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First printing 1972
__NOTE__ No copyright. [2]CONTENTS
5 19 33 44 47 63 73 85 96 128 144 159 178 219 237 252 264 274 283 307 About the Author
Introduction
Stanislavsky's Time
Civic Responsibility in Art
The Director and the Playwright
Stage Direction is a Profession
The Director and the Times
Theatre and Cinema
Reflections on the Classics
The Philistines
Towards the Conception
Genre
Realising the Conception
Work with the Actors
Method
Work with the Designer
Music in the Drama Production
Training the Company
Meeting with Shakespeare
List of Gcorgi Tovstonogov's Produc
tions
At one point in this book Tovstono-
gov writes: ``Speaking of the way rehearsals should be conducted, I feel
that one of the most serious diseases in stage direction today is
verbosity. We always seem to be talking non-stop.
``.. .We waste a tremendous amount of time on useless talk. As I see it, ideally our profession should be a silent one.
``.. .Very often, how I feel after a rehearsal, whether I feel satisfied or dissatisfied, depends on the amount of talking I have done. If I've done a lot of talking, then something's wrong: it means I've tried to cover up with words the fact that I am not sure what I want in a particular scene.''
There's a lot of truth in these words. Indeed, it is because Tovstonogov displays such inspired vitality at rehearsals and in all his everyday work, is so constructive in the complex business of staging a play - in giving real help to the actors and collaborating with the author, designer and composer - that this discourse on the job of the stagedirector is so interesting and useful. His views are convincing because they are so well substantiated, backed up with practical examples drawn freely from his vast experience in the theatre. They are all the more valuable in that Tovstonogov does not try to foist his opinions 5 upon the reader but, on the contrary, avoids the slightest note of superiority and dogmatism, and plays down his own ability and experience.
It is this humility, sincerity with himself and others, coupled with a high sense of professional responsibility that makes Tovstonogov's art so vital and startlingly original, that makes him stand head and shoulders above the many cock-sure mediocrities.
Paradoxical as it may seem, it is because he constantly casts doubt on the value of his experience, that we feel such tremendous respect for him and confidence in the correctness of his opinions.
One chapter of this book is entitled ``Stage Direction Is a Profession'' and is a plea for professionalism all the way. Tovstonogov examines almost every aspect of the director's work in his book, and stresses throughout the director's professional duty.
Tovstonogov makes no attempt to dazzle the reader with brilliant literary tricks, paradoxes and clever twists of style. He writes in a straightforward, honest manner of the hard effort that goes into producing a play, getting what he wants from the actors, and achieving a high level of dramatic art.
Tovstonogov is an extremely versatile director. He has tried his hand at all kinds of themes, genres and styles. Yet his productions all have one thing in common: they all deal with man as a member of society, are all in a major key, and all have a strong note of conviction running through them, the conviction that man is essentially good and strong, and that he is capable of reorganising life and making it good too.
This optimistic theme was naturally strongest in such heroic plays as The Death of the Squadron, The Optimistic Tragedy, and the story of Julius Fucik.
The Leningrad Pushkin Theatre production of The Optimistic Tragedy, for which Tovstonogov was awarded a Lenin Prize, was one of the greatest triumphs of the Soviet theatre. It was a triumph on every count. A. Bosulayev's magnificent sets created the impression of a road of battles and glory running into the distance through boundless expanses. Kara Karayev's original music was full of emotion and lyricism. The acting was first-class: O. Lebzak brought tremendous moral purity and humanity to the role of the Woman-Commissar, Y. Tulubeyev's Vozhak, the anarchist leader, had quite extraordinary evil force, and A. Sokolov as Siply was mercilessly acute.
But the main thing was the way all these individual ingredients were blended, so that instead of clashing with one another they merged to form a single monumental whole. They were welded together by the producer, who perceived in Vishnevsky's play the sharp realism of the 6 characters, the poetic convention of the framework and the deep, lyrical undercurrents expressed by the music.
Tovstonogov managed to give the authentic acting and the designer's poetic rendering of nature a truly epic sweep, so that the production, harmonious and uplifting, was in fact an optimistic tragedy.
For those who saw the production, the scene of the sailors' farewell ball where the terrible pain of parting was presented so poignantly or the episodes where the regiment is seen leaving for the front, are quite unforgettable. As the severe, majestic outlines of Leningrad's buildings float slowly past and away, and the endless road unfolds, leading into the distance, the spellbound audience are irresistibly drawn into the moving epic being enacted on the stage.
Tovstonogov visualised The Optimistic Tragedy as the strands of individual destinies interwoven perfectly naturally with the vast canvas of history.
A similar effect was achieved in Tovstonogov's production of Sholokhov's Virgin Soil Upturned, where revolutionary ardour was blended with true humanity, mingled with lyricism. P. Luspekayev in the role of Nagulny combined child-like naivety and simplicity, authentic and life-like to the last detail, with tremendous integrity and devotion to noble ideas that gave him almost superhuman stature. T. Doronina as Lushka and Y. Lcbedev as old Shchukar were tremendously human. The whole production represented a superb synthesis of the epic and the lyrical, the social and the human.
However, Tovstonogov's repertoire includes other, very different productions, far removed from the heroic. In these too, he is to be found constantly searching for features that correspond to his convictions, his faith in life, and his constant desire to present it in a major key, in all its beauty and power.
Many of Tovstonogov's productions at the Gorky Theatre in Leningrad begin with a short prologue, added to the original play by the producer as a ``tuning-fork'' for what follows.
Thus When the Acacias Bloom begins with two smart, witty ``masters of ceremonies'' introducing the actors, establishing contact with the audience. The gay, festive ``parade'' serves to prepare us for a light-hearted, playful show.
While in the prologue to When the Acacias Bloom the stage lights are full on, for Sixth Floor they are all out but for a dim light in the gloomy corridor of Madame Marais' boarding house. Bertha, one of the tenants, gropes her way around, with tousled head and bleary eyes, only half awake. The silhouettes of people stretching are visible through the frosted glass of one of the doors, and a young woman trots blithely past on her high-heels, proudly bearing a chamber pot.
7Instead of being given a foretaste of a theatrical ``occasion'' we have an invitation to take a look at a slice of unadorned everyday life.
The Fox and the Grapes opens to the striking of a gong, at which the actors slowly make their way up the steps from the orchestra pit onto the practically empty stage. They walk seriously with fierce concentration as if mounting a rostrum to deliver a speech, to explain, argue and convince. We realise that we are about to witness a fierce battle of ideas, a philosophic debate, that the loud stroke of the gong, the concentration of the actors and the meticulous precision with which they take up their places on the stage are an invitation to listen carefully and seriously, and follow closely the meaning of what is about to begin.
Before The Idiot, the title page of Dostoyevsky's novel, yellow with age, printed in the old-fashioned script, is projected onto a small screen. One can almost sense the enchanting smell of old books in the theatre. And before every scene a new page is opened, a new page of the old book with the yellowed edges, taking the audience back to the time when Dostoycvsky wrote his impassioned work.
Tovstonogov manages to find his own formula for every play, for every author, his own special ``rules of play'' as he calls it.
Why did Tovstonogov decide on a light-hearted, ``theatrical'' method for N. Vinnikov's When the Acacias Bloom? The point is that in this play with its light humour, and lyrical, youthful note, many of the situations are somewhat artificial and the characters superficial, so that care over psychological authenticity and ``depth'' would be out of place. Tovstonogov adopts a tongue-in-cheek approach to some of the more naive points in the action, characters and dialogue, though perfectly good-naturedly, without any intention of getting at the author. He prefers plain fun, or light-hearted hints at something more profound to seriously presenting a storm in a tea cup.
Yet, despite his ironic attitude to the characters, Tovstonogov is charmed by their youth, by their youthful sincerity and vigour.
The producer's dual attitude is embodied in the two ``masters of ceremonies'', who run an original commentary on the action. One of them is a man, a wise, dispassionate and slightly mocking observer, the other is an expansive woman, who goes into rhapsodies over the characters of the play, unable to remain uninvolved.
The light-hearted, ``theatrical'' acting is perfectly suited to the play. The heroes are students, and in every room of their hostel there is laughter, chattering, friendly mystification and romping. Indeed the whole production is one delightful, scintillating, youthful romp, where everything seems to occur spontaneously, in an improvised manner, out of excessive exuberance, effervescence and imagination. It throbs with 8 the creative pulse of youth, sometimes humorously, sometimes magically turning the world upside down, making a holiday of a working day and turning the mundane into something quite extraordinary.
We are taken for a ride by Tovstonogov, designer S. Mandel and the whole cast, but what a delightful ride it is, and far from being offended we are quite enchanted, especially as this apparently casual romp has great theatrical precision, optimism and elegance.
Tovstonogov did not merely hit on just the right form for the play: he injected added irony and humour into it. I would even go so far as to say that, paradoxical as it may seem, his light-hearted approach is what enables us to take it seriously, as a serious work of art. Indeed, I can't help feeling that if it had been produced in all seriousness, then we, the audience, would as likely as not have adopted a tongue- incheck approach to the production.
Tovstonogov finds a completely different answer for A. Gehry's Sixth Floor. Both he and the designer, V. Stepanov, went for all-out realism. Tovstonogov's aim was to show that self-sacrifice and the purifying dream of happiness are to be found in the most mundane circumstances among the most ordinary people. Hence the way he begins by showing the unvarnished prose of life with all its incongruities, before going on to gradually reveal its hidden beauty.
All the sordid aspects and routine of everyday existence, both amusing and tragic, are represented here: the drab, peeling walls, the squeaking doors badly in need of oiling, and even the long loud flushing of the toilet, whither the tenants race one another of a morning.
Why is it that all the perfectly ordinary details of this joyless existence are so interesting, why is it that taken together they make real art, and delight us as real theatre (though of a very different kind from When the Acacias Bloom)?
Simply because it is all done so boldly and slickly according to the producer's well-defined intentions.
Tovstonogov brings all the events and conflicts in the play, and all the characters' feelings to boiling point, so that they simmer with passion, and the vigorous acting of many of the cast is just right to give the irrepressible joie de vivre of the simple French folk the play is about.
Daylight never penetrates the sixth floor, the same old light as was there in the prologue glows feebly, yet by the end of the first act the stage seems brighter, as if there were sunshine there after all. For we have found it in the characters' hearts.
Tovstonogov manages to overcome the sentimentality and shallowness of Gehry's play by intensifying all conflicts and emotions to the utmost, adding salt and dimension. If he brought an added irony to 9 Vinnikov's play, here he brings a passionate faith in the essential beauty and nobility of man that was lacking in the original.
A great contrast is provided by Tovstonogov's production of Guilherme Figueiredo's The Fox and the Grapes, where attention to detail is completely abandoned for a laconic statement of the essentials. Here the aim was to present the general idea and Tovstonogov went about it himself, dispensing with the services of a designer, producing an extremely simple decor---one might even say ``ascetic''---consisting of white flagstones and doric columns, against a background of the azure sky of Greece, with the temple of Delphi in sharply reduced perspective in the distance. The result is a remarkable elevated atmosphere-almost rarified-ideal for thought, and high, noble ideas.
The acting too is reduced to essentials, and there is nothing superfluous in gestures or delivery, just intense concentration on the sense of the scene, dialogue or monologue in progress.
Tovstonogov's production of Nicolai's Signer Mario Is Writing a Comedy adds new dimension to a rather slight theme by bringing out the clash between the world that is the product of Signer Mario's imagination and the middle-class world of his family life.
Signor Mario's play is about noble and base feelings, purity and wickedness, hope and justice, and so contrasts with the world he actually lives in that it is as though two different plays are in progress at the same time. Tovstonogov treats the whole like an intricate piece of music in which various themes and refrains, uniting whole scenes and dialogues, come and go alternately either harmonising or clashing.
Signor Mario (played by Kopelyan) and the creatures of his fancy life move and speak as if obeying an invisible conductor's baton in the harmonious world of the imagination. Tragedy, passion and struggle are all dimly perceived in an as yet hazy plot, in a vague aura of magic that shrouds the nascent work. Everything is perfectly real yet at the same time has an almost fairy-tale quality about it, and the simplest actions seem remarkable in the beautiful and incomprehensible miracle of their birth in the calm joy of Signor Mario's profound meditation. His characters, and he himself, seem to act in slow motion in a special clear atmosphere purified by the breath of humane thought. They act slowly and carefully as if weighing up the truth and correctness of their words and actions as they go along.
It is as though the producer has bewitched his actors. They are totally obedient to his will, following and obeying an inner melody which can be sensed but not heard, almost like sleepwalkers. One is reminded of the Pied Piper of Hamlin.
But this sweet music is interrupted by the cacophonic blasts of the middle-class world in which Signor Mario lives. His quarrelsome 10 vociferous wife, his unruly, boorish son, and his dull, sentimental daughter arc the eccentric philistine trio that constantly distract him from his creative meditations. When they start their noisy chatter, shouting and gesticulating, it is as if the room has been invaded by swarms of buzzing flies that cannot be warded off no matter how hard you try to slap them down. Signor Mario blocks his ears, shuts his eyes and tries to answer, to make them see reason, to calm them down. Then suddenly an idea flashes through his mind, some image of his future play, and he no longer heeds them. They carry on waving their arms about furiously, but Signor Mario, and we the audience with him, are no longer listening, and their mouths form soundless words. The audience rarely fails to applaud this clever device for showing the retreat of vulgar philistinism before the attack of creativeness.
However, in his search for bold expressive devices Tovstonogov never loses sight of the inner life and psychology of the characters. His watchword in everything he does is Stanislavsky's formula ``the life of the human spirit on the stage''. His constant urge to put across a subtle and accurate psychological image of the characters of a play was very much in evidence in his production of A. Volodin's Five Evenings.
In this production we find perfect authenticity in every minor detail of behaviour coupled with tremendous dramatic intensity.
The orchestra pit is covered to form an apron stage. A moving platform comes forward out of the darkness bearing a minimum of modest furniture such as one finds in the most modest home. Everything is brought as close as possible to the audience, enabling the most subtle psychological details to be observed. Although every minor detail is brought out, one never feels the hand of the producer, for everything seems ``dissolved'' in the actors themselves and the director merely ``lights them up'', helping to reveal the wealth of their inner livesfocussing the audience's attention on what he wants them to watch at a particular moment.
Tovstonogov is equally attentive to psychological detail in tackling a heroic drama like Korneichuk's The Death of the Squadron. Here he presents the triumphant force of the revolutionary masses and the certain doom of the Whiteguard forces not only, and indeed not so much, in striking epic crowd scenes, as in subtle psychological details in the characters' behaviour and relationships. The profound social theme is refracted through the prism of the characters' thoughts, views and feelings, treated with remarkable insight.
Y. Kopelyan is superb in the role of Baltiets. Although a small part, he manages to give it the patience bordering on heroism, the proud unbending will and complete conviction that epitomise the Communist, with no doubt as to the final triumph of his just cause.
11Lebedev plays Kobza the kulak, cruel, sly and boorish, and full of irony in his relation with other people, and especially his masters and the officer caste. He makes no effort to hide his contempt, but rather takes a pleasure in showing it wherever possible. On the other hand he is devious and two-faced with Gaidai and the rank-and-file sailors, trying to assure them of his support for the cause he realises will triumph/ Thus the social aspects of the play are presented from within rather than from without, through the characters' psychological make-up.
Acting in full accordance with the producer's wishes, P. Luspckayev in the role of the miner Gaidai does not so much insist on the anarchist illusions as on the tragedy of a man afflicted by doubt and suspicion, and lack of faith in the revolutionary awareness of the masses. His political error is presented with great penetration as an example of the way doubt in the people can corrode the spirit of an essentially brave and honest man and lead him to isolation and loneliness, and political blindness.
Tovstonogov's insistence on getting an actor fully exploit the psychological potentialities of a role, accounts for the very fine performance usually achieved under his guidance.
Y. Tolubeyev gave one of his finest performances in Tovstonogov's production of The Optimistic Tragedy, for which he was awarded a Lenin Prize. Tolubeyev's Vozhak combined generalised features with certain accurately chosen individual qualities, and the result was a fine plastic, sculptural unity. He gave the role great human and philosophical dimension, making it an embodiment of the evil force of hatred for mankind, doomed thanks to the contempt and anger of the • sane majority.
Tovstonogov and K. Lavrov found a very interesting psychological approach to the role of Sergei in Arbuzov's Irkutsk Story. In many productions of this play Sergei is a static, ideal hero, a paradigm of virtue. Valya and Victor change, but Sergei remains infallible, irreproachable. Tovstonogov and Lavrov got away from this static approach and gave us a Sergei whose character develops during the play. Sergei's love for Valya transforms him as well as her. At the beginning of the play he is honest and pure, but somewhat hard-hearted and turned in on himself, displaying youthful directness. He gradually changes to become more tolerant, more subtle and less emotionally constrained. It is no longer a question of Sergei magnanimously giving Valya the key to his spiritual treasure-house. In the course of their relationship he too is gradually enriched by her; she brings joy and spiritual generosity into his life. Thus the role acquired a new freshness, inner dynamism and truth.
12It was under Tovstonogov's guidance that Smoktunovsky's remarkable talent flourished to the full. His performance as Prince Myshkin in the stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot made theatre history. This production brought to the stage a whole world of evil and injustice, full of tragedy and suffering, and there in the middle of it all stood a man with a gentle, hesitant, slightly puzzled smile and clear thoughtful eyes making slight, helpless gestures with his fine, sensitive hands.
Smoktunovsky didn't ``do'' anything, he didn't ``act'' but merely looked tenderly, searchingly into his partners' eyes, listening intently and slightly anxiously to what they were saying, with a caressing, almost guilty smile on his lips, yet it was startingly, shatteringly moving to watch. Nothing tragic had happened, nothing out of the ordinary even. He had done no more than walk slowly across the stage, talk quietly, smile, or stand, lost in thought. But it produced an effect of such amazing purity and goodness that you could not help loving him and suffering at the presentiment that cruel life might extinguish this pure flame of humanity.
Prince Myshkin comes slowly forward to the front of the stage and stands for a moment deep in thought, glances nervously about him. For a second a shadow of anxiety clouds his face, then vanishes, and he walks back upstage as slowly as before. What's the explanation for the burst of applause from the audience, not at a lively exchange, a passionate monologue or a magnificent set, but at a slow walk, a second of meditation, a fleeting glance?
What was so extraordinary was the inner light that glowed in Smoktunovsky's Myshkin, the tenderness that showed in his pale face, that coloured every word, every movement. His gestures might be awkward and limp, somewhat feeble, but there was such amazing grace in this awkwardness, just as in the whole of his outwardly slow, monotonous, almost impaired movement on the stage there was a captivating rhythm.
Tovstonogov has gathered together a splendid troup of actors, all of them highly individual talents, yet at the same time speaking the same language when it comes to the essentials of their art. There is latiana Doronina with her verve and great feminine charm, Ludmila Makarova who is outstanding in lyrical and light, comic roles, the fine character actress Zinaida Sharko, with her vigorous, virile talent, Yefim Kopelyan, Yevgeny Lebedev, with his rare gift for ``metamorphosis'', the delicate, sensitive Nikolai Korn, the strong, vivacious Pavel Luspekayev, the highly imaginative Sergei Yurski, and the original talent of Vladislav Strzhelchik, Kirill Lavrov, Vladimir Kuznetsov and many others.
Tovstonogov is convinced that the theatre offers practically unlimited scope for expression and this accounts for the way he is constantly ex- 13 perimenting with new devices and techniques. This is perhaps best illustrated by his bold experimental production of The Defiant Ones, based on a film-script by N. E. Douglas and H. J. Smith.
There are many problems involved in producing a stage version of a film, but Tovstonogov succeeded because he made no attempt to vie with the cinema, as regards authenticity and pace, but instead concentrated on the characters themselves and their inner lives.
V. Stepanov's sets were rather stylised making use of highly expressive imagery, but the behaviour of the characters who talk quietly from the front of the stage in close proximity to the audience is perfectly natural and realistic in every detail.
Tovstonogov's production served to prove that the theatre is a suitable medium for many things that we had hitherto thought of as exclusively reserved for the cinema. Our interest was sustained during long silences, when two characters sat passing a cigarette back and forth between them, or eating and drinking together without a word, for the simple reason that it was all part of a genuine expression of complex human relationships.
The subject-the way two men, a white man and a negro, forget their mutual hatred in their common misfortune, and the best human feelings gradually triumph in their hearts-is treated in a virile, adult manner without a trace of sentimentality. Kopelyan plays the white man Jackson as possessed of a cynical, cruel, unreasonable sense of superiority, and boundless egoism. He makes no attempt to tone down the role with hints that this man may after all be capable of nobility of soul, and this serves to make the final denouement all the more convincing.
The production abounds in psychological ``discoveries''. In the fight scene, for example, the sad, sorrowful eyes of the Negro Gallen (played by Pavel Luspekayev) are unforgettable, as he goes to hit Jackson not because he wants to but because he has to.
With his penchant for deep, bold, and sometimes even paradoxical psychological strokes, Tovstonogov has struck some very interesting new notes in his productions of the classics. He never treats the classics as museum pieces, attempting to ``restore'' them or simply touch them up, but manages to find in them something totally new and unexpected.
His production of Griboyedov's Woe from Wit was highly controversial, but there is no denying that his treatment of the events of this immortal play is so absorbing, so psychologically justified and convincing that one is prepared to forget everything one knows about it and enjoy it as a totally new experience. It is exhilarating and fresh as if it had just come straight from the author's pen, with all the surprising novelty of a true work of art. Tatiana Doronina as Sophia, 14 Kirill Lavrov as Molchalin and Sergei Yursky as Chatsky give wholly original performances, based on an inspired understanding of the director's brilliant, unique interpretation.
In Maxim Gorky's The Barbarians Tovstonogov synthesises the almost tragic dynamism of the characters and their behaviour with the slow, lazy pace of events. The monstrous contradictions, the comic and tragic realities of life in tsarist Russia, are worked up to a high pitch of tragicomedy. The ridiculous lurks in the tragic, while one has only to scratch the surface of the tragic to find the ridiculous.
The characters are at once perfectly authentic and believable and rather fantastic in their twisted psychology. Everything about their lives is stained with pettiness and triviality. Even the most violent passions are really of the most trifling nature, as uninspiring as the characters themselves-Monakhov, that provincial Mephistopheles, played by Lebedev; Tsiganov, the empty, cynical descendant of the ``superfluous man'' (Strzhelchik), and the pathetic petty tyrant Redozubov (Politseimako).
Luspekayev's performance in the difficult role of Cherkun was likewise based on the theme of an ideological impasse, the futility of a life of unbridled egoism.
Luspekayev plays a man who is on the whole a very attractive character, intelligent, strong-willed and unable to accept weakness and falsehood without protest. He is potentially a hero, but, alas, his energy, intelligence, will and honesty are all wasted for the simple reason that he doesn't know what to do with them, where he is going. He is ideologically paralysed, and all his fine qualities turn sour and instead of enriching life serve only to embitter and corrode. All his energies are directed towards asserting himself and lead to cruelty and philistinism. In the long run all his efforts are either aggressive or futile.
Strzhelchik gives an equally original interpretation of the role of Tsiganov. Here we have the sorry, pitiful successor to the long line of ``superfluous men'', combining features of Pechorin, Yevgeny Onegin and Childe Harold, the sad consummation of their plight, in whom romanticism has given way to cynicism and Pechorin's fatalism to total scepticism and moral bankruptcy.
The whole production has a highly charged emotional atmosphere and throbs with tension. Yelena Popova's Anna is highly strung and oversensitive to injury, while Katya (Zinaida Sharko) is as sharp as nails with her stinging, impassioned protest.
Nadezda Monakhova is usually played as a passive character, waiting patiently for the great love her heart yearns for to dawn. Here another surprise was in store for us, for Tatyana Doronina plays her as a passionate, frankly demanding woman, who expects beauty, heroism 15 and passion from life. When we are told that she is ``a dangerous woman'', we understand this to refer not so much to her womanly charms as to her strong, uncompromising and rebellious nature, and her contempt for the vulgarity of the life she sees around her.
Her clear blue eyes are not languid but bright, enquiring and trustful, and her great dignity of bearing and outward calm conceal a passionate soul.
One of Tovstonogov's greatest triumphs was his production of Chekhov's The Three Sisters. He interprets the play as a drama of fine, sensitive, intelligent people, who move like planets, each in his own orbit, as though lacking the energy to help one another escape the impasse of their lives. Throughout one senses the question being asked: Where does the borderline come between delicacy, high-principled ``non-interference'' in other people's lives, and self-centredness?
Many of the monologues are treated as painful confessions, representing a plea for help, while the other characters move away and try not to listen but concentrate on themselves. This subtly orchestrated production is full of merciless criticism of inactivity as being really no more than apathy, thanks to which the characters allow one another to lose themselves and enable the arch-enemy, philistinism, to triumph.
A documentary film, Dress Rehearsal, was made of the way rehearsals on this production were carried out. We see all the preparations for the dress rehearsal, the actors making up, the wardrobe mistress bringing round the costumes, the scenery being put up, and finally the three bells announcing the beginning of the performance. Then we are shown the birth of the production, so to speak: the first discussion round the table, the first rehearsals of separate scenes, the first runthrough. We are given the opportunity to watch the production in the making. The film brings us the atmosphere of life in a fine theatre, a serious, highly intellectual atmosphere. This is an extremely important point. Even in those painful moments of search for the best approach, and in moments of failure and frustration, or in those nervous moments before the curtain rises, the cast never lose control of themselves. They keep their sense of responsibility, their professional tact and restraint at all times and in all things-in their behaviour, in working things out, in their attitude to their partner, and last but not least in their humour.
The film conveys a feeling of intense creative activity, concentration, and profound, inquiring thought. What we are observing is the process of comprehending life, and we are reminded of a laboratory where the complex processes of human behaviour and relationships are studied under the microscope and experimented with, where ideas are prepared, and the laws governing those unexpected ``reactions'' which are what 16 makes the theatre so irresistibly convincing and fresh. Yet there is nothing unnaturally ponderous and overserious about the film's approach. The scriptwriter, director and cameraman have not worked in grim earnest with furrowed brow, but have taken a delight in capturing all the fun and humour they could spot. After all, everything is equally important in the theatre-grasping the author's ideas and style, trying on costumes, searching for a suitable frame for Baron Tuzenbach's spectacles, and the vigilance of the prompter safeguarding the integrity of every Chekhovian comma.
Naturally, Tovstonogov is the central figure in the film. All the threads of the narrative lead to him, for he is the creator, inspirer and organiser of the whole process we are watching. We may have seen Tovstonogov's productions on the stage. Here we are given a chance to see how he goes about his work. We know him as a strong-willed, firm man who has built up one of the finest theatre companies in the country. But watching him at work, we are struck not by a show of great authority and strong, despotic will, but above all by his boundless patience and tact. He docs not order people around and shout at them, but rather coaxes them, talks things over patiently, putting his ideas over as suggestions and trying to persuade them to agree with what he considers best. He lives through every moment of the performance from where he sits. As the actor recites a monologue, he sits completely absorbed in it, his lips moving, following every word, and his face assuming all sorts of different expressions as if he is testing for himself every note, every phrase of the monologue. He is completely wrapped up in it, concentrating fiercely, passionately, and yet mentally, creatively alert. One seems to grasp the special chacrri of his personality ---his conviction, the way he gives himself heart and soul to his work, arid lastly his cultivation, which may well be what gives his theatre its special style.
I feel this remarkable film is extremely interesting and useful to many people-to both theatre lovers and actors, novices and veterans alike. For it arouses interest in, and respect for, the theatre and all those who work in it, and provides a graphic illustration of what we call real theatrical art, Theatre with a capital T.
One could go on and on describing and analysing Tovstonogov's numerous other productions-Stein's The Ocean, Volodin's My Elder Sister and many, many others. Every one of them :has its triumphs, its defects, and its unique features which set it apart, yet they all have something in common, and that is the modern idiom of intelligent, vital theatre.
Tovstonogov has a way of expressing the most exciting ideas in the special language of the theatre. His productions have a convincing 17 power of dynamism and struggle, and reveal well the dynamics of actions and events, the power that brings life and movement to the theatre.
One never expects any of the antiquated theatrical devices from the actors of the Gorky Theatre-such as declamation, exaggerated character-acting, and slick, polished but glib recitation. Tovstonogov has made a real team of them, encouraged them to develop an ability for profound psychological penetration, without which serious modern theatre is, in my opinion, unthinkable. Moreover, it is not a question of making curious ``excursions'' into the labyrinths of the mind and wallowing in a psychologist's paradise: both producer and actors investigate the mind in order to present big, important ideas more thoroughly and convincingly.
The most interesting thing about Tovstonogov's art is his talent for combining range and scope in a production with tremendous attention to minute psychological details in the characters. His is thus a very special kind of theatre, where the actors' aesthetic convictions and approach to their work are unified.
In every production at the Gorky Theatre one feels the producer's will guiding the performance firmly and insistently in a particular direction.
The producer's will has nothing to do with despotism. When sensibly and correctly exerted, far from restricting or hindering, it unites the creative efforts of everyone participating in the production into a firm artistic whole.
By his treatment of a particular play, Tovstonogov is expressing his own attitude to life. His lively creative thought, his attitude to the dramatist and the play in question, testify to his active approach to life. The clarity and incisiveness of his scenic solutions reflect the clear-cut, positive nature of his views and convictions.
Tovstonogov's creative will helps him express the outlook of a modern Soviet artist in the theatre, the firm belief that life and man are essentially good, that they can, must and will be good. While adopting a different approach and different methods in each new play he stages, his message remains basically the same bold, life-asserting theme.
One chapter in this book ends: ``I am simply describing how I work, and saying what I think about our profession.''
I am convinced that many people will find his description both interesting and useful.
B. Lvov-Anokhm
[18] __ALPHA_LVL1__ INTRODUCTION Thirty-five years in stage direction is
a long time in that in this time I have worked on over a hundred
productions. Yet it is not so long when I think of all the outstanding
dramatists whose works I have not yet attempted and the various
genres I just have not managed to get round to-I have done very
little Shakespeare, for example. So perhaps my best productions
are still to come and it is too early to draw up the final balance
sheet. It is in this light that I would prefer to regard the present
book.
The book was written in a somewhat unusual manner. The material includes articles written at various times for periodicals, talk and lecture notes and shorthand records of work with directors at theatres in the provinces. The examples I give belong to different periods of my work. When the third edition was being prepared, I wondered whether I ought to revise it, but finally decided to leave it as it was. The book covers a comparatively short period in the life of the Soviet theatre, and it naturally reflects my own personal tastes and views.
There are many theatres and many directors in this country, and, inevitably, not all of my colleagues will share my views on the contemporary theatre, my ideas about the director's role and the essence 19 of our profession. These views will no doubt find even more opponents abroad. Various theories of the theatre, which tend to grow like buttercups, have always found adherents, sometimes gifted ones. All directors who take their profession at all seriously are searching for new scenic forms, joining a search that has been going on for 2,500 years. In our profession, one cannot reasonably expect to ``convert'' anybody with books or articles. A production is another matter. Productions can sway people's convictions. But not all of them do.
The director's job is to produce plays. It is the theatre critic's job to write about them. But, with all due respect to theatre criticism, it must be admitted that we do not always see eye to eye. The director and the critic see the stage from a rather different standpoint, and there are some things in our profession of which only we ourselves can speak-and do so in a different manner from the adepts of theatre criticism. This is what moved me to take up the pen.
For a number of reasons, this book makes no claim to offer incontravertible truths. To begin with it is based on examples that are more familiar to the Soviet than to the foreign reader. Few of my impressions of dozens of productions seen in Britain, France, Poland, Germany, the USA and other countries have been reflected on these pages. Secondly, there are certain important aspects of the director's job that I have either not mentioned at all or only touched on briefly. Thirdly, nothing stands still in life: everything is in a constant state of flux, and that includes my own views. I cannot guarantee that in a couple of years' time I won't do a production that contradicts everything I have done to date and affirms principles that at present I firmly reject. Nor is it simply a matter of discarding old views. From year to year, from production to production, I am gradually developing my basic views to their logical conclusion by experiment, through the process of trial and error. These experiments and explorations are directed towards the most complicated and interesting thing in our art-finding the ideal form for the contemporary production, the best means of arousing fine feelings in people and helping to affirm justice and noble, humanitarian ideals.
I am also extremely concerned with the problem of training our successors, actors and directors alike, and questions of interrelation and interaction between the theatre and other art forms.
In our age of fantastic achievements in science, technology, and engineering design, the reverberations of which are felt by us in the theatre, it is difficult to predict what the theatre of the future will be like. Whereas certain advances in chemistry, engineering and building techniques have found application in theatre buildings, stage machinery, and scenery, the achievements of physiologists, biologists and psychol- 20 ogists, who are persistently exploring the secrets of man's mind and nature, have hitherto remained beyond the fringe of our practical work. Who can tell how we shall select and train directors and actors, distribute roles and produce plays, when science reveals to us the mechanism according to which the emotions arise, the nature of theatrical talent and the laws governing audience response?
But for the time being we dispose of no theory of stage work more perfect than Stanislavsky's system. All my experience has convinced me of this. I profess adherence to Stanislavsky's teaching, and as far as possible try to apply it in my work, instill it in my pupils, attempting to suppose how Stanislavsky would have developed it, were he alive today.
Here, in this introduction, I should like to dwell briefly on what I consider to be most important in our practical work, on Stanislavsky's system and its lasting importance for the development of Soviet and world theatre.
My extensive travels in this country and abroad, my countless visits to the theatres and numerous talks with actors, directors and other theatre folk, have convinced me, much to my distress, that many, many people misunderstand the great teaching of the reformer of the Russian stage.
There are several reasons for this. One is that at one time only a small circle of people were familiar with Stanislavsky's writings. A great deal of damage was done by popularisers and followers with a lop-sided view, knowing only a part of his system, some particular stage of his life. Perhaps Stanislavsky himself was partly to blame, since he did not always manage to describe his system in the most precise literary terms. One cannot expect a genius to be a Jack-of- alltrades, after all.
But the biggest mistake of which students of Stanislavsky are guilty is to identify the system with the practice of the Moscow Art Theatre at all stages of its emergence and development. This is not to say that we should value Stanislavsky the practitioner any less than Stanislavsky the theorist. After all, it is his practice-the productions he staged and the roles he played, his achievement in creating a fine theatre company from a group of enthusiastic amateurs and young actors -that convinces us of the truth of his teaching. Nevertheless, Stanislavsky and the Art Theatre are not one and the same thing, and it is wrong to confuse Stanislavsky's system with his activity as a producer.
The relationship between Stanislavsky and the Art Theatre was somewhat ambiguous. He was by no means satisfied with everything in the theatre he himself had founded. On several occasions he seemed 21 on the point of breaking with it. Before the Revolution he tried to found a new theatre together with Meyerhold. He set great store by his First Workshop, the first theatre studio dedicated to the system. Later he transferred his sympathy to the Second Workshop and still later to the Third Workshop (Vakhtangov's studio). Shortly before his death, Stanislavsky founded yet another workshop, where together with a group of actors from the Art Theatre he produced Moliere's Tartuffe as an exercise in his new ``method of physical action''.
