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p Not a single aspect of modern stage
direction has any real artistic value unless it is revealed in the actor. This being so, the director’s work with the actors in the process of preparing a production, the question of the contemporary style of acting, is the most important in theatrical creative practice.

p Every time has its own concept of artistic truth. If it were possible for us to test our impressions of twenty years ago by seeing again a production that greatly impressed us then, we might well be gravely disappointed. What once seemed profound and powerful, wise and stirring might strike us as primitive, naive and even amusing today.

p It is often only in our memory that the theatre of the past seems so enchanting, and memory is wont to play unkind tricks. We change, and our memories retain impressions received when we were quite different from what we arc now.

p The expressive means of the theatre, like living people, are born, grow old and die. The evolution of social life brings new audiences, with a new artistic perception, and this naturally entails change in expressive means.

p There is therefore no such thing as a universal acting method, valid for all time. In my opinion, there are a number of features indicating 220 whether acting is contemporary or obsolete at the present stage in the development in the theatre. I do not profess to offer a theoretical substantiation of these features of contemporary acting. What follows is simply my own observations, which may be subjective and far from exhaustive. I cannot claim to have my own methodology for revealing the features of the new, contemporary style. I regard myself as the pupil of the Moscow Art Theatre, since I learned from its masters and use their methods. These are those laws of Stanislavsky’s system that are particularly valid today, supplemented, of course, by my own personal views based on my practical experience of work with actors. I have discovered several of these new features for myself, other directors will find more, and our collective efforts will lead to the discovery, on the basis of Stanislavsky’s system, of the most essential features of the art of acting that make it vital and militant at the present stage.

p I feel I must also warn the reader in advance that in what follows the terms used are only tentative.

p None of these features arose by accident: they were all the direct outcome of a new attitude to audiences, for all that is new in art is dictated by new audience demands. The archaic and obsolete in our art derives from underestimation of the Soviet audience, in its higher intellectual level, its most progressive world outlook and aesthetic demands.

p We often address our work to a low level of audience response, whereas the tremendous events that have taken place in our livcs-thc discoveries of science and technology, and everything the twentieth century has brought our people-have transformed audiences, so that Soviet people today, living in an age of stupendous achievements with magnificent prospects, demand a more subtle presentation of human life.

p That is why I regard intellectual vitality to be the most essential quality of contemporary acting. If in the past this was an individual feature of the talent of the few truly great actors, today it must become the determining factor in every actor’s style. At the present stage in the development of the theatre, this, of all the features indicated by Stanislavsky, undoubtedly assumes the greatest importance.

p In present-day acting the main trait of a character being created on the stage must be a special individual attitude to the world, expressed through a particular way of thinking.

p Hence the importance of what Popov has called the “zones of silence”. Even where the actor does not utter a single word on the stage, the audience must feel this “zone of silence” every second, must feel the actor’s pulsing thought, understand what he is thinking about. 221 Acting can on no account be regarded as modern in the absence of this capacity for intense thought.

p Many dramatists feel the need for this approach to character. It is no accident that in his Ocean, in a crucial scene in the evolution of the character of Platonov, the scene at Kilometre Eight, Stein does not put a single word into Platonov’s mouth. Many directors get carried away here with the opportunities for presenting an outwardly effective picture of “degradation”, whereas in fact the aim is quite different: the director and the actor should concentrate the audience’s attention on the silent Platonov. He is the central character, and therefore the important thing is not what is going on around him but what is going on inside him at that moment. It is important to show that what he sees forces him to form new judgements of people he has known for a long time. Platonov must be the focus of this scene and everything else is subordinate. Only an artist capable of thinking can solve this task.

p Jean Gabin is a fine example of this kind of actor in the cinema. He can act in Les Grandes Families one day and in Rue des Prairies the next with the same face and practically the same costume, yet be completely different. With all the differences of biography, class background and character, we have an apparent absence of superficial distinctive features. In the first case he is one of “the strong ones” of this world, aware of the drama of his class, which is historically doomed. In the other, he is a man of the people, aware of the dreadful contradictions of bourgeois society in which he lives, and the tragic insolubility of the moral problems man faces in that society. Although Jean Gabin plays the two roles in an externally similar manner, they are poles apart in essence, and audience feels this contrast strongly. How docs the actor achieve this effect?

p The secret is his careful choice of means for revealing the psychology of the character, which he has accurately determined in each case. The main thing is that the two characters think differently. It is not that they think about different things, that goes without saying, but that they think in a different way. It is because you arc all the time trying to penetrate the secret of their thoughts that you derive aesthetic pleasure.

