors from various Moscow theatres, began to applaud wildly. Meyerhold held up his hand and said: ``I consider that this applause is due to my teacher Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky. I propose a congratulations telegram be sent to him.''
29Another of Stanislavsky's opponents, Solomon Mikhoels, towards the end of his life, paraphrasing Schubert's appraisal of Mozart, said of Stanislavsky: ``In my early life I said `I', later `I and Stanislavsky', still later `Stanislavsky and I'. Now I say: `Stanislavsky'.''
Even Brecht towards the end of his life admitted that his own system, speaking in Stanislavskian terms, could be described as a system concerning the super-objective.
Stanislavsky has numerous followers. They put on tragedies and vaudevilles, didactic and psychological dramas, Brechtian parables and literary compositions. And I am sure any one of them would be quite astounded at the suggestion that he is at all ``cramped'' by the system.
Stanislavsky called his system ``the actor's ABC''. His discoveries are great precisely because they are based on eternal, organic features of human nature. The laws governing the actor's inspiration, establishing the dependency of feeling on action, the unity of man's physical and psychological life are eternally valid. Though, of course, one may be unaware of their existence, just as Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain had gone through life without suspecting that he was speaking prose.
In my opinion, the best actor's creations of the last decade in Western Europe have been Scofield's Lear and Busch's Galileo. And whatever school of acting they themselves profess adherence to, they act in the Stanislavsky manner. I am sure he would have been most gratified to see such a brilliant confirmation of his teaching in their work. I don't know if they do any teaching work, but if they do, and are passing on what they have learnt, they can be said to be proselytising for Stanislavsky.
Trends in stage direction come and go. Aesthetic systems serve their time, and like everything else in this world, grow old and are succeeded by new ones. But Stanislavsky's system remains, for it is not connected to a passing fashion for any particular dramatists. It will last as long as man's psycho-physical nature remains unchanged. It is necessary to every stage artist as long as he remains faithful to the truth and, like Shakespeare, regards the theatre as a mirror of nature. Stanislavsky is of no use at all to those who do not need live people in the theatre. The system is of no use to those who have broken with realism and do not believe in the edifying role of the theatre, and consider that human beings cannot possibly understand one another.
Very often, it is true, people in life fail to understand one another. As I see it, the theatre, throughout its history, has tried to restore broken links and find a language to unite the stage and the auditorium. For me, the theatre is the place where the greatest communication is 30 possible, and the idea of incommunicability is totally alien to the stage. Stanislavsky the artist, the citizen and teacher-the teacher, good friend and adviser of all actors and directors who regard service to art as a social mission, who regard Man as the measure of all things and the actor as the plenipotentiary representative of the dramatist, the artistic •``comrade-in-arms'' of the director and the contemporary of the spectator.
Genius and talent are mysterious concepts. The genius creates according to laws of which he himself is often ignorant. Stanislavsky dared to penetrate the ``sacred precinct'' of the creative process. He never promised to make talent burgeon forth where there is none, but he did show the way to enable talent to reveal itself and the capable actor to approach the gifted. From his observations he was able to say why it is that great actors do not simply act well but do so day after day. And it is looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth to reject the priceless treasure Stanislavsky offers with such generosity.
This is not to say that everything in Stanislavsky's teaching is beyond dispute and one hasn't a right to argue with him. But first one must understand him. For there are many people who are arguing not with Stanislavsky but with a fiction of their own imagination.
I haven't said a fraction of what I think about Stanislavsky. I don't suggest that you study him from my book. I have only one desire, and that is to arouse an active interest, now, this very moment, in the personality and teaching of that great actor, director and teacher, Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky, to arouse in directors the urge to rediscover Stanislavsky for themselves.
In my time I have attended numerous international conferences and symposia devoted to the modern theatre. I have heard many interesting, important things said by my colleagues from various lands. A great deal of attention is usually devoted to theatre architecture and stage technology. This is all doubtless very important. But I feel we do not devote anything like due attention to what I regard as the most important question of all, that of the actor's art. The most brilliant and excellent stage direction is worth nothing without the actors. It is not enough today to have a couple of ``stars'' in a production. If we are to hold our own in the face of stiff competition from the new Muses, the cinema and television, we must wage the struggle not in the spheres of dramaturgy and theatre architecture, but in the one sphere where •we are incontestably supreme. What was once regarded as a disadvantage of the theatre is now our chief advantage. The fact that the theatre always provides a unique experience, one that can never be exactly repeated, involving live artistic creation before people's very eyes, and the unity of stage and the auditorium-this is what 31 makes the theatre unique. For the audience is a qualitatively variable factor.
Showing ``the life of the human spirit'' is no easy task, especially to a constantly changing public, whose aesthetic and civic views are not formed by us alone, but are shaped by the whole of life-social, class conditions, art, literature, and so on. How well-polished must theatrical art, and stage direction in particular, be if we are not to lose contact with the public?
This is the main question that interests, and will continue to interest, all lovers of one of the oldest and youngest of the arts-the theatre.
I love my profession. I consider it one of the most difficult and treacherous. I have dedicated my life to it, and to it I dedicate this book.
[32] __ALPHA_LVL1__ STANISLAVSKY'S TIME
I was born too late to be his pupil. I
learned from his productions, learned watching the actors he had
trained, learned from those he had taught and had faith in. Thousands
of facts and even more legends about Stanislavsky the man, about his
sense of humour and how he lost his temper, made him seem terribly
familiar, as though we were close friends.