At the same time, it cannot be denied that the truth of the system found its fullest confirmation in certain Art Theatre productions, and that it was there that Stanislavsky did his best work as a director.
Stanislavsky's dissatisfaction was typical of the eternal searcher and explorer.
Stanislavsky ``diverged'' not only with the Art Theatre, but with himself too. While claiming that his system was universal, he applied it most successfully with the plays of Chekhov, Tolstoi, Gorky and Turgenev, i.e., in works of psychological realism and domestic drama. Gogol and Shakespeare, judging by the results he achieved, resisted the system, while Schiller, for example, was quite alien to Stanislavsky the director. Among Soviet dramatists he was attracted only to those who continued the traditions of the Russian classics.
However, it by no means follows from this that Stanislavsky's tastes as regards repertoire were limited to Chekhov and other kindred authors.
Unfortunately, such experimental productions as Warm Heart and The Marriage of Figaro, in which the normal Art Theatre manner was quickened by sharp, grotesque form, representing a tremendous advance in the existence of the actor on the stage, remain little known to this day. They have not received the careful attention they deserve as productions that provide a key to understanding the live Stanislavsky, as opposed to the ``canonic version'' of Stanislavsky that circulates so widely today. It is here that Stanislavsky conducted his search for new forms of the realistic theatre, where the principle of psycho-physical acting, the psycho-technique really came into its own, bursting forth in a free play of unrestricted fancy and grotesque, and superb choice of conventions for the work in question. It was here that Stanislavsky solved the problem of genre, the author's ruling idea and the nature of the feelings.
Stanislavsky's work as a director is really a subject apart, one that has hitherto been little studied. Yet it is a fascinating and most instructive subject, and Stanislavsky undoubtedly deserves an important place in the history of the theatre as a director. And yet, it is a long time since his productions were seen on the stage, and were we to see 22 them today we could hardly expect to understand an artistic phenomenon and judge it properly outside the social and artistic context that engendered it. Of course, not all Stanislavsky's work as a director belongs to history. A great deal is valid and necessary for us today. Stanislavsky's teaching belongs entirely to the present-and to the future.
Stanislavsky created a theory, his famous system, which lay the foundations for a science of theatrical art. Its universality has been confirmed by his students and successors, talented actors and directors of our own multi-national Soviet theatre, and of theatres all over the world. Their name is legion. Some of them may not even know of Stanislavsky's system as such, and yet, unwittingly, they obey the laws Stanislavsky discovered.
It is widely held that Stanislavsky's theory is refuted by Bertolt Brecht's theory of epic theatre. But it seems to me that this is the biggest misconception of the century in the theatre. To begin with, as Brecht himself declared, his theory was created from the standpoint of the playwright and not the director so that the two theories are not strictly speaking comparable. But anyway, there is nothing fundamentally contradictory about them.
This is not to try and gloss over the differences between Brecht and Stanislavsky. These two outstanding theatrical figures of our century did, of course, differ considerably in their views. But it is to take a superficial view of both Stanislavsky and Brecht to try and contrast their systems. Brecht's alienation effect does not imply rejection of the laws of organic life on the stage, the logic of the action, character, and so on.
Brecht lived on twenty years after Stanislavsky's death. After the Second World War the didactic theatre came into its own, requiring new forms of communication between the theatre and the audience. Brecht sought the laws that would help activate this relationship and imbue it with the power of modern ideas, without detracting from its psychological basis. In order to ``alienate'' oneself, one must first have something to be alienated from, and here we .are inevitably brought back to the laws of organic unity of the physical and psychological life of the actor, discovered by Stanislavsky. This is borne out by productions I have seen, and especially the superb acting of Helene Weigel, Ernst Busch and many other outstanding players of the Berliner Ensemble.
The essence of Stanislavsky's system cannot be accurately summarised. To claim that my interpretation of it is correct would be unmodest to say the least. Nevertheless, I shall attempt to refute some of the more widespread misconceptions of the system.
23The root of these misconceptions held by theatre people who reject Stanislavsky, as I have realised from many meetings and conversations with foreign colleagues, is that Stanislavsky's name and teaching are associated with naturalism. Many leading Western directors and actors refer to Stanislavsky with respect, but as though he belonged entirely to the past. They see Stanislavsky as a man who created a system that was progressive for his time but only appropriate for productions of plays of a certain trend-Chekhov, Ibsen, Hauptmann and other realist dramatists of the turn of the century. Many of them regard him as a ``Russian Meiningen'', or a ``Russian Antoine''. Accordingly, in their opinion Stanislavsky's school represents a special development of the ideas of fimile Zola's naturalism for the theatre, and since naturalism is today an anachronism, the same goes for Stanislavsky and his ``system''.
It is true that Stanislavsky was strongly influenced by the Meiningen Players for a time and, as was only natural, subscribed to some of Antoine's ideas at an early stage in his career. It is also undeniable that Stanislavsky based his experiments on contemporary drama at a time when naturalism was in vogue. Stanislavsky himself admitted his enthusiasm for naturalism at one time. But this was a very short period in his work in the theatre and his system was conceived and developed after he had become disenchanted with naturalism and broken with it. Moreover-and this is a most important point of all-unlike the Meiningen Players and Antoine, Stanislavsky was primarily concerned with the inner meaning of works and emotional authenticity as opposed to external form.
I have only made this short historical excursion for the purpose of confuting a widespread misconception. The system (to be more exact, the system in its early, incomplete form) emerged at a time when the theatre was working on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, Ostrovsky and Turgenev. The first steps of the new system were also tested in the plays of Moliere and Goldoni. Its merits were brilliantly demonstrated in Vakhtangov's production of Gozzi's Princess Turandot, perhaps one of the outstanding productions of the century.
But the system was not born overnight. Stanislavsky was quite prepared to radically revise his views of how rehearsals should be conducted, and this revision sometimes amounted to categorical rejection of what only recently he had been ardently advocating. Stanislavsky spent years on his book on the system, constantly rewriting pages and whole chapters, and it did not appear until after his death. (Only the first volume, An Actor Prepares, was published in his lifetime.) Only a small portion of his writings are included in the eightvolume Collected Works. Shorthand records and recordings of his 24 rehearsals, annotated scripts, and his lessons with actors and students of the theatre workshops, are preserved in the archives of the Art Theatre and the opera theatre that bears his name. A great deal only survives in the memory of those who knew him.
Many popular pamphlets and books about Stanislavsky unfortunately give a lop-sided view of him, and provide fuel for his critics.
The idea that Stanislavsky was a naturalist is no more than a myth. The conviction that Stanislavsky's teaching is only applicable to a certain narrow range of plays and only of use to those who profess tothe most narrow realist credo, is based on the most deeply ingrained fallacies. It is my studied opinion that if every artist were to ``discover'' the real essence of Stanislavsky for himself, this, far from hindering, would actually facilitate the implementation of the most bold and personal creative intentions, and would help bring about a general, and possibly unprecedented, flowering of theatrical art. I should like to feel I am making some contribution here, however modest. Indeed, that is the main purpose of this book.
I had the good fortune to see many productions by Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko and their talented pupils. The most inventive director in the world might well envy Stanislavsky his brilliant, bold imagination. In my time I have worked with many actors trained according to the system, and their brilliance and apparently boundless versatility, their ability to play parts of the most diverse periods, dramatists and styles, is for me ample confutation of criticisms of the system as a collection of acting devices only appropriate to naturalist domestic drama.
One of the terms of the system that tends to be completely misinterpreted in the West is ``living the part''. When Stanislavsky spoke of the ``inner vision'', the inner visual images formed in the actor, in his imagination, he was not calling for some mystical, complete reincarnation of the actor in the role involving total rejection of his own ``I am''. The ``system'' actor is not a spiritualist medium, and ``living the part'' is not going into a trance.
The few seconds when the actor is fully transformed into the character he is playing, those felicitous moments-rare even for the geniuswhen the subconscious comes into play, are the greatest blessing in dramatic art, for nature is the supreme artist. Stanislavsky was perfectly aware how capricious and uncontrollable inspiration is and how difficult, almost impossible, it is to control the feelings. After long experiments with himself and other actors, Stanislavsky devised a method of teaching this psycho-technique and a method of working on a part that created the most favourable conditions for inspiration to arise. He proposed proceeding from the conscious to the sub- 25 conscious, bringing the conscious to exert an influence on the subconscious.
Stanislavsky never violated the creative nature of the actor, insisting that he evoke in himself exactly the same feelings as in the character he was playing. Stanislavsky claimed that the truth of the passions could be attained through authentic feelings, feelings that were not identical to, but similar to and consistent with the feelings of the characters in the play. ``Metamorphosis'' for Stanislavsky certainly had nothing to do with the transmigration of souls!
At the earlier stages of his work on the system, Stanislavsky sought an answer to the questions that were perplexing him from psychologists, philosophers and even yoga experts. Later he was to renounce not only such terms as ``ray emission'' and ``ray absorption'', but his whole idealist interpretation of the spiritual processes. He gradually came round to the opinion that the feelings are associated with man's material, physical nature. The system finally crystallised when Stanislavsky realised that man's psychological and physical life are inseparable, as is reflected in the name he gave to the culmination of his system--- ``the method of physical action''. Of course, this term, `` physical action'', does not reflect the concept adequately. But Stanislavsky was deliberately stressing the physical rather than the psychological, as being more tangible, amenable and tractable.
As I see it, even that outstanding director and theorist of the theatre Bertolt Brecht was somewhat baffled and misled by the terms ``feeling'' and ``metamorphosis''. I am quite sure this is why his theory is contrasted to Stanislavsky. Only at first sight do such concepts as `` alienation'' and retention of a critical distance rather than total absorption of the actor in his role appear to be the antithesis of Stanislavsky's terms. Stanislavsky himself does not regard complete ``metamorphosis'' to be possible: in choosing actions, constructing a logical chain of actions, a line of behaviour, the actor is guided throughout not by his subconscious but by an idea, an objective.
As much, if not more, damage has been done to Stanislavsky's teaching by the misinterpretation of his famous statement that the actor has always to make use of his own feelings in creating a role as meaning that the actor must always play himself. This idea has always had an appeal for lazy and untalented actors, and it is they who have declared in the name of Stanislavsky that transformation is hereby abolished. People who lack any natural gifts are wont to reduce any theory or teaching they come across to their own level, simplifying it and singling out those statements that seem most readily intelligible, ignoring all the rest. Reducing the whole system to the division of the play into ``pieces'' and ``objectives'', they have eviscerated Stanislavsky's teaching, 26 producing their own feeble version, that bears as much resemblance to the original as interior decorating does to art. They have chosen to interpret Stanislavsky's idea that you shouldn't ``act'' anything as an excuse to do nothing, to just simply be themselves, and ``act naturally''. But it was not Stanislavsky who equated truth with simplicity.
The system was based on the realist traditions of Russian acting, on the acting of Shchepkin, Mochalov, Martynov, the Sadovskys, and the most outstanding European actors-Salvini, Eleonora Duse and others -none of whom ever equated life and the stage, demanding an exact, mirror-like reflection of reality. Stanislavsky was not seeking simply the truth, but the artistic truth.
Having made Stanislavsky a naturalist, the next step was to ascribe to him indifference to form. There are people who seriously believe that the grey, blurred, amorphous nature of many productions is to be explained by the fidelity of their creators to Stanislavsky's teaching. It is beyond me where those who praise or condemn Stanislavsky for neglect of form got this idea from.
Stanislavsky was indeed opposed to certain theatrical forms, regarding them as obsolete or contradicting the content of a play, the author's style. In other words, Stanislavsky was opposed to all ossified forms and rubber stamps. He was all in favour of forms akin to real-life forms, but never regarded a play as a copy of life. Although many of his productions were based on the ``fourth wall'' principle, he attached the greatest importance to the nature of the imaginary fourth wall, as a major compositional feature. His choice of form for a production was never made simply on the basis of external features calculated to produce an effect. For him form was more than the tempo-rhythm and plastic aspect of a production: it was dictated by the standpoint he had chosen to adopt, in both the literal and figurative sense.
Those who saw his productions were constantly amazed by his inexhaustible inventiveness, the wealth of external forms, the variety of his mise-en-scene$, decorative devices, and so on. Stanislavsky was opposed not to form as such, but to superfluous form, form at the expense of the content, form that blurred the meaning of a play.
Another tenet of Stanislavsky's teaching that has fared little better is his thesis that in playing a bad character one should seek his good points.
This has been interpreted by some, often for non-artistic reasons, as an appeal for dispassionate objectivity, for civil and political indifference. In actual fact, Stanislavsky was simply warning against simplification and conforming to set patterns and stock features. In art intended to penetrate the depths of human nature, the ``life of the human spirit'', as Stanislavsky put it, the truth of evil is no less important than the 27 truth of good. Adherence to simple, straightforward logic can lead the actor to produce masks instead of full-blooded, live characters in all their human complexity. Even the person dominated by a single passion is not all that simple and straightforward. A complicated, contradictory nature does not necessarily mean doubts, hesitations and inner conflict. But if a brave man does not have to overcome danger and a good man has no difficulty in struggling with evil, then what value do bravery and goodness have, and can they be convincing?
Seeking good in a bad character does not mean imparting nobility to the scoundrel or revealing base motives behind noble actions. It is simply that lago is not all perfidy, and the kindly Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot is not all sincerity: there is much more to them than that. Showing positive features in a bad character is a fine device for illuminating a character in depth. The ``generosity'' of the miserly Harpagon or the ``modesty'' of the boastful Malvolio are not generosity or shyness ``in general''. Revealing features that appear to contradict the ruling passions of characters is simply to highlight their essential nature.
The law of contrast is an eternal law, and Stanislavsky was not the first to apply it in the theatre. But he had his own way of referring to it, which was not perhaps quite ``scholarly'', and this has enabled the ``scholastics'' to play with his words and distort them, making the impassioned artist a mere indifferent observer.
Shakespeare referred to the theatre as a mirror of nature/ Gogol regarded it as a rostrum from which a lot of useful things could be addressed to people. Stanislavsky, like many of his predecessors, saw the theatre above all as a school of morals and instruction in ethics, as a social force. He considered the free play of passions and characters unsanctified by a noble idea as an idle pastime that debased art. This being so, we must regard his idea of the objective and super-objective as the basic tenets of his system.
I do not intend to go into the meaning of these concepts here, since .anyone who is interested can easily refer to the appropriate passages in Stanislavsky's writings. But I consider them absolutely fundamental, so much so that it is inconceivable for me to put on a play without having decided in advance why and for whom it is necessary. Moreover, I ascribe my occasional failures to a mistaken interpretation of my own or the author's super-objective.
I am perfectly aware that an idea, however noble, significant and wise it may be, is not by itself enough to create a work of art. There are infinitely more good ideas than there are good productions. The old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions is fully 28 applicable to our work in the theatre. But on the other hand, the most superb skill and inventiveness on the part of the director is not worth a brass farthing if it serves base, anti-humanitarian aims.
Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko held that the audience comes to the theatre to commune with Shakespeare, Dostoycvsky, Chekhov and so on, and that the stage-director's job is to translate the author's thoughts from the language of literature into the language of the stage. Some directors regard fidelity to the author as imposing intolerable restrictions on their creative freedom. Not so Stanislavsky. And yet Stanislavsky never restricted the stage-director's role to that of the conscientious ``translator'', indifferent to what he is translating. The teaching of the objective and especially the super-objective places the director ``above'' the play, as it were. The time in which the director lives, his personal civic and aesthetic views, determine his attitude to a work, his interpretation of it, and the form of scenic embodiment he chooses. Enthusiasm for a play and its author, far from hindering the director, helps him-providcd he is a genuine artist-to achieve an unexpected, bold interpretation of the work.
Naturalist directors, it is true, tend to adopt a servile approach towards a play. Stanislavsky was far too original and independent to content himself with the role of ``translator'' of the dramatist. In his best productions we saw not only Chekhov, Moliere and Goldoni, but Stanislavsky's reading of them. He ``died'' in the actors, but not in the production as a whole, which bore the mark of his own unique personality. Thus, to the joy of communing with the author was added the joy of communing with the director.
Many of those who accuse Stanislavsky of a servile attitude to the author typical of the naturalist school are people who have not taken the trouble to even read his works, let alone try and understand them. Life has shown that the majority of Stanislavsky's opponents, eventually, sometimes after decades, came round to admitting that he was right.
I was fortunate enough to attend ten rehearsals conducted by Meyerhold, where he ``fought with his own formalism''. They were brilliant director's improvisations on themes from his previous productions. What had seemed unjustified in the actors' performance was extraordinarily apt when demonstrated by Meyerhold himself, and nobody felt that the vivid and highly unusual form of the mise-en-scene was at all contrived. After one of these demonstrations, the audience, consisting of actors and directors from various Moscow theatres, began to applaud wildly. Meyerhold held up his hand and said: ``I consider that this applause is due to my teacher Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky. I propose a congratulations telegram be sent to him.''
29Another of Stanislavsky's opponents, Solomon Mikhoels, towards the end of his life, paraphrasing Schubert's appraisal of Mozart, said of Stanislavsky: ``In my early life I said `I', later `I and Stanislavsky', still later `Stanislavsky and I'. Now I say: `Stanislavsky'.''
Even Brecht towards the end of his life admitted that his own system, speaking in Stanislavskian terms, could be described as a system concerning the super-objective.
Stanislavsky has numerous followers. They put on tragedies and vaudevilles, didactic and psychological dramas, Brechtian parables and literary compositions. And I am sure any one of them would be quite astounded at the suggestion that he is at all ``cramped'' by the system.
Stanislavsky called his system ``the actor's ABC''. His discoveries are great precisely because they are based on eternal, organic features of human nature. The laws governing the actor's inspiration, establishing the dependency of feeling on action, the unity of man's physical and psychological life are eternally valid. Though, of course, one may be unaware of their existence, just as Moliere's Monsieur Jourdain had gone through life without suspecting that he was speaking prose.
In my opinion, the best actor's creations of the last decade in Western Europe have been Scofield's Lear and Busch's Galileo. And whatever school of acting they themselves profess adherence to, they act in the Stanislavsky manner. I am sure he would have been most gratified to see such a brilliant confirmation of his teaching in their work. I don't know if they do any teaching work, but if they do, and are passing on what they have learnt, they can be said to be proselytising for Stanislavsky.
Trends in stage direction come and go. Aesthetic systems serve their time, and like everything else in this world, grow old and are succeeded by new ones. But Stanislavsky's system remains, for it is not connected to a passing fashion for any particular dramatists. It will last as long as man's psycho-physical nature remains unchanged. It is necessary to every stage artist as long as he remains faithful to the truth and, like Shakespeare, regards the theatre as a mirror of nature. Stanislavsky is of no use at all to those who do not need live people in the theatre. The system is of no use to those who have broken with realism and do not believe in the edifying role of the theatre, and consider that human beings cannot possibly understand one another.
Very often, it is true, people in life fail to understand one another. As I see it, the theatre, throughout its history, has tried to restore broken links and find a language to unite the stage and the auditorium. For me, the theatre is the place where the greatest communication is 30 possible, and the idea of incommunicability is totally alien to the stage. Stanislavsky the artist, the citizen and teacher-the teacher, good friend and adviser of all actors and directors who regard service to art as a social mission, who regard Man as the measure of all things and the actor as the plenipotentiary representative of the dramatist, the artistic •``comrade-in-arms'' of the director and the contemporary of the spectator.
Genius and talent are mysterious concepts. The genius creates according to laws of which he himself is often ignorant. Stanislavsky dared to penetrate the ``sacred precinct'' of the creative process. He never promised to make talent burgeon forth where there is none, but he did show the way to enable talent to reveal itself and the capable actor to approach the gifted. From his observations he was able to say why it is that great actors do not simply act well but do so day after day. And it is looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth to reject the priceless treasure Stanislavsky offers with such generosity.
This is not to say that everything in Stanislavsky's teaching is beyond dispute and one hasn't a right to argue with him. But first one must understand him. For there are many people who are arguing not with Stanislavsky but with a fiction of their own imagination.
I haven't said a fraction of what I think about Stanislavsky. I don't suggest that you study him from my book. I have only one desire, and that is to arouse an active interest, now, this very moment, in the personality and teaching of that great actor, director and teacher, Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky, to arouse in directors the urge to rediscover Stanislavsky for themselves.
In my time I have attended numerous international conferences and symposia devoted to the modern theatre. I have heard many interesting, important things said by my colleagues from various lands. A great deal of attention is usually devoted to theatre architecture and stage technology. This is all doubtless very important. But I feel we do not devote anything like due attention to what I regard as the most important question of all, that of the actor's art. The most brilliant and excellent stage direction is worth nothing without the actors. It is not enough today to have a couple of ``stars'' in a production. If we are to hold our own in the face of stiff competition from the new Muses, the cinema and television, we must wage the struggle not in the spheres of dramaturgy and theatre architecture, but in the one sphere where •we are incontestably supreme. What was once regarded as a disadvantage of the theatre is now our chief advantage. The fact that the theatre always provides a unique experience, one that can never be exactly repeated, involving live artistic creation before people's very eyes, and the unity of stage and the auditorium-this is what 31 makes the theatre unique. For the audience is a qualitatively variable factor.
Showing ``the life of the human spirit'' is no easy task, especially to a constantly changing public, whose aesthetic and civic views are not formed by us alone, but are shaped by the whole of life-social, class conditions, art, literature, and so on. How well-polished must theatrical art, and stage direction in particular, be if we are not to lose contact with the public?
This is the main question that interests, and will continue to interest, all lovers of one of the oldest and youngest of the arts-the theatre.
I love my profession. I consider it one of the most difficult and treacherous. I have dedicated my life to it, and to it I dedicate this book.
[32] __ALPHA_LVL1__ STANISLAVSKY'S TIME I was born too late to be his pupil. I
learned from his productions, learned watching the actors he had
trained, learned from those he had taught and had faith in. Thousands
of facts and even more legends about Stanislavsky the man, about his
sense of humour and how he lost his temper, made him seem terribly
familiar, as though we were close friends.
I saw Stanislavsky the actor before I dreamed of going into the theatre. I saw him a few times as a student, and only once, together with a small group of young directors, had the good fortune to be his guest and chat with him. That was shortly before his death. It is most extraordinary but I feel I knew him long before I actually met him and still know him to this day. For more than thirty years now I have been holding conversations with him in my mind and asking him countless questions. For thirty years I have felt his stern, disapproving gaze fixed upon me. All these years I have been trying to learn to understand him. I feel he understands me perfectly, understands my weaknesses, where I have erred, and the reason for my mistakes. I have frequently imagined Stanislavsky watching my productions, and imagined what he would say if he were present at a rehearsal I was conducting.
33There are quite a few of us who are continuing to learn from Stanislavsky to this day. Our master has acquired new pupils whom he did not know during his lifetime. Some of his old pupils have broken with him. Stanislavsky no longer puts on plays, but I have frequently seen flashes of his thought in productions and characters created by my contemporaries.
More than a quarter of a century has passed since Stanislavsky was last among us. For those who are twenty-five today he already belongs to history as a great theatrical reformer who revolutionised dramatic art. Is he then a brilliant phenomenon belonging wholly to the past?
No, no, and a thousand times no! What Stanislavsky discovered and taught belongs to the theatre of today.
In the long history of the theatre we find various periods of flowering and decline and thousands of great names. Hundreds of times people who knew and loved the theatre tried to explain the magic of the stage, to reveal the secret of its impact. Every age left its theory of the theatre. Aristotle and Diderot, Goethe and Wagner, all offered their ``systems'', which were fine for their particular age, but which today belong entirely to the past. It was the same in Russia. For a long time two great actors, Karatygin and Mochalov, were opposed to one another. Later the theatre world was divided into the two camps on the basis of support for the different methods of the Maly Theatre and the Art Theatre. Later still, further new movements grew up like the Proletkult and the schools of Meyerhold and Tairov, and countless others. And young people are bound to ask: What is it that makes Stanislavsky's system superior to any other?
It is at once easy and difficult to answer this question. Easy because it is impossible to confuse any other trend in the theatre with the universal laws of scenic creativity revealed by Stanislavsky. Difficult because Stanislavsky was not just a great actor and thinker who created a science of acting, but also a brilliant director who created a certain trend in the theatre. Nobody but Stanislavsky united in a single harmonious system the experience of a galaxy of talented actors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; nobody but Stanislavsky revealed the objective laws of comportment on the stage; nobody but Stanislavsky attempted to find a conscious approach to the actor's subconscious mind.
In a way one can say that Stanislavsky did for the theatre what Pavlov did for physiology. Each discovered in his own sphere the laws of the unity of man's physical and spiritual life, laws that are eternally valid, for they are not inventions but discoveries. They have always existed and it was simply a question of bringing them to light. However much the productions of other directors may have differed from those 34 of Stanislavsky, the actors from the most different theatres could not help but live according to the laws of human nature. And they acted well when they observed them, and badly when they failed to observe them. If we profess realism there is only one system for us-the system rooted in real life-though there may be dozens of different trends and experiments. However startling the formal conventions of a production, whether the scenery and costumes are traditional or excitingly bold genuine emotion, living the part, depends on a single conditionfidelity to nature. No one can betray the truth with impunity.
Stanislavsky's method creates first the actor and the director, and subsequently the production.
The Soviet theatre is called upon to fulfil a great task, that of serving the people of today in the best manner possible. It aspires to a great ideal with its aim of preparing people for life in communist society.
The aesthetics of the contemporary theatre are born out of productions and discussions. The cornerstone was laid by Stanislavsky with his ``system'' and its practical embodiment-the Moscow Art Theatre.
Stanislavsky naturally could not know what mankind would be like twenty-five years later, could not know how and how much the Soviet citizen's spiritual life and aesthetic feeling would change. But the universal laws of acting, the emotional ``formula'' and the nature of the interdependence of the theatre and the people discovered by Stanislavsky provide the most accurate and suitable compass for today. Its needle points to realism. Whoever uses this compass is in no danger of losing his way. A genius may one day be born who will offer the world a new, more perfect acting method. But for the time being there is no system to compare with Stanislavsky's: the best of yesterday, and today in the theatre is the product of his brilliant discoveries, and the best of tomorrow will be essentially derived from them.
Stanislavsky's ``system'', like all products of genius, is amazingly simple. And incredibly complicated. A person who knows and loves life will understand it. A person with talent will master it. Whoever understands man will understand Stanislavsky's teaching. But anyone whose knowledge of life is derived solely from books and plays, films and theatre critiques will get nothing at all out of Stanislavsky.
By studying the great actors of his day and himself, Stanislavsky determined the laws by which an actor can call to life in himself every evening the real, genuine feelings of the character he is playing. Stanislavsky determined the conditions in which the reincarnation of the actor in his role takes place. He offered a method of educating the actor, the artist, the citizen. No artistic method is worth a sou unless it is born from practice and confirmed by practice.
35Stanislavsky's ``system'' has been tested in theatrical practice. Stanislavsky's school raised the Soviet theatre to unprecedented heights. Stanislavsky's books are translated into all the world's major languages and he is honoured by the most progressive stage-directors and filmmakers the world over. Such recognition speaks for itself.
Stanislavsky's teaching and experience is the patrimony of the whole Soviet theatre today. Every one of us basks in the reflected glow of his glory, and this places a tremendous responsibility on us for how our theatre develops.
Stanislavsky has left a priceless legacy. We could easily squander it, live on the interest, or consign it to a museum, but to do so would be criminal. It is our duty to double, to triple, to increase tenfold this inheritance.
Stanislavsky could not complain that he was ignored by his contemporaries. He was loved by theatregoers and had a host of admirers. But the Moscow Art Theatre that he and Nemirovich-Danchenko founded was a favourite target of the reactionary critics. Stanislavsky had to wage a constant battle, right up to the last days of his life, in defence of realism against the theoreticians and practitioners of the Old Theatre. During his long life in art, Stanislavsky was accused of all the deadly sins, first of facile imitation, later of decadence and tendentiousness, indifference to politics and idealism, despotism and aestheticism. As a progressive theatre, before the Revolution the Moscow Art Theatre often found itself in serious difficulties, and was several times on the verge of a financial disaster.
It is hard to say what the future of the Art Theatre would have been but for the October Revolution. Throughout the hard times of war, famine and destruction Stanislavsky continued to act, put on new productions, write books and teach. He founded actors' studios, drew up plans for the reorganisation of the theatre, travelled all over the place to attend various meetings and special performances.
Stanislavsky's whole life was work, work and work, with hardly a moment to spare. After an exhausting lesson or rehearsal he would spend ages explaining to an actor or young director the essence of his mistakes. His rare ``free'' time he would devote to writing.
Even during his lifetime Stanislavsky became a legend. His irresistible charm, fertile imagination and complete dedication to the theatre combined with irrepressible vitality, child-like spontaneity, and above all talent, made him, as Gorky put it ``a fine figure of a man''. In the eyes of the young people Stanislavsky was the legendary Knight in Shining Armour of the theatre.
Although it was common knowledge that Stanislavsky had long been suffering from a chronic illness, his death came as a shock. The 36 news of his death spread around Moscow like wildfire. There are no words capable of expressing the profound sense of destitution and bereavement felt by the members of the Art Theatre. The queue of people to file past the bier was many kilometres long, a touching farewell from the people of Moscow to the great revolutioniser of the theatre.
It is quite beyond me how some glib theatre critics or a drama school lecturers can present the life of Stanislavsky and the history of the Art Theatre as a long row of successes and triumphs.
It was not like that at all. The ``system'' took shape gradually in the course of long battles and controversies, and not as a ready-made whole, immediately bearing fruit. It was born in the crucible of heated disputes, in travail. Every thesis was put to the test in a thousand practical experiments. Thousands of pages of writing were mercilessly discarded and consigned to the waste-paper basket. Conversion to the new ``system'' was a long, slow process: followers were won over gradually, one by one. It was not until after the Revolution that Stanislavsky's lessons became the common patrimony of our theatres, actors' studios and drama schools. Stanislavsky's path to the young people was certainly never strewn with roses.
Controversy between the followers and opponents of Stanislavsky continued throughout his life and went on unabated after his death.
Today Stanislavsky and his ``system'' are no longer a subject of controversy: they have earned universal recognition. Just when exactly the mass enlightenment took place one cannot say. This should be enough to put one on one's guard. Especially as one cannot help noticing that many of the actors and directors who have a portrait of Stanislavsky hanging in the most conspicuous place, like an icon, secretly worship false idols. Soft-pedallers have been only too ready to draw from the ``system'' anything that makes life easier for them-not learning the lines, not ``acting'', being physically ``relaxed'' and so on. They will claim that Stanislavsky ``approved'' their sloth. Directors hypnotised by their own ``brilliance'' and originality have called upon Stanislavsky for ``justification'' of their dazzling tricks.
Stanislavsky insisted ``One must love art in oneself not oneself in art''. But there are still a lot of people about today who like to adapt Stanislavsky to suit themselves.
For many Stanislavsky remains a closed book, or a book of which they have only read the first few pages.
Stanislavsky's ``system'' is not a code of rules that can be hastily ``swotted up''. Every artist must discover it one day in himself. But this does not simply mean following the behests of the Master. Stanislavsky's teaching must be multiplied by life which is ceaselessly 37 in flux. The laws he discovered must constantly be developed and perfected.
As a director Stanislavsky approached realism by a long and tortuous path, but as actor and thinker he was always faithful to realism in the highest, deepest and most precise meaning of the word.
Stanislavsky spent his whole life seeking and testing manifold forms, rehearsal techniques and teaching methods, to ensure that his ``system'' was firmly linked with practice. His productions achieved a varying degree of success, but to the last he was never satisfied and prepared to rest content with what he had achieved. He realised, he felt deep down inside him, that neither he himself nor his theatre had yet reached their peak. Stanislavsky could see the peak, and urged people on to conquer it. But not all his comrades-in-arms understood him. And Stanislavsky turned to the young people.
Shortly before his death, when he was already gravely ill but as enthusiastic as ever, he created a new actors' studio. Very few people saw its productions. Stanislavsky himself did not live long enough to make full-fledged actors of his students. But it was at this time that he developed the foundations of the high truth of the nature of dramatic art. Stanislavsky summed up the essence of his teaching as a method of physical actions. Today we can say that this method is unique, and that it has no equal in the world theatre, past or present.
Stanislavsky was a great theatrical talent and a great citizen of his country. He was a worthy successor of Belinsky and Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky, Stasov and Gorky, faithful to their view that art should serve man's high ideals. He never looked upon the theatre as pure entertainment, but insisted that it was a rostrum from which a great deal of good could be addressed to people. All Stanislavsky's fine life In art involved service of the noble idea of struggle for human happiness.
The most important idea in Stanislavsky's ``system'' is that of the ``super-objective'', as he termed the essential idea of a play. His work on a production was concerned above all with searching for a true and absorbing ``super-objective'' and subordinating the whole play to it. He did not regard this ``super-objective'' as the be-all and end-all, and widened the concept to that of the ``super-super-objective'', thus designating the aim in life of the man and artist, the idea underlying the whole artistic activity of the actor, director and playwright.
Stanislavsky held that this ``super-super-objective'' should inform people of what was most important, most essential and necessary in the artist's day and age. It should be a bridge between the stage and the audience, making even an old classic sound contemporary, fusing the thoughts and feelings of actors and audience in a single \'elan.
38How little we know Stanislavsky and how inept we are in making use of his theory of the ``super-objective'' and the ``super-super- objective''! How many productions are still put on goodness knows why or for whom! If one asks oneself: Does every production I put on help people to live better, to understand themselves and our way of life better, to infuse them with the strength to struggle and the feeling of great fellowship and brotherhood? The honest answer is: No, by no means every....
Born over a hundred years ago, Stanislavsky provides a fine example of civic ardour and full awareness of his duty to the people. For only a highly developed sense of civic duty and commitment to a cause can make an artist stand the test of time.
Stanislavsky's sense of civic duty was most of all in evidence in his directing and teaching work. He had a way of embodying the noble ideas of a play and a production in the characters and their actions by the most subtle, and often imperceptible means. The implacable logic, the psychological and social authenticity of every character produced a genuine picture of life on the stage, and unnoticeably but very definitely shaped the audience's thoughts and feelings.
Stanislavsky's ideal, ``super-objective'' and civic ardour were fused with the characters' profound psychological and artistic truth.
Noble ideological content and the most skilful means of expression are the major conditions for the creative activity of the realist artist.
Stanislavsky taught that the theatre should create ``the life of the human spirit''.
Stanislavsky's teaching is completely alien to art that is indifferent to man, cynical and anti-social. Stanislavsky is of no use at all to art that ignores reality or seeks to escape it.
We are wont to speak of the ``simple Soviet man'', but he is not, after all, so simple.
This Soviet man is an amazingly complex ``mechanism''. But there is a magic key to his heart. It was not easy to find, to awaken man's creative energies and initiative, concern for the common cause, and the ability to find bold solutions. Our people are building, studying and inventing, and at the same time preparing themselves for life in communist society. The task of all our art is to inculcate in people the moral qualities necessary for life in communist society.