p The contemporary method of acting demands maximum audience involvement. Unless the audience is given something to think about, if they are intellectually passive, the acting cannot be truly modern, even if it is excellent in all other respects.

p The audience must not be allowed to guess in advance, even a second in advance, what the actor is going to do later. Audience involvement must take the form of the actors setting the audience “ puzzles” which will be solved at some later stage. If the audience get ahead 222 of the actor, it means that the latter is subscribing to an archaic style of acting. The actor must lead the audience in his wake, guiding their emotions.

p N. Khmelyov was one of the most contemporary actors in this respect. Take the scene in Anna Karenina where Khmelyov in the role of Karenin is meeting people from high society and greeting them, each one differently, according to their rank. On the surface he was. equally polite and courteous to all, and yet he somehow managed to convey by his handshakes the exact social rank of each character, whether he was Karenin’s inferior, equal or superior. What accounted for the expressive power was external inscrutability, identical in every case, combined with the subtle internal manner in which he stressed the difference. It would have been extremely primitive if he had held out two fingers to one and bowed low to another. As it was, everything was strictly according to the rules of society etiquette, yet Khmelyov was setting the audience a puzzle which they were unable to solve.

p When I say that an essential feature of modern acting is for the actor to be always one step ahead of the audience and hold their interest with ever-new puzzles, I am speaking not of the plot, of what happens to the character, but of an inner process. Our modern audience is interested more in processes than results, more in prospects than facts.

p If a modern work contains opportunities for puzzles for the audience, the concept of the director’s “score” is radically altered. It is not enough to construct the “score” from the point of view of developing the plot. This will only be “A”, and there arc other letters in the alphabet it must be remembered. The score must be made sufficiently intricate and subtle and the sequence of events must be drawn up in such a way as to determine where and how in a given play you will be giving the audience the opportunity for guesswork as to the essence of what is happening. Only too often we strive to ensure that everything is perfectly clear and straightforward-we are still doing elementary arithmetic when we should have already passed on to algebra.

p I regard indicating feelings instead of actually having them as the biggest enemy in acting. Thus, at the end of the last century, a declamatory style of acting was practised at the Maly Theatre in Moscow, against which the Art Theatre launched a full-scale attack. Today, a new tendency is in vogue, and a new enemy has arisen-the actor who works “a la Art Theatre”, a style of acting in which the feelings are merely indicated. Some of these actors have achieved a fair degree of “skill”, and in many theatres the acting looks pretty authentic and natural. In recent years this has become nothing short of a disaster. The Art Theatre emerged and flourished under the banner of struggle 223 against theatricality, false pathos, histrionics, and all that was reactionary in the Russian theatre at that time, thereby doing a great service and accomplishing, if not a revolution, at least a major reform in the dramatic art of the time. Today, however, this authenticity “a la Art Theatre” is shackling our art. It is often not the inner artistic principles elaborated by great masters of the stage, first and foremost Stanislavsky, that reign in our theatre today, but rather superficial imitation of the Art Theatre style.

p I feel this is extremely dangerous because any kind of imitation lacks vital thought and genuine human feelings: all you have is their indication with the aid of a collection of familiar expressive means.

p Stanislavsky’s thesis that you must not “play” passions is interpreted by many as rejection of passion altogether. Thus, at one stage in the development of the Soviet theatre there were numerous productions where the illusion of reality was successfully created, which seemed really authentic, but in fact failed to move audiences since the passions were counterfeit and thus could not evoke a live response.

p There are still many people today who regard the call for emotional restraint as an attempt to deprive the theatre of its emotional nature and banish all feelings from the stage. Nothing could be further from the truth. In actual fact emotional restraint requires tremendous emotional effort, since in order to restrain feelings one must first have them. I am very much against the way actors use the thesis of “ contained” feelings to justify their emotional vacuum. The director and the actors must first build up a highly tense emotional atmosphere on the stage, and only then set about the task of finding the minimum of expressive means.

p When we speak of emotional restraint we should be referring to the means of expression, and not to the presence or absence of passions. Otherwise our argument will degenerate into abstract juggling with the terms of theatre criticism and we shall never achieve any practical results.

p It is thus a question of laconic means of expression. For some reason many people fight shy of the word laconicism, which is strange since it is a law of all art forms. It means obtaining the maximum of expression with the minimum of means. There is nothing ultra-modern about it. Chekhov, Pushkin and Tolstoi were all laconic. If we take a manuscript of Chekhov or Tolstoi we can see that their method of work was based on selecting a minimum of means of tremendous exptessive power. Rodin said that he took a piece of marble and cut away all that was superfluous. Superfluous, note. Why then should the director and the actor feel free to disregard this law which has always been and remains a law of genuine art.