I saw Stanislavsky the actor before I dreamed of going into the theatre. I saw him a few times as a student, and only once, together with a small group of young directors, had the good fortune to be his guest and chat with him. That was shortly before his death. It is most extraordinary but I feel I knew him long before I actually met him and still know him to this day. For more than thirty years now I have been holding conversations with him in my mind and asking him countless questions. For thirty years I have felt his stern, disapproving gaze fixed upon me. All these years I have been trying to learn to understand him. I feel he understands me perfectly, understands my weaknesses, where I have erred, and the reason for my mistakes. I have frequently imagined Stanislavsky watching my productions, and imagined what he would say if he were present at a rehearsal I was conducting.
33There are quite a few of us who are continuing to learn from Stanislavsky to this day. Our master has acquired new pupils whom he did not know during his lifetime. Some of his old pupils have broken with him. Stanislavsky no longer puts on plays, but I have frequently seen flashes of his thought in productions and characters created by my contemporaries.
More than a quarter of a century has passed since Stanislavsky was last among us. For those who are twenty-five today he already belongs to history as a great theatrical reformer who revolutionised dramatic art. Is he then a brilliant phenomenon belonging wholly to the past?
No, no, and a thousand times no! What Stanislavsky discovered and taught belongs to the theatre of today.
In the long history of the theatre we find various periods of flowering and decline and thousands of great names. Hundreds of times people who knew and loved the theatre tried to explain the magic of the stage, to reveal the secret of its impact. Every age left its theory of the theatre. Aristotle and Diderot, Goethe and Wagner, all offered their ``systems'', which were fine for their particular age, but which today belong entirely to the past. It was the same in Russia. For a long time two great actors, Karatygin and Mochalov, were opposed to one another. Later the theatre world was divided into the two camps on the basis of support for the different methods of the Maly Theatre and the Art Theatre. Later still, further new movements grew up like the Proletkult and the schools of Meyerhold and Tairov, and countless others. And young people are bound to ask: What is it that makes Stanislavsky's system superior to any other?
It is at once easy and difficult to answer this question. Easy because it is impossible to confuse any other trend in the theatre with the universal laws of scenic creativity revealed by Stanislavsky. Difficult because Stanislavsky was not just a great actor and thinker who created a science of acting, but also a brilliant director who created a certain trend in the theatre. Nobody but Stanislavsky united in a single harmonious system the experience of a galaxy of talented actors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; nobody but Stanislavsky revealed the objective laws of comportment on the stage; nobody but Stanislavsky attempted to find a conscious approach to the actor's subconscious mind.
In a way one can say that Stanislavsky did for the theatre what Pavlov did for physiology. Each discovered in his own sphere the laws of the unity of man's physical and spiritual life, laws that are eternally valid, for they are not inventions but discoveries. They have always existed and it was simply a question of bringing them to light. However much the productions of other directors may have differed from those 34 of Stanislavsky, the actors from the most different theatres could not help but live according to the laws of human nature. And they acted well when they observed them, and badly when they failed to observe them. If we profess realism there is only one system for us-the system rooted in real life-though there may be dozens of different trends and experiments. However startling the formal conventions of a production, whether the scenery and costumes are traditional or excitingly bold genuine emotion, living the part, depends on a single conditionfidelity to nature. No one can betray the truth with impunity.
Stanislavsky's method creates first the actor and the director, and subsequently the production.
The Soviet theatre is called upon to fulfil a great task, that of serving the people of today in the best manner possible. It aspires to a great ideal with its aim of preparing people for life in communist society.
The aesthetics of the contemporary theatre are born out of productions and discussions. The cornerstone was laid by Stanislavsky with his ``system'' and its practical embodiment-the Moscow Art Theatre.
Stanislavsky naturally could not know what mankind would be like twenty-five years later, could not know how and how much the Soviet citizen's spiritual life and aesthetic feeling would change. But the universal laws of acting, the emotional ``formula'' and the nature of the interdependence of the theatre and the people discovered by Stanislavsky provide the most accurate and suitable compass for today. Its needle points to realism. Whoever uses this compass is in no danger of losing his way. A genius may one day be born who will offer the world a new, more perfect acting method. But for the time being there is no system to compare with Stanislavsky's: the best of yesterday, and today in the theatre is the product of his brilliant discoveries, and the best of tomorrow will be essentially derived from them.
Stanislavsky's ``system'', like all products of genius, is amazingly simple. And incredibly complicated. A person who knows and loves life will understand it. A person with talent will master it. Whoever understands man will understand Stanislavsky's teaching. But anyone whose knowledge of life is derived solely from books and plays, films and theatre critiques will get nothing at all out of Stanislavsky.
By studying the great actors of his day and himself, Stanislavsky determined the laws by which an actor can call to life in himself every evening the real, genuine feelings of the character he is playing. Stanislavsky determined the conditions in which the reincarnation of the actor in his role takes place. He offered a method of educating the actor, the artist, the citizen. No artistic method is worth a sou unless it is born from practice and confirmed by practice.
35Stanislavsky's ``system'' has been tested in theatrical practice. Stanislavsky's school raised the Soviet theatre to unprecedented heights. Stanislavsky's books are translated into all the world's major languages and he is honoured by the most progressive stage-directors and filmmakers the world over. Such recognition speaks for itself.
Stanislavsky's teaching and experience is the patrimony of the whole Soviet theatre today. Every one of us basks in the reflected glow of his glory, and this places a tremendous responsibility on us for how our theatre develops.
Stanislavsky has left a priceless legacy. We could easily squander it, live on the interest, or consign it to a museum, but to do so would be criminal. It is our duty to double, to triple, to increase tenfold this inheritance.
Stanislavsky could not complain that he was ignored by his contemporaries. He was loved by theatregoers and had a host of admirers. But the Moscow Art Theatre that he and Nemirovich-Danchenko founded was a favourite target of the reactionary critics. Stanislavsky had to wage a constant battle, right up to the last days of his life, in defence of realism against the theoreticians and practitioners of the Old Theatre. During his long life in art, Stanislavsky was accused of all the deadly sins, first of facile imitation, later of decadence and tendentiousness, indifference to politics and idealism, despotism and aestheticism. As a progressive theatre, before the Revolution the Moscow Art Theatre often found itself in serious difficulties, and was several times on the verge of a financial disaster.