Maxim Gorky called literature the study of man. The theatre is concerned with the same science.
Our age offers ideal conditions for this science to flourish. All Stanislavsky's tremendous experience, his lessons, productions and books are available and help our theatre comprehend the spiritual essence of Soviet man and inculcate in him new ideals of Beauty.
39The young people of today for some reason imagine Stanislavsky as a venerable old sage, a stuffy ``upright'' scholar of art. What rubbish! Stanislavsky was an amazingly vital, volatile, restless personality, highly inventive and temperamental, even mischievous at times. He had an awesome temper. But what impresses me most about him was his courage. Having achieved international fame, he sat down and wrote My Life in Art, a work in which painstakingly and with merciless honesty he listed and analysed his mistakes. His mistakes, not his triumphs. Who of our contemporaries would be capable of such bold frankness? Having opened a new chapter in the history of the world theatre, trained a whole pleiad of remarkably talented actors, and finally, elaborating his remarkable ``system'', in the last years of his life he came to the conclusion that all he had achieved in half a century of work was not the end of the road but the beginning, and already hampered by illness he set out to choose new students and begin all over again.
Stanislavsky is a model of a man who feels he must go forward all the time, the eternal seeker who can never rest and take time off from the quest.
Stanislavsky's art is a remarkable blend of wisdom and sly humour, of scintillating imagination and classical harmony, of passion and warmth. He can play with equal virtuosity on the kettledrum or the most delicate heartstrings. He has a perfect mastery of Russian that can be understood by people the world over. His love for his fellow men and his faith in the creative powers of the people go hand in hand with angry protest against all that is base and unworthy. He knew and loved his own people, and had faith in them, and he always told them the truth.
Fortunately, time does not make Stanislavsky any more tolerant of all forms of falsehood. He never forgave himself anything. He never invented excuses for himself, and never trembled for his authority. He could abandon what had once been dear to his heart without regrets if he found something dearer.
Somebody has spread the myth that Stanislavsky had no time for form in art and did not even know the meaning of it. It is beyond me how people can bring themselves to say such a thing about the author of such masterpieces as Warm Heart and The Marriage of Figaro and many, many others.
Somebody has spread the myth that Stanislavsky was dry and austere in art-practically a puritan and an ascetic. That about the man who in La Locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn) had the young nobleman Ripafratta go so far as to rip the petticoats off the brazen Ortensia and Dejanira!
40Someone is persistently spreading the myth that Stanislavsky had a coldly rational and analytic mind. This can hardly be said of a man who once got so carried away that he rushed onto the stage and demonstrated to a live horse how to flick away bumblebees and gadflies!
Stanislavsky was an ordinary genius and an extraordinary man. A man, not one of the Twelve Apostles. Like all men, he had his weaknesses. At times he could be unjust. He could lose his temper with people for no reason at all. He frequently suffered from angina. In his youth he was a bit of a dandy.
He created his remarkable ``system'' above all for himself. For a long time he considered himself a bad actor, and it was a long time before he decided that his ``system'' might be useful to others.
Today Stanislavsky's ``system'' is the property of all. There was a time when it was forced down people's throats whether they wanted it or not. Which probably explains why to this day there are people who, without having ever taken the trouble to study the ``system'' properly have dubbed it a code of rules and instructions. Vulgarisers and ignoramuses have failed to understand that it is in the very nature of the ``system'' to reject all rules and ready-made solutions. The ``system'' does not restrict the actor in any way but on the contrary unchains his creative spirit, making the whole world his stage. Everyone must find the ``system'' in themselves. For the ``system'' is fidelity to nature. Like nature, it moves, changes and lives. The ``system'' is a revolt against dogmatism. One has to be pretty blind to understand it dogmatically.
The ``system'' belongs to us all and we all swear allegiance to it, but by no means all of us act or produce the way Stanislavsky taught.
Stanislavsky has borne the blame for the boredom, colourlessness and bleak realism of many present-day productions. It is not worth lowering oneself to argue with those who make such accusations, people who use the fruits of Stanislavsky's teaching, without bothering to consider who cultivated them.
Within the recent memory of all of us there came the order to ``fall into line with Stanislavsky''. Instead of getting into line with the moving Stanislavsky, people were content to catch up with books about him. Stanislavsky has long since forged ahead, leaving the rest of the field way behind, and those who have ``lined up'' with him are softpedaling, if not running on the spot. The time has come for the command: ``Forward to catch up with Stanislavsky!'', and those who enter the field will need a good pair of legs to keep the fleet Stanislavsky in sight even.
When we arrive at the theatre of the future, Stanislavsky will be the first to meet us, young as ever, wise and smiling mischievously.
41He was born and lived for the theatre of the future, and that is where his monument should be. Meanwhile, he is with us, only way ahead.
Stanislavsky was born a hundred years ago and died over a quarter of a century ago, but his time is only just coming.
Stanislavsky is being born anew. He has left us definite rules for realistic acting, the actor's organic existence and the methods for achieving truth on the stage. But this does not absolve us from the duty of continuing the search; it does not mean that there is nothing left to be discovered and that no problems remain to be resolved.
It would be very wrong to take such a view, for it makes the rules of the ``system'' an abstract dogma. The great genius of the theatre left us an enormous patrimony, but our only benefit from it will be dry scholasticism and abstract speculation if we are prepared to accept it as a ready-made solution rather than making it our everyday practice, frequently taking a new look at it.
Time passes and the concept of truth in art does not stand still and remain unchanged. There is no such thing, and cannot be, as a truth for all times. The rules formulated by Stanislavsky are in perpetual motion, constantly developing, and we are required to make a tremendous creative effort to rediscover them for ourselves every time we embark on a new undertaking. It is not enough to know these rules: we must make them a part of ourselves, of our time, try to penetrate their very essence in order to understand how Stanislavsky himself would have viewed them and put them into practice in today's conditions.
Only thus can we ensure that the ``system'' is alive and new, just as Stanislavsky would have wished to see it. This is in fact what he demanded of his pupils and followers. That they treat his ``system'' not as a ready recipe, but as an effective instrument for everyday practical creative work. Unless we adopt this approach, however much we may pay lip service to Stanislavsky his great discoveries will be quite worthless. Quite enough has been done already to make a dogma of his theories, to destroy people's respect for his ``system'', and their willingness to put it into practice in the contemporary theatre. This attitude discredits Stanislavsky's teaching, completely eliminates it as an effective force, and gives rise to all kinds of nihilistic declarations.
We should arm ourselves today with Lenin's thesis that protecting our heritage means above all developing it. Every stage-director should make his contribution to the development of the ``system'' and its creative application. This is not a task for individuals, for in the arts, just as in science, the age of individual discoveries has given way 42 to an age in which new breakthroughs can only be achieved through the combined efforts of a group of like-minded people.
We must discover the laws of Stanislavsky for ourselves in a new quality, in new manifestations, for in art there is not, and cannot be, a ``universal gadget'' that can be used in any contingency. Every one of us must strive to carry out Stanislavsky's chief behest-to create our own method on the basis of his teaching.
I do not claim credit for any special discoveries, innovations or original theories. I consider myself Stanislavsky's pupil. I merely wish to share with others, with the reader, my conclusions, observations and ideas from thirty years of work in the theatre.
[43] __ALPHA_LVL1__ CIVIC There is no such thing as ``routine'' in
art, the same old thing, day in day out. Art is always a process,
exploration, movement. And it is a never-ending process. If you have
stopped, you have fallen behind. It is this uninterrupted movement,
the eager search for the new and the constant sense of dissatisfaction
with what has so far been achieved that ensures the freshness and
viability of art, and indeed its being necessary at all.
A new production means new objectives, new problems and new explorations. There are no constants in art, no eternal truths. But there are eternal values and absolute concepts. There are no permanent criteria, but there are permanent requirements.
And the first of these requirements is civic responsibility.
What does it mean, being a worthy citizen of one's country and time?. It means above all being vividly aware of what society lives by, what really interests contemporary audiences, what questions people are seeking an answer to when they come to the theatre today.
The question of a work's ideological and social content is not just one problem among many for the artist. It is the problem, the foundation from which a work of art proceeds or fails to proceed as the case may be. One can have superb technique and even genuine talent with- 44 out being an Artist, for unless one feels with the precision of the most accurate of barometers the climate of life, of one's time, all one creates -will at best be but a clever display of tricks of one's mind and imagination.
The artist must live as a good member of his society, with a strong sense of civic responsibility. No amount of professional skill or even talent can compensate for failure to do so. Indeed, the ability to feel the pulse of life, sense what interests and concerns people, what they accept and what they reject, is an essential ingredient of true talent. There is no harm in making mistakes during rehearsals, but one must not forget for an instant the problems and ideas occupying the minds of one's fellow citizens. For if we do, we gradually, imperceptibly, become mere timeservers, incapable of creating anything authentic, necessary or useful to society.
When I know exactly why a particular play is being put on today, when I am quite clear in my mind as to its message and it is something that I personally consider to be of social importance at the time, then I can go ahead and pursue definite ideological and artistic objectives in the scenic embodiment of the work, so that the production hits the desired target.
The second basic requirement is that ideas must be experienced emotionally, that they infect the artist. Tolstoi wrote because he just had to write. One has to be ``obsessed'' with ideas like Tolstoi to create a truly moving work of art. If we have a cold, purely intellectual approach to ideas, how can we possibly hope to move people?
The director must not be cold or impartial. He must not be indifferent to beauty and ugliness. All his abilities, knowledge and experience must serve a single goal-that of affirming what is new and beautiful in our lives. He must mobilise his art against all that is base and philistine, hostile to the ideal our people and its Party serve, the ideal of communism.
We continually hold forth on the importance of ideas in art, on how it is essential that the artist should be in the forefront of the struggle for the building of communist society, yet we often fail to fit the deed to the word, fail to give our art that emotional meaning, the message that is an essential condition for Art with a capital A.
I am quite convinced that a definite ideological and emotional bias is a sine qua non of art. Without it not a single significant work of art can be produced. In this respect one must be perfectly honest with oneself as regards one's own work. It is most important to blend one's own artistic interests with the interests of the people, of the whole country. This will make the artist's Weltanschauung and his sense of civic responsibility clearly manifest.
45A man may have been endowed by nature with remarkable gifts for stage direction but his work will be fruitless unless he knows life, is aware of his civic responsibility, and feels himself to be a direct participant in the historic task of building the new, communist society. It is important not to be a mere ``visitor'' in life, but to be a part of life, for only then does perception of the processes of life arise naturally, and only then can the desire to affirm or condemn become an inner need for the artist, as natural and necessary as breathing.
An unstable civic outlook, lack of sensitivity to the rhythms and movements of life and the failure to accurately discern the direction of its main trends lead to a primitive, superficial understanding of the present day of art, which involves marching forward with the times in the front ranks of the general progress towards the future. All this concerns only the director's views. His talent-whether or not he can translate his ideological concepts into artistic terms-is quite another matter.
But until he has decided the meaning of a play, why it should be put on now, he has no basis for discussion with the actors, and hence with the audience, even if he is a giant talent. Method and talent are inseparable from the artist's Weltanschauung.
If the social role of the theatre and its artistic objectives are understood thus, then the more particular, purely professional objectives of stage direction and acting will be perfectly clear.
[46] __ALPHA_LVL1__ THE DIRECTOR We often receive plays in which the
words ``sputnik'', ``semiconductor'', ``quantum generator'', ``computer'',
and so on, crop up with disconcerting frequency, and yet the characters
and events are such that if one were to cut out these modern
expressions the action could very well be transposed to the last century. In
all ages people have fallen in love, suffered from unrequited love,
worked, written books, dreamed of justice and so on. Modern dress,
a TV set and reference to contemporary events do not suffice to make
a play modern. A play is only modern if the characters are modern,
present-day people, when they behave not as people were wont to
behave in the past but in accordance with the new, Soviet morality,
when their ``language'' is modern, and they think and feel like
our contemporaries. The situations and conflicts in a modern play,
and even the plot, can be similar to those in the classics, but the
characters and their attitudes to events must be different, must be
modern. Try dressing the heroes of Ostrovsky's comedy Even a Wise
Man Stumbles in modern costume. It won't work. The play will seem
phoney, ridiculous, absurd. Does this mean that we no longer have
clever careerists, superstitious old wives, old dodderers living entirely
m the past and so on among us today? Unfortunately, we do come
47
across such people. But a modern Glumov has to be far more careful
to avoid being exposed for what he is and stands to lose far more than
Ostrovsky's Glumov, whom the Mamayevs and the Krutitskys just
cannot do without. The modern Krutitsky hasn't a chance of weilding
any effective power and could hardly offer patronage to a Glumov.
Try imagining the action of Rozov's In Search of Happiness transferred to the nineteenth century or a capitalist country and you will soon realise that it is quite out of the question. Yet one can easily do this with the plays of some authors for they only contain the outward tokens of our time.
A lot of plays written recently differ vastly in form from Gorky or Ostrovsky. They have some rather unusual characters in the list of dramatic personae-Author, Master-of-Ceremonies, Choir.... The authors of these plays deliberately destroy the illusion of reality by making their characters talk to the audience, interrupting the action with author's commentaries and so on. Unfortunately, some directors mistake novel and unusual form for genuine innovation and modernity.
Yet no formal dramaturgical device in itself makes a play innovatory and modern. Choirs, masters-of-ceremonics, taking liberties with chronology and other such devices are only novel, modern, and indeed necessary in so far as they serve the author as the best means of expressing his idea and presenting modern people and modern human relationships.
A real modern dramatist observes the development of the new in life-new attitudes to work, property, friendship, love and the people.
In his In Search of Happiness V. Rozov does not feel at all cramped within the framework of traditional theatrical forms, and only departs from them in preferring to divide the action into two parts instead of the usual three acts. In Town at Dawn and Irkutsk Story A. Arbuzov feels the need to present his own personal attitude to events and therefore has a Choir on the stage, constantly switches from place to place, looks ahead into the future and returns to the present. Simonov has the living consorting with the dead and Stein has his characters meditate aloud. It is absurd to try and find a mean quantity of form obligatory for all dramatists.
It is as ridiculous to criticise Soviet dramatists for not writing in the way Gorky or Ostrovsky wrote as it is to criticise the latter for not having written like Shakespeare. Every age produces its own writers, who are sons of their time. If they have talent, their works will differ in both form and content from works written in earlier times. The new cannot be created by imitating the old. We can learn a lot from the classics, but they have never taught us imitation.
Unfortunately good plays are always in short supply. But it is far 48 worse when dramatists repeat one another's mistakes and we have monotonous repetition in their choice of plots and characters. A vast number of plays have the most petty, insignificant conflicts. The characters are often primitive and stereotyped and the language is flat and insipid. Not infrequently, we fail to recognise a work of talent, individual weaknesses blinding us to its genuine novelty, bold message, original characters, and fresh language. But more often we are dazzled by an author's brilliant external effects, strikingly original plot and vociferous characters and fail to notice the phoney ideological content and artistic impurity. And how often we are duped by a play's apparent popularity with audiences!
Our theatre life has livened up considerably in recent years. Writers and theatre people have renewed their interrupted controversies, not just for the sake of arguing, but in order to find the truth, each man in his own way. They argue about how plays should be written, produced and acted with actual plays, productions and acting. They try to find the shortest path to people's hearts and minds.
The controversy is essentially centred around one major problem, that of the hero and the heroic. This is no abstract discussion, and it is productive in so far as those with a bone to pick demonstrate their views not in articles and speeches but in practice.
What is the essence of this debate which, although not openly announced, is definitely in progress, a debate which is reminiscent of the arguments that raged among dramatists in the 'twenties?
One group of playwrights, critics and directors presumes to defend the heroic, monumental theatre as opposed to what they consider theatre concerned with banal, petty themes, imparted in whispers, full of undercurrents. They point as shining examples to The Optimistic Tragedy, Break-Up, How the Steel Was Tempered and other works of Soviet literature of which our people are justly proud. Having come to the end of the list of Soviet classics with which they are familiar, the advocates of the theatre of heroism attribute to it according to their own personal tastes a medley of other works, unwittingly abandoning genuine, objectively-appraised values for works that have no claim to greatness by common consent. Having passed from objective to purely subjective positions, they then reject anything that does not conform to their cheapened aesthetic ideal. Anything that lacks epic sweep is classified as petty, anything that lacks heroism is dubbed anti-heroic. Plays and productions where the spotlight is on man's inner world and the plot concerns family relations are as a rule placed in the category of petty-bourgeois, pernicious plays lacking ideological content. Volodin, and even Rozov and Arbuzov, are often included in this category.
49True, without romantico-heroic plays the Soviet theatre cannot live and develop. The theme of heroism must occupy the leading place in our theatre. But in life heroism exists and manifests itself in an infinite variety of human characters and destinies, personal and social circumstances and conflicts. Art does not have the right to restrict itself to any one particular sphere in which heroism manifests itself, and anyway, the heroic theme even in its manifold forms is not life in its entirety.
Surely the real aim of the Soviet theatre is to delve down to the grass roots of courage, to the grass roots of man's spiritual life.
Rozov's On the Wedding Day is really far more than the family, domestic drama it appears at first sight. It tells of a girl who has found the courage to reject marriage with a man she loves but who does not love her, and in its own way affirms the moral purity, and, if you like, the heroism of the new Man. In my opinion this play fulfills the social objective no less than a play like Dora Pavlova's Conscience. The two plays are vastly different as regards their themes, the range of characters the author has chosen to show, and the means used to present the authentic material, but both authors have the same civic passion and political views. It seems hardly right to contrast these plays to one another simply because the one is openly didactic and the other psychological.
One can argue about the skill and talent of the dramatists, their temperament and way of writing, but it is wrong and unfair to pronounce the plays of one civic-spirited and those of the other shallow merely on the basis of their subjects.
Choice of subject, plot, characters and scene of action cannot, and certainly ought not to, serve as a criterion for a dramatist's ideological commitment, loyalty and civic ``reliability''.
Any theme can be treated in a petty, banal manner. The most runof-the-mill personal matter can be raised to the level of a most striking artistic achievement by an author and theatre with a highly developed sense of civic responsibility, while a powerful theme with sweeping historical implications can be reduced by a philistine to the level of the petty and banal. It is the duty of both dramatist and theatre to present on the stage not only the Revolution itself but also the way it is reflected in people's lives. But this can be done through practically any kind of play. The contrasting of ``civic theatre'' and ``intimate theatre'' is one of the rudiments of standard aesthetics. Miniatures, watercolours and prints are as necessary as large canvasses, if they are skilfully produced in the name of high social ideals. An oratorio is in no way superior as a genre to Lieder. Declamatory verse may speak of matters of moment, but it may also speak of the most appallingly trivial matters. Simple unadorned prose can tell of great deeds, but it may also 50 describe the base and ignoble. The volume of sound means nothing. The scale of a play, its social and philosophical message and its power to move people are not determined by the number of characters or the scene of action but by its author's talent and the depth of his civic outlook. Not infrequently a play is judged not by its ideas and artistic qualities but by certain superficial aspects taken out of context.
When Volodin wrote the play five Evenings (the action of which indeed took place in the evening) he was accused of a gloomy, `` twilight'' mood. But the play was after all about love, about the difficult road to happiness of a highly-principled middle-aged woman. It was a sad play, although it had a happy ending. But sadness was tantamount to pessimism for those critics who considered sorrow and misfortune as synonymous with decadence. The play shows how two fine people almost missed the chance of happiness. They eventually found it, but too late. Surely there is every reason for sadness and regret at the thought of how much they had denied themselves.
In Five Evenings there are no fine heroes performing great deeds or making great discoveries. But surely we are justified in writing and performing plays about ordinary people such as these-the workshop foreman, the driver, the student, the telephonist, the chemical engineer-who make themselves and their near and dear ones live better and more honestly. For these plays are about people who in different circumstances would most definitely find the courage for the most patriotic and heroic deeds.
Certainly Tamara's heroism is quite different from that of the woman Commissar in The Optimistic Tragedy. But I love both these women. Why should we class Tamara as an ``anti-heroine''? Merely because she lives in a crowded flat and not in a military tent? Tamara has just as much integrity as Nila Snizhko in Salynsky's Drummer Girl. The authors have chosen different times, different circumstances and different conflicts. But did not the Commissar die and Nila risk her life for the same reason-so that later, many years later, in peacetime, people might live according to high moral principles?
The fact that the play is the basis of the mise-en-scene should be in no need of proving. Yet it quite often happens that this is just not the case, and instead the author's thoughts are lost in the production. This may of course be intentional on the director's part, but in the majority of cases it is accidental. The truth is that many directors just do not know how to read, or rather understand, a play and find the appropriate scenic expression. Anyone can grasp the moral of a play, but it is not at all easy to spot the sparks set off by the collision of conflicting forces, and the sad fact is that not all plays contain these sparks, this live fire.
51There are plays that seem to contain everything they should- confiict and clashes, unexpected twists in the plot, intelligent dialogue, triumphant virtue and punished vice-and yet we are not satisfied, we feel that something is lacking. The conflict turned out to be contrived, the passions artificial and the fire a bengal light. And it is even worse if the director has failed to notice how contrived and artificial the play and characters are. We also find the opposite: the director has failed to spot the conflict in a slow, apparently calm scene, or to realise that the hero's reserve and apparent singleness of purpose hide a particularly complex character.
Can one learn to understand plays properly? And if so, how?
They say there's no accounting for taste. Some plays everybody is vying to put on, while with other plays the competition is slight. A play that has been turned down by one theatre may be successfully staged at another. One director regarded a play as a poetic, lyrical story, the other as a tense drama. And both productions are good in their own way, both have their merits. One seeks simplicity and home truths in the heroic, and the other seeks heroism in the mundane and everyday element. Which of them is right? Which of them has understood the play better?
The only answer to these questions is to be found in practice, in the finished production. The only real criterion for judging a production is the power of the impression it makes on the audience.
There arc no rules in art, no universally obligatory definitions. Does this mean that it is all a matter of personal taste, that a play has no objective value, but that it all depends on individual appreciation? Obviously this is not the case. A play's power, meaning and valuemust be determined by comparing it to reality.
Truth to life is the only objective criterion for judging a play. And the better, the more fully and accurately, the director understands life, the more exactly he can determine the degree of truth a play contains.
Thus, the director's prime task is constant, day by day study of life. He must know everything. He must not only learn to see facts but must be able to compare them and reveal the inner mainspring of human behaviour. We must look deeper into the inner world of the people around us, note the first green shoots of the new, perceive the complex laws of the struggle between the old and the new and the tangled links between major historical events and personal fortunes. Politics and economics, aesthetics and sociology are so interconnected that it is quite impossible to even imagine a modern director not versed in all these fields.
It is not so easy to distinguish between good and bad plays. The only way to learn to do so is to be constantly increasing one's ideo- 52 logical baggage, widening one's horizon and improving one's taste by devoting considerable time to the arts-literature, music and painting.
But improving one's taste is a long laborious process, and meanwhile plays have to be chosen at once. What is one supposed to do? Rely on the recommendations of the critics? I think the first thing to be done is to eradicate the insulting theory that the public is ignorant, that our Soviet audiences are incapable of comprehending complicated things, and one should give them entertainment. This lack of faith in the taste of the public is one of the most dangerous of errors, and one of the most widespread. There arc naturally cases when a good play is not given the reception it deserves. But no one is to blame for this except the author, or the director, or the actors, or all of them together.
Unfortunately the opposite is often the case. We find appallingly bad plays, badly acted into the bargain, having a most successful run. But here it is the theatre that is to blame and not the bad taste of the audience.
A director must be reading new plays all the time in search of suitable material. Surely the reason why theatres sometimes put on the first thing that comes along is that they simply have not got time to search and select.
It is certainly far more reprehensible when a theatre has got a wide choice of plays yet selects a bad, phoney one without realising it.
I have no firm recommendations to offer, but I would suggest that on reading a play through a director might try imagining its action taking place in a different country in, say, the last century. If this is remotely possible, then the play is phoney, for it means there can be nothing modern about it except for the setting, up-to-date dress, and bit parts like the man from the executive committee or the Young Pioneer. It means that all the events presented could equally well take place in any age in any country. It makes not a scrap of difference if the family drama is complicated by the fact that there are children or by the characters every now and then holding forth on the Soviet Man's family duties and so on.
It is far from my intention to suggest that plays about love, the family and children, or the problems of family life have no place in the Soviet theatre and are unsuitable for Soviet audiences. Of course love and the family must be written about. But only provided the old conflicts and traditional situations serve to reveal new human qualities, new features of human relationships and the nature of the people of today.
Often a highly dramatic conflict, an engrossing plot and the superficial attributes of modernity serve to mask what is in fact a pedestrian 53 rehash of the worn devices of old-fashioned melodrama, thereby sapping the director's vigilance, so to speak.
It is a perfectly natural desire to wish to present to the public a play with a dramatic situation and highly intriguing plot. But however fascinating you may have found the play yourself, you should immediately ask why the author has treated us to such an intrigue and for what purpose he has made the events so dramatic.
Unfortunately, only too often the answer will be: simply in order to evoke tears and give the audience a pleasant thrill.
There is nothing easier than exciting or moving an audience, even to tears, with plays full of suffering-the old roue stricken with remorse, children suffering because of their terrible parents, or parents suffering because of their enfants terribles-but as often as not such plays leave no lasting imprint in the hearts and minds of the audience and are forgotten the moment they leave the theatre.
This is surely a poor reward for months of work and effort by a whole group of people.
Thrillers are usually considered modern if only the action is set in the present. They are in no way inferior to any other genre per se. But they are often the excuse for stereotype characters and situations, trite, cliche-ridden dialogue and a complete absence of psychological analysis. Not infrequently they are full of glib patter about patriotism by which they contrive to hide the fact that they are totally devoid of ideological content. These empty phrases simply serve to mask the emotional sterility of the heroes, and a closer look shows that the latter are entirely motivated by a thirst for adventure, that they are in fact not heroes at all but cheap adventure-hunters. One has no difficulty in imagining the action taking place in some other country: one can do so without anything essential being changed.
If we take a look at some of the more famous heroes of great adventures to be found in the literature of former ages-Till Eulenspiegel, D'Artagnan, Robin Hood and so on-we find that they were motivated not by a thirst for thrills, but by love for their people, the longing to avenge cruel injustices, the noble desire to rescue the fair maiden, their beloved, from captivity and so on.
Courage, boldness and enterprise are clearly worthy of emulation, but only if they serve the achievement of a noble end. After all, the most rapacious people, and even criminals and careerists, are wont to demonstrate courage and daring on occasion.
The courage and heroism of Soviet men and women is of a special brand. I don't intend to examine this here; it has been superbly done by Fadeyev in his Young Guard, Sholokhov in his Destiny of a Man, by Katayev and countless others.
54But if the ``modern'' repertoire in some theatres was only recently represented by works of an extremely low standard both as regards ideological content and artistic qualities, we should regard this as no less than a disaster. Those theatres which put on ``cruel'' melodramas, ``spine-chilling'' thrillers and frivolous comedies with precious little dialogue and lots of singing and dancing are perfectly well aware of the objective value of such productions. They are none too keen to have visiting critics see them, and are not overworried if the local press fails to mention them. They allow their ``boxoffice'' repertoire scarce ideological content and certain lapses from modern standards.
The worse such productions are the less dangerous they are. They are anyway far less dangerous than those ghastly petty-bourgeois dramas heavily camouflaged as ``plays with a message'' where dreadful philistines pronounce just what we like to hear and hidebound people deliver edifying sentences to us.
In this category we find numerous large-scale plays, which we theatre folk call ``canvases''. Producers are often taken in by the apparent modernity of some of these ``canvases'' with their show of exuberance and fearless optimism. The economic issue being solved, or the task of major importance to the national economy being carried out by the heroes is in most cases but the background for a love story. It is very sad when the director's attention has been so drawn to the important economic question raised that he has failed to realise that it is all issue and no play.
The essence of Soviet people's lives is the struggle of the new with the old, a struggle being waged at Party congresses and conferences, in industry and agriculture, science and the arts, in short on every front. Playwrights have a habit of reducing the most complex issues to the simple pattern of the conservative trying to oust the innovator, or rather the innovator ousting the conservative from his post. The characters are stereotype: the conservative has a fine work record behind him, while the innovator has a foul character. To liven things up a bit the conservative's daughter, or sometimes even his wife, is in love with the innovator. The conflict between the conservative and the innovator is completely pointless, since we get the message from the very first scenes: it is better to take a little longer and build something that will last, and grain in the granaries is worth more than the report on the table.
But to keep the conflict going, everybody for some reason supports the conservative. As a rule all the arguments arc settled by the secretary of the local Party committee, various desperate attempts being made to bring this pale shade of a character to life and make him ``oh-- so-human''---perhaps he is gravely ill, or his daughter is in love with the 55 innovator's son or the conservative. The Party secretary is wild about fishing, or occassionally on hunting.
At first sight these plays seem modern. After all, the issues being debated are actual present-day problems. At first sight one has the impression that the action could not possibly be set in another country or in the last century. But upon closer inspection you will find that it is the old familiar characters of bygone days that are being paraded before us in a modern setting, masques uttering modern phrases. Many centuries ago the Comedia dell'Arte flourished, a masque theatre, where a group of familiar formalised characters-Pantaloone, the tricked father, Capitano, the cowardly warrior, Doctor Lombardo, the quack, the cunning Harlequin and Lelio and the witty Columbina and Smcraldina-walked the boards in production after production in the same stock situations.
Some fifteen years ago one of our directors got the idea of putting on a modern masque comedy; with an old-fashioned doctor, his frivolous secretary, his wife, the epitome of cheap vulgarity, two pairs of lovers, one lyrical, the other comic, and an old couple, she a charwoman, he a concierge (or watchman-it makes no difference).
Luckily the director in question soon realised that this would be the theatre of parody. But unfortunately there arc still dramatists and directors creating just this kind of theatre today, with the young stilyaga, the charwoman, the absent-minded scientists and the bureaucrat from the personnel department, as bad, if not worse than Pantaloone or Brighella, making their appearance in play after play.
Many plays that aspire to epic sweep for some reason or other just don't seem to be able to do without such natural disasters as landslides and blizzards, droughts and burst dams, fires and traffic accidents. Such plays are themselves disasters as theatre. The trouble is not simply that these are worn cliches but that they create the appearance of drama, the appearance of struggle.
An author has every bit as much right to present a catastrophe on the stage as any other real event, but many writers make use of disasters as an easy way out. It is very wrong, and rather unfair, to drown one's heroine merely because one does not know what else to do with her.
One must of course distinguish between a bad play and a play that is simply not modern. The latter may be very well written. That's the trouble. That is why it is even more dangerous, for a false idea is worse than no idea at all.
We are perfectly aware that there have always been very few really first-class plays, and theatres must play a most active role to promote their creation. What exactly does this mean, the active role of theatres in this process?
56I think we have long since reached the conclusion that theatres should not take it upon themselves to write plays for the dramatist, that nothing good can come of this and it is really not within their province to do so. The role of the theatre is therefore rather that of setting high standards by insisting on quality and secondly of refusing to compromise and lower their standards, as so often happens. Therearc occasions when we are prepared to compromise and overlook `` minor'' details provided the play satisfies the main requirements.
Thus I think we arc justified in helping the author to improve on the artistic qualities of a play with all the means of which the theatredisposes, provided the play in question satisfies the essential requirement of fidelity to life. But if we violate truth and go against the dictates of our own conscience, putting on a play in which nothing but the subject appeals to us, then we arc doing both ourselves and the author a disservice and hampering our general advance.
Saltykov-Shchcdrin wisely remarked that in order to make it clear to all how bad a play is one should stage it.
We do this all too frequently. Saltykov-Shchedrin intended his remark as a satirical paradox, whereas we often set out to justify what is quite unjustifiable and thereby do a great deal of damage to the development of Soviet dramaturgy.
I think our professional theatre, directors and actors alike, should wage an unrcmmitting struggle against topicality in the worst meaning of the word, when it is the sole excuse for the appearance of a bad play. It gave rise to the phenomenon of the so-called ``local play''. If a play is a real work of art it belongs to all, and nobody is interested in the author's place of residence. If it is ``local'' in the sense that its artistic qualities arc such as to make it of no interest to anybody but it should be put on at a particular theatre simply because the author lives locally, then it is a most pernicious phenomenon.
It seems to me that there should be a special way of testing local plays. Thus if a play were written in Smolensk, it would be worth sending it to Voronezh, and only if it were a success there have it staged at a local Smolensk theatre. In this way we could ensure that theatres did not have local plays foisted upon them and were less tempted to compromise.
I don't mean that new plays should only make their appearance in Moscow and Leningrad, but merely that it is wrong for authors to be given preference in their home town.
Naturally, the more writers there arc in various towns the better. But are writers always guided by artistic aims in setting out to write a play? I don't know about other theatres, but we are literally swamped with new material and just don't know where to put it all. Never 57 before has there been such a flood of material, such a quantitative boom in dramaturgy. Everybody's writing, and though there are some honest, if not necessarily very skilful efforts, the majority of plays are completely uninspired and suggest that too many people are looking upon writing for the theatre as a way of making easy money rather than an art. And this is a very serious situation.
It is not enough to point out that if dramaturgy is failing to advance, then the theatre as a whole is also falling behind. We directors must make high demands, and this is no time for us to sit back with our arms folded. We too have our shortcomings which we must strive to overcome, or when good plays make their appearance we shall not be ready to stage them properly.
The theatre can, and indeed is duty bound to, promote the appearance of good plays. It can and must see to it that it has creativeprogrammes developed in collaboration with the playwrights. But how can we speak of theatres having their own particular line when the majority of theatres have absolutely identical taste as regards plays? We can note a most gratifying tendency in Leningrad: the city's threeleading theatres are gradually abandoning their old haggling over plays.
Whereas they used to fight like cats and dogs over plays, practically snatching them out of each other's hands, today they are gradually coming to accept demarcation lines, choosing their own ``province'' and keeping to it. The Comedy Theatre no longer snatches up the plays the Pushkin Theatre likes, and keeps away from the plays that arceminently suitable for the Gorky Theatre. A theatre's repertoire is an essential element of its creative physiognomy. It is not a question of which theatre is right-that only time will show-but it is extremely important that there should be fixed limits and that the repertoire should correspond to the theatre's general creative physiognomy.
It is most important that our creative styles should be more and more varied, while remaining within the bounds of socialist realism. Every theatre should have its own artistic taste, for only then can they really deserve being called artistic organisations.
Even when a play has been chosen, as satisfying all the essential requirements, there remains a great deal to be done to ensure that the production is a success. A modern play can be staged in a modern way, but it can also be staged in an old-fashioned way that is of no use to anybody. What exactly constitutes a modern production? How does a modern play dictate a modern production?
In recent years we have seen many new, essentially modern plays. The characters seem familiar to us, people we meet in our daily lives. 58 Yet at the same time not so familiar, in the sense that we now see and learn a great deal about them that we had never suspected. The author introduces us to their inner world, showing us their nobility and moral fibre. We get to know our contemporaries, and perceive the wisdom and greatness of a social order that produces men cast in a very special mould. They arc all very different, each with his own special ``kink'', his own peculiar nature, his own destiny. It might seem that the young school leaver Andrei Averin in Rozov's Good Luck, and Platonov in Stein's Ocean have precious little in common: yet they are both members of the same great Soviet family.