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p Applied to acting, laconicism means restraint and control in expressing the feelings, allowing passion to manifest itself only when it is called for by the situation, and not continuously and indiscriminately. The idea is to make the audience feel that something quite ordinary and insignificant is taking place so that some detail, confirmed by the preceding or subsequent events suddenly acquires a tremendous intensity, thereby showing it to be present throughout the scene in question. But only too often our actors go to one of two extremes, both equally unsatisfactory. Either they simply “exist” according to so-called truth, “just talking” in a neutral manner so that they cannot possibly be accused of falsehood, yet at the same time never allowing what is happening to acquire intensity, or they indulge in highly dramatic “play acting” throughout. Many actors strive to make their acting as “ dramatic” as possible, as though constantly afraid that the audience might fail to notice something. In so doing they deprive the audience of the opportunity for conjecture, so that they lose all interest.

p Y. Tolubeyev’s performance as Vozhak in The Optimistic Tragedy is a fine model of laconic acting. Throughout the scene of Vozhak’s collapse and exposure, he continues to behave in a perfectly calm and normal manner despite the fact that he realises that this is the end. Only when he is being led off does he suddenly swing round and cry: “Long live the revolution!” in an almost inhuman voice, thereby expressing the terror and horror of death he has been feeling all this time. Thus a single detail illuminates the preceding scene in retrospect revealing the tremendous emotional tension he has been feeling.

p An extremely important question of a practical nature arising in connection with these features of the contemporary style of acting is the question of “transformation”, or “metamorphosis”. Even professionals are wont to subscribe to the layman’s understanding, or rather misunderstanding of it, identifying it with making oneself unrecognisable. We often hear a person saying to an actor: “You know, I’d never have recognised you if it hadn’t been for your name on the programme!”, and this is supposed to be the highest compliment one can pay to an actor’s talent. In fact, of course, such a compliment would be more appropriate at a fancy-dress party. This is a widespread layman’s view of what constitutes the essence of good acting and it is only dangerous when it is shared by critics and actors, when the latter substitute external attributes for real character. The kind of transformation that involves a heavy application of grease-paint and the adoption of a special gait, all kinds of grimaces or stuttering should hardly concern us today.

p Genuine transformation is only achieved at the cost of tremendous effort by the actor, and even then it may not be complete. I for one am 225 Tovstonogov during rehearsals of Toot, the Others and the Major bv Y Erkcn at the Gorky Theatre, Leningrad, 1971 Tovstonogov during rehearsals of Toot, the Others and the Major by Y. Erkcn, 1971 not inclined to blame the actor if the process has not been completed, as long as his work on the role has been organic and correct. For this belongs to the sphere of inspiration, the subconscious upsurge that docs not take place as a matter of course, since it largely depends on the distance between the actor and the character he is creating, on the psycho-physical characteristics of the actor.

p The concept of transformation is intimately related to Stanislavsky’s concept of the “kernel” of the role, a factor enabling the actor to live not only within the circumstances of the play given by the author, but in any circumstances in life, in a new quality. They say that for Shchukin the kernel of the role of Tartaglia in Princess Turandot was a twelve-year-old girl, and that this he sustained throughout the play. He had searched for this kernel for a long time, and, once he had found it, was able to exist according to it easily and freely in any circumstances.

p This is the grain of sand around which the actor builds up the pearl of the role, which makes the performance unique and helps the process of transformation. The greater the distance between the actor and the part, the higher this qualitative leap must be.

p But very often, despite a close similarity between the traits of the actor and the character he is playing and a correct attitude to life, there is still something missing-the final stroke which, as in a painting, brings the whole work to life and illuminates it in a special light. If the actor does not go beyond “I am” in the given circumstances and subordinates everything to “I am”, the result is quite unsatisfactory as theatre. There are exceptions to the rule of course, but it is the rule that must concern us here.

p From the history of the theatre we know that not all great actors were ones who transformed themselves according to the role they were playing. In such cases we usually concede that so-and-so can be absolved since they are such a “personality”. Thus, we are quite fascinated by the personality of Komissarzhevskaya, who was not wont to transform herself for a part.