It is hard to say what the future of the Art Theatre would have been but for the October Revolution. Throughout the hard times of war, famine and destruction Stanislavsky continued to act, put on new productions, write books and teach. He founded actors' studios, drew up plans for the reorganisation of the theatre, travelled all over the place to attend various meetings and special performances.
Stanislavsky's whole life was work, work and work, with hardly a moment to spare. After an exhausting lesson or rehearsal he would spend ages explaining to an actor or young director the essence of his mistakes. His rare ``free'' time he would devote to writing.
Even during his lifetime Stanislavsky became a legend. His irresistible charm, fertile imagination and complete dedication to the theatre combined with irrepressible vitality, child-like spontaneity, and above all talent, made him, as Gorky put it ``a fine figure of a man''. In the eyes of the young people Stanislavsky was the legendary Knight in Shining Armour of the theatre.
Although it was common knowledge that Stanislavsky had long been suffering from a chronic illness, his death came as a shock. The 36 news of his death spread around Moscow like wildfire. There are no words capable of expressing the profound sense of destitution and bereavement felt by the members of the Art Theatre. The queue of people to file past the bier was many kilometres long, a touching farewell from the people of Moscow to the great revolutioniser of the theatre.
It is quite beyond me how some glib theatre critics or a drama school lecturers can present the life of Stanislavsky and the history of the Art Theatre as a long row of successes and triumphs.
It was not like that at all. The ``system'' took shape gradually in the course of long battles and controversies, and not as a ready-made whole, immediately bearing fruit. It was born in the crucible of heated disputes, in travail. Every thesis was put to the test in a thousand practical experiments. Thousands of pages of writing were mercilessly discarded and consigned to the waste-paper basket. Conversion to the new ``system'' was a long, slow process: followers were won over gradually, one by one. It was not until after the Revolution that Stanislavsky's lessons became the common patrimony of our theatres, actors' studios and drama schools. Stanislavsky's path to the young people was certainly never strewn with roses.
Controversy between the followers and opponents of Stanislavsky continued throughout his life and went on unabated after his death.
Today Stanislavsky and his ``system'' are no longer a subject of controversy: they have earned universal recognition. Just when exactly the mass enlightenment took place one cannot say. This should be enough to put one on one's guard. Especially as one cannot help noticing that many of the actors and directors who have a portrait of Stanislavsky hanging in the most conspicuous place, like an icon, secretly worship false idols. Soft-pedallers have been only too ready to draw from the ``system'' anything that makes life easier for them-not learning the lines, not ``acting'', being physically ``relaxed'' and so on. They will claim that Stanislavsky ``approved'' their sloth. Directors hypnotised by their own ``brilliance'' and originality have called upon Stanislavsky for ``justification'' of their dazzling tricks.
Stanislavsky insisted ``One must love art in oneself not oneself in art''. But there are still a lot of people about today who like to adapt Stanislavsky to suit themselves.
For many Stanislavsky remains a closed book, or a book of which they have only read the first few pages.
Stanislavsky's ``system'' is not a code of rules that can be hastily ``swotted up''. Every artist must discover it one day in himself. But this does not simply mean following the behests of the Master. Stanislavsky's teaching must be multiplied by life which is ceaselessly 37 in flux. The laws he discovered must constantly be developed and perfected.
As a director Stanislavsky approached realism by a long and tortuous path, but as actor and thinker he was always faithful to realism in the highest, deepest and most precise meaning of the word.
Stanislavsky spent his whole life seeking and testing manifold forms, rehearsal techniques and teaching methods, to ensure that his ``system'' was firmly linked with practice. His productions achieved a varying degree of success, but to the last he was never satisfied and prepared to rest content with what he had achieved. He realised, he felt deep down inside him, that neither he himself nor his theatre had yet reached their peak. Stanislavsky could see the peak, and urged people on to conquer it. But not all his comrades-in-arms understood him. And Stanislavsky turned to the young people.
Shortly before his death, when he was already gravely ill but as enthusiastic as ever, he created a new actors' studio. Very few people saw its productions. Stanislavsky himself did not live long enough to make full-fledged actors of his students. But it was at this time that he developed the foundations of the high truth of the nature of dramatic art. Stanislavsky summed up the essence of his teaching as a method of physical actions. Today we can say that this method is unique, and that it has no equal in the world theatre, past or present.
Stanislavsky was a great theatrical talent and a great citizen of his country. He was a worthy successor of Belinsky and Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, Stasov and Gorky, faithful to their view that art should serve man's high ideals. He never looked upon the theatre as pure entertainment, but insisted that it was a rostrum from which a great deal of good could be addressed to people. All Stanislavsky's fine life In art involved service of the noble idea of struggle for human happiness.
The most important idea in Stanislavsky's ``system'' is that of the ``super-objective'', as he termed the essential idea of a play. His work on a production was concerned above all with searching for a true and absorbing ``super-objective'' and subordinating the whole play to it. He did not regard this ``super-objective'' as the be-all and end-all, and widened the concept to that of the ``super-super-objective'', thus designating the aim in life of the man and artist, the idea underlying the whole artistic activity of the actor, director and playwright.
Stanislavsky held that this ``super-super-objective'' should inform people of what was most important, most essential and necessary in the artist's day and age. It should be a bridge between the stage and the audience, making even an old classic sound contemporary, fusing the thoughts and feelings of actors and audience in a single \'elan.
38How little we know Stanislavsky and how inept we are in making use of his theory of the ``super-objective'' and the ``super-super- objective''! How many productions are still put on goodness knows why or for whom! If one asks oneself: Does every production I put on help people to live better, to understand themselves and our way of life better, to infuse them with the strength to struggle and the feeling of great fellowship and brotherhood? The honest answer is: No, by no means every....