The plays of Rozov and Stein, Pogodin and Arbuzov are written in a very different manner. Rozov's plays seem to be traditional in form. Stein uses techniques straight from the cinema such as ``the voice outside the picture'', having his heroes utter their thoughts aloud and playing around with the time sequence, using flash-backs and so on. Yet Rozov's plays are in fact modern in form, by virtue of their very special composition and pregnant dialogue, compressing the maximum of meaning into the minimum of words.
Soviet dramatists all have a lot in common: they all stand on the same ideological platform, professing the method of socialist realism.
They are all equally averse to bombast and stilted mumbling. However, our job is to see not only what they have in common but also how they differ, not only the general but the individual too.
Rozov's Unequal Struggle and Arbuzov's Tanya are both plays about love, about love as a moral force and its power to transform people. But the two plays seem to be written in different languages and require totally different solutions. The ground separating Vsevolod Vishnevsky from Trenev and Lavrenev is even vaster. The three plays The Optimistic Tragedy, Litbov Yarovaya and Break-Up are all about the Civil War, yet what a difference between the passionate didacticism of Vishnevsky, the lyrical romantic style of Lavrenev and the psychological depth of Trcncv! Both Shkvarkin and Mayakovsky wrote about the NEP period, but there is no comparing grotesque satire in Mayakovsky's The Bedbug or the Bathhouse and the gentle irony and lyrical vaudeville style of Shkvarkin's Last Judgement or Somebody Else's Child.
How can they possibly be staged in the same way?
We arc wont to measure one author against another and grumble that Shtok is no Shvarts, and Shatrov is no Pogodin. But surely it should not be a matter for regret but rather for thankfulness that Shtok has his own special way of linking fairy-tales with the present day.
59It is absurd to consider the intense, emotional language of Vishnevsky a shortcoming and wish he would simplify it a bit, take it down a tone or so. Just as it would be ridiculous to ask him not to have the Commissar killed at the end of the play, or to ask Arbuzov to show a moving Underground train in Long Road, or remove the baby crow from Tanya, although it would make no difference to the meaning of the play. History of a Love was just what one would expect from Simonov, yet not at all what one would expect from Dovzhenko. It is perfectly ridiculous to try and fit two artists into the same mould, having to cut off one's head and the other's leg in order to do so.
Indeed, the one author may write very dissimilar works. Arbuzov has a Choir in the list of dramatic personae in both Town at Dawn and Irkutsk Story, but the plays are so very different in structure that the position and function of the Choir is bound to be vastly different in the two cases. Rozov adopts a very different style in such plays as Good Luck and In Search of Happiness for all the similarities between them.
Much in Stein's Ocean points to the need for monumental epic sweep in presenting the stormy sea, ships, the fountains in the gardens of the Peterhof Palace and so on. We read it as a deep psychological drama, a duel of morals. Other theatres may well see the play in a totally different light. Every play is a lock, and each director fits his own key to it. There are as many keys as there are directors. Finding the key is a task requiring great skill and filigrain precision, for great care must be taken not to break the lock, batter the door down, or make a hole in the roof, but simply to open up the play by constant search for the answer, for the magic ``open sesame'' which will make the door fly open of its own accord revealing the author's treasure chamber.
Many authors do not know themselves how the door to their secret treasure-chamber opens. But then it is not really their job to know. Their job is to collect a great store of human characters, thoughts, feelings, events and actions. Our job is to find the key to it and pass it all on to the actors.
In my opinion it is best to refrain from putting on a play if you haven't found the key.
Indeed the ability to limit one's imagination and harness it, to strictly refrain from everything that is possible but not essential, and hence only a ``near fit'' is the prime virtue and duty of the director.
Unfortunately we tend to fall in love with our own conclusions, delight in our own inventive powers and offer the public a stew prepared from our own rabbit. We forget that the author should be 60 allowed pride of place, that it is he with his sharp eyes and ears that spends hours if not years as a pathfinder and researcher discovering and exploring the new with the aid of the faintest of clues, laying the path for us to follow.
It is the playwright who gives the play its form and content while our job is to search out, hear, see and sense the authors individual pitch, the special, unique system of the play and translate it all into scenic terms. It goes without saying that the director, like the author, must know the life, the people and the events, presented in the play.
Like the author, he will thoroughly disapprove of some of the characters. Like the author, he must be in love or enraged, bold or mocking. Nothing at all will ever come of a production if the author and the director have different standpoints, if they have quite different attitudes to life and art. The director is at liberty to disagree with the author over minor details, secondary episodes, linguistic inaccuracies or even the odd scene. He has every right to argue with the author if the latter, from inexperience or carelessness, has violated his own logic, contradicted himself, and been inconsistent, lacking in firmness in the views he expresses, or has failed to make his ideas sufficiently convincing. But he may do this only as long as he does so from the author's standpoint, or rather from his own, coinciding with that of the author.
Fidelity to the author does not mean a pedantic fidelity to the letter. The director has the right, and indeed the duty, to help the author express what he wrote and the aim he was pursuing in writing the play in the best way possible. If the director has a thorough grasp of the play and is in sympathy with the ideas it expresses, and the author is free from excessive petty pride, then the play can be freed of all that is superfluous, and be tightened to achieve the maximum clarity and conciseness.
The director's dependence on the author must not be slavish obeisance. Their relationship must not be that of teacher and pupil, commander and subordinate. Each of them is perfectly independent in his own sphere. But the play can exist without being performed, while there can be no performance without the play. That is why we consider the playwright the most important person in the theatre-but a person, not a god. And respect and gratitude, and even open enthusiasm should not take the form of idol worship. The fact that the playwright is accorded pride of place does not necessarily mean that playwright A is automatically superior to director X. There are cases where the director understands the play better than the author. There arc also cases where the director finds it necessary to disagree with a play- 61 wright he is fond of, to argue with him and demand changes, cuts and additions. We must not forget this, for there are those actors, directors and playwrights who regard the thesis of the primacy of the playwright as an unlimited indulgence granted to authors, placing them above reproach.
But the key to every production is always to be found in the play itself. Every author for every play finds a particular system of conventions, the ``rules of play''. If the director does not like them, then he should not stage the play. But if he likes the play, then he should take the trouble to find the rules the author provides and follow them. Indeed, it is finding the ``rules of play'' for each given work that constitutes the director's main task.
[62] __ALPHA_LVL1__ STAGE DIRECTION A theatre cannot be without a director,
for it is the director who plots the theatre's creative path. Every single
matter of stage art without exception depends on him, and it is he who
bears the main responsibility for a production. He is to blame if the
play is bad, if the acting is not genuine, if the audience laugh in the
wrong places. He speaks for the whole theatre company, and his
opinion is taken more seriously as a rule than that of any actor. He is
approached with all sorts of questions connected with the production
and is bound to give an answer. The director has numerous duties, but
also considerable rights.
The director must be a highly educated and extremely versatile man. He must know a lot about music, the fine arts, stagecraft, the technical side of the theatre, and even administrative and organisational matters. At the same time he may be perfectly incapable of writing a play, drawing, or playing a musical instrument, and may even be a bad actor. Hence the impression some people have that there's nothing easier than stage direction. Indeed, practically any actor can direct a play. Many, many directors never had an academic training in stage direction, and we have often seen a self-styled director coming along and directing a very successful production.
63Well then, is stage direction easy or difficult? The answer to that one is: it is easy if treated simply as a job, a craft, difficult if treated as an art.
Clearly, even in the first case, there are certain things the director must know. He must compensate for his lack of talent with boundless energy and drive, if not outright cheek, for his lack of real skill by assuming a pose of boundless self-confidence, for his lack of imagination with a good memory. He may even enjoy the reputation of being a great expert among beginners. But his authority soon wanes and his successes are purely transitory.
Before the Revolution some enterprising publishers brought out books that purported to teach one how to write verse. But it would be naive to imagine that a person who has learned to write verse is necessarily a poet.
It is absurd to imagine that by reading numerous articles, books and brochures on how to direct a play, or by attending a fortnight's course on stage direction-useful though these may be-anybody can up and become a good director. Unless a person has a natural talent for it, he will never make a director, however much he may ``cram''. The best that conscientious work, a talent for organising, and a good education can do for a person is make him a useful ``craftsman''. However, natural talent without knowledge, a good education or ability as a teacher and organiser gives scarcely better results than knowledge without talent.
You cannot teach a person to be a director: the most you can do is help those with a latent talent for directing to cultivate their gift and bring it out by suggesting interesting ways of dealing with a particular situation and putting them on their guard against possible errors. Some qualities useful in stage direction can be successfully developed, widened and deepened through training. But a person who has no ear for music will never make a good singer. And a person who lacks powers of observation and imagination, a sense of humour, temperament, a sense of rhythm and so on will never make a good director.
But if we insist on high artistic standards in our profession, it is surely about the most difficult there is.
However much people may argue about the role of the director, about the relative importance of director and actor, life has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that although the playwright is the supporting pillar of the theatre, and the actor is the main figure, as presenting the live embodiment of the essence of a work, nevertheless the fate of the theatre present and future largely depends on the director, since it is he who blends the various elements without which there is no theatre.
64
Scene from The Fox and the Grapes
Natalya Tenyakova as Clea
Some may accuse me of exaggerating the role of the director. I don't think I am. It has already been clearly demonstrated in practice that such arguments are pointless, especially as the aim is not to minimise the role of the actor, since no problem of direction is of any use, or indeed of any interest, to anybody unless it is manifested in the live actor. Therefore to say that the main problem today is that of directing is not to assert the primacy of the director over the actor. This vexed question is really obsolete although we still find articles harping on about it, complaining about an imaginary attempt to exaggerate the role of the director. I don't think there is ever any conflict between a good director and a good actor. But there is a conflict between a pedestrian director and a lively, creative company of actors. Just as there is a conflict between a director who is a real artist and a lazy, pedestrian actor.
However, this is not a fundamental conflict between two theatrical professions, for neither of them could exist without the other.
There is no essential contradiction here. The great trouble in the theatre begins as soon as there is an attempt to contrast the three main pillars of the stage-playwright, director and actor. Real theatre, however, is a harmonious partnership between these three pillars of dramatic art, with the director playing the role of a guide, organiser and navigator. That is why the question of responsibility is one that cannot be ignored.
Not everyone is fully aware of this responsibility. Some directors feel rather like extras taking part in a crowd scene who, like forty others beside them, do not understand how important their own part is, supposing that everything depends on ``the others''. We too are wont to automatically assume that responsibility rests with our neighbour, colleague or comrade, not fully appreciating the importance of what each of us is supposed to be doing at his own post.
Theatrical art is not portable. The fact that a play has been brilliantly staged in Moscow is of small consolation to people in Smolensk. A new improved line of cutters may be introduced in numerous factories, and a new medicine can cure a patient in a hospital at Tiksi Bay just as well as it can cure one in Kirovograd. But a creative discovery of Pluchck or Efros, Yefremov or Ravenskikh can benefit large and small theatres throughout the country only in very special circumstances.
They say that oil is not really such a highly inflammable substance since it only catches alight at a certain temperature. I don't know about oil, but I do know that cold hearts, unprepared, unwarmed by interest will not be set alight by any flying creative sparks.
Every theatre, every director has the duty to find the solution on his own ``home ground'' to the problem of how best to bring the people 65 the high humanitarian principles of communism, how to touch the hearts of his contemporaries and really move them.
I consider that the way the theatre is organised in this country is very largely to blame for the fact that the director has become more and more concerned with organisation and administration and less and less concerned with art. We are so busy with current matters, deciding all manner of problems connected with ``output'' and organisation, that we tend to lose sight of the very thing that makes us creative artists-we lose the ability to think imaginatively, which is the hallmark of our profession. Many of the productions of the last few years, as A. Popov aptly put it, have been remarkable for the conspicuous absence of the imaginative = element.^^*^^ This comes about partly for the simple reason that no other profession gives so much opportunity for dilettantism as stage direction. It proceeds from the very nature of the art of the theatre, which is a collective art.
In what other field could a man of average intelligence and cultureenter a professional group and be complete ``master of the situation''? If he also has a good command of the rudiments of theatrical terminology and is aware of the actual conjuncture, he will generally have no difficulty in posing as a director. Say we have a good play, good actors well cast, a designer who has done a good job and created the appropriate scenery, a semblance of direction of all these components during the course of work on the production, and the whole is crowned with success. But what has this got to do with a profession? And what claim has it to be regarded as art, the creative expression of an artist in visual terms? Then the critic may well examine it all from the standpoint of real art. And the man of mediocre intelligence who heads the group of creative artists will be delighted to read where he was successful and where he failed from the point of view of the visual solution and will be convinced that he has communed with art, and not only communed, but has even showed himself capable of directing art.
There are arts where the absence of a professional approach is immediately plain. It is thus in the fine arts, with the pianist's art, or the very risky art of the acrobat. Yet in our profession one can go on all one's life without ever becoming an artist.
I repeat, the trouble has its roots in the very nature of theatrical art, which enables the director to treat his work in a non-professional manner. It is thus extremely important for the director to be highly conscientious about adopting a truly professional attitude to his work, so that time-serving and dilettantism are not mistaken for true art.
_-_-_^^*^^ The word Popov used was bezobrazye (lit. ``imagelessness''), a play on words since it suggests the more familiar bezobraziye, a disgrace.---Trans.
66It seems to me that we should establish certain criteria, a code of creative laws, by which a person who does not meet the essential requirements of an artistic order should be excluded from the profession. And indeed we shall have to do so if we wish to prevent sham professionalism from continuing to penetrate the very essence, the very heart of the creative process of the theatre.
Today the situation is far from satisfactory in our profession. And we ourselves arc to blame for neglecting its essence.
Often the level of our professional discussions is such that any reasonably cultured person of another profession happening to be present at one of our meetings could easily participate without lowering the standard of the debate, and possibly even raising it.
Try walking into a medical consultation. A great deal of what is being discussed will be well above you. But if those doctors were to attend one of our theatrical discussions they would be perfectly able to take an active part. Why is this so? For the simple reason that we are wont to discuss things in the vaguest and most general terms, at the level of the most ordinary argument. We merely give a running commentary on a play, without getting down to a professional analysis in concrete terms. Here too, we seem unable to get away from dilettantism.
The director must be able to act on the artist's human nature. He has got to be able to act in such a way as to rouse a response in the audience with and through the actor. The complex dual counterpoint of transmitting his own human feelings and those of the author via the feelings of another person, i. e., the actor, to a third party, the audience, demands a profound knowledge of human psychology and the motions of the human heart. Between the author and the audience stands a middleman-thc actor-who decides the success of the production.
In order to succeed in this, we must devote our attention to questions of professionalism and skill as being of paramount importance.
It seems to me that passionate involvement has largely been lost in our profession. In life and art there are things that inspire or disgust, arouse a burning desire to intervene on behalf of what we believe in. This is what I mean by passionate involvement, and every director should be ``involved'' in this way.
We seem unable to accumulate, to carry over from one production to another the little grains of our creative achievement and temperament, the sparks of our spiritual fire. Today you may have done a production with which you are not at all satisfied, which just did not come off because you omitted to do something or for other reasons, but if only at a single rehearsal you managed to put something by, and carry it on into your next production, you will be making some progress.
67It is very difficult to nourish this something, irrespective of success or failure, to draw the correct conclusions from an unsuccessful production. Mainly because it is not flattering to one's vanity. It is always so much more natural to seek the reasons for failure elsewhere, in the actor, the play, or even the audience (how often we recur to these scapegoats!) and it takes courage to face up squarely to one's own blame. They say it is alright to make mistakes as long as we learn by them and try not to repeat them. But it does take tremendous willpower and moral strength to look the truth straight in the face and learn from it.
But apart from involvement multiplied by inspiration we also need cold calculation. Perhaps in no other profession is it so necessary to combine the qualities of Mozart and Salieri. One can imagine an actor who has more of the former: but in our profession the two should be harmoniously combined.
There exists a general misconception of stage direction as being a profession for those with the wisdom that comes with age. We have very few directors working independently who are under thirty. Why is it that we should consider that in order to be a director a person must have years of experience behind him?
Stanislavsky said that you cannot train a director, that you must be born a director. This being the case, quite different time scales for the acquisition of experience and the development of an aesthetic platform apply to a director by vocation and a talentless director. There is no reason why a twenty-two or twenty-three year old director should not be a fully-fledged artist of the stage, capable of producing a masterpiece. Your writer, playwright and critic all need to have experience. Yet Gogol was only twenty-two when he wrote his Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, Griboyedov was twenty-seven when he wrote Woe from Wit, Dobrolyubov died at the tender age of twenty-five, Schiller wrote The Robbers at twenty-five, Eisenstein was only twenty-seven when he made The Battleship Potemkin, Vakhtangov staged his best productions before he was twenty-six, Blok wrote his Poems on the Lovely Lady at twenty-four, Sholokhov wrote the first part of And Quiet Flows the Don at twenty-three, Rakhmaninov wrote his opera Aleko at eighteen.... ``But they were geniuses!'' some will explain. Indeed, they were, but we set ourselves the highest standards.
For Eisenstein to be able to make The Battleship Potemkin at the age of twenty-seven, it was necessary for people to have faith in him. There were no doubt reasons to inspire such faith. There is no reason to suppose that young people today are any less talented than those of preceding generations. It surely cannot be that they are not producing things that justify our having faith in them.
68This is all very important since talent (paradoxical though it may seem) ``dries up''. It is important to do something at the age of twentythree which, while quite possibly turning out to be a mistake you'll regret at the age of thirty, is nevertheless something you ought to have behind you. Otherwise you cannot expect to do much worthwhile at the age of thirty.
A weakness of many directors is their inability to think imaginatively. They may have this ability but be unable to apply it in their practical work.
I once came across a young director who talked wonderfully, in a most interesting manner and most graphically, in visual terms, about a scene he was going to create. Yet when he showed it to me, it was really quite pathetic. Everything he had told me was locked in his imagination and was quite conspicuous by its absence in the actual scene. The man obviously had a fine visual imagination, but though he thought in visual terms he was unable to embody it in plastic, scenic images. He saw everything in literary terms and was quite blind to what his eye should have been focussed on.
Nor is this an exceptional case. This is a typical weakness. It is an inability to translate a solution that is subtle, interesting, imaginative, yet literary, into scenic terms.
One of the main qualities a director must possess is a strong sense of spectacle. It is the sine qua non for a member of our profession. No matter what work we take, even if it be a psychological drama by Ibsen or Chekhov, this sense of spectacle is absolutely essential, however remote the plays of Chekhov and Ibsen may be from our concept ot. what constitutes a spectacle.
What is the essence of the stage-director's profession? What constitutes its greatness, its difficulty, its charm and mystery, its limitations and power?
For centuries, of course, the function of director was performed by the playwright himself or the leading players. Everything was plain and straightforward. How and why the post of director developed as a separate function, and how and why the director came to assume such an important position in the theatre we shall leave to the historians and theoreticians of the theatre. They know more about that than I do. But, be that as it may, the fact remains that the director made his appearance in the theatre and assumed a leading role. The twentieth century is the nuclear age, the age of artificial satellites, cybernetics and . .. the age of the stage direction. Once upon a time one could speak of the theatre of Shakespeare, Molierc, Goldoni or Ostrovsky in the literal sense of theatres run and directed by them. Today our Ostrovsky Theatre, our Chekhov Theatre or our Gorky Theatre arc 69 merely named after great playwrights as a sign of our respect and esteem. Once upon a time you had your Komissarzhevskaya's theatre or your Sarah Bernhardt theatre, effectively run by the great actress in question. Today it's Jean Vilard's theatre, Peter Brook's theatre, or Piscator's theatre. Of course it's not a question of the actual name of the theatre. The official name may be Mayakovsky Theatre, but people call it Okhlopkov's theatre after the stage-director, and likewise after a visit to the Comedy Theatre people are wont to say ``I've been to Akimov's theatre''.
A director who is worth his salt will justify this general recognition of his highly determinative and even decisive role. But. . .
The real greatness of our profession lies not merely in the ability to dispense with all barriers and create freely and boldly, submitting only to social duty and smooth or turbulent flights of fancy. The director's real freedom lies not in the passion of imagination he displays in creating a devastating impact on the boards, arranging light or water phantasmagoria, enlisting in his production the means of the cinema, or a symphony orchestra, making impressive use of the revolving stage, expending hundreds of yards of materials, tons of steel fittings and enormous quantities of timber.
The noble grandeur of our profession, its power and wisdom lie in deliberately restricting oneself, holding oneself in check. The limits of our imagination are set by the author, and crossing them should be punished as betrayal of the author. It is finding the only genuine, the only really appropriate solution for a particular play, valid for it alone, finding the true measure and nature of a play's conventions, and being able to put on another person's play as if it were one's own-such is the noble and most difficult duty of the director.
__*__I am afraid my thesis concerning the leading role of the director may be understood by some as a claim for unbridled despotism on the part of the director. I should therefore like to make the following short but substantial addition to what I have just said.
I certainly do consider the director to be the central figure in a theatre, but everything depends on how you understand this assertion. One must on no account confuse artistic will with despotic imposition of personal taste.
In my younger days I worked with only one aim in mind-to attract attention. The plays and the actors were merely material for me, with the aid of which I tried to show the world what I thought about it. Gradually, as I gained experience and skill, the following question 70 arose: have I the right to offer the public my own views, attitudes and sentiments without first establishing whether they are of interest to others, to people in general?
Definitely a director's individual personality, his own social and artistic views should find expression in a production. But one must know how to express them and make sure one has the right to do so. Thus, one must first of all realise that the public does not come to the theatre to see clever novelties and innovations by the director, but above all because they are interested in Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky, Ibsen or Moliere, Chekhov or Gorky. The director's success depends on his ability to understand and interpret the playwright accurately, and in a contemporary manner. For then the public will be interested not only in Shakespeare, but in Brook's Shakespeare, not merely in Moliere or Rozov but in Blanchon's Moliere and Efros's Rozov, and so on. Real theatre, Theatre with a capital T, is a tandem of playwright and director. The modern director must be first and foremost the best ``reader'' alive today. His tremendously important role derives from the ability to get as close as possible to the author's intentions, not from continuous exploitation of his gifts for production which, however great they may be, will sooner or later be exhausted.
The director's creative freedom is ``restricted'' not only by the author, but by the actors, and the whole company. The most original interpretation by the director is not worth a sou unless it is embodied by the actors. Actors transmitting the author's intentions and the director's interpretation become the creators of a production and not mere interpreters.
Edward Gordon Craig's dream of actors that arc little more than glorified puppets is fortunately quite impractical for the theatre. Just as the most perfect robots can never be a substitute for the genius of Praxiteles, Mozart or Shakespeare, so even the most perfect superpuppet can never move audiences as Martynov or Elconora Duse, Vcra Komissarzhcvskaya or Nikolai Khmelyov did.
I have never experienced the need to free myself from ``bondage'' to the play, from dependence on the actor or responsibility to the public. I often argue with them, but always as an ally, never as a slave, as a devoted friend, but never as a master. And I do not feel in any way confined by so doing, as if sacrificing my freedom. On the contrary, confining one's imagination to a certain framework is the main difficulty and at the same time the most rewarding aspect of the profession of stage direction.
The only school and method I recognise in the theatre is that of Stanislavsky. He was the only one to have based his system entirely on organic existence, on the laws of nature. Unfortunately there has 71 been a tendency to artificially divide him into Stanislavsky the theoretician and Stanislavsky the practician. The most empassioned artist, eternally searching and bold to the point of being completely unprejudiced has been canonised as an obstinate supporter of dreary naturalism. Yet even the most ``unruly'' of his followers-like Meycrhold, Vakhtangov and Mardzhanov-were developing his teaching even when they thought they were setting up a rival school, opposing it. Stanislavsky did not stand still, and were he alive today, I am quite sure hewould be the most modern director, without having to alter any of his laws of the nature of creative work, which he did not invent but simply discovered.
The director is often compared to a source of creative energy, the rays of which are diffused in all directions-to actor, playwright, and spectator. I rather see him as the point of intersection of time, poetic idea, and the art of the actor, that is of public, author and actor, a prism focussing into one beam all the components of theatrical art, receiving all the rays, refracting them and thus producing a rainbow.
Whatever the author's theme-be it the slough of provincial Russian life, as in Gorky, beauty defiled and a world where goodness becomes unnatural, as in Dostoyevsky, or the comedy inherent in everyday situations, as with the Georgian writer Dumbadze-the theatre should always bring people the joy of perception and knowledge of the world. 1 am not prepared to accept as theatre that which is totally lacking in noble humanistic principles. I refuse to serve it and T don't believe that it is of any use to people or that it has any future at all.
The theatre has come through thick and thin in the two and a half millennia of its existence. It has had just about every disease and it has survived them all. And it will continue to survive, as long as we do not dissolve the alliance of author, actor and audience. It is the director who cements this alliance and holds it together. For some this does not seem to be enough. For me it is everything.
[72] __ALPHA_LVL1__ THE DIRECTOR The chief problem of art is the matter
of being in step with time. Naturally, it is too great a problem for one
man to handle, and the best article or the best work is only a drop in
the ocean.
The modern theatre is a combination of a modern play, modern production, modern acting, and a modern audience; a modern idea expressed in modern form. The modern theatre is a theatre which reflects life most fully and profoundly.
We call contemporaries all those living at the same time. But a person's youth or age is not determined by registration data. There arcmany people still guided in their life and work by a long-since outmoded code of behaviour. They may be officially registered as our contemporaries, but in actual fact they belong to a bygone age.
Not every living writer, actor or spectator is a contemporary writer, actor or spectator. A play set in the past may well be contemporary, while a play set in the present is not necessarily so. A classic can be staged in a contemporary manner, a modern play in an old-fashioned, out-of-clate manner.
In every single production I face the same challengc-the problem of making it contemporary. Yesterday's solution rarely satisfies me today. Every new production presents new problems, forcing me to ruthlessly 73 reject everything familiar. Every production teaches me something new. One's idea of what is modern is modified and enriched every time one reads a new contemporary novel, sees a fine new film, observes; a truly modern architectural ensemble.
Our ideas of contemporary man were greatly enriched by the first space flights. Life in all its manifestations, in its swift progress, produces new thoughts and new feelings daily, hourly.
The contemporary theatre is a theatre in eternal movement, a theatre of search and experiment. It is an extremely complex task to reveal the laws of progress and give an accurate definition of what is contemporary.
The theatre is by its very nature contemporary, and the latter concept involves a great deal. There is the thirst for truth, the protest against falsehood, the urge to see life in all its wealth and genuine beauty and grasp the wisdom of the great achievements of our day and age. The social and the aesthetic are fused into one; questions of skill have become one with questions of allegiance. Only in this way can we present aesthetic problems without sliding into aestheticism, ideologically without dogmatism.
The problems of contemporary theatre arc of serious concern to everyonc-theatre veterans, students at drama school, critics and public alike. Young and old, all want to feel the pulse of the times, find the words, melody and rhythm of art which, like a good song, will help the Soviet people along their hard road to communism.
Yet the concept of what is contemporary in art, so often bandied around in polemics, has all sorts of interpretations, while even those who are in agreement as to what it means in theory often adopt a fundamentally different approach in putting it into practice.
We are right in saying that art docs not keep pace with life, with the achievements of science, technology and industry, with the various processes, major and minor, that are in progress. But we are wont to draw primitive conclusions: the largest power station in the world has just been completed-Where is a play about it?; a world-shaking scientific discovery has been made-Why hasn't it been reflected in the theatre?
This is of course an oversimplified, facile interpretation of contemporaneity. The words ``art must keep pace with time'' mean something far more involved.
Indeed it is quite impossible to actually apply such an interpretation in practice. Suppose a power station has been built, someone has immediately written a play about it, and a theatre has put it on without delay. Even so, enough time will have passed for another power station even bigger than the first to have been commissioned, and life will again be one step ahead of the theatre.
74When an artist hurriedly slaps a real slice of life onto a canvas or the stage without allowing it to percolate through his imagination and feelings art lacks the power to impress itself on people's minds and move them, and their thoughts and feelings remain totally unaffected.
The desire to be up-to-date has often moved us to mechanically transpose facts from life to the canvas, the film reel or the boards. Being in a hurry to be the first to tell of some significant or interesting event, we have made a careful copy of it, imagining that we are giving a true reflection of life, without allowing ourselves time to digest it properly and form an attitude towards it.
We still have numerous attempts today on stage and screen to present events and heroes of purely local importance. Even where every effort has been made to present the events strictly according to eyewitness reports or a person the way his relatives have insisted, we can hardly call the result art and the public gets no more satisfaction from it than from a conscientious reportage. Talent requires conscientiousness, but conscientiousness alone does not equal talent, and reporting facts does not equal art.
Nevertheless, there are many people in all the arts who suppose that the one and only real distinguishing feature of socialist realism is conscientious portrayal of life, and for whom verisimilitude is the sole criterion of contemporaneity.
Many people today are able to show life as it is, for it is really quite simple. Some consider this to be the supreme objective of art, and theirs is indeed a shabby role. A naturalistic, photographic copy of life, a pale reflection of the truth require neither talent nor inspiration. Those who try to lead art along this road are either timeservers or cowards, afraid to have a point of view of their own.
``Excuse me, but arc you suggesting the theatre ought not to play an instructive role?'' some may rejoin at this point. Not at all. Art most definitely has an important instructive role to play; every work of art •shows people something new, makes them realise something for the first time. But it would be wrong to take what is an essential element •of art and make it the sole objective.
The artist's aim is to express man's nature, his inner world. The objective aim of art is to create portraits typifying people, society, an age.
It would be wrong to confuse, as we so often do, what is of the day and age with what is of the moment, contemporaneity with actuality. It is the job of newspapers, magazines, radio and television to provide accurate coverage of current events. The theatre's job is to reveal the fundamental social processes going and indicate the trends of developJnent. That is what being contemporary means. But so wide in scope is 75 our life that we tend to fail to keep pace with events and only scratch the surface of things without getting down to essentials.
The aim of art is not to transfer events from life straight into a work of art. A play which does this will never be more than a schematic presentation of factual material.
A space flight presented simply as a spaceship with a man insidehandling the controls will be an impressive display of stage-properties, nothing more.
A really modern play is one that shows people's characters transformed by events, ideas which have only made their appearance today, in the nineteen sixties, not one that merely presents a certain actual event. Tt would be extremely tedious for an audience to find itself treated in the theatre to the very same things they have read in the morning paper or heard over the wireless.
Marxist-Leninist aesthetics have always been strongly opposed to such an oversimplified, vulgarised concept of art. To transform the artistic image into illustration of events is merely to destroy it.
Art is concerned with man's psychology and outlook, his new qualities and traits. The object of realist art has always been the new features people have acquired as a result of some event.
Today these new features have appeared; they have gradually, inconspicuously matured and actually exist in Soviet Man. We do not always notice this at home, but if we happen to be abroad we arcsharply aware of the very special outlook, psychology and nature of the people who have been educated a? a result of the fifty-year struggle for the New Man. Of course, even today when we have reached the stage of building communism we find hurdles to be overcome and not every individual is yet ready for the society we are building.
It is this which should determine our present objectives in art, not the post factum representation of concrete events, although such themes may well appear in plays, only in a different light. To reach the heights of art, penetrate into the artistic cosmos, so to speak, is not just a question of writing a play about . . . let's say a spaceman. It involves penetrating the secret chambers of human thoughts and feelings, which will show us how the characters of the men who conquered space were shaped, how they lived side by side with us, how such heroism, at oncemagnificent and somehow ordinary arose, how all this came about humanly and psychologically, the social and ethical processes that produced among us such a charming, remarkable young fellow, at oncesimple and complicated, with many qualities we had hardly suspected, as Yuri Gagarin, and then a whole group of Soviet cosmonauts. Arc we able to recognise these people for what they arc at the time when they are in the process of accomplishing their feat? Do we see them when 76 the foundations are being laid for their achievement? This, after all, is the aim of art, including the most human of the arts, the theatre.
One theatre expert declared that he was only interested in the fact of Gagarin's flight, not in what went on inside the cosmonaut, what he thought, felt and experienced. I must say that I myself am not only interested in his historic flight, which excites me as a citizen of my country, whose people accomplished an unparalleled feat for the first time in human history, but as a director, as an artist, I am fascinated by what this man felt and experienced the night before. Was he afraid? Almost certainly. It must indeed be frightening to think of being the first man to enter space. The objective of art is to find the psychological key, to understand what made him willing to undertake the task, what enabled him to carry it out so simply and then appear before his people so simply, so that we were impressed by his great humanity. But only too often we arc offered a photographic copy of a phenomenon instead of a penetrating analysis.
As regards the social side of our profession, it is extremely important that we be men of our times, with a perfect understanding of what makes our fellow-men tick, in order to achieve a correct attitude to the contingencies of a play. One must constantly bear in mind the temperature of the auditorium and have a clear sense of the latter's mood. That for a start.
What then is modern stage direction? Have the methods employed by our best directors of the past-Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko and others-become out-of-date? We must attempt to present truthfully the man of the past and the man of the present. Obviously Soviet people today are guided in their lives by different feelings and thoughts than people in the nineteenth century, but docs this mean that the methods we use must also be different?
Obviously if we view the director in the same way as a photographer, and the means of stage direction as a camera, we are ignoring the whole question of modern stage production. A camera simply takes a straightforward copy of whatever lies before the object glass.
The concept of modern stage direction is very involved and somewhat confused.
I am firmly convinced that one cannot possibly become a really modern director unless one is familiar with the whole classical theatrical heritage, national and foreign. It is necessary to make a careful study of the history of theatres like the Maly, the Art and the Vakhtangov, and have a good knowledge of the work of Meyerhold. It is essential to be well-versed in what was created and is being created by such Soviet directors as Diky, Popov, Okhlopkov, Zavadsky and Simonov.
The term ``contemporary'' covers a great deal. In a way, Pushkin 77 is our contemporary. Mayakovsky, although dead for over thirty years, is very much our contemporary. Being contemporary in art means having a sharp, precise and active awareness of reality, and the ability to express it via artistic means that influence the minds, will and feelings of the public.
All our classics were once contemporary since they all, as far as their talent, knowledge of life and Weltanschauung permitted them, captured and expressed their times with the most effective, expressive means. Is it then enough for us to follow the classical traditions? Is there an essential difference between the artists of past and present as regards the way they saw and expressed life? Of course there is.
The enemies of the new in the theatre are archaic acting and pseudomodern direction. Actor-innovators are rare, but pseudo-modern production is rather frequent.
The tender green shoots of the new are there all right in production, but a constant battle is waged for the new in every new production, at every rehearsal. The struggle is a fierce one, with real casualties. Sometimes a theatre loses an engagement, sometimes it wins. There is still a great deal we do not know, but we want to know. We still have a great deal to learn, but we are willing to learn.