p If an actor observes the first law of “living” the part, exists in accordance with the given circumstances and for a long time behaves in a way that is typical not of himself but of the part he is playing, making this behaviour his own, at some point there will be a great qualitative leap forward and something new and -essential to the part will appear. The actor thereby ceases to be himself and “becomes” the part.

p I think such transformation can be compared to the following situation in life. You are going along the street and you meet a person you haven’t seen for twenty years or more. He seems a completely different Tovstonogov during rehcarsals of Toot, the Others and the Major W Y. Erkcn, 1971 226 person, so much so that you did not recognise him at first. He has grown fat and bald, and he now wears glasses, and he somehow moves differently from the person you used to know, he is nevertheless the same person.

p What changes in the actor? Above all his way of thinking, his attitude to the outside world and his rhythm of life. These three factors determine the act of transformation. No change in external characteristics will do any good if they are lacking.

p Modern cinematography and television dictate to us the law of authenticity. We are finding it more and more difficult to do what seemed perfectly natural in the old theatre. At one time it made no difference if the actor was twenty years older than the character he was playing as long as he acted well. Our present-day audience is quite uncompromising over the question of authenticity, no matter how skilful the acting.

p Here we come to the well-known contradiction between type-acting and transformation. Type-acting prevents the actor from accomplishing the most precious thing in the theatre, transformation. At the same time, if you ignore type-acting in the sense of presenting a type, you are violating the law of authenticity.

p The point is that this contradiction is purely apparent. At the present stage of the theatre’s development the concept of transformation must undergo a qualitative change in the sense that the actor must abandon the attempt to be outwardly “unrecognisable” in favour of inner transformation.

p Transformation is the most difficult stage to grasp for the actor in his work, for it is at this stage that the subconscious comes into play. The director’s task is to ensure that the process of development from the conscious to the subconscious takes place naturally.

p The director needs tremendous sensibility and sense of balance in training the actors in order to enable them to achieve transformation, without departing from the law of authenticity. Otherwise he will be stifling the artist in them, exploiting their gifts without offering them any prospects for creative work or the acquisition of genuine skill. An actor will only be pleasing as long as he has these gifts.

p For this reason a director must often retreat in order to advance later, he must reach a compromise with the actor, and sometimes with the audience too, while all the time thinking of the ultimate end in training the actor. If you only think of today, of the theatre’s immediate tasks, you are not a real teacher since you are not showing any concern for the actor’s future but are destroying the essence of the actor’s art, depriving him of the possibility of transformation.

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p Actors of various schools, actors with very different personalities, habits and concepts of what is right and wrong are working in our theatres. Very often a director can talk himself hoarse in holding forth on new principles, while the actors remain unimpressed and continue to act as they have always done. It is necessary that the actor himself should be convinced of the fact that his devices for some reason no longer produce an impact on audiences-not because the director says “this is bad” but because he himself feels that in this particular production, in this particular situation, with these particular partners, a new approach is required. He must feel what is false for himself.

p Here we come to the question of the search for expressive means appropriate to a given production, because every genre requires its own particular “truth” and our great trouble is that so many of our actors adopt an identical approach for all dramatists and all plays. Actor’s cliches have developed not only in playing characters of a certain category but in the presentation of scenic life in general.

p This is the problem we discussed in connection with the director’s solution, the problem of the nature of the feelings inherent in a given work.

p The appropriate style of acting is determined by the play, the dramatist and today’s audience. A law must be created for the actor, “rules of play” in accordance with the manner of life on the stage a given work requires. For example, if in Princess Turandot B. Shchukin in a scene with Y. Zavadsky dropped a key and asked his partner to pick it up, thereby departing from the given circumstances to return to them immediately, in Yegor Bulychov it would be a crime to act according to these rules of play. Whereas in some play it might be perfectly alright for a character to turn to the audience and announce an interval, such an action by, say, Astrov in Uncle Vanya would be patently absurd.

p I realise that these arc extreme cases, but I choose them deliberately in order to drive home the essence of the matter. The genre distinction, the rules of play offered by the author are much more subtle, and the closer the work as regards the nature of the feelings, the more difficult it is to reveal these distinctions in the acting.

p The laws of existence in different plays are manifested in the most varied aspects of the scenic life of a given play, from the ideologicalartistic solution of the part to the relationship with the conventional environment, with every detail, even the most apparently insignificant, of this environment.

