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p The production of a play is a complicated process that is often painful, sometimes enjoyable. It is a process of search in which everything is mobile and changing. The actors, the designer and the composer all introduce their changes, additions and corrections to the conception (zamysel) of the author and the director. Their remarks and suggestions are of great help in arriving at a successful solution.

p What helps and what hinders the forming of an image of the future production in the director’s mind? How do his thoughts develop at this difficult and hitherto little-studied stage-on the path from the first hazy vision of his conception to its embodiment? I am talking not about the process of rehearsals, but about the stage of psychological germination and final materialisation of the director’s conception.

p It seems to me that from the very outset, at the initial stage of the conception of the mental picture of the future production, we often increase the obstacles met at this difficult and crucial stage, on which the final result to a very large extent depends. Unfortunately, many of us underestimate the importance of this phase for the whole process of stage production and the directors who really make a serious effort to understand their own creative laboratory are all too few and far between.

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p Stage direction, like literature and the actor’s art, has its established cliches. Their roots are to be found at the very beginning of work on a production, when immediately after reading the play the director puts his imagination to work to cut open and lay bare from the inside, as it were, the author’s intention, the idea of the play. At this stage dangerous enemies lurk to beset the director’s imagination, which can nip the natural and free process of the birth of the image of the production in the bud.

p In my opinion the chief brake at the initial period of search for the director’s solution and the ripening of the director’s conception is his so-called “vision” of the future production, which comes immediately upon reading the play.

p In the theatre we often use the term “director’s vision”. We say: “I see the scene”, “I see the play”, “I see the character”. I regard the concept of “director’s vision” with grave suspicion, and feel that it demands great caution, since at the initial stage this “vision” is the greatest enemy of our imagination, just as “vision of the final result” is in the case of the actor.

p Why? Above all because every normal person is endowed with a certain amount of imagination, whether he works in art or not. Were this not so there would be nobody for our art to appeal to. The object of all art is to appeal not only to the mind and feelings, but to the imagination, to arouse the imagination and set it working in a new, unexpected direction, that it would never have come to of its own accord. Art is indeed neccessary and useful only on condition that it does this: otherwise it would be quite pointless.

p Any reading is inevitably connected with the imagination, for the simple reason that a person cannot help letting his fancy come into play and imagining what he is reading. At the first stage of reading a work our imagination and that of the man-in-the-strect, the potential spectator, are at the same level. Such “vision” is not the prerogative of the director, it is a natural human propensity. But the director is wont to regard this propensity as the hallmark of his profession, and his first impression of a play upon reading it as a visual solution. But the simple fact that he calls this elementary vision “the director’s vision” does not necessarily mean that it is either a visual solution or exclusively “of the director”. Such “vision” is not a quality and feature of the director, but his dangerous enemy.

p Not only is this first vision often banal, it is subject to the first concept that happens to arise, and is cliche-ridden, since it is always superficial. The more the director works on this superficial vision, the more he us cutting the ground from under his own feet. The fact that this vision is carefully worked into, and expressed in, the design, the 146 sets and so on, makes not one iota of difference, for the director stilf does not advance beyond the banal impression which anybody who reads the play might be expected to have.

p This is why it seems to me that the vision which arises from the first reading of a play is the shortest path to cliches. The possibility of these cliches arising is inherent in the very birth of the future production and the director’s conception, at the very beginning of the creative process. The nature of director’s cliches is the same as that of actors’ cliches. As soon as the actor gains his first impression of the part, he immediately begins to act the result, by-passing the important and complicated process of penetrating the essence of the role, of the character.

p Like the actor, before he has a right to his vision, the director must do a great deal of preparation, so that it is not simply a vision, but an imaginative approach to the play, something the layman cannot achieve. It must be an artist’s product that makes it worth people’s while tocome to the theatre.

p Tf the audience’s view of the play is richer and more interesting than that of the dircctor-or even if it is equally rich and interesting-then our profession is quite superfluous.

p That is why I consider this first stage to be of such great importance. It is at this point that the question is decided of whether the production will eventually be worth seeing or not, whether it will justify being considered a work of art.