May the struggle for the new be waged in every theatre, so that everyone can make his contribution to the theatre of the future. The search is hard enough but it is even harder to hold on to what has been found. It is not so simple to learn from one's own mistakes and others' triumphs.
Recognising the new means rejecting a great deal of what one has accomplished, and that, too, is difficult.
The struggle for the new should be waged honourably, honestly, and sincerely, with wholehearted commitment of all one's resources, even if the scales often seem weighed against one. without ever losing sight of the main aim, which is to find means of expression worthy of the Soviet theatre of the future.
A failing of many modern productions is that the directors tend to take an illustrative approach, seeking to present a work in breadth rather than in depth, concentrating on the superficial environment rather than probing the conflict.
In staging Stein's Ocean we tried to build up a great complex of external means that would help create an atmosphere of inner tension, in which the audience would see, as if through a magnifying glass, the most subtle nuances of the actor's psychological state.
Hence our decision to make use of such a convention as the stagewithin a stage in order to localise the action and reduce the set details to a minimum.
78It is axiomatic these days to say that laconicism and convention are the tokens of modernity. In themselves these devices are not the expression of a ``modern'' style, unless their use is fully justified in each instance in which they are employed. In that particular production J feel they were in fact the best way of expressing the plot and helped slow down the psychological process and enabled attention to be directed towards the inner process, and not only the external events.
Quite often, instead of striving for the introduction of the new forms that best correspond to the new content, we tend to search for new formal theatrical devices outside this content, and elements that are in vogue, attempts to find external features predominate over deep probing of the essence of phenomena in our concept of contemporaneity.
In New York I saw what at first sight appeared extremely modern: bright advertisements, masses of people, palatial theatres and cinemas, half empty despite the fact that they show fashionable plays and the latest film hits. What we saw conformed with our ideas of America, it was modern enough in form: but we saw something essentially modern not here but in a small theatre that was quite inconspicuous among the theatres of Broadway. Here I saw The Miracle-Worker, a play about a deaf-and-dumb girl who pronounces her first intelligible syllable at the very end of the play. Thus, after all the gleam and glitter of Broadway with its flashing advertisements we finally found ourselves in the laboratory of the human spirit, captivated for three hours by the exchanges between a little girl and her teacher. The great humane idea of the awakening of the human in an almost savage creature was presented with remarkable skill. The little girl and the young actress Anne Bancroft gave a superb performance, in which there was nothing modern as we arc so often given to understand the word. The play was deeply moving because it was human, because it was genuine.
Like any other artistic category, real modern art is something very concrete. But in our choice of form it often happens that ``fashionable'' elements predominate.
I think the trouble with many young directors at present is exaggerated rationality and amorphous means of expression, a tendency to fetishise devices, taken out of context, quite irrespective of the actual content of the play.
And so we are brought to the question of innovation.
The contemporary and the innovatory always go hand in hand. If a Soviet citizen is concerned with a noble social ideal that is of vital concern to the whole people, and if he works honestly, to further the accomplishment of this ideal, he is our contemporary. If a man is able to express the process of building the new society in visual terms, he is an artist. If he is a conscientious citizen of his country and a talented 79 and honest artist, his works will be innovatory. If we are genuinely emotionally involved in the social idea that moves us to produce a work and we try to present it via a system of artistic images, then there is no need to be concerned with innovation. One cannot set oneself the express aim of being an innovator. That would hardly be modest. As for what it means to be an innovator, I think only history can be the judge.
If an artist does not know life, does not understand its laws or hear and perceive what is new, but is determined to be an innovator at all costs, he will never go beyond juggling with ``fashionable'' devices and petty actualities. A slavish adherence to fashion means copying what other people have thought of. A determination to do what nobody else has ever done, declaring everything to be new that one has not seen before, is merely pseudo-innovation and pseudo-modernity.
Paradoxical though it may seem, pseudo-innovation is very close to archaism. This enemy of modernity, the two-in-one adversary of the new, has a pretty firm hold on most of us. Now and then it makes us go out of our way to be startlingly original, for fear of appearing oldfashioned. Now and then it causes us to be drawn to the old, steady, well-tested forms. In one case it is a question of not having the courage to get out of the proverbial rut, in the other it is a question of not having the courage to refer to an old truth.
I am quite sure the painter Serov did not consider himself an innovator. It was certainly not his aim. He was merely tremendously sincere and unaffected, and posterity sees him as an innovator.
One cannot deliberately become an innovator. One cannot set out with the express intention of directing a production that will be hailed as an innovation, decide ``I am going to astound the world'', ``I am going to do something that has never been done before'', ``I'm going to think of something totally new''. For this approach leads straight to the most pathetic results, which we all condemn outright whenever we come across it.
So it is not this that we arc after when we speak of innovation. Some directors maintain that modern stage direction involves abandoning the truth, letting realism, everyday life, go by the board. For them a modern production means having the actors leave the stage for the auditorium, having an empty stage, no curtain and so on.
In an attempt to combat the monotonous repetition of old devices and properties they insist on eliminating walls, ceilings, windows and doors altogether, and dispensing entirely with natural behaviour and natural sets.
Once again, this has nothing to do with a modern production, but is merely a pursuit of external effects, novelty for the sake of novelty.
80Everything is possible on the stage. Sometimes a play ought to be staged with nothing but a backdrop, but sometimes it requires a box set, with ceiling, doors and windows. Some plays are better if we dispense with a curtain, but this by no means applies to all plays. In some cases it is right to insist on a maximum of authentic detail, in others this would ruin everything. There can be no general rule for all plays.
To have a castle where every authentic detail has been taken into account for Hamlet would be as out of place and false as it would be to stage Ostrovsky's A Profitable Job with austere backdrops and a constructivist raised stage. For the simple reason that Shakespeare was not concerned with such everyday details, whereas Ostrovsky was and wove them into the essential fabric of his plays. Chekhov's plays require all sorts of sound effects, the crack of a taut wire breaking, the creaking of a gate, the sound of axe strokes as the cherry orchard is chopped down, and so on and so forth. In Goldoni's comedies, on the other hand, sounds from the street or the nearby courtyard will be quite out of place, and will only distract from the action in progress.
The Bohemian forest in Schiller's The Robbers cannot possibly have the same trees as the forest in Ostrovsky's The Forest, although there may be every reason to suppose that the same kinds of tree grew in the two. The point is that in Schiller's romantic play we have bold outlaws living in the depths of the forest, while in Ostrovsky's comedy it is greedy merchants, coquettish old ladies and hangers-on. Brave people run into Schiller's forest and out of Ostrovsky's. One forest is the scene of passionate drama, the other is redolent with deadly nightshade and decay.
Every play must be given the special treatment that best suits it, and this applies to the mise-en-scene, music where applicable, and especially the acting. Prior to the Revolution many theatres had to make do with the same limited collection of sets all the time-a forest, mountains, a rich room, a poor room, a medieval hall-and use them for all kinds of productions, for plays of every age and land.
But while it is an easy matter to demonstrate how false the most realistic box set will appear if it is mechanically transferred from play to play, it is far more difficult to show that actors should act different roles differently.
Actors, after all, are restricted to a certain extent by having to use their own voice, their own body and their own feelings: there is a definite limit to the variations that can be achieved.
Plainly it is not a matter of assuming a special voice for vaudeville or somehow changing one's appearance for tragedy. External transformations must depend mainly not on the playwright or style in question, but on the actual part being played. Thus, one cannot adopt 81 the same movements for an old man as for a youth, and a Frenchman does not talk like a Russian or a Ukrainian. The art of acting involves the ability to assume the aspect and manner of people of different natures, professions and nationalities. This is an essential aspect of acting, but not the be-all and end-all.
Comedy and tragedy must be played differently. Gorky and Shakespeare, Pogodin and Chekhov require a very different approach.
In attempting to present the playwright's work the director is bound to intrude with his own personality. When the painter Vrubel set out to depict Lermontov's Demon, he was attempting to present the idea and spirit of the original. However, he did not ``dissolve'' in the process, but revealed himself to the maximum as a great artist, for the artist's personality leaves its mark on any work he produces, and thereis no getting away from oneself.
We must decide which danger threatens most today-a slavishly •literal interpretation of the work or the tendency to ignore the author's intentions and treat a work we think fit, reading in things that are just not there.
I am inclined to think that the latter is the more dangerous. And it is those directors who take this for innovation that I am addressing.
The director's intention must be organically limited and subordinated to the author's purpose. He can forget about originality, for if he has it it will show itself without prompting. But if we allow directors to indulge in an orgy of self-expression, the results will be most regrettable.
Various directors have their own personal interpretation of artistic truth. Okhlopkov and Ravenskikh tend towards a poetic, romantic theatre, their best productions revealing a marked inclination for monumentality and a clearly-stated message. Efros and Ycfremov avoid outward effects, preferring to concentrate on human psychology. Their heroes look and behave as very ordinary men and women. Yet their productions achieve a very strong emotional impact, and great civic ardour. The wealth of plastic effects in Ravenskikh's productions makes them quite the opposite from the severe, laconic style of Efros. You could never call Okhlopkov or Ravenskikh retrograde or routine directors. They are always willing to experiment. The same applies to Efros, Yefremov and Lvov-Anokhin.
Many theatres are keen to keep up with the times and make for a more vital theatre. Which is the best path for them to take? Who is more modern-Ravenskikh or Yefremov? Efros, Yefremov and LvovAnokhin are closer to me personally. While I may beg to differ over details I am with them on essentials. But this of course does not mean that I refuse to recognise Okhlopkov. I am a great admirer of his work.
Naturally, in any argument over what is best, everybody tries to win 82 as many people over to his own point of view as he can. But it would be pretty dreadful if all our directors suddenly came to resemble Okhlopkov or Lvov-Anokhin, Ravenskikh or Lyubimov. Unification and levelling are as intollerablc in stage direction as in any other art. Yet there are some critics who, while rightly attacking attempts to create a universal ``modern style'' arc actually, by their arguments, pointing the road to monotonous uniformity. They are even hostile to such terms as laconicism and austere simplicity. They confuse discreet feelings with lack of feeling, unwilling to realise that keeping things in the background does not imply burying them completely, and subtlety is not necessarily ambiguity, thereby making contrasts where no contrast exists.
The social theme was expressed quite differently in Ravenskikh's production of Virgin Soil Upturned from the way it was expressed in our Gorky Theatre production. It is not for me to judge which of the two moves audiences the more. We saw Nagulnov as an idealist, Ravenskikh saw him as a fanatic. For us Virgin Soil Upturned was a poem about a sea change in people's attitude to work, a major turning point in the peasant's outlook and mentality, about the need for humanity towards one's fellows and exacting demands on oneself. The most important thing in the novel for Ravenskikh was the irreconcilable conflict between the heroes. Our main artistic instrument was scrupulous verisimilitude expressed in a laconic, conventional style. Ravenskikh preferred to choose allegory and the poster. This surely docs not mean that the Gorky Theatre production was necessarily in any way less socially committed than the Pushkin Theatre production.
It is not the lampshade or the factory chimney that determines a playwright or director's degree of social commitment. Both a `` vociferous'' and a ``quiet'' play can educate morally, politically and aesthetically. Stirring themes and psychology must both be present in any production, whether it is The Optimistic Tragedy or My Elder Sister, The Rout or On the Wedding Day. It would be wrong to impoverish our art simply on the grounds that some directors prove to be incapable of achieving this synthesis. We cannot draw up a scheme for use in creative work and on the rostrum.
In this connection it is worth remembering the discussion between Maxim Gorky and Lenin in the Hall of Columns at Trade Union House in 1919. Gorky said: ``That the new theatre public is no worse than the old theatregoers, that it is more attentive, is indisputable. But what does it need? I say it only needs heroics. But Vladimir Ilyich maintains that it needs poetry too, that it needs Chekhov and truth to everyday life.''
The strict order of military parades is fine and inimitable in its way. 83 But in art, having everyone in step, even if the finest artists arc on the flanks, is disastrous.
There never has been, and there never will be, an artist who expressed absolutely everything there is to express in a single work. Only if there is creative variety, freedom and a choice of themes and artistic forms, equal rights and mutual respect will the Soviet theatre be able to produce a collective portrait of the great age we live in.
I hold that Soviet theatre should be a theatre of high social consciousness and the most subtle psychological penetration. The union of these two qualities which we should strive to cultivate in ourselves will enable us to create a theatre that meets the demands of contemporaneity.
The deeper we learn to penetrate into the sphere of the human psyche, the more subtle the means we use to this end and the more brightly they are illuminated by the flame of civic ardour, the more influential, interesting and powerful our art will be. We must strive to make the theatre a laboratory of the life of the human spirit.
Stanislavsky's thesis that the processes of art are the processes of the life of the human spirit seems to me to be the most important and eternally-modern. The most valuable property of the theatre is the inner psychological processes that represent the mystery of art, its great power to influence people. Art should not ``shout''. The actor's educative power consists in the way he lives on the stage not in facing the audience and declaiming loudly.
Our life in this country has the excitement of great achievements and deeds and Soviet artists must feel it. But while understanding the order of things and the significance of all these achievements it is by no means essential that we express the excitement of the age with excited words, with excited declamation on the stage. Especially since these great events come about very simply in life, without sound and fury, in a calm, determined, businesslike manner.
I long for a large-scale, epic work, but I am for psychological art, ``quiet'' art. Quiet in the sense of the quiet that reigns in laboratories where people are absorbed in investigating the most complex natural, physical, chemical and other phenomena. In art too there must be this same concentration, this same keen attention so that we can perceive the interesting spheres for art, the spheres, into which the inner vision of the artist must penetrate.
Nor do I reject the most varied styles on the stage. A work may be heroic, pathetic, satirical, lyrical or anything else. It is not a matter of paring away all other genres until we are left with psychological plays but of seeing to it that works of every style penetrate the human psychology.
[84] __ALPHA_LVL1__ THEATRE AND CINEMA Once upon a time everything was
simple and clear-cut. You had science and you had the arts. Physicists
did physics, mathematicians did mathematics and poets wrote poetry.
But then as a result of so many new discoveries new sciences
arosecybernetics, astrobotany, geophysics and a host of others. Physiologists
became mathematicians, biologists became chemists and mathematicians
became philosophers. It was not arts men but scientists and engineers
who were responsible for the invention of photography, the cinema,
radio and television. They began as technological inventions and later
became art. And a struggle developed between the ``old'' arts, such
as the theatre, painting and sculpture, and the ``new'' arts-the cinema,
photography and what are known as the applied arts. The cinema was
the first of the latter to rise to the rank of an art. Not so long ago
photography earned recognition as an art form, while one is still in
doubt as to what status to accord the designers of furniture, clothes,
crockery and household utensils. As for the designers of cars and
refrigerators, one cannot bring oneself to call them artists. Perhaps
because it takes a bit of getting used to.
Advertising would seem to have acquired art status. Aestheticians who try to deny this are wasting their time; advertising has become an essential part of the modern townscape.
85The ties between science, technology and the arts arc inevitably becoming firmer and more complex. The distance between physicists and poets is being narrowed down, as is the distance between different kinds of poets. An important process is taking place before our very cyes-a new relationship is emerging between life and art.
It would be marvellous to take a peep forward into the future and see what the theatre and the cinema, television and painting will be like. What of the things that are happening now will the future accept and what will it reject?
It is difficult for the exponents of art to grasp the theoretical side. A special talent is required for interpreting the complex phenomena of life and art and analysing and predicting their paths of development. But the fact is that our best critics and aestheticians prefer to focus their attention on the past rather than on the present.
In attempting to find my way in the complex tangle of problems concerning intercommunication and mutual understanding between science and the arts, between the different arts, and between the arts and life, I make no claim to be discovering the truth. I would be only too delighted if somebody be so kind as to explain to me in what conditions sport becomes an art, a designer an interior decorator, or an engineer a musical expert. I should like to know myself way an abstract design on wall-paper or upholstery gives aesthetic pleasure, while the same picture placed in a frame produces quite the oppositeeffect.
Not so long ago in Leningrad talented architects, sculptors and poets collaborated to produce a memorial cemetery to the fallen in the defence of the city during World War Two. Literature makes a considerable contribution to this magnificent and remarkably harmonious ensemble of architecture, sculpture and decorative lawns. The propylaca would lose much of their expressive power were they not crowned with the superb verses of Olga Bergolts, and the cemetery walls would be nothing but for the moving words carved on them.
Architecture and sculpture have been related for a long time. As for painting, murals have long been an important clement in domestic architecture. Perhaps the day is not far off when poets will be called in to the architect's studio.
From time to time mass spectacles are held in our sports stadiums. Hundreds and thousands of sportsmen weave extraordinarily beautiful compositions on the field. Is this to be classified as sport or art?
I should very much like to know the answers to these and many other questions. I must know, I need to know, where the boundaries come between art and technology, what separates one art from another.
We have long since outgrown the old aesthetics manuals. New arts 86 have come into our lives and entered the sacred precincts of the old arts. Some people are raising the cry that the old arts have outlived their time and are doing their best to hasten their death. Others rush to fill the breaches made by the new arts in the fortress walls of the old arts, and launch a crusade to prevent the arts from being defiled. Everywhere the frontiers are being flung open-the cinema has invaded the territory of the theatre, and the theatre has retaliated by invading the territory of the cinema. Television has declared itself to have extraterritorial status. The frontiers are being broken down before our very eyes, the frontiers between the different arts, forms and styles.
It would be simply absurd to be alarmed by this process and seek to halt it. But we shall be making just as big a mistake if we calmly observe the changes taking place in the world of art, merely taking note of things as they occur. I do not intend to talk about the connection between architecture and literature, sport and ballet, or about the aesthetic qualities of a motor car. I shall be delighted to read what the architects, poets, sportsmen, designers and other specialists have to say on the subject.
I wish to speak about the theatre and the cinema. We have long since introduced radio and cinema (both literally and figuratively) into the ancient art of the theatre. No doubt television too will find a placein our store of artistic devices.
Cinematography as an art form was born as imitation of the theatre and to this day makes use not only of the theatre's actors, but also of many of its expressive devices. At times it is difficult to sec where the theatre ends and the cinema begins.
More and more frequently we find film-makers restricting themselves to a small number of scenes of action and a small number of characters, ignoring the opportunities they have for freedom of movement and free-play with chronology.
It is as if the cinema has returned to its source, rejecting fifty years of development. In fact, this is not so. The best films of this new type are not a betrayal of the medium. The cinema broke into the sacred precinct of the theatre, rejected a great number of its own devices and lost nothing as a result.
Neither here nor later do I intend to deal with examples of uninspired mechanical transference of the expressive means of the one art into the other. It is more interesting by far to examine the prospects of new solutions in works that display true artistic talent.
The cinema has learned a lot from Stanislavsky and NemirovichDanchenko; it has benefitted greatly from the experience of Meyerhold and Vakhtangov, Diky and Popov. In reminding the film-makers of this I am not trying to rub in how indebted they are to the theatre, 87 but am merely pointing out how fruitful and mutually enriching cooperation between the two media can be.
The theatre has also been influenced by the cinema and still is. At first timid, and gradually bolder, attempts were made to adopt the techniques of the cinema in the theatre, and plays have been brought closer to film-scripts. Theatres began to use the device of projecting bits of newsreel, stills or movies; the action was broken down into small episodes, chronology was no longer strictly adhered to and so on.
The theatre has tried practically all the devices of the cinema. We have seen the use of written legends like in the silent films, projected panoramas, fade-outs and flash-backs. Under the influence of the cinema we have made characters utter their inner monologues and thoughts aloud. There is no denying the tremendous impact the cinema has had on the modern theatre.
Yet the theoreticians of cinema and theatre still persist in the idea that it is fatal for their respective art to make use of the ``enemy's'' devices.
A film-maker is declared to be a slave of the theatre and a stagedirector is declared to be a slave of the cinema as soon as they try to adopt the methods of the other medium.
It is the numerous pedestrian plays and films that give rise to this attitude. It is hard to say which lost the most-the theatre or the cinema-by pedestrian attempts to transfer plays to the screen. I suspect it was the public that lost the most. But one should not take the mediocre as an example. Really the theatre and the cinema both have everything to gain from taking advantage of one another's experience. They should be friends, not rivals. They should be learning from one another not just waiting to pounce on one another's mistakes. There would be no need to appeal to film and stage-directors to make friends and co-operate were it not for a whole host of books, articles and statements by leading exponents of the two media insisting that they should not.
``Limit the sphere of activity of the cinema and the theatre!'', `` Reexamine the art boundaries'', ``Return to the theatre and the cinema their original charm!''---such are the vociferous appeals made by those who would have us keep our art forms ``pure''.
But it is quite impossible to keep the cinema and the theatre from penetrating one another. In all ages art that strove to be in step with the times and relevant to contemporary life had to do away with ``accepted'' frontiers. New people, new problems, new events wrought havoc with both the form and content of the drama. The development of ``mixed arts'' and technology had a tremendous impact on the theatre, and the taboos of yesterday became the imperatives of today.
88The same thing happened in music and painting, and in the cinema too. In the last half century alone tremendous changes have taken place 5n the theatre. The triumph of realism erased the old barriers between the various styles. Actors now had to be versatile. Words were no longer the theatre's only means of expression. And nobody with any sense thought for a moment of demanding that the styles be kept ``pure'' or that actors return to specialising, as they had for centuries, as ``the lover'', ``the narrator'', ``the fool'' and so on. Nobody suggests that declamation should be restored. There were, of course, a few ``prophets'' who predicted that the theatre would perish from stage direction and who campaigned for the preservation of the ``actor's theatre'' as opposed to such theatres as the Moscow Art Theatre.
The wheel of history is turned by the objective laws of life, and if the director's role is more important today than it was a decade ago there is a natural explanation.
After all, the same sort of thing happened in the cinema with the appearance of talkies, colour and the wide screen.
Unless we want to find ourselves redundant in art, it is time we stopped harking back to the past, hooking it onto the present and dragging art back.
The famous Cuban chess player Jose Raul Capablanca once predicted that the game itself would one day reach a stalemate. In his opinion, chess theory was so evolved that players who knew their theory perfectly were equally matched and could not get the better of one another, and the only way out was to enlarge the chessboard by one square and have an additional chessman. His proposal was not accepted. Chess with nine rows of squares is not chess, but a new game. The subsequent development of chess has shown that even cybernetics cannot cope with all the possible combinations.
The theatre is over two thousand five hundred years old. When all is said and done, its means of expression are not inexhaustible-thc stage and the actors, words, movements and pauses, lightings, music and rhythm. Yet what an unlimited number of combinations of words and movements, characters, thoughts and feelings the old yet evergreen art of the theatre can dispose of! But the life of the theatre depends on one sole condition-that it never stands still but continually searches for new ideas and new means of expression in life.
The cinema has changed our way of thinking. Knowledge has greatly increased our powers of imagination. The modern audience has a boundless wealth of new associations which audiences in the last century did not have. The modern theatregoer thinks `` cinematographically''. Modern dramatists, stage-directors, and actors are likewise compelled to think cinematographically.
89However, they must express their ideas in scenic terms. It is disastrous when a theatre thinks sccnically but borrows its means of expression wholesale from the cinema.
What is wrong with cinema and theatre enriching one another? Why the hysterical cries of ``Hands off! That's mine!'', or the self- righteousinjunctions ``It is wrong to steal. You might get into trouble''. After all, we are not mischievous children playing with matches. And anyway, can a match burn the theatre down, or the cinema?
Let's take a look.
What are the specific qualities of the cinema or the theatre these days, which we must keep our hands off?
Time was when the main specific quality of the cinema was considered to be its almost unlimited opportunities for free transference of action in time and space.
But this has ceased to be the exclusive monopoly of the cinema, and indeed it never really was. Shakespeare freely transferred the action in his plays from room to street, from Venice to Cyprus and so on. True, the cinema made it possible to carry out such changes of scene far more rapidly than the theatre, and make the process far more natural and convincing. But the difference is quantitative rather than qualitative.
Of course the theatre and the cinema go to the same sources for their material; their themes and plots, their ideas and characters are in no way exclusive. There arc differences between a play and a film script but both arc essentially dramatic works, and such differences as do exist are gradually being reduced.
Iskusstvo Publishers and various journals do not publish film scripts simply in order to bring new writers and works of literature to the public eye but primarily so that they may be put on the stage.
Film-makers frequently read plays with the secret thought at the back of their minds that they might well make a good film. Theatre people seem to entertain no such arriere-pensee in reading film scripts. We have seen how the play Under the Big Top by Ilf, Pctrov and Katayev served as the basis for the screen play of Alcxandrov's famous film The Circus, how the Tur brothers' Blue Route became Meeting on the Elbe, Rozov's The Immortals became The Cranes Are Flying and so on. The only film I can think of that was made into a play was Riskind's Night Bus adapted by Malyugin as Road to New York. That was a long time ago, and after all one swallow doesn't make a summer, and this particular swallow was no exception.
When I read the screen-play of The Defiant Ones by N. E. Douglas and H. J. Smith, I felt nothing but pleasure and envy; pleasure at reading such a superb work, and envy because we still have so few plays of such a high standard. I immediately dismissed the idea of 90 rewriting it as a play. The material and the way it was composed, the pace, were all essentially cinematographic. But I just could not free myself from the impact this screen-play had produced on me, and late one evening while talking to friends the practically insane idea occurred to me of staging it as it was, of trying to make the cinematographic theatrical. Naturally what attracted me most to the undertaking was the deeply humane and tragic theme. But the very form of the screenplay held out a fascinating challenge I just could not resist.
The production had its shortcomings. Something of the original was lost. But this was a first attempt after all. Only the expressive means of the theatre were employed in turning the film-script into a play. Experience shows that the specific qualities of cinema and theatre reside in the sphere of literary forms.
What about montage? Well, yes, to a certain extent this is more associated with the cinema than with the theatre, but this does not rncan that it has the exclusive monopoly. An adaptable set, moving •spotlights transferring the light from one object to another, the alternation and even simultaneous presentation of different places, actions and pcople-thcse arc the theatrical methods of montage.
What about the ``angle of vision''? Again only to a certain extent. It is not only the cinema that can show a person or an event from any point, or from the point of view of any character. The painter can see life from any point he chooses, but it will always be from his own particular vantage point. The cinecamera can see the world through the eyes of a coward or the eyes of a man in love. Yet the stagedirector Akimov has on more than one occasion enabled audiences to see the stage as if from below. He has placed the people in the stalls as though on a balcony, in the orchestra pit or on the fourth floor and so on. The Czech stage-designer Josef Svoboda projects his scenery playing with perspective, completely ignoring Gonzaga's classical laws of stage design. In both cases this produces quite an impact on audiences, and achieves unexpected expressive power.
The theatre too can show events through the eyes of a particular person. In Diky's production of Rubbish we are made to see a beer hall with swaying brick pillars, as though we were drunk. We have been made to see plays through the eyes of a child, or a youth, or an objective bystander.
The audience's ``angle of vision'' is always different in every good production. It is merely that the cinema and the theatre have different qualitative possibilities in this field. This is another sphere in which exchange of experience between the two media is carried on successfully, both of them benefitting without losing any of their specific qualities.
91Both the cinema and the theatre, as any other art, are essentially conventional, but in different ways. The modern cinema requires that both the characters and their environment be three-dimensional, authentic and natural.
A play staged without a stage-set may be an excellent production, a film done thus is sheer folly. An open section of a house is quite normal on the stage but on the screen is only likely to be the result of an air raid or an architect's brainstorm. Perhaps the border-line between the two arts follows the meridian of convention?
The theatre can present a room without a ceiling. Not so the cinema. In the theatre we can have an interlude in front of the curtain. The cinema cannot. In the theatre it is possible to have the author or chronicler appear on the stage, interrupt the action and comment on it. It would be most unnatural in a film. It seems we have found the dividing line between the theatre and the cinema.
But what about Charlie Chaplin's films? His art has nothing to do with normal authenticity, with the rules of classical realism. And what about cartoons, puppet films, or ballet and opera films?
In a sense the theatre is more naturalistic than the cinema. A filmmaker can use various devices of combined shots to create, for example, the impression of a dizzy height, create the illusion of danger when in fact the actors are perfectly safe. The theatre can only do this by actually having the actors raised to a dizzy height. One could find all sorts of cases where the theatre, essentially more bound by convention than the cinema, has to be more natural.
Where do we find more convention, in Charlie Chaplin's films based on a remarkable combination of eccentricity, clowning, hyperbole and lyricism, or in the theatre where the shadow of a barred window can represent a prison and a single lamp post can represent a street?
Montage, angle shots, fade-ins and fade-outs, close-ups and numerous other terms from the vocabulary of the cinema, understood not in the narrow technical sense but in the widest sense, are by no means exclusive to the cinema. Of course the theatre and the cinema use their own methods to achieve roughly the same affects of montage and ``blow-ups''. As for fade-ins and fade-outs, each handles them in its own specific idiom, just as the novelist does it with words, the painter with light and colour, and the composer with sounds and rhythm. Montage, fade-ins, mobile camera and cuts are an essential part of film-making and audiences take it all for granted. Tracking and pan shots are as customary in the cinema as scene changes in the theatre. But as soon as these effects are attempted in the theatre, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, the familiar becomes something quite new, and a technical device becomes a convention.
92We can get the audience to agree to accept any convention. The modern audience is prepared to accept the most involved ``rules of play''. I imagine the normal devices of the theatre appear just as new, unfamiliar and fresh when transferred to the screen. The important thing is to refrain from transferring the technical devices of one to the other wholesale.
In the screen-play of The Defiant Ones, the police, following the trail of the two runaways, Gallen and Jackson, keep coming to places where the two men had been shortly before. In the stage version the chief of police and the sheriff are shown the whole time against a single conventional decor which might be swamp, road or prairy. Not because the theatre could not handle a dozen different flats, but because, thanks to the specific means of theatrical convention the pursuers could adequately convey the impression of the chase by always entering from the left and exiting right, without any scenery at all.
The Defiant Ones was written for the cinema, and the story of the screen-play is the story of a long round-the-clock hunt for escaped convicts. The incredibly determined runaways and the equally determined pursuers are on the move the whole time, and the constant change of places and the various obstacles they have to overcome can only really be shown by the cinema, for the theatre is limited by the size of the stage, the amount of scene changing that is technically possible and so on. We cannot show on the stage the heroes fording a river, how one of them boards a fast-moving train and so on. The theatre has to bow to the cinema when it is a question of swift movement over a considerable period of time. But there is something far more interesting than the hunt in Douglas and Smith's script, and that is the moral struggle between the white man and the Negro, chained together by the fetters of social inequality and race hatred, and the manhunters. Most important of all is the story of how hatred turns into friendship, the story of the moral awakening of Jackson and Gallen. The possibility of showing this human drama on the stage (referring of course to the possibility of dramatic art as a whole and not only the Gorky Theatre production) finally dispelled all doubts.
We did not try to present several scenes of action in full detail but merely altered a few details on half of a circular turntable and then revolved it every now and then to create a succession of episodes on the proscenium and forward half of the stage. Thus the idiom of theatre convention enabled us to retain the continuous action proper to the cinema with the means available to the theatre. The only real compromise we were forced to make was that of resorting to the ageold tradition of having an interval, since in our attempt to enrich the lives of the white man and the Negro with numerous details and present 93 the process of their changing relationship with the maximum accuracy we found that we had increased the running time of the play to two and a half hours.
The experience of certain hlm-makers who have taken the risk of making their films twice as long as the normal accepted length convinces us that the division of a play into acts is not an eternal law of the theatre. It was as though we were projecting onto the stage what takes place on an imaginary screen. It is not for us to judge what the results were, but we claim the right to think and act the way we did.
The cinema, far from hampering us, actually helped us. It certainly did not make things any easier for us, rather on the contrary, but that is a very good thing.
Like the cinema, the theatre proceeds from the character of a work in determining the degree and quality of convention to be employed. The same aesthetic principles underlie both arts. One could cite thousands of examples of things that are done successfully in the cinema but not in the theatre. Yet this is only because both arts tend to try to appropriate mechanically the methods of the other. If a creativeapproach is adopted the results are quite different.
The production of a play or a film is a translation from the language of literature to the language of stage or screen as the case may be. There exist some very fine translations, and also some very bad, illiterate ones. But it can hardly be suggested that translations should be banned merely because some translators are not up to standard.
Dostoycvsky was one of the most ``theatrical'' of all writers. His novels lend themselves to dramatisation extraordinarily well. Yet Dostoyevsky objected strongly to attempts to put his works on the stage. In his opinion this could only be done if the plot, composition and characters were specially reworked and adapted.
A stage version of a book is an independent work of art. The same is true of a screen version. The old film Dowerlesx Bride was far closer to the spirit of Ostrovsky's play than later screen versions of his plays which appeared to show far greater respect for the original. The film Such Love was greatly inferior to the play of the same name it was based on, despite the fact that Kohout's play resembled a film-script more than a play-script.
The same was true of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Despite the apparent ``cinematographic'' nature of Miller and Kohout's scripts, they are really theatrical through and through, and the films only served to bring this to light. What was new, and startlingly bold for the theatre was old hat for the cinema.
This is just an example of the way excessive respect for the author can become the opposite-a mockery of the author's intentions.
94The interpreter must be a creative artist. Mimickry is not art.
Children at a certain age are wont to wet their fingers and carefully rub them over a transfer to produce pictures of animals and toys in their exercise-books, or on walls and window panes. This is not considered a creative act. It is more interesting by far when the child himself draws a flower or a ball.
As long as we persist in using the achievements of other arts like transfers, substituting saliva for creative imagination, the opponents of alliance between the arts, the champions of strict compartmentalisation will erect more and more new barriers and ``no entry'' signs on our road.
The more of these there are, the more our progress will be slowed down, and the more ``accidents'' there will be. The road must be cleared. Exponents of theatre and cinema must open wide the doors of their creative laboratories to one another. Let each take away as much as he can carry. Neither the cinema nor the theatre will lose anything; on the contrary they will both gain a great deal.
It is not interpenetration that threatens the specific qualities of theatre and cinema but pedestrianism and uncreativc mimickry. I am by no means convinced that ``naturalness'' and ``veracity'' arc essential features of the cinema.
A one-sided concept of truth to life, the sign of equality that is set up between truth in life and truth in art are fetters that chain us hand and foot. The cinema has by no means exhausted its possibilities.
The exponents of the different arts can no longer go on cutting themselves off from one another by carefully erected barriers.
The modern cinema needs Stanislavsky and Meyerhold as much as the modern theatre needs Eisenstein. Prokofiev and Shostakovich are needed not only by music, but also by the cinema, the theatre and painting. For life, which dictates to us the new form and content of works of art comprises everything-people and their relationships in society, science and technology, art and culture.
We must answer for one another, know one another and learn from one another.
[95] __ALPHA_LVL1__ REFLECTIONS The Soviet theatre emerged before
Soviet dramaturgy. At first it took Russian and foreign classics relevant
to contemporary life.
In the far-off days of the civil war, Schiller, Lope de Vega, Gogol and Lermontov served the cause of the revolution, inspiring the people in their struggle against foreign intervention, the capitalist world and the forces of the old order.