Born over a hundred years ago, Stanislavsky provides a fine example of civic ardour and full awareness of his duty to the people. For only a highly developed sense of civic duty and commitment to a cause can make an artist stand the test of time.
Stanislavsky's sense of civic duty was most of all in evidence in his directing and teaching work. He had a way of embodying the noble ideas of a play and a production in the characters and their actions by the most subtle, and often imperceptible means. The implacable logic, the psychological and social authenticity of every character produced a genuine picture of life on the stage, and unnoticeably but very definitely shaped the audience's thoughts and feelings.
Stanislavsky's ideal, ``super-objective'' and civic ardour were fused with the characters' profound psychological and artistic truth.
Noble ideological content and the most skilful means of expression are the major conditions for the creative activity of the realist artist.
Stanislavsky taught that the theatre should create ``the life of the human spirit''.
Stanislavsky's teaching is completely alien to art that is indifferent to man, cynical and anti-social. Stanislavsky is of no use at all to art that ignores reality or seeks to escape it.
We are wont to speak of the ``simple Soviet man'', but he is not, after all, so simple.
This Soviet man is an amazingly complex ``mechanism''. But there is a magic key to his heart. It was not easy to find, to awaken man's creative energies and initiative, concern for the common cause, and the ability to find bold solutions. Our people are building, studying and inventing, and at the same time preparing themselves for life in communist society. The task of all our art is to inculcate in people the moral qualities necessary for life in communist society.
Maxim Gorky called literature the study of man. The theatre is concerned with the same science.
Our age offers ideal conditions for this science to flourish. All Stanislavsky's tremendous experience, his lessons, productions and books are available and help our theatre comprehend the spiritual essence of Soviet man and inculcate in him new ideals of Beauty.
39The young people of today for some reason imagine Stanislavsky as a venerable old sage, a stuffy ``upright'' scholar of art. What rubbish! Stanislavsky was an amazingly vital, volatile, restless personality, highly inventive and temperamental, even mischievous at times. He had an awesome temper. But what impresses me most about him was his courage. Having achieved international fame, he sat down and wrote My Life in Art, a work in which painstakingly and with merciless honesty he listed and analysed his mistakes. His mistakes, not his triumphs. Who of our contemporaries would be capable of such bold frankness? Having opened a new chapter in the history of the world theatre, trained a whole pleiad of remarkably talented actors, and finally, elaborating his remarkable ``system'', in the last years of his life he came to the conclusion that all he had achieved in half a century of work was not the end of the road but the beginning, and already hampered by illness he set out to choose new students and begin all over again.
Stanislavsky is a model of a man who feels he must go forward all the time, the eternal seeker who can never rest and take time off from the quest.
Stanislavsky's art is a remarkable blend of wisdom and sly humour, of scintillating imagination and classical harmony, of passion and warmth. He can play with equal virtuosity on the kettledrum or the most delicate heartstrings. He has a perfect mastery of Russian that can be understood by people the world over. His love for his fellow men and his faith in the creative powers of the people go hand in hand with angry protest against all that is base and unworthy. He knew and loved his own people, and had faith in them, and he always told them the truth.
Fortunately, time does not make Stanislavsky any more tolerant of all forms of falsehood. He never forgave himself anything. He never invented excuses for himself, and never trembled for his authority. He could abandon what had once been dear to his heart without regrets if he found something dearer.
Somebody has spread the myth that Stanislavsky had no time for form in art and did not even know the meaning of it. It is beyond me how people can bring themselves to say such a thing about the author of such masterpieces as Warm Heart and The Marriage of Figaro and many, many others.
Somebody has spread the myth that Stanislavsky was dry and austere in art-practically a puritan and an ascetic. That about the man who in La Locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn) had the young nobleman Ripafratta go so far as to rip the petticoats off the brazen Ortensia and Dejanira!
40Someone is persistently spreading the myth that Stanislavsky had a coldly rational and analytic mind. This can hardly be said of a man who once got so carried away that he rushed onto the stage and demonstrated to a live horse how to flick away bumblebees and gadflies!
Stanislavsky was an ordinary genius and an extraordinary man. A man, not one of the Twelve Apostles. Like all men, he had his weaknesses. At times he could be unjust. He could lose his temper with people for no reason at all. He frequently suffered from angina. In his youth he was a bit of a dandy.
He created his remarkable ``system'' above all for himself. For a long time he considered himself a bad actor, and it was a long time before he decided that his ``system'' might be useful to others.
Today Stanislavsky's ``system'' is the property of all. There was a time when it was forced down people's throats whether they wanted it or not. Which probably explains why to this day there are people who, without having ever taken the trouble to study the ``system'' properly have dubbed it a code of rules and instructions. Vulgarisers and ignoramuses have failed to understand that it is in the very nature of the ``system'' to reject all rules and ready-made solutions. The ``system'' does not restrict the actor in any way but on the contrary unchains his creative spirit, making the whole world his stage. Everyone must find the ``system'' in themselves. For the ``system'' is fidelity to nature. Like nature, it moves, changes and lives. The ``system'' is a revolt against dogmatism. One has to be pretty blind to understand it dogmatically.
The ``system'' belongs to us all and we all swear allegiance to it, but by no means all of us act or produce the way Stanislavsky taught.
Stanislavsky has borne the blame for the boredom, colourlessness and bleak realism of many present-day productions. It is not worth lowering oneself to argue with those who make such accusations, people who use the fruits of Stanislavsky's teaching, without bothering to consider who cultivated them.