p Take that very common theatre property, the gun. It will be qualitatively different according to the artistic system on which the production is based. In one case it will be perfectly naturalistic, in another the 228 actor can “fire” simply by raising two fingers. Both will be equally “correct” provided they are appropriate to the relevant system of existence on the stage being employed.

p Here we see the link between the conventional environment and the unconventional actor’s existence. The gun is a part of the environment which must be included in the scenic life of the actor in a different manner in every case, although the actor must always be organic.

p The nature of the feelings is also manifested in the method governing the selection of the given circumstances (we have already considered this in connection with the director’s efforts to establish the genre of the play: here we examine it in its major manifestation, in the acting). From part to part, it is not only the given circumstances that differ but the method governing their selection. In the case of one character for example, his health, work, or the weather may be of importance in determining his system of scenic life. For another role this may be of no importance whatsoever since the key to his life offered by the author requires something else.

p The nature of the feelings is formed on the one hand by the method underlying the selection of the given circumstances and on the other by the degree and quality of the audience’s involvement in the scenic life of the actor.

p Here the most extreme solutions are possible, as long as the audience is actively involved. But if in some productions communication with the audience must be direct, in other productions the scenic life of the character can be based on the “fourth wall” principle. Here I am not speaking of the nature of the text of the part, which may be directly addressed to the audience or only to the partner, as the case may be, but of the possibility of constructing the actor’s existence and the nature of his communication with the audience in a certain fashion. Between these two extremes of direct contact with the audience and the “fourth wall” principle there are a vast number of subtle qualitative gradations and combinations. Thus in the Gorky Theatre production of A Memory of Two Mondays the whole action was based on the reminiscences of one of the characters, and he lived according to the laws of direct contact with the audience while all the other characters lived according to the “fourth wall” principle.

p Stanislavsky’s term “faith and imagination” implies a different kind of faith in each particular role.

p To determine the nature of the relationship between the actor and the audience is to find the solution of the second aspect of the problem of the nature of the feelings.

p Here asides can provide an important clue. Thus, an actor may have an aside in his role which he utters loudly so that the whole audience 229 hears but not his partner. The nature of such asides is an important factor determining the style of acting.

p Even with the most conventional environment, even with the most direct communication with the audience, the scenic life of the actor must remain true, and this truth will be different in every case, according to the artistic structure of the given work.

p Vakhtangov took a great step forward when he demonstrated not only in theory but in practice that the truth is not destroyed by having a conventional environment, by having the actor perform according to other rules than those of the “fourth wall”.

p A frequent mistake we make is to treat the question of getting away from convention in the acting as something “given once and for all” by the objective laws of the system. These objective laws do exist, but as an historical, fluent, changing concept, changing according to the level of the audience, the level of their aesthetic demands, which are also in constant flux. That is why the laws of truth are new for every new play. And when a director rehearsing a play uses his imagination together with the actors, within the given circumstances, he must tune it to the given work, so that he is using it in the appropriate genre key.

p When a director comes to rehearsal in the correct mood this helps him lead all those taking part into the logic, structure and atmosphere the work requires.

p When we began rehearsing When the Acacias Bloom we had an ironic and at the same time serious approach to the given circumstances of the play. This combination predetermined the life in this play right from the start, producing the right degree of convention, the rules of play necessary for this particular play as opposed to, say, The Idiot.

p The task consists in getting the actor into the appropriate logic of life so that the unexpected can arise. Yet more often than not in determining the life of the actor we rest content with the author’s suggestions and simply follow the lines, the connections between the words, filling the gaps with more or less possible physical actions. We must fight against this, for a work by its very nature prescribes a certain style of acting.

p When rehearsing Simonov’s The Fourth we felt the distinctive quality of the play which on the one hand is a psychological drama and on the other hand a didactic work in view of the dramatic device of thinking back to the past, which requires a special style of interpretation. V. Strzhelchik in the main role tries to live in a entirely different manner than in the part of Tsyganov in The Barbarians, for example. Moreover, the difference is not simply in the characters themselves, which naturally have nothing in common, but in the style of acting.

p If a work is written in the form of a pamphlet and not in the form 230 of a psychological drama, provided the genre is correctly appraised psychological authenticity and truth to life will not be lost. Surely Shchedrin’s fable about generals is no less authentic for all the fantastic things that take place. It is simply that the nature of the truth is different than in, say, The Philistines. It must be understood that even a work of an extremely artificial, conventional nature-a fairy-talc or a comedie bouffe-u\timatc\y requires its own truth and authentic organic life of the actor.