p I must point out before I go any further that it is essential to avoid confusing the concept of vision with the concept of impression, of which Stanislavsky wrote. He even suggested writing down one’s first impression of a play, regarding this as an important and necessary step in the creative process. The freshness of perception we find here is something not to be rejected. Comparing the way one feels about a finished production with one’s first impression of a play can be very useful indeed.

p First impressions are by no means always correct. Sometimes onefails to grasp the whole depth of a play on first acquaintanceship with it, and sometimes unusual form or spectacular subject matter conceals a complete absence of ideas. But be this as it may, as a general rule a first impression is remarkably strong. It is extremely difficult to express the impression a piece of music has made upon one in words. The smell of lilac cannot be adequately described. Yet a play that is a real work of art is a complex combination of ideas and actions, the music of words, rhythms and colours.

p A good play is as full and diverse as life itself. A first reading produces the most general, but extremely powerful feelings. One play may 147 give one a feeling of amazing purity and transparency, somehow conjuring up images of spring landscapes, shepherds’ horns, a vast dome of blue sky and the chirping of grasshoppers. Another play may produce an agonising feeling of profound melancholy, of captivity from which one longs to escape. Deep shadows, dark colours, the mournful hooting of steamers in the night and dancing candle flames may for some reason accompany one’s feeling of a play in which there are no ship’s sirens or burning candles either in the dialogue or in the stage directions. A play can leave an impression of crystal-pure sounds or cheerful melodies of spring, recklessness or grim determination, pride or ingenuousness.

p The visual impression conjured up by a play is always different and original. One play produces an impression in which rhythm is uppermost, another play an impression in which timbre, or colour, or the plastic predominates, as the case may be. There is no need to seek to give these impressions precise verbal expression. It is enough to write down or remember one’s first impression. The exact words and definitions for the super-objective, rhythm, style and genre will come in the course of work on the production. To begin with it is enough to write down one’s impression in rather vague terms.

p During rehearsals one’s original impression gradually fades from one’s memory. When the production is ready, the time has come to consult one’s memory or note-book. Let us suppose you find the word “close” or “oppressive”. If the finished production fails to produce this sense, then there are flaws in the solution. If, on the contrary, one’s original and final impression coincide, you can consider that you have gone the right way about it.

p But, I repeat, what I was referring to earlier on was not first impressions but what we in the theatre call “vision”.

p When you read a play you already “see” it, and here lies the danger of stylisation, that is, of a preconceived approach.

p Meycrhold once told a group of drama school graduates, myself among them, that if we imagined ourselves going along some familiar street in Moscow, Petrovka for example, and were then asked what the street looked like, our inner vision would fix the shop windows, cafes and stores, and very few of us would say what the house above the cafe looked like, because the human memory is such that it only retains that which is utilitarian. But if the layman needs to remember the cafe or the store, the artist must be interested in the architectural ensemble, he must see that special something that gives the town its distinctive appearance and atmosphere.

p One can make the following experiment for example. Say “the Middle Ages”, or “the Renaissance”, or ,,the Moscow of the boyars”. 148 What images do they conjure up? The same stereotypes that determine stylisation and banality. Here lie the roots of cliches.

p One could try dozens of similar experiments, and all kinds of different people will come up with exactly the same “visions”. What are these visions worth if everybody has them? Why should we show audiences what they can see for themselves simply by reading the play.

p Unfortunately, first impressions in this sense often take the place of the real variety and depth of a given phenomenon, and by making use of it we are very often doing no more than transferring into our production the first associations and outward features that struck us, the surface phenomena without the content.

p Here lurks a danger far more serious than mere stylisation. From here the road runs straight to pedestrian productions that are uninspiring however satisfactory they may appear on the surface. A first impression is often that received by the dilettante or the layman, and the strong element of banality it contains prevents real penetration of the content. If we are unable to draw a distinction between a pedestrian approach and a creative approach, the audience may well be ahead of us. We have to bear in mind that it is an intelligent audience that is going to judge our work, and must endeavour to ensure that such an audience derives pleasure from what they have seen. Unless our interpretation of the play goes beyond theirs, if the only difference is that they were unable to put it on the stage because they are busy in other jobs, we can hardly claim to be enriching them, and indeed it is hardly worthwhile in this case working in the theatre at all.