Within the recent memory of all of us there came the order to ``fall into line with Stanislavsky''. Instead of getting into line with the moving Stanislavsky, people were content to catch up with books about him. Stanislavsky has long since forged ahead, leaving the rest of the field way behind, and those who have ``lined up'' with him are softpedaling, if not running on the spot. The time has come for the command: ``Forward to catch up with Stanislavsky!'', and those who enter the field will need a good pair of legs to keep the fleet Stanislavsky in sight even.
When we arrive at the theatre of the future, Stanislavsky will be the first to meet us, young as ever, wise and smiling mischievously.
41He was born and lived for the theatre of the future, and that is where his monument should be. Meanwhile, he is with us, only way ahead.
Stanislavsky was born a hundred years ago and died over a quarter of a century ago, but his time is only just coming.
Stanislavsky is being born anew. He has left us definite rules for realistic acting, the actor's organic existence and the methods for achieving truth on the stage. But this does not absolve us from the duty of continuing the search; it does not mean that there is nothing left to be discovered and that no problems remain to be resolved.
It would be very wrong to take such a view, for it makes the rules of the ``system'' an abstract dogma. The great genius of the theatre left us an enormous patrimony, but our only benefit from it will be dry scholasticism and abstract speculation if we are prepared to accept it as a ready-made solution rather than making it our everyday practice, frequently taking a new look at it.
Time passes and the concept of truth in art does not stand still and remain unchanged. There is no such thing, and cannot be, as a truth for all times. The rules formulated by Stanislavsky are in perpetual motion, constantly developing, and we are required to make a tremendous creative effort to rediscover them for ourselves every time we embark on a new undertaking. It is not enough to know these rules: we must make them a part of ourselves, of our time, try to penetrate their very essence in order to understand how Stanislavsky himself would have viewed them and put them into practice in today's conditions.
Only thus can we ensure that the ``system'' is alive and new, just as Stanislavsky would have wished to see it. This is in fact what he demanded of his pupils and followers. That they treat his ``system'' not as a ready recipe, but as an effective instrument for everyday practical creative work. Unless we adopt this approach, however much we may pay lip service to Stanislavsky his great discoveries will be quite worthless. Quite enough has been done already to make a dogma of his theories, to destroy people's respect for his ``system'', and their willingness to put it into practice in the contemporary theatre. This attitude discredits Stanislavsky's teaching, completely eliminates it as an effective force, and gives rise to all kinds of nihilistic declarations.
We should arm ourselves today with Lenin's thesis that protecting our heritage means above all developing it. Every stage-director should make his contribution to the development of the ``system'' and its creative application. This is not a task for individuals, for in the arts, just as in science, the age of individual discoveries has given way 42 to an age in which new breakthroughs can only be achieved through the combined efforts of a group of like-minded people.
We must discover the laws of Stanislavsky for ourselves in a new quality, in new manifestations, for in art there is not, and cannot be, a ``universal gadget'' that can be used in any contingency. Every one of us must strive to carry out Stanislavsky's chief behest-to create our own method on the basis of his teaching.
I do not claim credit for any special discoveries, innovations or original theories. I consider myself Stanislavsky's pupil. I merely wish to share with others, with the reader, my conclusions, observations and ideas from thirty years of work in the theatre.
[43] __ALPHA_LVL1__ CIVIC
There is no such thing as ``routine'' in
art, the same old thing, day in day out. Art is always a process,
exploration, movement. And it is a never-ending process. If you have
stopped, you have fallen behind. It is this uninterrupted movement,
the eager search for the new and the constant sense of dissatisfaction
with what has so far been achieved that ensures the freshness and
viability of art, and indeed its being necessary at all.
A new production means new objectives, new problems and new explorations. There are no constants in art, no eternal truths. But there are eternal values and absolute concepts. There are no permanent criteria, but there are permanent requirements.
And the first of these requirements is civic responsibility.
What does it mean, being a worthy citizen of one's country and time?. It means above all being vividly aware of what society lives by, what really interests contemporary audiences, what questions people are seeking an answer to when they come to the theatre today.
The question of a work's ideological and social content is not just one problem among many for the artist. It is the problem, the foundation from which a work of art proceeds or fails to proceed as the case may be. One can have superb technique and even genuine talent with- 44 out being an Artist, for unless one feels with the precision of the most accurate of barometers the climate of life, of one's time, all one creates -will at best be but a clever display of tricks of one's mind and imagination.
The artist must live as a good member of his society, with a strong sense of civic responsibility. No amount of professional skill or even talent can compensate for failure to do so. Indeed, the ability to feel the pulse of life, sense what interests and concerns people, what they accept and what they reject, is an essential ingredient of true talent. There is no harm in making mistakes during rehearsals, but one must not forget for an instant the problems and ideas occupying the minds of one's fellow citizens. For if we do, we gradually, imperceptibly, become mere timeservers, incapable of creating anything authentic, necessary or useful to society.
When I know exactly why a particular play is being put on today, when I am quite clear in my mind as to its message and it is something that I personally consider to be of social importance at the time, then I can go ahead and pursue definite ideological and artistic objectives in the scenic embodiment of the work, so that the production hits the desired target.
The second basic requirement is that ideas must be experienced emotionally, that they infect the artist. Tolstoi wrote because he just had to write. One has to be ``obsessed'' with ideas like Tolstoi to create a truly moving work of art. If we have a cold, purely intellectual approach to ideas, how can we possibly hope to move people?
The director must not be cold or impartial. He must not be indifferent to beauty and ugliness. All his abilities, knowledge and experience must serve a single goal-that of affirming what is new and beautiful in our lives. He must mobilise his art against all that is base and philistine, hostile to the ideal our people and its Party serve, the ideal of communism.
We continually hold forth on the importance of ideas in art, on how it is essential that the artist should be in the forefront of the struggle for the building of communist society, yet we often fail to fit the deed to the word, fail to give our art that emotional meaning, the message that is an essential condition for Art with a capital A.