p If a work is written in the style of a satirical pamphlet, and the actors play it as a slice-of-life drama, they will be completely at loggerheads with the author and the production will lack the truth they are seeking.

p Stanislavsky bequeathed us a great discovery-trie law of the organic life of the actor on the stage. But the most important and most difficult thing still remains to be done, and that is to apply it appropriately in each individual case.

p In this connection it is necessary to turn to one of the major means of scenic expression-words. This question demands our attention because a very difficult situation has developed in which two extremes are competing for recognition.

p Some actors, in their desire for a modern manner of existence on the stage, for truth to life, are strongly opposed to deliberate enunciation, feeling that it smacks of declamation, thereby playing havoc with the essence of our art, since the audience is often unable to hear and understand what is being said on the stage. Such actors maintain that they need only speak as they do in life in order to be understood. Moreover, it is not a case of inability to speak clearly or carelessness but rather a matter of principle, a basic feature of their art. The trouble is that this destroys our very raison d’etre, since the whole meaning and content is lost. It is not simply a matter of enjoining actors to “speak up”: it is a creative principle, and must be combated in a creative manner.

p The other extreme is the old disease of allowing the words to become an element in their own right, an extraneous element. You have a pause in the action and words take over. This also destroys the nature of the theatre, where words must be the ultimate and major expression of the whole process, but not the only one.

p Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, the founders of psychological theatre, affirmed the concept of realism as the simplicity of life. It might seem that a new thesis should have been affirmed in the theatre: on the stage, as in life, you can talk carelessly. Not so: the closer the theatre came to life, the more importance Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko attached to words.

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p The closer we approach a subtle modern theatre, the more concise and laconic the dramatists become. Remember how in Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters Truffaldino is told by his master to deliver a letter. In a modern play his master would simply have said “Go and post this letter!”. But there the verbal possibilities arc used to the maximum, for in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries dramatists strove to express as much as possible in words. But the fact that dramatists have become more laconic does not mean that words have become less important. On the contrary: if an actor has only a couple of lines instead of a lengthy monologue in which to express the essence of a whole life, a single inaudible word ruins everything. Words have become more condensed on the stage, each word carries a far greater impact and even a single interjection can pack tremendous meaning.

p In no circumstances whatsoever, either in the verbose theatre of the past or in the modern theatre, can words exist in their own right, as an end in themselves. They must be perceived through the action process, as the ultimate expression of that process. The words must filter into our minds naturally, without any effort on our part, while our attention is fixed on the action and the inner life of the characters. If we allow the words to be extraneous and self-sufficing they will not only fail to produce any impact but will actually work against the objectives we have set ourselves. When the words are quickened by thought so that one follows not the textual logic of a passage but the active logic, then the words, while seeming to be secondary, actually acquire primary importance. In this sense, we must make the primacy of the words a strict law of our art.

p We have an actor working in our theatre who has a serious speech defect, and yet he never slurs over a single word, not because he suffers from “disease number two” but because his mind is always active and on the mark.

p Today, the dramatists face the task of leaving more to the audience’s intelligence. The urge to draw the audience into the action-make them divine what is transpiring and not only listen-stems from Chekhov. The role of the words has thus undergone a qualitative change, becoming more important and profound. In Schiller’s day the second disease was far the more dangerous, but today it can only cause superficial damage. In time this disease will disappear altogether, for it is out of step with the times. Disease number one, on the other hand, is in step with the times, and is therefore likely to last, which makes it the bigger enemy for us.

p We must remember that simplicity is not always synonymous with truth, that it is sometimes simply a good imitation of the truth. In order to convey ideas, an actor must above all be “active” on the stage.

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p There are various phases of work on the words. At the first stage the words are a puzzle for both actor and director alike, a puzzle that must be solved in order to determine what lies behind the words. Then we begin to test and accomplish something, to act, and the words return as the final outcome of the creative process.

p If we understand the creative process as progression from the words to the action and back to the words, the importance of the words, far from being decreased, actually increases. The same principle underlies our approach irrespective of whether we are dealing with a terse Hemingwayan phrase or an extremely long-winded passage. The important thing is to ensure that there is action on the stage, for in the reverse event, we shall be slaves of the verbal expression and the result will be that dreadful form of theatre where the words are the only expressive means, so that this major element of scenic art is deprived of its real significance.

p Speaking of the way rehearsals should be conducted, I feel that one of the most serious diseases of stage direction today is verbosity. We always seem to be talking non-stop.