As the years went by the Soviet theatre gradually acquired its own dramatists. The stage became peopled by heroes returned from the war, steelworkers, peasants, engineers and scientists. The life of the people became the life of the theatre. But the old classics still continued to serve the revolution. Shakespeare and Ostrovsky, Beaumarchais and Gorky rendered a valuable service to the Party and the people in the task of uprooting the survivals of the past and educating the feelings of Soviet people.
The Soviet theatre is now in its fifties, and Soviet drama now has its own historians and its own classics. It is quite a normal thing for Soviet plays to be staged in London and Tokyo, Helsinki and Vienna. Yet the classics, such great names as Shakespeare and Pushkin, Ostrovsky, Chekhov and Gorky have somehow imperceptibly slipped out of the Soviet theatre's repertoire.
96The news that Lawrence Olivier has had a great success appearing in Uncle Vanya or that there has just been yet another premi\`ere of ^a Gorky play in Berlin or Sofia are taken as a matter of course. But the news that a Soviet theatre is staging Woe from Wit or The Storm is not far short of a sensation.
This is not only sad, it is alarming. There is something very wrong if the classics are being ignored practically everywhere. There is no room for complacency. We must not just shrug our shoulders: we must find the reasons and try to combat them.
The watchword of the Italian futurists: ``Throw the classics overboard from the ship of today'' has never been accepted by the Soviet theatre. The fact that we are searching for the modern theme, the modern conflict, and the modern character does not mean that we arc free to cast overboard the great heritage of the past. It is our duty to preserve it and enrich it. Even increase it-for many Soviet plays which now rank as classics are also appearing on the billboards very rarely.
A classic play is not an old newspaper, a kerosene lamp or a musket, whose place is in the museum. The classics preserve their value for all time, and their gradual disappearance from the theatre threatens us with spiritual impoverishment.
The whole trouble is that we have no open opponents of Shakespeare or Gorky. Everybody loves the classics and appreciates their value. Everybody wants to act and produce them. At least they say they do. There are no actors who would not be delighted to have the opportunity of playing Astrov or Vassa Zheleznova, or no directors who would not jump at the chance to produce The Seagull or Yegor Bulychov. The classics have no opponents within the theatre. Nor do they have any adversaries among the critics. Admittedly, no one is in a hurry to publish a critique of a production of the classics. Thus a new production of a Western classic might very well receive no write-up at all. In short, there is a tendency to save time, newsprint and mental energy on the classics, but no open attack on them. The fact is that the theatregoers are the ones who are opposed to the classics. They just don't attend. And the theatre managements, who have to make their receipts cover their costs, have eliminated from their repertoires ``bad box-office'' authors.
We are thus faced with a situation which is not only contradictory and confused, but downright humiliating for the Soviet theatre and Soviet audiences.
One cannot accuse a country, where universal literacy prevails and a quarter of the whole population are studying, of lacking respect for the classics. This is convincingly disproved by the vast editions of 97 Tolstoi and Chekhov, Shakespeare and Gorky that come off the presses and are immediately snapped up.
But one cannot avoid facts, whether one likes them or not. A shameful silence, a desire to ignore the problem as though it did not exist and attempts to hide the unpopularity of the classics with the successful production of modern plays aggravates the disease by driving it beneath the surface.
We have frequently seen good actors in good theatres play Hamlet, Yegor Bulychov, Larissa Ogudalova, Arbenin and Mary Stuart, and yet the productions only ran for a short time. The theatres that do not put on the classics today did use to put them on after all. They spared neither efforts nor expense and were sincerely distressed when their efforts proved to have been in vain. There were further attempts to stage the classics but they gradually became less and less enthusiastic and less and less successful. Finally the theatres deemed it best to drop the classics altogether in the interests of the public and box-office takings. The easiest solution was adopted, which amounted to a capitulation, an admission that ``Moscow and Leningrad audiences are more cultivated than ours in the provinces. And then of course they have fine actors like Ravenskikh and Ilyinsky''. (Although few towns are lucky enough to have a director like Efros or an actress like Borisova, this did not prevent Good Luck and Irkutsk Story from being extremely well received in the provinces, so that the excuse that provincial audiences are not as ``appreciative'' as those in the major cities sounds a bit lame in the light of the facts).
No, it is not the audiences that are at fault. Nor is it a question of the classics being too much for modern actors and directors to cope with. The problem is not a new one. It used to be referred to as ``the problem of critical adoption of the classical heritage''. This problem was solved. A passive academic presentation of pictures of the past gave way to an active approach, showing the theatrical classic as a concentrated reflection of the social contradictions of an age. There •were pitfalls in this ``new reading'' of the classics: all too often the social was vulgarised and reduced to the cheap sociological, and many fine works were made primitively schematic. But the old uncommitted, unbiased approach was gone for ever, and it would no longer have occurred to anybody to produce Dowerlexs Bride as the story of a provincial girl seduced by a provincial society beau, or The Living Corpse as the drama of a tormented alcoholic.
We now saw the classic work as a social canvas, the classic hero as a representative of his age, and the theatre no longer dealt with the abstract ``eternal'' problems of love or jealousy, ambition or duty but treated every character as the bearer of a particular class morality.
98We saw how the ``kingdom of darkness'' destroyed Katerina, how hypocritical bourgeois society destroyed Fedya Protasov and were delighted to see the theatre become more aware, how it had learned to think and to present the complex social problems of the theatrical classics.
But time passed and Soviet audiences grew up while the theatre marked time, and made no headway at all.
It is impossible to stage a classic or even understand it without revealing the social essence of the conflict, without profound knowledge of the age in question and the forces at work: that is the foundation of the work. It is impossible to produce a theatrical classic without a good knowledge of history, morals and manners: that is the foundation of the production-the foundation but not the whole edifice.
We do not want the emotional side of the classics to be crushed under the weight of social analysis; we do not want the poetry and the imagery of the masterpieces of the past to be buried beneath a pile of social and period details.
Times have changed, and we no longer want pure social analysis from the classics. We want the classics to reflect the past and thereby help us live today and build our future. And it is not enough to look on the classics simply as documents unmasking the world of landowners and merchants, as graphic illustrations of the impoverishment of the Russian peasantry, the degeneration of the nobility or the reactionary nature of tsarist autocracy.
Today, when our schools have taught us scientifically and methodically the social nature of life, taught us to view history as the history of the class struggle, and given us a correct understanding of the historical process, there is no longer any need for us to demonstrate these facts in every play we put on. Knowledge of history is an essential requisite but not an end in itself. The historical process exists in the classics in the very system of artistic images, and the creative interpretation of the facts. The theatre is called upon not to illustrate history but to interpret and recreate it. This is what the contemporary public expects of the contemporary theatre.
The basic reason why the classics have disappeared from the stage of a theatre is the theatre itself. And, paradoxical though it may seem, a theatre fails in putting on the classics because it puts them on as classics.
The theatre is by its very nature contemporary. Every theatrical production ought to provide an answer to some question that is of vital interest to audiences today. Soviet audiences have collected numerous questions to which the modern dramatists have so far failed to provide an answer. Often a classical play can provide an answer, and even a better answer than a mediocre modern play.
99 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1972/PSD310/20061226/199.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2006.12.27) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [*]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nilBut do we take this attitude to the classics? Are we always guided by the criterion of contemporaneity when we include a particular classic in our repertoire?
Quite recently one of the managers of a leading theatre announced his intention ``to revive the forgotten tradition of staging plays for the actors''. Doubtless he has found, and will continue to find, numerous followers.
Only too often in our work we find ourselves proceeding from purely practical considerations, something like this: ``I say, it's a long time since we put on a classic. What could we do? How about Wolves and Sheep? Ivanova would be fine as Glafira, and we've got a Lynyaev. Sidorov hasn't acted for some time now. It would be a good opportunity to give him something. Yes, let's make it Wolves and Sheep. But what about Wild Money? Well, we could; but then it wouldn't be so good with Lidia, and Sidorov would be left without a part again. No, Wolves and Sheep is definitely the answer.''
I may be oversimplifying it a bit but this is roughly the sort of logic which often governs our choice of a classical play. Those who think along these lines fail to realise that they arc making quite sure that the play will be a flop before they've started, and that such an approach renders any constructive work quite impossible.
Many people find it very tempting to match the repertoire with the personality of the actors and director. They feel it is a sure guarantee of success. Of course, there is a certain amount of logic in this. Thus a theatre may feel it is time they did a production of something by Dostoycvsky: why on earth should they do The Idiot if they have no one in the company who would be able to cope with the role of Nastasya Filippovna, when they have an actor perfectly suited to the role of Raskolnikov? Crime and Punishment is thus the obvious choice. Ostrovsky's ``turn'' has come round. Once again they proceed from the inclinations of the company. There are always plenty of people only too eager to play Karandyshev or Katerina, Gurmyzhskaya or Glumov. And the whole question is immediately solved by the actor's ``status'', his popularity with the local public and his authority with the theatre management.
Sometimes even less important considerations govern the choice of a play: the fact that the costumes are available, the director is prepared for it, a parallel production in the repertoire, the fact that it does not require a complicated mise-en-scene and so on.
Theatres named after Ostrovsky regard it as their duty to perform his plays frequently, and the same applies to theatres named after Chekhov or other playwrights.
Sometimes it is quite simply a matter of ``What haven't we done
100
Scene from Pompadours
MESSIEURS ET MESDAMES
POMPADOURS, a stage
adaptation by Georgi Tovstonogov of
themes from the works of
SaltykovShchedrin. Leningrad State
Academic Comedy Theatre, 1954
Scene from Pompadours
Irina Zarubina as Nadczhda Petrovna and N. Trofimov as New Pompadour?
Scene from Pompadours
A. Benyaminov as Blancmange and Irina Zarubina as Nadezhda Pctrovna
of Gorky's yet? The False Coin'? Right! Let's do it, then we'll have
done all Gorky!''
The classics are put on for special occasions, centenaries and so on, for ``last appearances'' of actors retiring from the stage. Sometimes they are put on especially for a guest artist, who makes a particular play the condition for his accepting an invitation. ``I'll come on condition I can do Arbenin.'' They want him badly, so they put on Masquerade, without stopping to consider for a moment what the play might have to offer the public today. In short, the classics are performed for the most various motives, which tend to be not even remotely connected with artistic considerations.
I don't deny, it would be pointless to put on a production of Hamlet if there were no one to play the title role, the Dowerless Bride without having a Larissa and so on. But this consideration, essential though it is, should not be allowed to become the determining factor.
This sort of approach ensures that productions of the classics will be a flop from the outset. The best classic performed by the very best actors and actresses is a galvanised corpse, a dead weight, unless it raises problems that are of interest to us today, as having some relevance to our day and age.
A play about the past, where the characters are dressed in clothes we have long since ceased to wear, live in houses such as we have long since ceased to build should nevertheless comprise thoughts and feelings that are relevant today.
Classic plays all have their own different destinies. Some were highly acclaimed on the first night but within a few years had been condemned to oblivion. Some only became popular several years after their first performance. Even the greatest classics were not always wanted on the stage, even in days when the classics made up a considerable part of the repertoires, before being ousted by modern plays. Thus, during the civil war, Schiller was far more popular with the theatres than Shakespeare. This was only natural, for a play like Don Carlos could be made to sound an appeal for struggle against the foreign interventionists, while Hamlet's doubts could hardly be made to serve the cause of the revolution.
Today for some reason there is a tendency to lump all the classics together, as if it were all the same whether we stage Othello or King Lear, The Forest or A Profitable Job. Of course, the fact that Masquerade is so rarely staged does not mean that it is any worse as a play. But the matter of how it sounds today has to be decided by the theatre proposing to stage it. I personally would not be able to produce it today because I cannot see its relevance for the present, and only a person who can discover its relevance has the right to stage it.
101To me Gorky's Philistines is a highly contemporary play. That is why T produced it. So you see, it is not all the same what classic play you choose, even if they are all equally fine. This attitude must be the determining factor in the choice of classic both for actor and director. Otherwise it will be quite impossible to produce a real work of art. The director will invent something more or less original depending on his experience, imagination, skill and taste, but all his inventions will be somehow artificial and contrived (although it is by no means excluded that his production may have some very fine points from the purely professional and aesthetic point of view). If, on the other hand, the director has put his finger on certain points of the classic that are relevant to our lives today, even the most traditional device will be new, since its use will be dictated by artistic necessity.
We often pay lip service to social and ideological commitment, while completely ignoring these categories in our practical day-to-day work. Yet our task is in fact to be continually guided by these criteria, to make them an essential part of all our activity since the intrinsic value of a production depends entirely on the social motives that a theatre company and its director were guided by in their choice of a particular play. A truth becomes weakened by repetition, becomes banal and less convincing. We are all the time repeating that the idea is the most important thing of all, but the trouble is we often fail to make it our inner need.
Thus out of all the vast oeuvre of Ostrovsky, Soviet theatres periodically stage the same three or four plays, and most of these productions have extremely short runs. And the reason is the fortuitous choice of plays. Either it is The Storm, so popular with the theatres in the capital, or one of a few plays that are usually chosen out of such purely technical considerations as the small number of dramatis personae, the fact that they need no change of scenery, or can be conveniently combined with a modern play being rehearsed, which takes up most of the company, especially the young actors. It is not difficult to foretell the results.
Yet Ostrovsky of all people is one of the classics whose plays are of high contemporary relevance, since they are plays of great ideas. But it is all a question of what plays should be chosen, for they can only be truly contemporary if the theatre can co-operate with the author to present on the stage its own social feelings and thoughts.
I for one could not possibly produce a play like Wild Money today. Yet I enjoyed working on Even a Wise Man Stumbles tremendously. Why? Well, is the problem of the soul-destroying pursuit of wealth, a passion for gain making a spiritual cripple of a man, really of vital importance to us today? Of course there are people in our society who 102 are ruined by money, there are spendthrifts and corrupters of the young, but from the point of view of the moral criteria of our present-day society (without going into legal side of the matter) we can hardly say that this is a matter of top priority at the present time. Even if I am wrong, and it is, in any case it is not presented in Wild Money in an aspect which will evoke a real social response among the audience. This was a regular theme with the classics, a theme of which Balzac gave the classic interpretation. Ostrovsky is close to Balzac here, but there are many works in which it is treated in sharper terms.
A production of this play may well come off all right, and even be a hit with audiences. Audiences will applaud its professionalism and the good acting of which there will undoubtedly be examples. But it will be the professional skill of the director and the cast which will account for the success of the production and not its social significance. Far be it from me to insist that this is bound to be the case. After all this is a very personal matter, and I may be wrong in my appraisal of the play in question. It is quite possible that another director might find a way of handling it that would make it relevant to contemporary life. But I could not, at the moment anyway.
On the other hand I experienced real creative joy in working on Even a Wise Man Stumbles, for here Ostrovsky makes possible an extremely acute examination of the psychological springs of careerism together with all its attendant evils-treachery, cynicism, and a propensity for compromise.
And I felt my finding this in Glumov was important today because we are constantly coming across such things in one form or another in our lives, and it is therefore a problem which cannot fail to arouse a response in audiences.
When people say ``Ostrovsky'' I am immediately put on my guard, because it implies Ostrovsky in general, and there is no such thing as ``Ostrovsky in general'', for the great dramatist was different in different concrete instances, in different plays. Ostrovsky is fine but which Ostrovsky?
Here we must avoid abstract speculation, and adopt a very concrete approach. A theatre must first of all grasp the specific social content of a work, and only then set about finding the best form in which to present it.
Alternatively, it must take a play which might appear to have no message for us today-like -Moliere's Tartuffe-and give it a modern interpretation which brings out its tragic note, so that Moliere is brought to life for us and made relevant to our life, for his plays are open to numerous interpretations. If a director has not first found a real social key (but has simply said to himself, ``Well, now I think 103 I'll do Tartuffe. The Comedie Francaisc did it this-a-way, so I think I'll do it that-a-way'') the production cannot possibly be a real success. The cast and the scenery may be excellent and the production may be rcaay in time, which may be more than anybody had hoped for, but the result will be a flop. Because they failed to lay the foundation and built the edifice on sand. It may not be a sensational flop, it might even pass almost unnoticed that it is in fact a flop. The production may pass muster, it might be ``satisfactory'' professionally, but that is the most disappointing thing that can happen for a director; there is no joy at all in having to one's credit a mediocre, ``run-of-the-mill'' production.
Indeed, if he tries to achieve a few innovations in the production the results will be even more deplorable, for they will simply appear pretentious under the circumstances. If there is no ideological and social petard in the production it is far better that everything should be as academic and modest as possible.
The question of form is extremely important in producing a classic, but the question of whether the form is ``modern'' or ``traditional'' does not in fact determine the result. An accurate reproduction of the external features of the age in question does not make the production antiquated, a museum-piece, provided the emotional conflict, the underlying idea are modern.
On the other hand, a modern interpretation does not necessarily imply dispensing with the external details or departing from historical authenticity, let alone reconsidering the play's form. Revolving stages, voices ``off'', an austere expressionist decor, in short the superficial externals of modern form do not necessarily inject new blood into an old play. However ``fashionable'' the production, the play will not be brought to life unless the audience is made to feel that its thoughts and feelings are modern through a complex system of associations. The attempt to hide the wrinkles of age with a heavy application of `` makeup'' will only serve to highlight the wrinkles. The outward features of modern form, a demonstration of acting talent and inventive production techniques can not reanimate people who have long since departed from life.
I repeat, a modern interpretation of a classic consists first and foremost in the ability to treat it as a modern work, forgetting that the author is a classic and that it shows us the past.
I think we should strive to understand the contemporaneity of the classics in the way Jean Vilar and Maria Casares, understood it in the case of Victor Hugo's Marie Tudor. This is a romanticist work, with all that that implies, yet Vilar showed that if treated in a new way Hugo can rank with the realist Shakespeare. The most important thing 104 in the work of both the director and leading lady was the fact that they perceived a tremendous emotional wealth in the work in pinpointing both the universal and feminine qualities of the heroine. And they presented it through a deeply penetrating analysis of a human drama, avoiding the slightest hint of melodrama and histrionics, discovering in a writer who is generally associated with the most exaggerated high-flown theatricality genuine psychological depth. Hugo, who seems to belong to the past, was shown as belonging very much to the present. We should appreciate the classical heritage not only for its instructive value, but also for its tremendous aesthetic power, for its moral influence on the minds and hearts of our contemporaries. This does not mean that we should view it as something abstract humanist, ignoring its historical, social and class content. On the contrary, the theatre should try to present as fully and deeply as possible the complex links between the classic and the life that engendered it, the objective and subjective truth of its time. But this must be the means and not the end, the means of revealing the connection between past and present. We must make the past serve the essential objectives of the present. There is no need to modernise the classics, decking them out in modern ``gear'', for this is merely to vulgarise the aim.
In this connection we would do well to examine certain attitudes to the classics that prevail in other countries. It has become very common to dress a modern problem in historical costume, so to speak. We see Greek kings, medieval warriors and the scholars of Hellas discussing problems which are currently being debated in the French and British parliaments. Modern dramatists use Joan of Arc and Antigone as mouthpieces for ideas that are the subject of polemics between the intellectuals of today. The subject matter of many of these plays is extraordinarily reminiscent of all the fuss going on over European integration or the road to power of Adolf Hitler, while the action is boldly transferred to our own day. There are very few playwrights in the West who do not separate the subject of a classical play from its characters, the characters from the language and the whole from historical truth.
Presenting the historically concrete, they artificially extract the typical from the typical circumstances.
Some of the more talented and progressive directors however do manage to place the classics in the service of the present. Zola's Therese Raqiiin was made into a very fine French film set in the present; while the theme of Romeo and Juliet was successfully embodied in the modern American musical West Side Story. This approach to the classics is perfectly permissible and far from new. The great Pushkin did not scorn it and adopted it in writing his Stone Guest. But the 105 ``projection'' of the themes, composition and characters of the classics into our own times is not the only, and in my own opinion not the main, way of preserving the classics. The classics may serve to inspire new works, but they still have a lot to offer us in themselves.
There are various attitudes to the classics in the West. For some the old themes merely serve to prove that ``there is no new thing under the sun''. Following the pessimistic message of Ecclesiastcs they are blind to historical perspective and the ways of renewing the world, and their art is deprived of life-assertive power.
Honest-minded artists in the West make the classics and classical forms serve the end of destroying the existing order, while reactionary artists use them to affirm the impossibility of changing human nature, to show how senseless it is to change the time-honoured social and human relations: for the latter everything is eternal and immutable. Our attitude to the classics is essentially different at grass-roots level from the theory and practice of the contemporary bourgeois theatre. We have our own special aims and are well aware that if the danger of drifting towards abstract humanism is Scylla, Charybdis is waiting there at the other side of the straits-restriction of the classics to the aim of presenting a concrete historical picture. Both these extremes are an expression of a passive, objectivist attitude to the great values of human culture.
There is little to choose between primitive allegory and primitivesociological synopsis. There is little to choose between anger at evil ``in general'' and passive contemplation of concrete manifestations of evil.
We must endeavour to find the most profound and subtle links between the classics and the present day. Nor should we ignore the slightest opportunity to attract the audience's attention to analogies between past and present. Trigorin's rhetorical question in The Seagull, ``Why keep digging at one another?'' is still applicable to our presentday literary squabbles, while Repetilov's ``We talk a lot, that's all we do'' in Griboyedov's Woe jrom Wit should be associated with the bravado of our present-day ``rebels''.
History does not repeat itself. But human feelings, failings and virtues do. We still have our thriving Molchalins, for many the arrival of the Inspector is still a ``most unpleasant piece of news'', and even Feklusha from The Storm has not entirely vanished. By forcing audiences to make comparisons, by inviting them to associate past and present, we reduce the time gap and bring the classics closer to our own day. But a thousand individual links are no substitute for an underlying spiritual link between the classic and the life of our own day and age.
This link does not arise automatically. A calm objectivist presenta- 106 tion of the world of the past will not make the audience hate it and be glad that they live in the new society. A few years ago a naive and extremely expansive young man from the provinces visited the Tretyakov Art Gallery. He was profoundly stirred by Repin's painting of Ivan the Terrible murdering his son. He then, and I quote his own words, ``went straight to Shishkin's `Forest' and had a little rest''. I feel that all too often our productions of the classics are very like this forest, ideal for a little rest. Wouldn't we do better to see that our audiences are profoundly stirred?
A conscientious but cold academic presentation of pictures of the past, intellectual but not emotional parallels and associations, and making particular details of a classic ``recognisable'' do not by a long chalk make the work modern in the full sense of the word.
The modernity of the classics and their relationship with the present is extremely complex and subtle. The impact of the classics on the audience cannot be tailored down to elementary preaching and trite moralising. It is not essential that the audience should leave the theatre able to put into words what they have learnt from Gorky or what conclusion they have drawn from a play by Ostrovsky. The theatre is not a legal advice bureau let alone an enquiry office. The theatreis not there to provide ready answers to questions that are worrying the audience, but to help the audience answer these questions for themselves. The theatre is called upon to teach people how to live, not how to act in a given set of circumstances.
The above applies both to the classics and to modern works. The classics do not require a special approach or special methods and devices: like any modern play the classics arc historicist, like any play written today the classics require truth. The degree and quality of convention differ from play to play with the classics just as they do with modern works. The acting techniques, scene design and musical effects must be equally contemporary for the classics as for modern plays.
It would be absurd to act Schiller the way it was acted at the beginning of the last century, no less absurd than refusing to use spotlights just because in Ostrovsky's day the stage was lit by oil and gas lamps. Yet even today there are directors who seek to transmit Schiller's romanticism by means of the pseudo-classical histrionics in vogue in the last century.
If we continue the analogy, we arrive at the need to restore the stage machinery of the old theatre, and its architecture. But we shall never be able to restore the old audiences!
As the audiences pass away, they take the expressive means they understand with them. We only need historical authenticity in architecture, costumes, and domestic details to the extent necessary to bring 107 out the truth of the conflict, the logic of the characters, and ensure that the emotions are genuine. It must never be an aim in itself or attract the audience's attention. It is possible to find contemporary features in the Greek tunic, the farthingale, the bonnet or the colourful dress-coat without sinning against ethnographic truth. When working on Woe from Wit, we found that there was no less variety of coiffures in those days than there is now. One of them bore a remarkable resemblance to the recently fashionable ``pony tail'', and it was on this that our choice finally settled.
The classics must be acted like the contemporary playwrights, for only then do they acquire immortality. The best productions of the classics both in this country and abroad confirm this. And it may well be that a large number of the unsuccessful attempts at the classics these days are to be explained by the fact that we confuse traditions with cliches and are unable or unwilling to break their hold on us.
Such a large volume of commentary, essential conditions and examples has grown up around the classics that we are often seeing them in someone else's interpretation. It is often not Shakespeare we see on the stage but his commentator, not Ostrovsky himself but the traditional Maly Theatre interpretation of him. The playwright, and indeed also the director and the actor, are deprived of individuality, of their real personality. The Moscow Art Theatre brought us Chekhov, and we are very grateful to them for that. But today we should be staging Chekhov and not Stanislavsky's interpretation of him, with all due respect to great names.
Belinsky, Shchepkin, Dobrolyubov, Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov and Meyerhold all understood the time in which they lived very well, and they taught us not to engage in sterile repetition but to go forward.
It is our duty to preserve and develop this great tradition of the Russian theatre and Russian criticism.
The theatre creates traditions. Pedestrian repetition of the successful discoveries of others transforms these traditions into sterile cliches which are championed by shortsighted critics who cannot see beyond their own nose. They think they are upholding Ostrovsky and Chekhov, whereas in fact they are simply forcing their own commentaries upon us.
Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Plekhanov, Vorovsky and Lunacharsky left us some brilliant models of literary and theatrical criticism. Their analysis of plays and productions has lost none of its validity today. But surely they do not limit the creative imagination of the present-day director or actor? It is not Dobrolyubov's articles ``The Kingdom of Darkness'' and ``Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness'' that produced the tradition of interpreting the plays of Ostrovsky or Plekhanov's 108 articles that created the tradition of interpreting the plays of Ibsen. They have helped us, and continue to help us, to understand the essence of the plays and reveal to us their depth and beauty.
Dobrolyubov's view is not foisted upon us ``from above''. We are impressed and convinced by the accuracy, logic, emotional power, order and harmony of his artistic credo.
There are other views, less convincing and acceptable, which were declared to be the best, and to which we were more or less forced to subscribe. Yermilov's studies of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky are by no means faultless, and give rise to serious objections. Slavish conformity to Yermilov's works on Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, Nechkina's works on Griboyedov or Byalik's works on Gorky can lead to unnecessary monotony and uniformity in productions of these writers.
It would be very unjust to blame Yermilov or the Moscow Art Theatre for unsuccessful productions of The Seagull at numerous Moscow and Leningrad theatres. It is those who try to do Chekhov ``a la Moscow Art'', Ostrovsky ``a la Maly'', ``a la Alexandrinsky'' and Lope de Vega ``a la Sovietskaya Armiya'' who are really to blame.
A classic play, no matter how good it is, will be ``dragged down'' by a bad production and fail to make the grade. Paucity of ideas and imagination at a particular theatre can nullify all the fine qualities a play may possess. There is nothing easier than ruining a good play. A certain theatre once put on a production of Ostrovsky's The Storm for sailors of the Baltic Fleet. On the whole it was a pretty reasonable production. At first glance it seemed that here was indeed a ``kingdom of darkness'' with a rather faint ``ray of light''. But in actual fact the production contained only a token gesture to ideological content: the idea itself was missing. The sailors' reaction to the play was most interesting. Since they did not see the drama of a pure, noble woman and the full horror of the life around her, they understood the play as to be a story of marital fidelity. Many of them had left behind wives and sweethearts ashore and were naturally worried that they might cease to love them and forget them. To them, Kabanikha seemed to be a guardian angel of family life. With such an awesome mother-in-law, a wife could be expected to behave herself!
Is not the theatre to blame for the fact that Karenin, that ``cruel machine'', often appears a far more attractive character than his wife Anna?
Wherever the theatre fails to embrace the noble idea of man's right to freedom, it invariably remains at the inferior level of the moral principle ``the family is sacrosanct''. There is often a great temptation to substitute the moral principle for the idea, as being more concrete and actual. However, this practice is extremely dangerous, for it is 109 confusing and harmful to the audience, and injects their souls with the poison of philistinism.
The Lenin Komsomol Theatre in Leningrad once staged a production of Your Own Business by L. Oshanin and Y. Uspenskaya. The play is about a Party member with a wife and children who falls in love with another woman, but, as the authors would have it, prefers to stay with a woman he does not love and keep a clean Party card. And I must say that I myself, then manager of the theatre, was not worried by the thought that in struggling for a healthy family we were propagating an unhappy family, in struggling for moral purity, we were affirming mendacity as a norm of family life. Moreover, together with the authors, we were presenting this as true communist morality. But the most awkward thing of all was that shortly before the theatre had done Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done?, which preached the exact opposite. These two plays should never have appeared on the same poster. One intelligent theatregoer drew our attention to this. And although the critics and the public praised us for putting on such a ``ncccessary'' play, we were forced to agree that this criticism was perfectly justified.
I must say in all fairness that this frank admission is not intended to imply that L. Oshanin, whom I regard as an extremely gifted poet, is alone to blame for the theatre's mistake. The general creative atmosphere in those years and the notorious ``no-conflict theory'' sent many of us off in search of conflicts that might be acceptable, since without conflicts there can be no drama and no theatre. The labour and marriage codes seemed perfectly suitable material for the stage in those days. Unfortunately we still come across works today that bring to the stage important decisions in the sphere of ideology or economics, without expressing the essence of life. Thus we find plays which debase the tremendously important problems of the moral responsibility of the individual towards society, reducing them to such philistine principles as ``It's not nice to cheat the state. And it's dangerous too. You can get put in prison for it'', or ``It's a good idea to do a turn in production when you leave school. It's the quickest way of getting into university.'' Stanislavsky bequeathed us his system, the crowning achievement of which is his teaching on the super-objective and the super- superobjectivc. We have mastered the super-objective, more commonly known as the idea of the play, pretty well. But the super-super- objcctive has somehow fallen by the wayside.
The super-objective is hidden in the play. We may understand it in various ways, but it is given by the author. No one can claim to have understood the author better than anybody else, especially since the author himself does not always fully realise what he has created. Each 110 theatre makes a sincere effort to penetrate the innermost, often subconscious intentions of the playwright. But this is not enough. One must not only examine the core of the work itself, for we do not work in a vacuum, for some indefinite, abstract audience. While in the darkened theatre, with artificial lighting, the director and the cast reveal, sometimes joyously, sometimes painfully, the stores of wisdom, philosophic depth and psychological complexity of a classic play, outside the sun is shining brightly and people arc studying and arguing, working and inventing, achieving great things and making mistakes, wrestling with thousands of intricate matters.
Do they need what we arc working on for them today? Will our art help them? Will it interest them?
The super-super-objcctivc is the bridge between the play and life. The super-super-objective removes the walls of the theatre and enables us to see the play through the eyes of our contemporaries. The supersupcr-objectivc cannot be determined on the basis of the play alone. It requires knowledge of life, and of the people we are working for. It requires not only knowledge but feelings too. The super-super- objectivc cannot be foisted upon the artist. It must be the offspring of the artist-citizen himself. The super-supcr-objective makes the play the highly personal concern of the director and actor. Indeed this is what •constitutes the noble purpose of service to one's people. The personality of the creative artist and the objectives of people, state and Party are fused in the super-super-objective, which is partisan and determines the spirit of the production.
But in order to grasp this extremely elusive ``blue bird'' the artist must have civic ideas and feelings. He has to be capable of ardently defending or protesting fiercely, of loving and hating. It is not enough for him to understand that there is good and bad in our life, or even to understand what is fine and what is ugly. He must rejoice in beauty when he sees it and be genuinely pained by ugliness. Only such civic ardour can reveal in an old play an emotional charge of new thoughts and feelings.
Clearly then, the question of the super-supcr-objective is central to the whole problem of interpreting the classics, the matter of deciding the purpose of a play, why it should be put on, to whom it is addressed. The degree of authenticity, naturalism, historicism and ethnographic accuracy observed in a production of a classic should be sufficient to satisfy the sophisticated contemporary audience's highly developed sense of historical truth, but should never be allowed to become an end in itself, the primary objective, for in that case it will inevitably conceal the essential idea, so that there is no super-super-objectivcr •and no civic objective.
111If the instructive objective is raised from a secondary consideration to the primary concern, a play will simply be a vehicle for information like a museum-piece and its artistic and civic impact will be considerably reduced. And it is, after all, for the latter that the theatre exists.
Basically, it can be said that a classic play is a contemporary play. However, a danger lurks in this approach, the danger of getting carried away with superficial direct parallels and associations, where the audience is expected to recognise some concrete person. To my mind the classics require a far broader and more subtle system of analogies and associations than such direct parallels as are calculated to evidence the remark: ``He's just like John Smith.'' This is an over-simplified approach to the classics, which are indeed recognised as classics because their theme is universal, and applies to all ages, taking a different turn and acquiring different aspects and facets depending on the particular circumstances and conditions of the time. A classic is a classic just because it comprises these various facets and reveals what the author may not have been consciously endeavouring to present, but which is nevertheless present in the work, there to be brought out.
It must also be borne in mind that in writing his work, the author was conditioned by the expressive means available in the theatre of his day, since he could know of no others. It is very important that the contemporary theatre should not restrict itself to that position. The theatre should be the willing captive of the author in the realm of ideas, content and all that determined the choice of that particular work. Yet it is equally important that it should refuse to be a slave to the level of expressive means to which the work and its author were restricted at the time of its creation.
Unfortunately, all too often we come across an unwarranted respect for tradition in just this matter. It is not the theatrical means of the period to which the author belonged that should become a tradition, but something quite different. To be attached to Griboyedov's or Shakespeare's theatre as a spectacle, with all its means of expression, is an extremely bad form of traditionalism which gives rise to many mistakes.
How do we differentiate between tradition and traditionalism?
Othello has centuries of tradition behind it in the interpretation of the central role, and it would be absurd to ignore it. But every age adds something of its own to the understanding of the part. The tradition of the inner approach must be taken into account and can only be ignored provided a step forward is taken on its basis. We cannot afford to adopt a nihilistic approach to all that mankind has discovered before us. In this case it is as absurd to reject tradition as it would be to set out to invent the bicycle.
112
Scene from Act One
Y. Knpelyan as Vershim,, and Tatyana
Uoronina as Masha
Gorky Theatre Production of
Chekhov's THE THREE
SISTERS, 1965
'Ccne from Act One
from Act Three
S. Yursky as Tuzcnbach and K. Lavrov as Solyony
Scene from Act One
f Ludmila Makarova as Natasha and O. Basilashvili as Andrei Prozorov
Scene from Act Four
N. Trofimov as Chebutykin and Emma Popova as Irina
Tradition is a very good thing if we understand it as historically accumulated wisdom. But it is extremely harmful if it is understood MS a code of rules, devices and solutions. It is but a short step from tradition to cliche and from respect for the past to neglect of the present. All too often, tradition becomes a barrier between the classic and the audience, and the director runs around in front of it or behind it, not daring to remove it altogether. ``The director has a pious reverence for tradition,'' they say when a theatre regards a classic through a grille, afraid to touch him, as though he were a deity. ``The director is a slave to tradition,'' the critics write after a performance of this sort.