I am quite convinced that a definite ideological and emotional bias is a sine qua non of art. Without it not a single significant work of art can be produced. In this respect one must be perfectly honest with oneself as regards one's own work. It is most important to blend one's own artistic interests with the interests of the people, of the whole country. This will make the artist's Weltanschauung and his sense of civic responsibility clearly manifest.
45A man may have been endowed by nature with remarkable gifts for stage direction but his work will be fruitless unless he knows life, is aware of his civic responsibility, and feels himself to be a direct participant in the historic task of building the new, communist society. It is important not to be a mere ``visitor'' in life, but to be a part of life, for only then does perception of the processes of life arise naturally, and only then can the desire to affirm or condemn become an inner need for the artist, as natural and necessary as breathing.
An unstable civic outlook, lack of sensitivity to the rhythms and movements of life and the failure to accurately discern the direction of its main trends lead to a primitive, superficial understanding of the present day of art, which involves marching forward with the times in the front ranks of the general progress towards the future. All this concerns only the director's views. His talent-whether or not he can translate his ideological concepts into artistic terms-is quite another matter.
But until he has decided the meaning of a play, why it should be put on now, he has no basis for discussion with the actors, and hence with the audience, even if he is a giant talent. Method and talent are inseparable from the artist's Weltanschauung.
If the social role of the theatre and its artistic objectives are understood thus, then the more particular, purely professional objectives of stage direction and acting will be perfectly clear.
[46] __ALPHA_LVL1__ THE DIRECTOR
We often receive plays in which the
words ``sputnik'', ``semiconductor'', ``quantum generator'', ``computer'',
and so on, crop up with disconcerting frequency, and yet the characters
and events are such that if one were to cut out these modern
expressions the action could very well be transposed to the last century. In
all ages people have fallen in love, suffered from unrequited love,
worked, written books, dreamed of justice and so on. Modern dress,
a TV set and reference to contemporary events do not suffice to make
a play modern. A play is only modern if the characters are modern,
present-day people, when they behave not as people were wont to
behave in the past but in accordance with the new, Soviet morality,
when their ``language'' is modern, and they think and feel like
our contemporaries. The situations and conflicts in a modern play,
and even the plot, can be similar to those in the classics, but the
characters and their attitudes to events must be different, must be
modern. Try dressing the heroes of Ostrovsky's comedy Even a Wise
Man Stumbles in modern costume. It won't work. The play will seem
phoney, ridiculous, absurd. Does this mean that we no longer have
clever careerists, superstitious old wives, old dodderers living entirely
m the past and so on among us today? Unfortunately, we do come
47
across such people. But a modern Glumov has to be far more careful
to avoid being exposed for what he is and stands to lose far more than
Ostrovsky's Glumov, whom the Mamayevs and the Krutitskys just
cannot do without. The modern Krutitsky hasn't a chance of weilding
any effective power and could hardly offer patronage to a Glumov.
Try imagining the action of Rozov's In Search of Happiness transferred to the nineteenth century or a capitalist country and you will soon realise that it is quite out of the question. Yet one can easily do this with the plays of some authors for they only contain the outward tokens of our time.
A lot of plays written recently differ vastly in form from Gorky or Ostrovsky. They have some rather unusual characters in the list of dramatic personae-Author, Master-of-Ceremonies, Choir.... The authors of these plays deliberately destroy the illusion of reality by making their characters talk to the audience, interrupting the action with author's commentaries and so on. Unfortunately, some directors mistake novel and unusual form for genuine innovation and modernity.
Yet no formal dramaturgical device in itself makes a play innovatory and modern. Choirs, masters-of-ceremonics, taking liberties with chronology and other such devices are only novel, modern, and indeed necessary in so far as they serve the author as the best means of expressing his idea and presenting modern people and modern human relationships.
A real modern dramatist observes the development of the new in life-new attitudes to work, property, friendship, love and the people.
In his In Search of Happiness V. Rozov does not feel at all cramped within the framework of traditional theatrical forms, and only departs from them in preferring to divide the action into two parts instead of the usual three acts. In Town at Dawn and Irkutsk Story A. Arbuzov feels the need to present his own personal attitude to events and therefore has a Choir on the stage, constantly switches from place to place, looks ahead into the future and returns to the present. Simonov has the living consorting with the dead and Stein has his characters meditate aloud. It is absurd to try and find a mean quantity of form obligatory for all dramatists.
It is as ridiculous to criticise Soviet dramatists for not writing in the way Gorky or Ostrovsky wrote as it is to criticise the latter for not having written like Shakespeare. Every age produces its own writers, who are sons of their time. If they have talent, their works will differ in both form and content from works written in earlier times. The new cannot be created by imitating the old. We can learn a lot from the classics, but they have never taught us imitation.
Unfortunately good plays are always in short supply. But it is far 48 worse when dramatists repeat one another's mistakes and we have monotonous repetition in their choice of plots and characters. A vast number of plays have the most petty, insignificant conflicts. The characters are often primitive and stereotyped and the language is flat and insipid. Not infrequently, we fail to recognise a work of talent, individual weaknesses blinding us to its genuine novelty, bold message, original characters, and fresh language. But more often we are dazzled by an author's brilliant external effects, strikingly original plot and vociferous characters and fail to notice the phoney ideological content and artistic impurity. And how often we are duped by a play's apparent popularity with audiences!
Our theatre life has livened up considerably in recent years. Writers and theatre people have renewed their interrupted controversies, not just for the sake of arguing, but in order to find the truth, each man in his own way. They argue about how plays should be written, produced and acted with actual plays, productions and acting. They try to find the shortest path to people's hearts and minds.