p Unless we set the highest standards from the very start of our work on a production we arc not likely to produce a real work of art. This is why it is necessary to discard the simple, familiar answers that immediately suggest themselves. The most important thing at this stage is to refuse to follow the first impulse of one’s imagination, the “vision” that comes automatically on first acquaintanceship with the play. Especially as we tend to see things immediately in theatrical terms, in the framework of the stage.

p The director’s vision is usually regarded as visual, sound, rhythmic and other pictures of the future production. One person will see a staircase running from off-stage left to off-stage right, another a whole set, yet another will imagine the whole action taking place on a revolving stage and so on. Sometimes a director forces his imagination and produces sheer hallucinations, so that despite himself he is seeing a picture he has seen long ago. This is where the cliches creep in. It is against this method, against such “vision” that I appeal to my colleagues to be on their guard.

p All this is not to say that it is impossible for a director to find an 149 excellent and interesting solution at once after reading a play. Just as an actor sometimes gets into a role from the very first rehearsal. This is either luck or evidence of great talent which one can only envy. There is no need to teach geniuses. On the contrary, we should learn from them. Stanislavsky did not have them in mind when he devised his system. As for luck, one ought not to count on it. You might have experienced a flash of inspiration today, but one can hardly bank on this happening regularly or even frequently.

p Inspiration does not favour the lazy. It comes as the result of long, arduous work storing up fuel for the imagination. One must not be depressed if it docs not come immediately, there is no point in getting angry with oneself and stamping one’s feet at one’s imagination for refusing to perform to order. One must work. Inspiration will come eventually, provided of course, the director and his actors have real creative ability.

p If we give in to our first “vision” we are depriving our imagination of the opportunity to work, hampering our fancy with such earth-bound questions as “is it technically feasible?” Such questions should never be asked, whatever the technical capacity of the theatre’s stage. It is essential to decide once and for all that everything is possible in the theatre. Otherwise the amount of imagination employed in a particular theatre will be limited by that theatre’s technical possibilities, which is patently absurd.

p At this stage it is of no matter whatsoever what theatre you work in, whether it is big or small, what the stage is like or what properties and equipment arc available. At this stage there should be no difference in the creative process, provided, of course, we arc speaking of true artists and not time-servers.

p Your imagination can only take the right course on condition that you firmly believe that you are completely unrestricted, that you have at least as wide technical possibilities as the cinema.

p One must not tell oneself that the theatre is poorer than the cinema: one must convince oneself that the theatre disposes of infinitely greater and wider possibilities than the cinema and it is just that these means are different. If you say: “the theatre just cannot do this”, you are condemning yourself to failure before you start. One’s sole concern must be to find the ideological and artistic objective, the reason why it is necessary to produce this particular play.

p From here on the magic of stage convention comes into its own, and it is important not to proceed along the path of impressive artifice and outward inventiveness, but to seek the one and only correct and necessary approach. Then you will find that you can make the means unexpectedly simple.

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p This is the strength of the theatre, this is what enables it to keep alive and compete with the cinema despite all the pessimistic forecasts on this subject.

p I am not appealing to you to abstract from real conditions. It is just that only by freeing oneself from the idea that one is restricted has one a chance of reaching the ideal solution. And it is essential to search for the ideal, for only thus can one’s intention be truly original. The simple technical solution can wait. It must arise not as the first thing that comes into your mind, or even as dictated by the concrete conditions of the given stage, but as the embodiment of your “ideal” conception.

p Very often something quite different happens. Before he has found a visual solution, the director endeavours to conceive the exact concrete lay-out and all the details, where a table or chair will stand, who is to come on where and when. Before he has decided how life flows in the Prozorov household in The Three Sister*, for example, he is already perfectly clear in his mind about what door a character will enter through and what chair he will sit down in.

p This means that a most important stage in the creative process has been completely omitted. The director has robbed himself, depriving himself of the opportunity to discover the visual interpretation that will best express the essence of the work, the author’s idea. Some experienced directors mistakenly assume that because they have already worked on numerous productions their task is now perfectly simple and straightforward. This is purely an illusion. It is most important to create real difficulties at the early stage of work on a production. I am always rather worried if upon reading a play I experience a feeling of relief, feel that it all seems perfectly clear and simple and I can get clown to rehearsals right away. If there is no painful searching at this stage one can be pretty certain that the production will never come off. If it is easy to begin with, it will be correspondingly difficult later on. Unless between the first reading and the first rehearsal there has not been a period of intense, independent search that has marked a new stage in your artistic biography, and perhaps in your whole life, if there has only been “normal preparation”, then something is very wrong.