If it is a museum-piece we are after, a play whose impact is the same as that of the relics preserved in mothballs in theatre museums for the interest of posterity, then we have no need to go to the classics. We might just as well turn to some second-rate work consigned to oblivion by all except those with a specialist's interest. Why should we turn to Moliere, thereby placing him on a level with any of his contemporaries? How can we compare Moliere with those who have been quite rightly forgotten?
This is as preposterous as it is to only employ the stage machinery the theatre disposed of at the time a classic was written, ignoring all that has been invented since.
For a long time I myself laboured under the illusion that Chekhov should be staged with illusionistic sets. It was Svoboda and Krejca at the National Theatre in Prague, who destroyed this illusion and helped me realise that I had been quite wrong in my insistence. They made full use of modern lighting effects to express Chekhov for the modern audience. This is not a crime or disrespect for the great playwright. On the contrary-provided it was an artistic requirement expressing the essence of the writer, provided modern theatrical means were used to bring out the super-supcr-objective.
Here lies the boundary between a healthy attitude to tradition and nihilism.
I call for respect and due regard for tradition, but it sometimes happens that study and the possibility of reading and learning something about a play contends with direct spontaneous perception. Without realising it, the director is a prisoner of a preconception from which he is unable to free himself. Then another danger arises, which I call ``perversity'' when a director wants to be original at all costs and is thus on the slippery path towards vulgarisation and pseudoinnovation.
It is difficult to envisage all the mistakes connected with staging the classics, and I have no intention of trying to do so. I merely wish to The finale 113 mention the basic points of departure which I consider to be of special importance. When I say that one must not be a slave to the expressive means of the theatre, it is difficult to determine where the line should be drawn. The theatrical philistine regards the very existence of new expressive means as a crime against the author, as ``perversity'' and formalism, and it is very difficult to come to any firm decision in this matter. It is not at all easy to preserve the essence of a work when using new, present-day means.
It may be a misfortune, or it may be a blessing in disguise for art that there is no fixed standard of measurement as there is in building a bridge or a tunnel. It is a question of aesthetic views, and there can be no firm law.
What is a good tradition which ought to be observed, and what is ``perversity''?
Let us return to Othello. There is a tradition of not regarding Othello as simply a jealous man. It is quite possible to transform Shakespeare's profound, humane work into a melodrama. On the surface, there is the possibility of such a ``reading''. But there already exists a tradition of interpreting this character and nobody can say today: ``I have realised that it is wrong to play Othello as a jealous man.'' This is a fine tradition which must be observed today. To find an approach that takes into account the personality of the actor playing the role-such must be the director's contribution to a fine tradition that it would be absurd to depart from. There is no point at all in making traditional mistakes for the thousandth time. Such is man's experience. Why cover the ground that has already been covered by many before us?
Any new features should involve not the destruction of the essence of the work but an original approach to revealing that essence. There is nothing wrong in that approach being traditional, for there still remains a vast ocean of unplumbed opportunities for personal, individual, unique expression.
In the case of Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, the good tradition in the interpretation of the role of Chatsky has been to draw a contrast between him and the world of Famusov, and reveal his democratic spirit. But I felt that in making this contrast today one could adopt a slightly different approach, and I felt I could dispense with the tradition of the ``dandy'' Chatsky. It was history itself that suggested this solution to me. I saw a real historical figure like Kiichelbecker behind the character of Chatsky. Kiichelbecker was a nobleman, who moved in high society, but was by no means a society ``dandy''. On the contrary, he was a rather awkward, eccentric person, and I felt that by revealing Chatsky's democratic spirit through this approach I would be 114 making Griboyedov's hero closer and more understandable to peopletoday.
Chatsky's democratic spirit was left unquestioned, but in our contemporary interpretation of his character we sought something more important, than the need to show a society dandy. Especially in view of the fact that the audience's impression of high society has changed considerably and people today are no longer familiar with certain details which one could not have afforded to overlook as little as thirty years ago.
I was training at the Art Theatre at the time when Anna Karenina was being rehearsed. I remember how much time and effort went on trying to produce an authentic picture of ``high society'' at the races. When the play came on, elderly people in the audience were not at all satisfied by the results. But for the people of those years the features the theatre chose to present were quite sufficient and perfectly convincing, since they had been chosen from the point of view of what people at the time would accept and understand. Nor should this be taken as implying a condescending attitude; it was assumed that the audiencewas of the highest level of intelligence, and no attempt was made to play on ignorance.
Shakespeare understood this sort of thing very well indeed. He realised that Italian soldi would mean nothing to an English audience in his day, and although perfectly aware that Italians did not use English pence, his heroes do, thereby revealing his genuine realism. When we translate foreign plays in this country and an American says ``I haven't a cent'', we translate it into our own terms, for otherwise we would be translating the word but not the meaning.
This is something that escapes the ``restorers'' in the theatre. They attach more importance to the letter than to the essence. Real Theatre (with a capital T) has no right to do this.
In Woe from Wit there is the following line: ``Here's a sofa for you. Lie down and have a rest''. Our adviser explained to us exactly what the sofa should be like. But such a sofa suited neither the scale nor nature of our set and we decided to have a simple divan instead. Contrary to our expectations, it did not occur to anybody, even historians, to criticise us for this historical inaccuracy.
All this is not to say that there arc not bad traditions too. Everyone is familiar with the traditions of the cloak-and-dagger plays. The production on The Dancing Teacher at the Sovietskaya Armiya Theatre led to dozens of repetitions and endless cliches in this genre.
I have seen many productions of this sort in my time, where tradition has become its opposite. Lope dc Vega is in the position of having to once more earn himself the right to appear on the stage, in a new quality.
115When I was working on Gorky's The Barbarians at the Gorky Theatre, I found great difficulty in breaking free from the Maly Theatre traditions. But it was when we managed to get away from the traditional that we experienced true creative joy and a sense of achievement. I do not mean to suggest that we should make it our main aim to be original at all costs, and at every step take the attitude: they did it like this, so we'll do the opposite.
It is a question of finding in the essence of the play itself opportunities for a fresh, unbiased reading, and getting away from the cliches that are so often confused with tradition.
For example, the traditions of staging Gorky and other classics tend to insist that the interpretation of the roles requires great skill and experience, which is mainly to be found among the older generation of actors. As a result we find the age balance becoming more and more distorted as time goes on. Yet age is a most important factor, determining the nature of human relationships and the manner in which people behave. If we freely alter the age of characters, a great deal becomes a mystery, and their behaviour seems most enigmatic and fortuitous.
In The Barbarians, Nadezhda Monakhova is twenty-eight. She is young and beautiful. That is why, as well as her husband, the doctor and Tsyganov are in love with her, and even Cherkun cannot resist her charms. Romanticism and passion in the search for an ideal hero are perfectly understandable and attractive in a young woman. But we arc offering completely different explanations for her emotional upsurges if we have on the stage a woman who is no longer young, an `` experienced'' woman, a woman who has ``lived''. Exuberance, ingenuousness, and even stupidity may be pardonable in a voung person, but not in a mature person. In a mature woman ingenuousness looks suspiciously like weak-headedness, and passionate desire suggests a morbid pathology. If Anna is not twenty-three, but-god forbid !-looks even older than Nadezhda, all the complex, profound relationships in the play are reduced to primitive case of adultery, where a husband prefers a younger woman to his aging wife. Any alteration in the ages of the characters of Gorky's plays distors their meaning. This being so, our theatre entrusted young actors with most of the leading roles. We did not even need an elderly actor for the role of Tsyganov, for after all he is only meant to be forty-five.
It is necessary to see the characters through the author's eyes. A production will be truthful if one departs from the traditional in the elementary matter of the distribution of the parts.
However, important though it is, this is secondary to the problem ot finding a message for today in the classic.
116A few years ago, when we at the Gorky Theatre began work on a stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot, we had an extremely hard time trying to answer the question: What does the story of Prince Myshkin contain for the modern audience? We realised that the answer must be basically very simple and human.
We were not interested in the power of money in the eighteensixties, but in something very different. Through the character of Myshkin, Dostoyevsky appeals to the most profound wellsprings of the human soul: from contact with this crystal-pure, kind man, other people find themselves becoming purer and kinder. Myshkin's goodness triumphs over many base feelings of the people around him, and affirms in the hearts of people today the noble truth that ``man to his fellow man is a friend, comrade and brother''.
Of course there arc times, as during the civil war, when appeals for brotherhood and forgiving one's enemies would have been blasphemous, a betrayal of the cause for which the people were fighting. But today, when our ideological opponents arc all beyond our frontiers and within our Soviet household we arc arguing with people sharing the same basic views, humaneness, goodness and kindness produce far better results than the big stick or rough orders.
It is useful and instructive to know that the only good, honest man in nineteenth-century Russia was dubbed an ``idiot'', and we made this point in our production. But this was not the reason why we put on The Idiot, nor is it the reason why Prince Myshkin is so dear to us.
In our age, when we are building communist society, our way is a thorny one, and not every individual is worthy in his heart of the noble ideal for which we arc striving, or of the noble moral standards that we affirm and must instill in people today. We still occasionally come across roughness and lack of respect for other people. Apart from the figures of the current economic plan, there arc also the people who are building the new society, and they must improve themselves. Writers like Dostoyevsky and Chekhov collaborate with us, as it were, in the task of improving man.
Or take Shakespeare, who lived in the sixteenth century. It might seem that his plays have absolutely no point of contact with our time, but if we approach any one of his plays from the standpoint I have just mentioned, we shall find that it contains a tremendous power to influence, and that a work written several centuries ago is consonant with the spirit of our age.
Let us take as an example Richard the Third, a play in which the question of power, the state and the individual is posed with tremendous dramatic force. The key to this work is to be sought through deciphering the philosophical concept of government rule and the 117 responsibility of a government towards the people. The betrayal of the noble aim for personal thirst for power, entailing disastrous consequences for other people, who become simply tools of Richard's aspirations for self-assertion-such is the problem that can make Shakespeare's tragedy consonant with our times, when we arc everyday witnesses to the actions of individual personalities not directed towards the good of the people but towards ends that do not justify the sacrifices involved.
Admittedly, the evil which Richard III was responsible for is ``child's play'' compared to that caused by, say, Hitler. But the great strength of Shakespeare lies in the fact that he revealed the inner workings, the psychological mainsprings by which we can explain many modern tragedies and disasters that have shaken the world by their apparently senseless cruelty.
If we seek parallels and analogies along these lines, then Richard the Third acquires a great interest for us today. Coriolanus and Macbeth are also plays about power. But the twist Shakespeare gave to the problem in Richard the Third, it seems to me, reveals the problem more deeply and fully in the aspect that concerns us most today.
If civic ardour is present in the interpretation of Richard the Third, it can be made to say more than any contemporary play. If the director feels this and manages to speak in the classic and via the classic of the present, then Richard the Third, quite irrespective of the scale and possibilities of the theatre, will emerge as a true work of art, powerful and valid, and its reading will not be traditional in the bad sense of the word.
Calls to seek universal, eternal motives in each classical play were at one time condemned as idealism, objectivism, in short, extremely harmful. But surely the moral code of Soviet man, formulated by the Twenty Second Congress of our Party, was none other than an appeal to educate people for life in communist society, for life in a society where there will be no room for lies and falsehood and where there will be no evil or violence.
We are the inheritors of the best that mankind has created throughout its long history. The struggle for the moral perfection of society rests with us.
When we put on The Barbarians, we considered the question of what we could teach people with this work today. The answer was: directlynothing. The play elicits no direct, obvious associations with the present day whatsoever, and cannot possibly do so. Soviet life is too different from the life presented in the play. Nobody has the faintest recollection of excise inspectors, local dignitaries and police chiefs. The provincial Russia described by Gorky has passed into oblivion. 118 The prototypes of Gorky's characters no longer exist. His play is peopled by characters who are alien to us, people we have difficulty in understanding. But there is something in the play that still concerns us, and that is the barbarity that is latent in every one of us, the barbarity that is expressed in parental selfishness, in lack of consideration for others, barbarity concealed in the old fashioned frock-coat and flaunting itself in fashionable trousers, restrained barbarity and aggressive barbarity.
Despite the fact that there are no longer any social foundations for the barbarians, barbarity still persists here and there. There are still apathetic people and hypocrites. There are still those devoted to the past. Very often we lack the energy and strength to battle with routine and we let it get us down and debase us. Petty pride can lead to great suffering. Dissatisfaction with things one sees around one can be a source of vitality to a man who is struggling with it: it can equally demoralise the person who has renounced all struggle.
It is not easy to become a real man. It is difficult to retain one's humanity. The thirst for pleasure and a longing for peace and quiet, dissatisfaction with one's lot and self-love can make a person cruel and cold towards others. Time and again we manage to justify our unseemly actions. But one day our failure to behave with sufficient consideration for others may lead to disaster. A little light flirtation, some petty insult, selfishness or indifference, which seem to be very minor sins, nevertheless corrode our spirit and can ruin other people's lives. Thus, in The Barbarians, though passing unnoticed by anybody, a crime against humanity was committed, which resulted in the senseless death of Nadezhda Monakhova.
That is how we understood Gorky's play. For all of us who worked on it, it is this that constitutes the message of the play for us today. We were not content that our production would make the audience condemn and mock the old society that has passed away. Unless a play evokes some kind of associations with present-day life, it is simply an illustration for a history book.
Several years passed after the premiere, and the production did not remain unchanged. It gradually became clear that we had somewhat cluttered the production with period details. We felt we required a radically different mise-en-scene. Certain characters were elaborated and developed. The fact that a particular solution has been found does not mean that a theatre is on a smooth open highway along which the production can speed unobstructed. New people and signposts appear on the ``highway'' and they must be acknowledged and carefully taken into account. If a theatre constantly compares its own calendar with that of the audience and makes sure that its own ``time'' does not fall 119 behind the time in which we live, a production will never ``age'', even if the play was born long, long ago.
The classics are immortal just because they are profound and manysided. Every time and every artist chooses from them whatever he happens to find of concern. Often a masterpiece that had hitherto evoked in me no more than admiration for the skill of the playwright today excites my deep interest as a citizen and an artist, and insistently demands: ``Put me on!''
That was how I came to feel the irresistible urge to produce Woe from Wit, and that is how the idea of producing Hamlet and Boris Godunov arose.
For a long time Boris Godunov remained for me buried beneath operatic tinsel, heavy boyars' robes, brocade and jewels. I was quite unmoved by the drama of a bad conscience presented in the productions I saw. But once, when reading Pushkin for myself, I was suddenly struck by lines about very recent events on the very first page of Boris Godunov. Pushkin wrote a new play for us, a contemporary play based on historical material.
Soviet audiences have not seen Boris Godunov for a long time, and Pushkin's tragedy awaits its true embodiment.
The treasury of the world theatre is truly inexhaustible. It is a shame to let this vast capital lie on the bookshelves, when it could be usefully ``invested''.
I had never produced Chekhov, although I had longed to do so ever since I can remember. For me Chekhov is more than a great Russian dramatist and writer, a world literary classic: he is a great explorer, the prophet and Columbus of the twentieth-century theatre. The great Gorky was a pupil of Chekhov's. I am quite convinced that not only the Moscow Art Theatre and the Russian Theatre as a whole owe a great debt to him, but also Hemingway and Saroyan, and the Italian neo-realists. Without Chekhov there could have been no Leonov and Afinogenov, Arbuzov and Volodin, no... One could go on and on. Chekhov erected thousands of invisible memorials to himself in the hearts and minds of at least three generations of writers.
Several times I was intending to do a production of Chekhov. Everything seemed to dispose towards it-good actors, and all the time and facilities I needed. But every time I shrank from it. I felt I could not add anything to what the Art Theatre had already said in The Three Sisters. I could not possibly put it any better than Nemirovich- Danchenko, and who needed poor copies of a brilliant production or senseless attempts to alter at all costs a perfect work of art?
But did this mean that the solution the Art Theatre had found to
Chekhov's play had deprived the theatre forever of the possibility of
120
ovsky as Prince Myshkin and Tatyana Doronina
as Nastasya Filippovna
THE IDIOT, a stage adaptation by
lovstonogov of Dostoyevsky's novel
New revised version at the Gorky
Theatre, Leningrad, 1966 (original
version tirst produced in 1957)
Smoktunovsky as Prince Myshkj
I. Smoktunovsky as Prince Myshl
N. Korn as Totsky and Taty
Doronina as Nastasva Filipp
Scene from The Idiot
Tovstonogov conducting a rehearsal
Nastasya Filippovna and •
Prince Myshkin
Y. Lebedcv as Rogozhin,]
centre
Scene from 7 be l<liot
I. Smoktunovsky as Prince Myshkin
producing it differently? Of course not, as is proved best of all by
Nemirovich-Danchenko himself, who created a completely new version
of The Three Sisters. The great friend and interpreter of Chekhov
realised that a new time and new audiences required a new approach
if the play were to retain its vitality, and that time reveals a new
ring, new ideas in Chekhov.
Chekhov's dream of a bright future seemed vain to his contemporaries, like building castles in the air. Astrov hoped that man would be happy in a thousand years time. Vcrshinin insisted that ``in another two or three hundred years life on earth would be unimaginably beautiful''. This longing for the impossible gave rise to the tendency to regard Chekhov as a pessimist. But for us today, Chekhov is not a prophet of gloom but a herald and champion of a bright future.
Treplyov in The Seagull says: ``We need new forms.'' But he invented them and was defeated in an argument with Trigorin, a man of letters who wrote well but in the old way.
New ideas and new forms arc part of the very fabric of Chekhov's plays. One needs time to discover them. Chekhov was bound to come to us as a young, inspired dreamer, a wise friend and stern judge and teacher, to help the great-grandchildren of Astrov and Vershinin, Uncle Vanya and the three sisters to love life more, to make it more beautiful and to dream more boldly of a ``diamond-spangled sky''.
I knew all along that I would one day produce Chekhov. It was something I just had to do. I saw it as the most difficult, but at the same time the most satisfying, examination for the right to consider myself a contemporary director. And I consider it no coincidence in my artistic evolution that I came to Chekhov via Dostoycvsky, Gorky, Griboyedov and, even earlier, Ostrovsky, Chernyshevsky and SaltykovShchedrin.
Thus we faced a great challenge, the challenge of emulating Nemirovich-Danchenko's great production, representing the highest achievement of the Moscow Art Theatre. But we accepted that challenge. Not because we wanted to try just another production of a classic, but because we felt that Chekhov was necessary, indeed absolutely essential, today. I cannot think of any other playwright who made such a passionate effort to transform the human soul, to bring the finest qualities in people. The poetry of the life Chekhov dreamed of, his civic protest against the philistinism that stifles this dream, make his plays have an impact on people's lives such as no other dramatist, with the exception of Shakespeare, has achieved.
Why did we choose The Three Sisters rather than any other of Chekhov's plays? It seemed to me that in our age of active creative interference in life and nature, the theme of tragic inactivity acquires a 121 special impact and vital relevance. I felt that the more nobility, goodness and kindness the heroes had, the greater the tragic impact of the theme of their spiritual paralysis would be. In presenting today the story of the shattered dreams of Chekhov's heroes, of the collapse of their ideals, I wanted to capture the full tragedy of their plight, for The Three Sisters is a profoundly tragic work. The somewhat subdued tone of the play is only a means. The essence of the work is the civic anger of the author and his boundless love for humanity, his tremendous involvement with life.
Take Act Four, for example. It has always been played as a sad, wistful elegy, with a touch of faint, inexplicable regret for something that is passing away. We felt, however, that it could now be done in a different key, and that the shot at the remark ``One master less'' was the main emotional stroke, which quite possibly embodied the meaning of the whole play, Chekhov's reason for writing it. After all, it is not Solyony who kills Tuzenbach, but the surrounding indifference, the unbroken silence that reigns. It is not physical death that is so terrible, but the slow moral, spiritual death. Such was the new tragic chord we wished to achieve in the finale.
Today the tragedy of the action ought to be presented in higher relief and sound more terrible than before. We endeavoured to make the combination of the poetry of life and the evil opposing man's dreams as emphatic and acute as possible. This involved reviewing all the expressive means at our disposal. The failure of the Alexandrinsky Theatre production of The Seagull was a lesson to us in many respects. Why was it that the professional actors of one of the best Russian theatres had failed, while yesterday's amateurs, practically unknown actors under Stanislavsky, had succeeded?
Chekhov is a strict author, and he always avenges egoism on the part of actors. Stanislavsky, an innovator himself, grasped what was novel in the essence of Chekhov's works. Sixty years have past since then, and we should be that much wiser than Chekhov's contemporaries.
In tackling The Three Sisters we had no illusions about the incredible complexity of the task we were undertaking. Apart from having to bear in mind the essential condition of reading a classic from the standpoint of today, we had also to remember that Chekhov was an innovator in drama not only in the sense that he was creating something new for his time, but in his demand that the expressive means employed be new in relation to the time when the play is being produced.
What did I feel to be the essentially new features in dramatic art without which our work on the play would have been in vain?
I was amazed at the way the last few years had seen poetry readings 122 drawing vast audiences and often readings by unknown poets and reciters, who in themselves could not possibly have acted as a magnet for the public. Why was it that thousands of people snapped up tickets to listen to one man reciting poetry for several hours on end?
It all seemed to contradict the generally accepted opinion of what the public wants, and suggests some new laws of audience response. If we wished to find more effective means of producing an impact on audiences with our art we had to understand these laws.
Shortly before we began work on The Three Sisters I saw an unusual production at the Brccht Theatre. It was entitled Poems and Songs. On the stage were actors of the Berliner Ensemble and a small band. The only decoration was Picasso's dove on a grey canvas backcloth. The actors read poems and aphorisms by Brecht, and extracts from his diaries, and sang songs to his words. But this was not simply a concert program consisting of separate numbers. It was an integrated spectacle in which a song passed into poetry, poetry into prose, prose into music and back to a song. It was a peculiarly organised stage spectacle, moulded and cemented by a single artistic will, and it was a tremendous success with the audience.
I have been told that another production by the same company in which Brccht's statements on the theatre are collected and organised into an integrated whole enjoys even greater success. It is done as follows. The actors are playing the last act of Hamlet when suddenly a man made up as Brccht comes onto the stage and says that you cannot act like that today. There follows a rehearsal during which Brecht's directions are followed exactly as they appear in his rehearsal notes, and his statements on the theatre and extracts from his theoretical articles are quoted. These directions have all been carefully chosen so that they arc not only embodied in the rehearsal but really strike home.
It might seem that such a spectacle could only be of interest to theatre people, to directors, actors and critics. In fact it was Berlin's biggest box-office success.
To take another example, the best thing I had seen at the Art Theatre during the last decade or so was Dear Liar. I began to wonder why it was that a theatre that had based its art on the aesthetics of verisimilitude should have scored such a triumph with a play which in its very essence had nothing at all to do with fidelity to everyday life, with a production where the same was true. Two actors read the letters of Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, making no attempt whatsoever to create the illusion of life on the stage. This is simply a clash of thoughts and complicated human relationships, so complicated that they embrace the whole world.
123Why was it that a production that broke with the theatre's fundamental aesthetic principles which it had always observed brought it the greatest success? Could it be a mere coincidence?
I think not. I am convinced that the contemporary theatre should on no account be interested in making the illusion of real life on the stage the sole aim of art. I for one find myself getting terribly bored when I see the illusion of life on the stage. A man comes on, takes off his hat, advances a few steps and says: ``Good morning!'' ``Life-like'' though it is, it is extremely dull to watch if there is nothing else to the man's appearance.
In the days when the naturalist theatre was only coming into its own, verisimilitude produced a powerful impact. I remember several productions at the Art Theatre where a series of extremely life-like situations was quite captivating.
But I am quite sure that today verisimilitude has lost all its power. However well done, a poduction that is ``truc-to-lifc'' and nothing more, can have no real impact at all.
Andrei Mikhailovich Lobanov, a remarkable director whose importance in the Soviet theatre is still not fully appreciated to this day, understood this perfectly. Under his management, the Yermolova Theatre was the most up-to-date in Moscow.
Lobanov produced Malyugin's Old Friends, which was put on by numerous theatres throughout the country. I have a vivid recollection of one of the central scenes, the conversation between Shura and Volodya about love. Since the scene is one of the culminating points of the play, directors, aware of its importance, have invariably devoted the most scrupulous attention to its mise-en-scene. In Lobanov's production, Shura and Volodya simply walked onto the stage, stood facing the audience and hardly made a single movement throughout the dialogue. I remember being quite amazed, not so much by the unexpectedness of this solution in an essentially naturalistic production as by the fact that I suddenly realised how absolutely justified it was by the logic of the play. The conversation between the two old friends was so exceptionally important that the director felt the need to clear the stage of everything that might distract attention from the ideas being expressed.
It never occurred to anybody else to adopt this approach. Why? Surely other directors had sought to make the scene as expressive as possible. Of course they had. But only Lobanov sensed and grasped the new laws of audience perception that were emerging.
Thus, this process began a long time ago, although directors failed to understand it. We at the Gorky Theatre first sensed it when working on The Fox and the Crapes. We began work quite convinced that the 124 audience would be thoroughly bored by a production in which five people recite monologues for three hours on end with nothing else happening on the stage. We felt then that we were doing this work more for ourselves than for the audience, but as it turned out the production not only drew full houses for several years, but even competed successfully with the cinema and television.
When I took a fresh look at some of our older productions, I realised that where we had paid homage to illustration, to creating the illusion of real life, elementary verisimilitude, we had failed, and that our real triumphs had come when we had managed to avoid this-such productions were still as ``alive'' as on the first night.
I consider poetic truth to be one of the chief features of the contemporary style at the present stage. The art of external verisimilitudeis on the way out, and all its means should be scrapped wholesale. The theatre of a new kind of truth is emerging, poetic truth, which demands that the expressive means be made as precise and concrete as possible. Every action must be charged with meaning and not simply illustrative. In this way every detail on the stage becomes a realistic symbol. This, far from disregarding the basic principles of realism, makes realism poetic and figurative instead of naturalistic, which is what is needed today.
If at one time we got away with a great deal that lacked figurative and poetic quality but was simply true to life, and we were perfectly satisfied with such a production, today audiences are less and less prepared to accept such work.
Once Ostrovsky went behind the scenes during a performance at the Maly Theatre and listened to the superb delivery of the actors. Only recently I felt that the theatre had grown up since those days when everything was for the ear and nothing for the eyes, how out-of-date this attitude was. But now I realise that Ostrovsky was perfectly right. The plastic aspect must be present in a production only to the minimum degree necessary to make what is happening understandable. Anything else is superfluous.
Thus I recently found the answer for myself to what I feel to be the most important and essential thing in the theatre today. I now understand why people flock to Brecht's Poems and Songs and why it is practically impossible to get tickets for a poetry evening.
Such art provokes thought and cxites the imagination far more than spectacular sets or acting that is ostensibly true-to-life but not dictated by the necessity of the super-objective.
Although this demand is by no means new-Stanislavsky himself insisted that the most important thing on the stage was to recreate ``the life of the human spirit''---today it has arisen before us in a new quality, 125 as it were, and we must reinterpret a great deal in our practice if we are to capture the new, present-day nature of this law of art. It was my wish to try and embody that principle as far as possible in The Three Sisters.
We made it a strict principle that not a single second of stage time should be wasted on showing a likeness to life, that we must show in domestic situations the intense inner life of the heroes, that there should be ho preconceived or premeditated mises-en-scene in our production, which was to be outwardly static despite the vitality of thought. The only way to achieve this was to apply the most stringent self-restraint. We agreed that no one should be allowed to slip into the comfortable, easy groove of familiar things, things already achieved.
We should have found it far too easy to achieve our aim if we had been doing Brecht, for example. Chekhov is a playwright from whose works it is quite impossible to exclude period elements altogether. But we had set ourselves the difficult task of following the inner law according to which not a single physical action can be performed on the stage that is simply truc-to-life without embodying some other, intrinsic meaning. We had to check and regulate one another, to endeavour to overcome the force of habit, the inertia, the strong attraction for illustrative verisimilitude that abides in every one of us and often makes it extremely difficult to resist backsliding towards the old methods. I was determined to produce a feeling of real palpable life within the framework of the poetic, realistic symbol.
In the course of our work we were constantly striving to achieve a combination of the terrible power of evil, tragedy and radiant faith in man.
Chekhov's play docs not involve a struggle between two camps. The struggle is invisible. The chief adversary is not named. Chekhov loved all his characters: what he hated was the absurd, futile existence which engendered in them tragic inactivity, lethargy, listlessness and, in the long run, total apathy. Naturally we had to reach some sort of attitude to Chekhov's heroes, but the struggle is not between them but with the senseless lives they lead. It is significant that Chekhov wrote this play on the eve of the 1905 Revolution, that he was such an ardent opponent of petty actions. Behind this lies his fierce loathing for inactivity as a phenomenon of Russian life, for all his love of people themselves.
We saw the contemporary validity of the play to consist not in showing how Chekhov's heroes foresaw our life, the future. We wished to find the life-asserting principle in the work in a deeper, less obvious sense. As I see it, Chekhov's optimism is expressed in the way he struggles for thought and deeds, for activity, and understands that the 126 way of life he is describing is doomed to obsolescence. This being so, we sought the life-assertive principle in rejection and negation: we wanted the audience to be infected by the same sentiment of passionate protest against the senselessness and futility of life as Chekhov was.
We tried to contrast life and ideals, and express this contrast scenically by a combination of various very different effects. This is why we rnade a bright, carefree atmosphere reign throughout the first act, replaced by a cold, chilly atmosphere in the second act, and followed in the third act by a stifling, oppressive atmosphere, with a smell of burning, the very air throbbing with anxiety which seized everybody. Then the clear, crystal-clear quality of the last act came as the logical conclusion to the tragedy.
We sought this combination in every character, in every scene, and sometimes it arose of its own accord, spontaneously, quite unexpectedly.
We did not set out with the express aim of reinterpreting Chekhov, or amazing the world with a completely new reading of The Three Sisters. We only had one aim: to bring out in the work the thoughts and feelings that make Chekhov so necessary and vital today.
In our age of advanced technology nothing but old cliches and worn traditions is conceived for communication with ``the beyond'' that is the world of the classics. The connection becomes ever more tenuous. Mayakovsky, by the strength of his imagination, love and talent, brought Pushkin to life and conversed with him for a whole night. Perhaps we shall succeed in bringing to life Shakespeare or Griboycdov, Chekhov or Ostrovsky, at least for an evening?
It is worth all the time, energy and tremendous effort involved for the pleasure of spending an evening with the wisest, most amusing and most brilliant people in human history.
We are duty bound to solve the problem of the theatrical classics, to solve it along with the major task-thc creation of works reflecting the processes of present-day life. Every director may have his own way, but all the individual paths lead from the same point of departure -the attempt to break free of all the customary, preconceived ideas about how they should be played in order to read them as though for the first time, as though they had just been written. We must approach a classic as we would a contemporary play.
For the time being, the problem remains a highly complicated one, and no individual director, however talented, is in a position to solve the problem of the classics in the modern theatre. Its solution requires a collective effort.
[127] __ALPHA_LVL1__ THE PHILISTINES The theatre I work in is named after
Maxim Gorky. Yet despite this, or rather because of it, it was some
time before I resolved to try my hand at one of his plays. Indeed,
despite the fact that some of the most illustrious pages in the theatre's
history were connected with Gorky's plays and everyone was urging
me to do one, it was only after I had been with the theatre for three
years that I finally accepted the challenge with a production of The
Barbarians. I realised that the theatre was encumbered by the traditions
it had itself created, and strangely enough it was the company's great
respect for its past that was to prove the main obstacle on my road
to Gorky, an obstacle I could not surmount, despite the fact that I was
always perfectly aware of the great importance of his works, the fine
opportunities they offer to director and actors alike as a school for
skill and acumen, when one is forced to think big. The company and
myself were agreed on this. But I was searching for a more subtle and
complex agreement, that no amount of declarations or avowals of
support was enough to create. The theatre's pre-war and immediate
post-war productions of Gorky were extremely intelligent and
wellacted. But the general approach had been such as to bring out Gorky
the propagandist rather than Gorky the subtle psychologist. There was
128
a certain amount of uniformity about them, a rather one-sided
treatment of the conflicts, and almost classicist treatment of ``colour''.
This approach, while being perfectly natural and even progressive for the time, gave Gorky the reputation of being a profound, accurate and consistent writer but one who was perhaps a little too straightforward, lacking in the complex undercurrents, nuances and elements of surprise characteristic of Chekhov.
Intelligent audiences were always pleased to see Gorky's plays performed by a good cast, but were never really moved to the root of their being and the success of such productions was always short-lived. Hence the widespread myth that Gorky's plays were not really scenic.
I had always felt this view to be rathei unfair to Gorky, and wanted to disprove it in practice. It is true that Gorky is always publicistic. But it is surely significant that, apart from his articles on petty- bourgeois philistincs, he also wrote a play with the title The Philistines. The strong note of publicism in Gorky's plays by no means contradicts their complex psychological basis and many-sidedness, but it must arisenaturally from the complex stream of events, feelings, unexpected actions, conflicts and clashes, and not be openly and insistently declaimed.
When I began work on The Barbarians I first became fully aware of something which I like to call ``ruggcdness''. Gorky thinks in philosophical categories of tremendous sweep, raising eternal problems of mankind. He appeals for humanism, without which the building of the harmonious society of the future is unthinkable, ruthlessly depicting such features as barbarity, philistinism and spiritual parasitism, which though changing with time and becoming ``modernised'' nevertheless remain essentially hostile to man in his efforts to achieve such harmony.
Eight years have passed since we produced The Barbarians. If I were to return to it today, I would seek to present the same message, but using different expressive means.
During the eight intervening years between my first Gorky production and my new one at the Gorky Theatre we should have drawn closer to Gorky by at least eight years, and that means penetrating deeper into his philosophy and the psychology of his characters, and presenting them more accurately on the stage.
The fact that I produced the two plays in this order is not a mere coincidence. The Philistines is by far the more difficult of the two to produce, and the philosophy is expressed in a more complex manner and on a more sweeping scale. Moreover, the play has been more compromised by numerous productions, and the back-drag of theatrical traditions, supported by volumes of research and criticism, inter- 129 pretation and commentary sanctifying and fetishising these traditions is far stronger.
The first question to be answered was: What characterises the philistine spirit? A canary in a cage, geraniums on the window-sill, a gramophone-later replaced by the transistor and other obviously upto-date objects-are simply the outward features and do not reveal the essence.
Philistinism is a socially dangerous category. It is a way of thinking, a definite outlook on life, a mentality. Where does the danger lurk? Why is it that Gorky's play can serve us as a useful weapon today?
Only if I found very precise answers to these questions had I the right to undertake a production of The Philistines. My answers might be subjective, they might not take in the whole phenomenon in its entirety but only stress one aspect of it, yet if my interpretation reflected certain real, historically conditioned features of life, then I had the right to speak to my contemporaries on the subject, for the play would then be bound to provoke useful reflections for the audience.