The controversy is essentially centred around one major problem, that of the hero and the heroic. This is no abstract discussion, and it is productive in so far as those with a bone to pick demonstrate their views not in articles and speeches but in practice.
What is the essence of this debate which, although not openly announced, is definitely in progress, a debate which is reminiscent of the arguments that raged among dramatists in the 'twenties?
One group of playwrights, critics and directors presumes to defend the heroic, monumental theatre as opposed to what they consider theatre concerned with banal, petty themes, imparted in whispers, full of undercurrents. They point as shining examples to The Optimistic Tragedy, Break-Up, How the Steel Was Tempered and other works of Soviet literature of which our people are justly proud. Having come to the end of the list of Soviet classics with which they are familiar, the advocates of the theatre of heroism attribute to it according to their own personal tastes a medley of other works, unwittingly abandoning genuine, objectively-appraised values for works that have no claim to greatness by common consent. Having passed from objective to purely subjective positions, they then reject anything that does not conform to their cheapened aesthetic ideal. Anything that lacks epic sweep is classified as petty, anything that lacks heroism is dubbed anti-heroic. Plays and productions where the spotlight is on man's inner world and the plot concerns family relations are as a rule placed in the category of petty-bourgeois, pernicious plays lacking ideological content. Volodin, and even Rozov and Arbuzov, are often included in this category.
49True, without romantico-heroic plays the Soviet theatre cannot live and develop. The theme of heroism must occupy the leading place in our theatre. But in life heroism exists and manifests itself in an infinite variety of human characters and destinies, personal and social circumstances and conflicts. Art does not have the right to restrict itself to any one particular sphere in which heroism manifests itself, and anyway, the heroic theme even in its manifold forms is not life in its entirety.
Surely the real aim of the Soviet theatre is to delve down to the grass roots of courage, to the grass roots of man's spiritual life.
Rozov's On the Wedding Day is really far more than the family, domestic drama it appears at first sight. It tells of a girl who has found the courage to reject marriage with a man she loves but who does not love her, and in its own way affirms the moral purity, and, if you like, the heroism of the new Man. In my opinion this play fulfills the social objective no less than a play like Dora Pavlova's Conscience. The two plays are vastly different as regards their themes, the range of characters the author has chosen to show, and the means used to present the authentic material, but both authors have the same civic passion and political views. It seems hardly right to contrast these plays to one another simply because the one is openly didactic and the other psychological.
One can argue about the skill and talent of the dramatists, their temperament and way of writing, but it is wrong and unfair to pronounce the plays of one civic-spirited and those of the other shallow merely on the basis of their subjects.
Choice of subject, plot, characters and scene of action cannot, and certainly ought not to, serve as a criterion for a dramatist's ideological commitment, loyalty and civic ``reliability''.
Any theme can be treated in a petty, banal manner. The most runof-the-mill personal matter can be raised to the level of a most striking artistic achievement by an author and theatre with a highly developed sense of civic responsibility, while a powerful theme with sweeping historical implications can be reduced by a philistine to the level of the petty and banal. It is the duty of both dramatist and theatre to present on the stage not only the Revolution itself but also the way it is reflected in people's lives. But this can be done through practically any kind of play. The contrasting of ``civic theatre'' and ``intimate theatre'' is one of the rudiments of standard aesthetics. Miniatures, watercolours and prints are as necessary as large canvasses, if they are skilfully produced in the name of high social ideals. An oratorio is in no way superior as a genre to Lieder. Declamatory verse may speak of matters of moment, but it may also speak of the most appallingly trivial matters. Simple unadorned prose can tell of great deeds, but it may also 50 describe the base and ignoble. The volume of sound means nothing. The scale of a play, its social and philosophical message and its power to move people are not determined by the number of characters or the scene of action but by its author's talent and the depth of his civic outlook. Not infrequently a play is judged not by its ideas and artistic qualities but by certain superficial aspects taken out of context.
When Volodin wrote the play five Evenings (the action of which indeed took place in the evening) he was accused of a gloomy, `` twilight'' mood. But the play was after all about love, about the difficult road to happiness of a highly-principled middle-aged woman. It was a sad play, although it had a happy ending. But sadness was tantamount to pessimism for those critics who considered sorrow and misfortune as synonymous with decadence. The play shows how two fine people almost missed the chance of happiness. They eventually found it, but too late. Surely there is every reason for sadness and regret at the thought of how much they had denied themselves.
In Five Evenings there are no fine heroes performing great deeds or making great discoveries. But surely we are justified in writing and performing plays about ordinary people such as these-the workshop foreman, the driver, the student, the telephonist, the chemical engineer-who make themselves and their near and dear ones live better and more honestly. For these plays are about people who in different circumstances would most definitely find the courage for the most patriotic and heroic deeds.
Certainly Tamara's heroism is quite different from that of the woman Commissar in The Optimistic Tragedy. But I love both these women. Why should we class Tamara as an ``anti-heroine''? Merely because she lives in a crowded flat and not in a military tent? Tamara has just as much integrity as Nila Snizhko in Salynsky's Drummer Girl. The authors have chosen different times, different circumstances and different conflicts. But did not the Commissar die and Nila risk her life for the same reason-so that later, many years later, in peacetime, people might live according to high moral principles?
The fact that the play is the basis of the mise-en-scene should be in no need of proving. Yet it quite often happens that this is just not the case, and instead the author's thoughts are lost in the production. This may of course be intentional on the director's part, but in the majority of cases it is accidental. The truth is that many directors just do not know how to read, or rather understand, a play and find the appropriate scenic expression. Anyone can grasp the moral of a play, but it is not at all easy to spot the sparks set off by the collision of conflicting forces, and the sad fact is that not all plays contain these sparks, this live fire.