p So often the process is all too “simple”. The director does a bit of reading around the subject, peruses a few books or articles about the play and the author, studies pictures or photographs, learns a few things about the period that are not generally known, and in a week to ten days he knows far more than the rest of the company who have only just met the author and the work, and considers himself to be perfectly prepared to begin work. But here lurk the treacherous reefs of a banal, pedestrian, non-artistic reading of the work. For unless the whole vi- 151 sual—imaginative aspect of the production takes shape naturally and organically, unless it takes shape as the result of careful reflection and selection, unless everything is clear and well-formed, whether you like it or not you will find yourself in the position of which I spoke earlier: a little ahead of the audience as regards knowledge of the material, but not a bit in advance of them in visual-imaginative perception of the work. You will be carried along by an empirical current that does not depend on you in the slightest, where there might even be the odd success, but only accidental, since it will have come of its own accord and strictly speaking will have nothing at all to do with the art and profession of stage direction.

p Consequently, the first stage of the director’s work is to make up his mind what it is he wishes to achieve, and to use his imagination on the basis of the author’s own image of the play, without limiting himself in any way, without hampering himself cither with a concrete scenic vision or technical considerations.

p The image of the finale of Act One of The Optimistic Tragedy is limited by the words in the stage directions: “The unit comes marching by!” It was necessary to show a marching military unit, men leaving their home town for battle (something that takes up a considerable amount of scenic time) and I was hard put to to decide how this should best be donc-by using the revolving stage, a projector, or some other means. But I was sure about the main thing: I had a clear image of the scene in my mind.

p Many people find Vishncvsky’s directions far too vague and abstract. It is true, he docs not give much material for detailed planning. But he does present an arresting image of the scenes, which fires the imagination and compels one to embark on creative exploration of unknown spheres. How to realise the image in practice, what technical means to use in order to produce the optimum solution-this is the next stage of the work.

p I repeat: the technical solution may often be surprisingly simple and straightforward, but even so it is necessary to arrive at it by way of serious reflections within the limits of the author’s-and life’s-logic.

p How was I to show the distraught Prince Myshkin roaming the streets of St. Petersburg? Could this be done by strictly theatrical means without resorting to cinematographic means? This was a question we dealt with at the very beginning of our work on Th^ Idiot at the Gorky Theatre. We felt it was most important to show Myshkin wandering through the streets of the big city for hours, returning again and again to his confused thoughts and premonitions. The solution, when it finally came to us, was extraordinarily simple. As Myshkin begins his soliloquy the lights fade so that there is a single spotlight shining 152 on his face and our hero, to his own great surprise (this was stressed by Dostoyevsky) finds himself in the dark doorway of a hotel, where a fateful meeting with Rogozhin awaits him. In this simple solution, which indeed seems quite elementary in retrospect, we were especially satisfied by the fact that the logic of the scene corresponded to the logic of the novel, for the purpose and essence of the director’s art lies above al{ in compliance with the author’s logic.

p When I was reading the novel I was struck by the fact that the author has a great deal happening “on the move”, as it were. Take the scene where Myshkin and Ganya Ivolgin make serious explanations as they walk through the streets of St. Petersburg. Or Rogozhin taking Nastasya Filippovna along the dark passages and up the dark staircases of his father’s house. On the very first day after his arrival by train in St. Petersburg, Myshkin goes to visit the Yepanchins, then the Ivolgins, and then Nastasya Filippovna. What does this involve in scenic terms, a man walking along a street or passing down long corridors from one room to another? One’s first impulse is to make use of the revolving stage and thus create the outward dynamics of movement. Yet in this first idea that comes into one’s mind there lurks the first danger. It seems to me that outward dynamics would contradict the intense inner life of Dostoyevsky’s characters, and such a solution would be too unwieldy and cumbersome for the psychological structure of the novel. If I had given way to my first impulse I would have thereby renounced what I feel was the most fortunate find in our production. I am referring to the connection that was established between all the cadres, based on the constant movement of all the characters in a fixed, motionless set, three moving curtains and doors which always indicated where the action was taking place and created the impression of long corridors and staircases. This device, which, by the way, we did not hit on immediately, became the principle underlying our solution of the production, when, as though following Myshkin, we pass from a scene to an intermezzo and thence to another scene.