p The reader is almost sure to have noticed, probably quite frequently, that there are people we enjoy talking to and others who, although they are clever and well-educated and we learn a great deal from talking to them, are a perfect menace they are so boring, and one is hard put to it to keep one’s patience and be polite to them.

p Why is this? The point is that when we talk we should always leave some things unsaid if we wish what we say to be interesting. One must not begin from the very beginning every time one opens one’s mouth. Very often just a few words are enough to make it quite clear what we wish to say, since a great deal is predictable or known in advance.

p We waste a tremendous amount of time on useless talk. As I see it, ideally our profession should be a silent one, although we sometimes feel obliged to talk a lot for the simple reason that we tend to find very few people with the same artistic credo as ourselves. The trouble is not so much that we talk a lot as that we don’t try to talk as little as possible, limiting ourselves to what is absolutely essential.

p Verbosity is a hindrance in our work, depriving words of their power to influence and infect people. If a director lives the scene being rehearsed in the same rhythm as the actors, he will often find that simple catchwords can explain his meaning quite adequately. But unless there is vital communication between him and the actors no amount of talking, however wise and profound, will help.

p Once at a major theatre a tape-recording was made of a rehearsal, and it turned out that four hours of rehearsal time had been used as follows: the actors had rehearsed for twenty minutes, and then the 233 director had spoken for three hours forty minutes. Unfortunately, this is very typical.

p In my opinion, the actor should not even be aware of the director talking during a rehearsal. A collective search is in progress, in which the director plays the guiding role, and in order to lead the actor to the correct nature of feelings there is absolutely no need to explain to him all the various component elements: the important thing is to stimulate his imagination and turn his thoughts in the right direction. Rather than embark on an endless monologue it is frequently far more useful to suggest to the actor the right physical action that will enable him to find the correct existence in a particular scene more quickly. Detailed explanations and comments tend to simply destroy the creative process.

p 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. The clearer the vision the director has of a scene or n play or a certain character, and the more precisely he feels the rhythm and the whole plastic side of the future production, the less words he needs. He should make it a rule to use as few words as possible. Of course, it’s all very nice to have a flare for oratory and show how erudite one is, but this is perfectly immaterial as far as producing a play is concerned. No, the director must find another way of communicating with the actors, and this is very much bound up with the problem of creating a group of people who share his views. Only then can he get away from starting from scratch every time and having to prove that the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea and two plus two does equal four.

p When we at the Gorky Theatre were rehearsing the difficult tragic scene of Myshkin’s madness just after Rogozhin has killed Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot the question arose of how best to help the actor achieve its embodiment. I could have given a long talk on the features of Myshkin’s illness, or the mental state of a person whose mind is unbalanced by such a tragic event. But instead we chose another course. Having brought the scene to a high emotional pitch, I suggested to the actors that they now act as though this were a perfectly ordinary case, and decide among themselves whether it was alright to let somebody come in, and so on and so forth. In the general context of the work this simple conversation produced a shattering impact.

p One must not overload the actor with explanations. We often forget this and go into far too much detail over each passage so that the 234 actor passes into an abstract-rational state. We thereby destroy the germ of the future scene in his imagination, without which he will never be able to solve the objective.

p I don’t want these ideas of mine to serve as ammunition for those directors who understand work on a production purely in terms of external organisation of its components. When I say that it is important to offer the actor a timely suggestion as to the correct physical action, I most certainly do not mean to say that the director should limit himself to telling the actor to take a step to the left or the right, move closer to his partner or sit down. What I am speaking of is the search for a genuine solution whose realisation depends on suggesting to the actor the only possible plastic expression.

p I once produced Prokofiev’s opera Semyon Kotko. One of the most powerful moments is the scene of Lyubka’s madness, when the Germans shoot her sweetheart before her very eyes. Lyubka stands on the road in a fierce thunderstorm and the composer has given her only one phrase: “Where’s my Vassilyochck” repeated about twenty-five times. I sought a solution for this scene for a very long time. I had to determine how Lyubka’s madness should be expressed in visual terms. At the shooting she stands amid a crowd of people being held back from the place of execution by a chain of German soldiers.

p I decided on the following solution. She comes down from the higher level and goes along the line of German soldiers asking each one in turn “Where’s my Vassilyochek?” The fact that she asks the Germans, the very people who have killed him, gave visual impact to her madness.