51There are plays that seem to contain everything they should- confiict and clashes, unexpected twists in the plot, intelligent dialogue, triumphant virtue and punished vice-and yet we are not satisfied, we feel that something is lacking. The conflict turned out to be contrived, the passions artificial and the fire a bengal light. And it is even worse if the director has failed to notice how contrived and artificial the play and characters are. We also find the opposite: the director has failed to spot the conflict in a slow, apparently calm scene, or to realise that the hero's reserve and apparent singleness of purpose hide a particularly complex character.
Can one learn to understand plays properly? And if so, how?
They say there's no accounting for taste. Some plays everybody is vying to put on, while with other plays the competition is slight. A play that has been turned down by one theatre may be successfully staged at another. One director regarded a play as a poetic, lyrical story, the other as a tense drama. And both productions are good in their own way, both have their merits. One seeks simplicity and home truths in the heroic, and the other seeks heroism in the mundane and everyday element. Which of them is right? Which of them has understood the play better?
The only answer to these questions is to be found in practice, in the finished production. The only real criterion for judging a production is the power of the impression it makes on the audience.
There arc no rules in art, no universally obligatory definitions. Does this mean that it is all a matter of personal taste, that a play has no objective value, but that it all depends on individual appreciation? Obviously this is not the case. A play's power, meaning and valuemust be determined by comparing it to reality.
Truth to life is the only objective criterion for judging a play. And the better, the more fully and accurately, the director understands life, the more exactly he can determine the degree of truth a play contains.
Thus, the director's prime task is constant, day by day study of life. He must know everything. He must not only learn to see facts but must be able to compare them and reveal the inner mainspring of human behaviour. We must look deeper into the inner world of the people around us, note the first green shoots of the new, perceive the complex laws of the struggle between the old and the new and the tangled links between major historical events and personal fortunes. Politics and economics, aesthetics and sociology are so interconnected that it is quite impossible to even imagine a modern director not versed in all these fields.
It is not so easy to distinguish between good and bad plays. The only way to learn to do so is to be constantly increasing one's ideo- 52 logical baggage, widening one's horizon and improving one's taste by devoting considerable time to the arts-literature, music and painting.
But improving one's taste is a long laborious process, and meanwhile plays have to be chosen at once. What is one supposed to do? Rely on the recommendations of the critics? I think the first thing to be done is to eradicate the insulting theory that the public is ignorant, that our Soviet audiences are incapable of comprehending complicated things, and one should give them entertainment. This lack of faith in the taste of the public is one of the most dangerous of errors, and one of the most widespread. There arc naturally cases when a good play is not given the reception it deserves. But no one is to blame for this except the author, or the director, or the actors, or all of them together.
Unfortunately the opposite is often the case. We find appallingly bad plays, badly acted into the bargain, having a most successful run. But here it is the theatre that is to blame and not the bad taste of the audience.
A director must be reading new plays all the time in search of suitable material. Surely the reason why theatres sometimes put on the first thing that comes along is that they simply have not got time to search and select.
It is certainly far more reprehensible when a theatre has got a wide choice of plays yet selects a bad, phoney one without realising it.
I have no firm recommendations to offer, but I would suggest that on reading a play through a director might try imagining its action taking place in a different country in, say, the last century. If this is remotely possible, then the play is phoney, for it means there can be nothing modern about it except for the setting, up-to-date dress, and bit parts like the man from the executive committee or the Young Pioneer. It means that all the events presented could equally well take place in any age in any country. It makes not a scrap of difference if the family drama is complicated by the fact that there are children or by the characters every now and then holding forth on the Soviet Man's family duties and so on.
It is far from my intention to suggest that plays about love, the family and children, or the problems of family life have no place in the Soviet theatre and are unsuitable for Soviet audiences. Of course love and the family must be written about. But only provided the old conflicts and traditional situations serve to reveal new human qualities, new features of human relationships and the nature of the people of today.
Often a highly dramatic conflict, an engrossing plot and the superficial attributes of modernity serve to mask what is in fact a pedestrian 53 rehash of the worn devices of old-fashioned melodrama, thereby sapping the director's vigilance, so to speak.
It is a perfectly natural desire to wish to present to the public a play with a dramatic situation and highly intriguing plot. But however fascinating you may have found the play yourself, you should immediately ask why the author has treated us to such an intrigue and for what purpose he has made the events so dramatic.
Unfortunately, only too often the answer will be: simply in order to evoke tears and give the audience a pleasant thrill.
There is nothing easier than exciting or moving an audience, even to tears, with plays full of suffering-the old roue stricken with remorse, children suffering because of their terrible parents, or parents suffering because of their enfants terribles-but as often as not such plays leave no lasting imprint in the hearts and minds of the audience and are forgotten the moment they leave the theatre.
This is surely a poor reward for months of work and effort by a whole group of people.
Thrillers are usually considered modern if only the action is set in the present. They are in no way inferior to any other genre per se. But they are often the excuse for stereotype characters and situations, trite, cliche-ridden dialogue and a complete absence of psychological analysis. Not infrequently they are full of glib patter about patriotism by which they contrive to hide the fact that they are totally devoid of ideological content. These empty phrases simply serve to mask the emotional sterility of the heroes, and a closer look shows that the latter are entirely motivated by a thirst for adventure, that they are in fact not heroes at all but cheap adventure-hunters. One has no difficulty in imagining the action taking place in some other country: one can do so without anything essential being changed.
If we take a look at some of the more famous heroes of great adventures to be found in the literature of former ages-Till Eulenspiegel, D'Artagnan, Robin Hood and so on-we find that they were motivated not by a thirst for thrills, but by love for their people, the longing to avenge cruel injustices, the noble desire to rescue the fair maiden, their beloved, from captivity and so on.
Courage, boldness and enterprise are clearly worthy of emulation, but only if they serve the achievement of a noble end. After all, the most rapacious people, and even criminals and careerists, are wont to demonst