p In this way we produced the continuity which to my mind is an absolutely essential compositional feature of the novel. This device was not intended to produce an independent impact, but, on the contrary, seemed to us to be the right one for the very reason that the audience does not notice it in the course of the play.

p I have given this example not because I regard it to be a striking discovery, but as a simple confirmation of the fact that if the director’s thought and imagination tend towards worn cliches, he is tying himself hand and foot from the very outset and depriving himself of the opportunity to reach a satisfactory scenic solution. It is necessary to 153 learn to release one’s imagination and not bind it at the moment the conception is born.

p Many of our young directors who are still unfamiliar with the techniques and mechanics of the theatre think and use their imaginations far more boldly and with far more interesting results while they are still students than when they pass to practical independent work in the theatre. On coming face to face with the real possibilities of the theatre, where a great deal seems incompatible with concrete stage conditions, the novice is frequently brought down to earth with a bump. We sec a talented young director doing violence to his chief strength-his imagination-as he acquires experience and settles down on the firm ground of practical work, and gradually becoming a time-server. The theatre management must show subtle understanding and tact in order to help the young director master the stage machinery and not stifle his precious imagination. Only then will the knowledge of the stage machinery, which is of course necessary to every professional director, be of real value and lead to good results.

p Paradoxical though it may seem, the better a director masters the technical side of his profession, the more he can forget about it at the initial stage of devising his intention for a production.

p However, between the birth of the “ideal” conception and its scenic embodiment lies a long process of getting to know the work thoroughly. Here the director comes to what is perhaps the most difficult part of his job.

p As I have said earlier on, we often begin to use our imagination, already in the grip of the future production, we “see” it, and we attach great importance to our “vision” of it. And this is a great pity, for our vision is often deceiving, superficial and banal, inherently false too, for it does not allow for the unexpected solution.

p All this fetters our imagination, prevents us from finding the unexpected twist which will cause the play to burst open and reveal an internal facet whose existence we never suspected when we first began working on it.

p By what means, if any, can we show what we wish to show without by-passing the necessary process and going straight to the result? No universal recipe has been discovered, and I shall therefore speak of what I have found in my own work.

p What methods do I myself have of struggling with cliches and preventing my conception on being cliche-ridden at its inception?

p The only method of struggling with the banal first-vision is to forget for the time being the formal structure of the work and direct one’s imagination not towards the future, towards the completed production, but towards the past, towards the reality presented by 154 the dramatist. In other words, to think of what was and not what will be.

p This transfer from the future to the past gives a certain psychological impulse to your imagination.

p It is interesting to note how the more experienced the director the more difficult this is, for his vision is more “expert” and arises far more easily since there has already been a great deal similar in his previous professional experience. His vision follows the path of the future production, it is already enclosed in the proscenium arch, and this right from the start makes it impossible for a true image of the play to arise, since having “seen” the play on the stage, in embryo, he has left no room for the element of the “unexpected”. The unexpected can only arise from the real-life material that lies behind the play.

p This leads to various paradoxes. For example, a director who is familiar with the background material to a play is very likely to produce a play that belies this knowledge. This is because the director’s imagination has been concerned with the familiar theatrical elements and he has overlooked the real stream of life. One of the main moments in the creative process has been omitted-drawing on one’s own impressions of life in order to find justification for the play in real life.

p Thus, in order to produce The Three Sisters successfully, one must discover for oneself the situation in the Prozorov household, see the people and the house itself, the street it stands in, and so on.

p The question of how Chekhov presents all this from the point of view of genre and the dramatic structure of the work, from the point of view of subordination of all the events to the climax, should be left aside for the time being.

p Stanislavsky insisted that a play is a recording of people saying things unaware that they were being recorded. And the director’s task is to reveal the meaning and sense of what they said from the standpoint of the time, situation and circumstances in which they lived, and understand why they said these words and not others.

p If you interpret all this in the light of life as it actually was, you will find yourself discovering all sorts of things you were hitherto unaware of. You will analyse the big, medium and small circle of circumstances that led to the given verbal expression. In this way, you will see everything far more widely and unexpectedly than if you begin from the very outset to see all the events in terms of scenic expression.

p This material will provide much food for thought, enabling you to picture the milieu in which the characters live in all its everyday details.