p The correct solution of a detail, suggested to the actor at the right moment, helps him to find the correct nature of feelings. 1 even regard demonstrating things to the actor at the stage when the image is germinating can be dangerous, since it tends to make the actor rely too much on the director rather than using his own initiative. I try to demonstrate only at the culminating moment when the transition to n new quality is already under way.

p Sometimes an unexpected detail may provide the solution for a whole scene. This is always the result of a contrast between the inner life of the characters and its plastic expression. In Signor Mario I.f Writing a Comedy the scene in Signor Mario’s play of the hero’s execution, where he takes leave of the heroine, is presented entirely according to the laws of heroic melodrama. The prison gates with soldiers standing there; the hero is led out for a moment and then led away again, and the heroine is left alone. The scene is a very short one. When we rehearsed it we could not for the life of us avoid making it sentimental and melodramatic, whatever we tried. At the same time 235 the dramatic context was given by the author and it could not be violated. So T suggested to the actors that they play the scene as though they were at a station seeing somebody off on their summer holidays. Since the tension was present in the very fabric of the work, the development of the through-action should be automatic. The whole scene was played in a straightforward, everyday manner, and the apparent absence of drama was what gave the scene its real dramatic impact, by virtue of the preceding and subsequent scenic action.

p What other means arc there of helping the actor find the appropriate nature of feelings? The director only has the right to set to work with the actors when he has already found the correct tuning fork himself. It is in this light that we should understand Nemirovich-Danchenko’s statement that the director, although he may not act on the stage himself, must be a born actor. The director must be able to penetrate the emotional as well as the rational element of the work.

p It is the director’s emotional “infection” by a work that should give him the ability to correspond with the future audience, and at the earlier stages of work on a production this means the actors. He must help the actor to keep in key throughout, in the key he has found in the work. The important thing is to keep the flame he has managed to set alight at the beginning burning as an unquenchable fire throughout the process of work.

p I personally regard so-called director’s “explanations” as being extremely harmful, since this is to put the cart before the horse and offer results and solutions to the actors before they are ready to live the essence and spirit of the work, thereby depriving them of the opportunity to participate in the live creative process. In this case instead of working together to understand the work and making joint efforts to arrive at the appropriate solution, the actors and director are on opposite sides of the fence: the cast have the impression that the director has already arrived at a solution and feel absolved from all creative search. The director must on no account abandon his guiding role in the production, however, since otherwise anarchy will prevail, with everyone tugging in their own direction and disagreements arising over the slightest issues, so that the essence of the work will be drowned in a flood of words.

p The main thing is to lead the cast towards one’s conception in such a way that they are not aware that they are being led yet at the same time constantly feel that they are on the right path. This approach will create the necessary creative atmosphere.

p A false concept of authority tends to persist in many of our theatres. The director feels that he ought not to accept suggestions, since this undermines his authority in the eyes of the rest of the company. If a 236 director is able to accept suggestions and only reject them when he feels they are invalid and not simply because they are not his own, then constructive co-operation is possible. It is extremely important to sustain a feeling of infectious play acting, in which everybody takes part and makes his contribution. Then rejection of something is not going to offend anybody, and acceptance is perfectly natural. Only in this way can the necessary free and relaxed creative atmosphere be achieved, with everybody working with equal interest and enthusiasm.

p I am often asked whether I consider the actor to have the right to his own individual vision of a part. I think the question itself points to a fundamental misconception of the director’s role, for it implies a contradiction between the director’s concept of the part and the actor’s personality, a contradiction which I regard as non-existent in the normal creative process.

p It seems to me that when the conception ripens in the director’s mind, his aim should not be to force living people into the straightjacket of his own intention. The conception should be a “conspiracy of equals”, the actors’ adherence to which depending not simply on their being encouraged to go along with its aims but on affinity of views and willing collaboration, so that the question of their right to an individual vision simply does not arise.

p When a director tries to make two actors doubling the same role conform to an identical inner and outward pattern he is making a grave mistake, for he is violating the law of the organic existence of the actor on the stage as it is impossible for two different people to have the same “reflexes”. Two actors playing the same part must act differently but within the same nature of feelings. One may be more inventive, the other more subtle, but the nature of feelings must be the same, dictated first by the author and then by the embodiment of the director’s conception.

The director’s objective must never involve the destruction of the natural organic life of the actor on the stage. If the live nature of the actor is deadened, his “vision” can be of no interest at all. A real actor cannot commit creative suicide. I prefer a puppet to such a dead actor, forced into an alien scenic form.