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p 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.

p 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.

p 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 20 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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- 21 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?

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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 22 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”.

p 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.

p Stanislavsky’s dissatisfaction was typical of the eternal searcher and explorer.

p 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.

p However, it by no means follows from this that Stanislavsky’s tastes as regards repertoire were limited to Chekhov and other kindred authors.

p 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.

p 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 23 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

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p The 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”.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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 25 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.

p Many popular pamphlets and books about Stanislavsky unfortunately give a lop-sided view of him, and provide fuel for his critics.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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- 26 conscious, bringing the conscious to exert an influence on the subconscious.

p 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!

p 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.

p 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.

p 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, 27 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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 28 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?

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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 29 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.”

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p Another 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’.”

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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 31 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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.

p 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 32 makes the theatre unique. For the audience is a qualitatively variable factor.

p 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?

p 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.