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p In my opinion it is wrong at this stage to try and get away from the stuff of everyday life. However much symbolism and pure convention there may eventually be in your production, at this stage one should be immersed in the stream of life, using it as the material for moulding the characters.

p Life provides the impulse to the imagination. And the important thing here is not separate facts reflected in the work but the flow of life. The director must try to return to the moment when the author began writing the play, when he was choosing from the vast selection of material life provides the elements most necessary and important for his work. The director must be equal to the author in his perception of life, must become a witness of the events that take place in the play. In other words, he must be reading a novel written by himself, as it were, on the same subject as the play, getting away from the dramatic form. I mean a good, epic novel, developing the theme, a novel in which play of eighty pages would be expanded to fill a volume of eight hundred pages, with minute details, descriptions of nature and streets, in a manner similar to that in which Balzac describes his characters’ homes. You must do as a novelist does when creating the background for the existence of the characters he is going to present. Perhaps you remember Balzac’s description of the street in Chat Noir. If runs into sixteen pages, and contains numerous details, and appears to have no direct connection with the events of the work.

p But without such a knowledge of, for example, the street where the Prozorov’s house stands, the director cannot begin work on the production, despite the fact that it bears no direct relationship to what happens on the stage. I use the term “novel of life” in my work, and 1 find in it an antidote to the terrible hypnosis of experience which all the time draws me towards familiar scenic conditions.

p What exactly do I mean by this “novel of life”? In reading a play 1 try to visualise it not in a stage setting, but on the contrary force my attention towards those layers of life that lie behind the play and try to translate it into a “novel of life”. Whatever the play, whether it be a psychological drama or a lyric poem in dramatic form, phantasmagoria in the spirit of Sukhovo-Kobylin or a folk-tale, vaudeville or Shakespearean tragedy, I try to see this “novel of life” during the first stage of my work on it, no matter what scenic form the production is likely to take eventually. I try to imagine Ostrovsky’s The Storm, for example, not as a play with acts and characters entering and exiting, but as a stream of life that really existed in the past. I try to translate the play from the language of the theatre to the language of literature, make the play into a novel, imagine that I am dealing not with the play The Storm, but with a novel called The Storm, in which there 156 arc no entrances, no acts, and no lines or stage directions. I try to imagine the lives of the characters as the lives of real people who exist or have existed. I very much want to know what they were doing before their appearance on the stage. And what they were thinking. The most important thing of all for me to know is not what they actually say and do, but what they do not but would like to.

p It is not af all easy to create a picture of life independent of the stage in answer to the question: How did it actually happen? At this stage the question of form, especially scenic form, does not arise. The director must have the right to know what to say without knowing how to say it. And when he knows “what” to say he must try to enlist the support for it of everybody engaged on the production, from the performers of the leading roles to the designer.

p One must write this novel as though Ostrovsky had not compressed the story of Katerina into a concise, tense dramatic form but had spun it out in a long slow-moving novel.

p If one is to do this successfully one requires an awful lot of “fuel”. It is very difficult, for example, to fill the large gaps between acts one and two. And in order to write a “novel of life” it is not enough to have a thorough knowledge of the play itself, or even of Ostrovsky’s entire oeuvre: one must know a great deal too about Russian life at that time. This involves consulting a vast amount of material, including pictures and ethnographic studies, literature, the arts, and the newspapers and magazines of the period. The purpose of all this work is not simply erudition, not simply to be able to appear at rehearsals armed with a vast array of facts and thus be in a position to answer whatever questions may arise. No, the main purpose is to give “fuel” to one’s imagination, because the imagination cannot burn without fuel, and cannot spring to life like a flame. It requires fuel, and fuel means facts, concrete facts.

p Only when the imagination is well supplied with factual material and is at work in a clearly defined sphere can one pass on to thinking about the scenic expression suitable for the work. From here on you can start considering the features of the play and the author’s viewpoint of the events described with the aim of arriving at a scenic solution that fully corresponds to the author’s conception. Now your creative imagination can go to work freely and easily, without beating around wildly, so that the solution arises in a natural manner, and not as a conscious effort. I think you can only say you have found your solution when, on thinking it over, you can see that this is how it was in life, that this is no invention but a fact. Then everything will work out simply and naturally.

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p Anything invented lies in the level of an illusory, associative concept, which must be resisted, since it belongs to the sphere of first vision.

p Thus, I regard the first stage of work on a production as a means of struggling with what is familiar and banal, with what exerts an irresistible attraction. This requires great will-power and courage. Only then will you acquire real joy and satisfaction from your work. Only when you are so full of your “novel of life” that the play is not enough to contain it all have you the right to start thinking about how to express it in scenic form.

p In order to be able to create a “novel of life” one must teach oneself the art of being observant. When I began work as a teacher at the Leningrad Theatre Institute I tried to explore ways of training the imagination and discovered that there is not a single drama school that includes any work on this subject in the syllabus, and it all has to be done as an “extra subject”.

p Yet this is the very essence of our work! How can there be any question of imaginative vision without training the imagination? If the visual-imaginative aspect is absent from a production we are left with an organisation of components that has little in common with what we call art. We must train the imagination in order to make ourselves need what the layman has no need of, in order to see what the layman attaches no importance to seeing.

p We do very little in this direction, and we are even a little shy of talking on the subject, for it seems somehow too abstract.

p I consider it my duty to call the attention of directors to this matter, since by sweeping it under the carpet we are doing a great deal of damage to our profession.

p Thus, for the ripening of the director’s conception the important thing (however paradoxical it may seem) is not to see but not to see.

p How can we struggle with the second danger? How can we prevent ourselves from immediately visualising the future production in the framework of the stage?

p It seems to me that the director ought not to reject a “ cinematographic” vision of the future production when he is in the process of forming his conception (as opposed to embodying it). What exactly does this mean? It means we must see the events and characters in motion, in all the breadth and diversity of life, and not try to cram our thoughts at this stage into the narrow framework of the stage, or impose temporal or spacial restrictions on ourselves.

p The course of our thoughts must depend not on the possibilities the theatre offers but on those of other, adjacent spheres of art, and above all literature and the cinema. I put it like this for myself: a cinemato- 158 graphic way of thinking combined with theatrical means of embodiment.

p The great Eisenstein made some most interesting observations on this subject. In his note-books he examines Pushkin’s description of the battle of Poltava, and shows how it is in accordance with the laws of the cinema although it was done long before people had even begun to imagine the cinema. If you follow the description line by line you will see that it is all there: rhythm, precise continuity, close-ups, longand medium-range shots, all the laws of montage.

p You can also find highly cinematographic descriptions in Dickens: a kettle is bubbling and whistling-close-up; it hangs above merrily blazing logs-the camera has panned down; all the family are gathered round the kettle-the camera has withdrawn. Thus, here we have a perfectly cinematographic method of construction.

p If I speak of the cinema it is simply because it interests me as a way of thinking. In this sense the means of the cinema are far richer than those of the theatre. Everything can be brought to life almost at the speed of thought.

p And if you convince yourself that nothing limits you or ties you down, you will find that your imagination can proceed along the right path and you will sweep aside the fetters of convention.

I should like to feel that my thesis of “director’s vision” is perfectly clear. I consider that we directors are just as prone to the dangers of cliche and banality as actors are, if not more so. And the only means of struggling with them is to provide food for the imagination. Only then is the imagination able to work in the most unexpected directions, unexpected even to yourself, and be of interest to others. And since “others” means the audience, you will realise what a great responsibility we have. It is essential that we have something to say because otherwise our collective effort using the means of the theatre will simply be illustrating a play, and we shall be failing to live up to the high standards of our noble art if we regard this as sufficient. Illustrating written dialogues by scenic means is not the same thing as endeavouring to penetrate the essence of a work and interpret it.