I saw the danger of philistinism to consist in the invention of fetishes and blind belief in them, in their viability, the failure to glimpse real life behind the protective wall of concepts. Willing servitude makesman limited and hide-bound, unable to free himself from the grip of sterile schemes and canons, condemning him to perpetual confinement within the walls of his own sterile being.
We often say: ``You have to look at life philosophically.'' But are we always ourselves able to philosophically reject false concepts? Are we always capable of sailing straight past petty things without stopping? Of course not. Only too frequently we stop and attach importance to things that do not even deserve our passing attention. We are sucked into this vortex and find ourselves in the grip of worthless concepts and illusions, and sometimes even false ideas, blindly believing in their reality, and failing to see that they are unwarranted and untenable.
Sometimes we have an opportunity to see ourselves from the outside, as it were, and then we realise the futility and illusory nature of the aims we have set ourselves, sec that they are not really worth the efforts we have devoted to them. Many dramatists throughout the world today are greatly concerned by these problems, just as Gorky was in his time.
Paradoxical though it may seem, it was the theatre of the absurd that stimulated me to new reflections on The Philistines. It forced me to think about the problem of contemporary petty-bourgeois philistinism as a definite philosophy of life, and I began to search for a play in which this problem was presented most fully and completely in an 130 artistic form that was close and understandable to me, where it was presented from head to foot, so to say. In the course of these reflections I ``rediscovered'' The Philistines for myself. I had long been thinking about producing this play. But the solution, a solution that made it possible to relate it to the present day, arose quite unexpectedly.
Gorky presents the problem of philistinism with philosophical depth, and the process of refraction of phenomena of life in his work follows a logic directly opposed to that of the theatre of the absurd. Gorky's play is based on real conflicts between real people whose lives arc .absurd and futile. These people arc drawn into a vortex of dead concepts, obsolete views, devalued values and illusory, imaginary relations from which they arc unable to escape, because it is stronger than they are.
I based my interpretation of the work on Nil's remark that in the Bessemyonov home, for the umpteenth time ``they have played a dramatic scene from the endless comedy entitled Neither Hither nor Thither''.
The most important thing for me in the course of my work was to find the key to this cycle of delusion into which these people had fallen and which made their very existence absurd. The tragedy of their futile floundering lies in the fact that people in general are apt to submit to delusion, create these vicious circles in which they cast around futilcly, and worship fetishes of their own creation. In short, they are prone to a kind of self-hypnosis.
But how was I to find that circle of delusions so that we would be dealing with concrete factors and not simply vague generalisations? How was I to find not only concreticity but such concrcticity as would enable us to treat the subject on the level and scale of the work itself, with Gorky's incisiveness?
This was how the theme of complicated relationships between people and things arose in our production.
The power of things over people had often been shown in the theatre. Often it was achieved simply by having people practically smothered by the clutter of furniture, ornaments and household objects. I wanted to reduce the quantity of things in the Bessemyonov apartment to a minimum, yet somehow instil them with the spirit of their owner. Bessemyonov regarded things largely as symbols demonstrating his power and unshakable authority over his household. He could easily change the clock that strikes so wheezingly and is so inconvenient to wind, acquire a new cupboard, oil the door to his room, or replace the dining-room chairs. But a king does not change his throne for a new one, and he prefers his inalienable possessions, the things that always were and always will be his. Any concession here is regarded 131 as a concession to new ideas, as attempts to destroy the old stable world. The less confident he becomes, the less sure of himself, the more fiercely Besscmyonov clings to the external attributes of his castle. This approach was suggested to me by Gorky himself, by his remark about the cupboard, by Bessemyonov's lines about sugar, which ``must be bought in a lump and broken up at home'', about the plank he put across a puddle, and which was stolen. It was suggested to me by the very first words of Piotr's soliloquy on the cupboard.
The parallel that immediately suggested itself between the latter and Chekhov's ``dear, highly esteemed bookcase'' compelled me to think about the difference between the basic outlook of the two great writers. Tt is always easiest to discover such a difference through small detailssuch as these, through similar dramaturgical devices. Both playwrights employ the same device, the personification of an inanimate object, but their attitude to the object shows a complete contrast. Chekhov's attitude is of warm irony. For Gorky the cupboard is a symbol of a ghastly way of life.
The theme of attaching senseless value to things, a theme which has been treated time and again in art, and in very different ways, fits for me into the view of petty-bourgeois philistinism as a force that dehumanises man, and eventually destroys him. I searched for its development, as one of the major components of my interpretation. This was why apart from the cupboard we also had a clock which acquires a great significance in the play, living a stupid life of its own, making strong demands on people, insisting on attention, requiring to be wound up daily and so on.
Hence the photograph on the curtain at the beginning and end of the performance, a photograph of the dignified greying merchant surrounded by his family with Vesuvius belching fire in the background. Absurd? Most certainly, as was the autograph, a pure Russian surname written in French.
Such absurdity was a habit at that time, so that no one even noticed it. Indeed, on the contrary, it was regarded as being extremely ``chic''. For us it was yet another detail showing the power of the absurd, the power of habit.
Bessemyonov's remark about the plank was another such detail. If the remark was made in an ordinary, matter-of-fact manner, the audience would feel that Besscmyonov was not only mean but honest, that he was not so much concerned over the loss of the plank as indignant about the fact that it had been stolen.
For us Bessemyonov's remark was not simply a plain, straightforward statement. He must be breathless and dry in the throat as he utters it, for the matter is of tremendous importance to him. It is one 132 of the signs of the collapse of the world in which he lives, a world which is cracking at the seams before his very eyes. The theme of the plank thus assumes a cosmic significance.
The culmination of this theme in our production came in the scene where Bcssemyonov begins moving the potted plants around and then cries seriously, as a genuine appeal for help, ``Police!''. At the moment when he realises that he is unable to prevent the world of his own household from collapsing, when the family conflict has reached its apogee, he goes around putting the plant pots in their ``correct'' positions with pedantic accuracy, because everything has its appointed place and the established order must be preserved now and for all time.
The absurdity of this was the key with which we endeavoured to open the door to the essence of the play. Life had entered a blind alley, and the more accurately and convincingly we could demonstrate this, the more futile Bessemyonov's attempts to stop the rot and thrust life back into its normal narrow course would appear, and the better we should be able to sound the tragic notes of his devotion to an invented faith which he had endeavoured to instil in himself all his life, and of his intimation of the truth which he opposed with all his might and main.
This world and its inhabitants were obsolescent, both psychologically and objectively-such is the revolutionary theme of the play. And there is no need to have the Marseillaise sung off-stage for the idea of approaching revolution to be clear. Such obvious symbolism of this kind is definitely contra-indicated in this play. For me, outside the walls of the Bcssemyonov house there is nothing but a working-class district full of drunks.
Within the Bessemyonov house, on the other hand, to my mind the Marseillaise is totally out of place, and can only sound highly ironical. Piotr, ``a citizen of half-an-hour's standing'', banging out the rhythm of the song while Yclena waves a red handkerchief taken from Tetcrev's pocket-thcse people are really a parody of revolution. They will never go anywhere, they arc incapable of struggling, of creating anything, they have no aim in life. The revolutionary situation is created by the very existence of this house which, once strong and firm, will not be able to withstand the movement of life, for it is weakened from within so that all that is really vital and alive leaves it.
These were the considerations we were guided by in developing each of the characters. I wanted to get away from the customary interpretation which I felt had become too closely associated with the play. On the basis of the general intention, I endeavoured to determine the exact place of each of the characters in the general system of relationships obtaining in the world of this house.
133Why do we find Nil such an attractive character? What makes him different from the others? To begin with, he is stronger. He tore himself free from the Besscmyonov way of life before the play opens, and now he sets about helping Polya escape too.
The good, honest common-sense of a healthy-minded working man enables Nil to carry out his resolution to leave. All the others wanted to get away, but Nil was the first to go, and he went for good.
For me, the contrast between absurdity and the sense is the most important thing in the play.
Teterev and Perchikhin are also outside the vortex, for different reasons. The former is an outcast from life and by force of circumstance is placed above its conventions and the Besscmyonov way of life. He lives according to different laws, moving in his own orbit, and doing so without a compass, without any sense of direction. But he is inwardly free of the dogma fettering the others. Perchikhin is not fully aware of his own inner emancipation and relative independence. He acquired it by turning his back on people and seeking inspiration in nature.
Both these characters are likeable for their unsusceptibility to Bessemyonov's philosophy, but both of them abandoned his views spontaneously while Nil made a deliberate and complete break with him, which makes his position the most purposeful and active in the play. I had no need to try and find in Teterev and Perchikhin something that would make them very different from their numerous predecessors. In general, I found the usual form of expression adopted for these characters more or less suited my own understanding of them. This explains why they both seem far more traditional than any of the other characters in our production. The important thing for me was to find what principles they represented in the general idea of the play. I made no special effort to achieve other innovations or discoveries.
In interpreting the classics from the standpoint of today we must deal with the core and not with the surface. I feel it is artificial to endeavour to avoid at all costs what has been done by others before. This path will lead a director not to any real achievements, but only to vulgarisation and ``perversity''. Any innovation must be dictated by the logic of necessity, must be inherent in the material itself and fit into the framework of the basic solution. The idea is that of altering the illumination of a picture without altering the contours of the picture itself.
In themselves, the features of everyday life, truth to life in externals, do not make a role archaic, provided the meaning it embodies captures the minds of the audience. In such cases I prefer not to depart from historical authenticity. In the case of relationships, however, I consider any departure from historical truth to be a serious crime.
134A contemporary interpretation of a play docs not necessarily involve departure from period details. Everyone is familiar with productions of Shakespearean plays where the action was transferred to our own day that were no more contemporary for that. On the other hand, no amount of historical detail prevented Nemirovich-Danchenko from evoking a complex system of associations and reflections extremely useful to his contemporaries with his production of The Three Sisters. There arc things that should not be ignored. This is not the way to search for means of revealing the complex relationship between past and present. Primitive allegories, which are so often substituted for complex associations, remain totally unconvincing. The connections between past and present must be sought in more profound and subtle links.
When we were working on The Philistines somebody suggested that Besscmyonov should be done without a beard. Why? Simply because he had always had a beard, in the hope that if we shaved him this would essentially alter the essence of the character? I rejected the proposal outright. To begin with this would have been doing violence to historical authcnticity-in those days only actors were beardless. Besides, this would have distracted the audience's attention from essentials : they would have begun to attach importance to it and have tried to find some subtle hidden meaning, for they were used to seeing him with a beard. This would have been an unnecessary formal distortion. My chief concern was to determine the character's place in the clashes that form the core of the main conflict. Besscmyonov was somehow never in the centre of the action, although the play contains social and human reasons why he should be. He is the most consistent of the characters, the strongest and most firm in his convictions. He has a fanatical belief in the indestructibility of the pillars of his world. And this gave us the right to make him the focal point in the play, from which the waves of his gloomy faith spread like circles in a pond.
At the same time I wanted to make him as human as possible. The more he suffers from each loss, the more passionate and frantic his efforts to prevent the collapse of his world, the more the audience will be struck by the absurdity of what he is doing.
Such was my interpretation of the essence of this character, and I thereby sought to break away from the traditional interpretation of the role as not being central to the development of the general conflict. In our production Bessemyonov is a tragic figure, since he is the victim of devotion to a false, unrealistic belief. I wanted to blow him up to the full size Gorky intended him to be, make him more important than he had hitherto been on the stage, and more human.
Roughly the reverse took place with Yelena in our production. Usually 135 she was defined above all by her non-acceptance of the Bcssemyonov way of life, by her urge for independence. This was enough to make her a very positive, noble character in the play, an advanced and even somewhat progressive woman. Yet, unlike the others, she enjoys the process of living, and this is the only definite thing about her that provides grounds for setting her up in opposition to the Bcssemyonov world. She herself is a part of this world, and it is simply a question of its different reflection in her and Bessemyonov.
For me the contrast was between Tatyana and Yelena. Tatyana is not simply an old maid who has gone sour on account of an unrequited love, but a human being who tragically breaks up before our very eyes. She loses the illusions and hopes that were connected with Nil, with escape from the house. At the end of the play she is like a miserable bird pining in captivity in a small cage from which she is destined never to escape.
My choice and organisation of expressive means was dictated by the desire to reflect the whole world in the clashes between a small group of characters, and to capture as much as possible of Gorky's wealth of characterisation and ideas, the conflicts in all their acutcncss. I strove to attain the maximum, in Nemirovich-Danchenko's interpretation of maximalism in stage direction as taking circumstances to their logical conclusion without departing from the basis of reality.
The Bessemyonov household is like a vulcano which is now dormant, now belching forth once more its molten lava. I endeavoured to express this in scenic terms through the alternation of three states: scandal, and pre- and post-scandal. We had no other state. A ``scene'' arises on the slightest grounds, and the lull that follows is only a short breathing space before the next explosion. The very air of the Bessemyonov house is permeated with the premonition of a new clash between its occupants. Everybody lives in a state of constant expectation of a scandal, since the smallest spark is enough to set off the smouldering passions in a new fierce blaze. There is no way of putting it out. All one can do is to wait for it to subside.
Since this is quite senseless and absurd, and everybody is aware of it, a scandal becomes for every one of them an occasion opportunity for ``play-acting''. I was intent on showing that these people lived an artificial, theatrical life, that they were the actors of that endlessly repeated comedy Neither Hither nor Thither that Nil spoke of.
This approach required a rather special stage design. Truth to life was not enough, for I was trying to emphasise another element, the publicistic note. The mises-en-scene were thus designed to ensure that the person who was at the centre of a given scandal had plenty of room, had a stage for his performance.
136
Maxim Gorky's THE PHILISTINES,
Gorky Theatre, Leningrad, 1966
Y. Lcbcclev as Besscmyonq
Ludmila Sapozhnikova as Folya and K. Lavrov as
Scene from The Philistines
tcene from The Philistines
enc from The Philistines
The lulls between the scandals, the interludes of peace and quiet in this house, are extraordinarily short. People live cither before or after a scandal, and it is sometimes difficult to define exactly where one scandal ends and another begins. However, T felt that these intervals were extremely important. As the time goes on, the clashes become more and more violent and the intervals between them longer. I wished to stress this especially in the last act. The old Besscmyonov couple have gone to church and their children and members of the household are about to have tea. The room somehow seems brighter and more cheerful, and even Tatyana has brightened up. Yclena feels like singing, but unfortunately this is out of the question. ``What a shame it's Saturday today and the all-night service is not yet over,'' she complains. Tn our production, to stress to the maximum Yelena's joie de vivre which is such that she does not stop short of mild blasphemy, and the natural desire of the others to make merry, to extend this rare moment of ``peace and quiet'', we had Yelcna deliver this line with a mischievous smile instead of seriously, and go straight off to Piotr's room to fetch the guitar. Then she strikes up with ``Those Evening Bells'', in which everyone joins in, and leads in to a rollicking, dashing improvisation. At this point the old couple enter, coldly dignified in their Sunday best, and the merriment is over. Before us are two hostile camps, completely incomprehensible to each other. From this moment on there will not be a single moment of silence, and the action rushes forward to the denouement.
If we make the basic meaning of the play the idea of people living an artificial ``invented'' life, all the elements in the play must be subordinated to this basic idea. Moreover, the means of enlisting them to this purpose should not be superficial truth to life but something else.
Off-stage remarks play a most important part in this play. It is well known that Gorky was very fond of resorting to this method for creating a certain atmosphere. This is an essential part of the play, and since it concerns the text itself there is no getting away from it anyway. But this is not enough. I felt that the off-stage remarks could reveal another, hidden meaning, that awaited decipherment.
At the end of Act Two, when Tatyana has accidentally overheard the declarations between Nil and Polya, and Nil accuses her of eavesdropping, we hear Bcsscmyonov's voice from off-stage: ``Stepanida! Who dropped that coal? What do you mean, you see it? Pick it all up at once!'' This serves to accentuate the uninterrupted course of the daily round household activities. We are being told that life goes on in its old monotonous way whatever dramas and complications there may be in individual destinies. But I saw something else in this as Emma Popova as Tatyana and K. Lavrov as Nil 137 well: it provided an opportunity to stress the petty vulgarity of what has just occurred between the three people on the stage.
This off-stage remark must be presented as heard by Tatyana, for whom something terrible has happened. If these words are filtered through Tatyana's mind they will heighten the impact of what has happened, force her to see once again Nil's expression of profound contempt. In our production it was at this moment that Tatyana conceived the idea of suicide.
I sought a combination of tragedy and vulgarity throughout. If asked to what genre I consider the play to belong, I should be hard put to it to find an answer. As for the style, I should define it with an invented word-``tragivulgar''.
When it came to the task of embodying the conception in the characters, it was a question of observing the laws of the elementary existence, justified by the logic of inner life of each person. It was a matter of rejecting preconceived scenic solutions and sticking to the simple, unadorned truth.
The scene where Nil and Polya declare their love for each other has traditionally been played as the billing and cooing of two love-birds, whose love is something of beauty in this terrible world. But if we look at the hard facts of the matter, who is Nil? He is an engine-driver, a healthy fellow on the whole, but fairly chaste-that is to say, he probably does not frequent brothels, and Polya is, if not his first, then one of his first women. Certainly he is her first man. Their love is earthy and sensual. That is why I made the declaration scene rather frank and unashamed. Tatyana unfortunately saw it, and Nil is embarrassed because she saw something that a third party ought not to witness. This is what makes it so vulgar and terrible. Nil is ashamed not because of what Tatyana has overheard, but because of what she has seen. He is beside himself, and angrily hurls his unjust accusation at her. After such an experience, the thought of suicide is understandable.
It is the same throughout: the tragic becomes vulgar, and vulgarity leads to tragedy. It is a vicious circle, from which no one can escape.
Surely Bessemyonov is not incapable of understanding that Nil and Polya make a fine pair and that their marriage is not a subject for a scandal. He understands it as well as anybody else. The dinner scene, when Bessemyonov learns that Nil is going to marry Polya, begins perfectly calmly in our production. Bessemyonov tries to fight down his anger that is ready to burst forth and stifle it. But the imaginery relationships between people, all that he calls order, are stronger than him, and control his reason and logic. And in the end he explodes violently.
138Once again the tragic and the vulgar arc interwoven in an illogical, absurd fabric.
I am speaking of what I was guided by in this work, of my search for my own concrete solution. I deliberately avoid referring to the picture of the age, or the social significance of the play and the characters, for all this is inherent in the work itself and will be present in any interpretation whatsoever. But if I produce something that only illustrates those aspects of the play that have become commonplace, my production will not have the right to command the attention of the present-day audience, since it will not make them any wiser than they already arc.
What makes Gorky's play so contemporary is the dramatist's uncompromising attitude of condemnation for philistinism as a dangerous category that is not simply a vestige of the past, but represents a real danger today. What makes the production of the play so necessary is Gorky's own interpretation of the concept as a senseless vortex of fctishiscd concepts in which people spin. Can we'honestly say that we arc free from this today? Are we always able to break free and escape from the vortex? The sphere in which we rotate may be different from the one in the play, it may be different in individual cascs-for some cupidity, for others a thirst for glory, for yet others clinging to obsolescent idcas-but it is all petty-bourgeois philistinism.
If we compare art to a magnifying glass, we can say that our aim was to examine through it the phenomenon itself. Not individual people, but the phenomenon itself, which is fraught with danger for any age. The audience should adopt a philosophical attitude to the life we present, and sec it in its broad contours, not directly but mediated.
But in order that this distance may be maintained, it is essentially that there should be an element in the production that continually brings the audience back to this position, compelling them to sec everything from this standpoint. In our production this clement was the music. I am not speaking of the period music that was intended and suggested by the author of the play, but of the music we introduced, which was charged with special meaning.
We had the balalaika and the mandolin playing the simple melody of a ``cruel'' love song or a tune such as one might expect to hear in a working-class suburb suddenly breaking into the action, enabling the audience to make a better evaluation of events. In other words, the music here was intended to create the alienation effect of which Brccht writes in his theory of the theatre. When one of the inevitable scandals in the Bessemyonov household reaches its climax and the audience is under the spell of the hysterical ``play-acting'' of the characters, this little melody rises to enable the audience to look upon the scandal 139 with irony and at the same time give the characters an opportunity to get their breath back and gather their strength for the next bout.
We used music to help the audience to adopt an attitude of wisedetachment and let the characters continue in their vanity alone.
Naturally, as a matter of course, the question arose as to what scenery would best fit the bill. I naturally wanted something that would correspond to the general principle of our solution, so that the outline of the interior would be natural and familiar and the scenery illusionistic. When the curtain rises the audience sec a normal box-set, in strict accordance with Gorky's directions. Only somewhere in the middle of the second act does it suddenly strike them: Why, there are no walls! We built an extremely authentic room, but left out the walls, and stretched the ``wallpaper'' across the backcloth. On the one hand, this creates a perfect illusion of a real home. On the other hand, we are able to change the colour of the wallpaper at will, according to the mood of the passage in progress, by altering the light illuminating the canvas without changing the lighting on the rest of the stage. And so it is from the point of view of basic authenticity too, for the wallpaper in any room changes shade depending on whether it is morning or evening, a sunny or a cloudy day.
In organising the scenic area in this way I was pursuing one aim, that of making this clement of the production fit into the general pattern of the chosen solution. In the sense that this is a perfectly normal room, only since there are no walls the house is not simply a house but a part of the great wide world.
This was what determined the significance of the sounds. The wheezing gramophone, the squeaking door, which really ought to be seen to only nobody ever gets round to it, and the clock striking-thcse are not simply naturalistic sound effects, necessary to create atmosphere, but details symbolising the life in this house.
In the course of work on a Gorky play all the components acquire significance for the revelation of the basic motive of the work, Gorky's reason for writing it-his merciless, uncompromising attitude to all that is base and his virile love for the moral health of man-the basis of the harmonious society of the future.
We have five Russian classics in our current repertoire. The characters and ideas in the great models of Russian and world literature retain all their power today and give tremendous scope for the imagination and raise present problems whose solution is essential if there is to be true mastery and a profound understanding of civic duty. Moreover, the classics provide the high criteria in the theatre which are essential in approaching contemporary Soviet plays and in choosing foreign works.
140The classic contains something of value for all times and helps us in our struggle for the new man. Each play in its own way. It is thus wrong to regard the question of interpreting the classics today as a matter for abstract speculation: it is necessary to decide what is of value for today in each given play. And if the essence of the play, that which is most necessary, is revealed from within, then the play will be vitally alive and the characters will not become wax-work figures despite their authentic period costumes and make-up.
In this way contact will be established with the present without any superficial additions or attempts to evoke individual direct correspondences with the present day and contrive to bring the classics up to date with external devices, seeing this as proof that one's production is innovatory.
In general, the question of tradition and innovation remains one of the most vital in current theory, although it seems to me that it has been solved long since in practice in the Soviet theatre where these concepts were always intimately related. Thus, Stanislavsky is unthinkable without the Maly Theatre, just as Meycrhold is unthinkable without Stanislavsky. In My Life in Art Stanislavsky is full of enthusiastic praise for the great Yermolova and Fedotova, as a supporter of their acting method. He makes a theoretical generalisation of their experience, adopting it as his own. For several years Meyerhold went along with the Art Theatre, accumulating experience for the creation of his own new programme on the boards of a young novel theatre.
Continuity in art involves rejection of the obsolete, which is what determines progress, the movement forward to new discoveries and innovations. This is natural, for repetition in art is a step backwards, and we often confuse literal repetition with tradition, a practice which many find convenient, since the proper use of traditions involves ceaseless energetic search for the new. It is far less trouble to adopt the approach that the classics need not be in any way related to the present. This sterile ``museum'' approach to the classics has done a great deal of damage both to the classics and the theatres that produce them in this way, for their painstaking didacticism have made audiences indifferent and even frightened them away.
For me the laws of acting skill discovered by Stanislavsky remain inviolate. In this sense I regard tradition as sacred. But if Stanislavsky were alive today he would find many different solutions, and would search and experiment just as we do to the best of our abilities.
I am convinced that it is essential to have mastered the method of physical action in order to present Brecht properly. True, Stanislavsky never produced Brecht, he was not in time to do so, but we ought not to forget his production of Warm Heart where the characters and their 141 relationships were sharpened to the point of open didacticism, which heightened the reality of what was happening, every step of the scenic action revealing new layers of the human soul.
Here, as in every great teaching, it is the spirit not the letter that counts. And if we regard Stanislavsky as an eternally searching artist, we shall find the mark of his influence in the best creations of world art, just as we shall find that of Mayakovsky, Vakhtangov and Brecht.
Another point about innovation in approaching the classics today. I feel that innovation at present is very much associated with determining the exact genre of a work. Each play contains its own genre key which opens the life-giving spring of the particular nature of the work itself, and not drama, comedy, tragedy, or what have you, in general. The genre a classic is regarded as belonging to is invariably determined by conventions dictated by the aesthetic principles of the age.
Today aesthetic principles are becoming ever richer and more varied, and it is a shame not to take full advantage of the experience of many generations.
Griboyedov intended his Woe from Wit to be a comedy, and indeed it is a comedy according to the formal features of eighteenth-century drama. But when we read the play today and go deeply into its moral significance, its human content, we have every reason to reflect on the real destinies of the heroes of this great work where the passions acquire a tragic impact. Nobody dies: Chatsky drives off in his carriage, and we have every reason to suppose that he will find the strength to continue to live and struggle. But this would be another Chatsky, and until he is reborn we must say goodbye to this Chatsky in the course of the play, and do so properly, without glossing anything over, without smoothing things with century-old cliches, for we arc interested in the man's real destiny in the conditions of Famusov's world and not the restricted conventions of stage comedy.
When working on The Barbarians, I was convinced from the outset that the many directors who regarded it as a play of manners were mistaken. We were not going out of our way to make our production ``different'' but the deeper we delved into the atmosphere of the play, the stronger our conviction became that it was really a tragicomedy.
The clash between provincial barbarians and ``civilised'' barbarians is more acute and dynamic if this genre definition is adopted. The comic becomes genuinely amusing and the dramatic becomes tragic. We endeavoured to achieve this both in the general and in the particular.
In this respect a key point became the moment in the last act when Nadezhda Monakhova, shattered by the collapse of her ideal, embodied in Cherkun, asks Tsyganov to step out into the porch with her. ``With 142 you---anywhere! Even onto the roof!'' he says in reply. And hardly has the laughter subsided in the theatre than a shot rings out. Nadezhda has shot herself.
In many theatres this line was omitted at the request of the actress playing Nadezhda, as reducing the tragic tension. But we can assume that Gorky knew what he was doing when he wrote this line. In this tragic farce set in a small provincial town at the turn of the century people fail to understand one another. And for me this remark was decisive in determining the genre of the play, in revealing the nature of the characters' relationships. I regarded this situation of a clever man, with a kind, loving heart, totally unable to understand another person's feelings, as the quintessence of spiritual barbarism. Tsyganov failed to realise that the wound inflicted on Nadezhda Monakhova might well prove fatal. He hoped that a joke would make everything alright. But for Nadezhda, unaccustomed to making compromises, this was the end, and a tragedy occurs before Tsyganov's eyes.
There are many such examples in this play, and they are all indications of the style and genre. We tried to overlook none of them, in order to bring out the distinctive features of the play that make it unlike any other.
Nowadays form and content are inseparable: the content has become much more important and with it the choice of an appropriate form. There is no offering one to the total exclusion of the other. The form is hidden in the content, and it is our duty to find it. Sometimes this involves throwing overboard all one's preconceptions in order to reveal the psychological clement in a grotesque comedy and pungent tragicomedy in the play of manners.
[143] __ALPHA_LVL1__ TOWARDSThe 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.
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.
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.
144Stage 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 145 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 146 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.
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.
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.
But, I repeat, what I was referring to earlier on was not first impressions but what we in the theatre call ``vision''.
When you read a play you already ``see'' it, and here lies the danger of stylisation, that is, of a preconceived approach.
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.
One can make the following experiment for example. Say ``the Middle Ages'', or ``the Renaissance'', = or ,,the Moscow of the boyars''. 147 What images do they conjure up? The same stereotypes that determine stylisation and banality. Here lie the roots of cliches.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All this is not to say that it is impossible for a director to find an 148 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
149This 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.
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.
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.
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.
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- 150 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 151 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.
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.
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.
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 152 learn to release one's imagination and not bind it at the moment the conception is born.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What methods do I myself have of struggling with cliches and preventing my conception on being cliche-ridden at its inception?
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 153 the dramatist. In other words, to think of what was and not what will be.
This transfer from the future to the past gives a certain psychological impulse to your imagination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This material will provide much food for thought, enabling you to picture the milieu in which the characters live in all its everyday details.
154In 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.
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.
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.
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 155 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
156Anything invented lies in the level of an illusory, associative concept, which must be resisted, since it belongs to the sphere of first vision.
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.
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''.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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- 157 graphic way of thinking combined with theatrical means of embodiment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[158] __ALPHA_LVL1__ GENRE I spoke of the ``novel of life'' as a
means of finding the poetic image of a play. However, before
establishing his conception and achieving its scenic embodiment the director
must first determine the genre of the work. At this stage he must
regard the play not as a novel of life but as a means of reflecting reality
from a certain angle, requiring the intrinsic degree of convention. Only
thus can he find the concrete scenic expression.
There arc two aspects to the question of genre as far as the director is concerned; one is feeling the work, understanding and determining its style and genre and the other is the realisation of these features in the actor.
What is genre? I explain it as follows to my students. Here is an object which we must reflect. Let us hold up a mirror in front of it. If we take an ordinary mirror and place it directly in front of the object, we shall see a straightforward reflection of the object, only the other way round. But if we take a curved mirror the image will be different. And if we place the mirror not directly in front of the object but at an angle, the reflection will be altered even more.
Film cameramen know that different objects require a different object-glass. We find a set of mirrors, object-glasses, filters and lenses 159 being employed by writers too in the sense that they use different means of reflection for different plays and subjects. There are those who only look at life through a lateral view-finder, while others only recognise sharp-angle object-glasses, and yet others employ stereoscopic equipment. Some reflect life in a clear picture with sharp contrasts, others very softly and blurred as though slightly out of focus, some in colour, others in black and white.
Every work reflects life in one way or another. Genre is the manner In which it is reflected, the viewpoint from which the author regards reality as refracted in the artistic image. Our task is to penetrate the nature of the author's conception, and determine the quality and degree of convention he employs.
The more profoundly our study of this manner, the closer we shall approach the individual style and manner of the author in question, the unique features of the work that concerns us.
If we manage to achieve this same viewpoint employing the means of theatrical art we shall apprehend the genre features of the work.
What distinguishes one play from another, one genre from another? Above all the ``given circumstances'', which are different in every case, in Gorky and Chekhov, Ostrovsky and Pushkin, Shakespeare and Moliere, Pogodin and Arbuzov.
The means of reflecting life is the artist's vision, as it were, and the viewpoint depends not only on the writer's ability to see life in certain of its manifestations but also on his reason for choosing to present one particular slice of life rather than another. If we understand this we shall also understand why it is that Saltykov-Shchedrin sees a man in one reflection and Chekhov, for example, sees him in another. The facts underlying two works may be identical. Sometimes we find two authors presenting a similar period, milieu, and given circumstances, and yet the works are quite different because the authors have reflected them in a totally different manner.
Let us take, for example, two works that are very different but where the material itself is very similar as regards the time and place of the action, the milieu depicted and the general atmosphere. I have in mind Pisemsky's novel A Thousand Souls and Saltykov-Shchedrin's sketches about provincial town bureaucrats. When working on a production of the latter at the Comedy Theatre in Leningrad, I was suddenly struck by the great similarity between the events in the work of the great satirist and part two of A Thousand Souls. I realised that here was the same provincial town, the same district office, the same way of life, the same people. It was as though the two writers had lived in the same town, knew the same people and were shocked by the same events. The two works they wrote have the same object but completely 160 different ways of reflecting it, different vision, different thoughts refracted in the work through the writer's prism, through the ``magic crystal'' to use Pushkin's expression.
Reading these works, we realise they are written in different genres.
In the case of the works of Anatole France and Kuprin; for example, it is easy to see the difference between them, since the object of reflection, the life reflected in their works is completely different, and it is always easier to discern the difference between contrasting things than things that are similar. It is far more difficult when the object of portrayal is one and the same world taken in contrasting aspects.
The bureaucrat in A Thousand Souls and Saltykov-Shchedrin's bureaucrat arc similar characters acting in similar circumstances. Should there be a difference in their scenic embodiment? If so, what method should one use to show that the same person is seen through the eyes of different writers?
A superficial acquaintance with Stanislavsky's teaching has produced a certain amount of confusion in the minds of some directors. They tend to confuse the concept of real-life truth with the concept of artistic truth. Truth in life and truth in art are entirely different things. Different artists describe the same fact quite differently. Their real-life truth is the same, but their artistic truth is different.
When Stanislavsky insists that one must be equally truthful in comedy, tragedy, melodrama and vaudeville he is referring to artistic truth and not real-life truth.
One must always be truthful and natural on the stage. Although people don't talk in verse in life, in the tragedies of Shakespeare or Pushkin this is perfectly natural. In real life animals have not the gift of speech, yet we are quite prepared to accept that they have in a fable.
Directors who attempt to find some general truth common to all plays and dramatists, who try to present life with photographic accuracy and always keep the same simplicity and naturalness in the acting are really doing constant violence to the truth, distorting it. Such directors blame Stanislavsky and the realist method for monotony, drabness and artistic levelling, when the whole source of the trouble is not fidelity to Stanislavsky and the method of socialist realism but betrayal of it.
Stanislavsky and socialist realism do indeed require truth all the way. But truth in a comedy of manners and truth in vaudeville are quite different, as are truth in a romantic drama and truth in a tragedy,, or Vishnevsky's truth in The Optimistic Tragedy and Korneichuk's truth in The Death of the Squadron.
There is Chekhov's world, Tolstoi's world, Gorky's world and Stendhal's world. Every writer has his own special world in every work. 161 Gorky's Old Man and The Philistines are quite different. Thus one must seek differences even between the works of the one author. Gorky's The Zykovs must be played in one key and The Artamonovs in another, The Barbarians one way and Yegor Bulychov another way. There is nothing easier than to find similarities between them: their similarity is obvious, for all these works are in the realist manner. It is important to find their specific features, the differences between them.
In Stanislavsky's teaching we find a concept which, if developed in practice, will lead us to the correct conclusions. It is ``the nature of feelings'' inherent in a work, the spiritual essence of a work. Every play is a new world, and this world has its own special nature of feelings, requiring its own special ``tuning'' of the actors' soul. This is what gives rise to scenic truth. We know in theory that there is no single general truth, but in practice we do not always manage to find the truth that is the only valid one for a given play.
How then can we determine the genre of a play? As I see it, the nature of feelings necessary for a given play is to be established according to the author's method of selecting the given circumstances and the attitude to the audience, the extent to which the audience is involved in the actor's existence on the stage. Indeed the difference between authors lies in their method of selecting circumstances.
What is the difference between Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, for example, from the point of view of their selection and arrangement of the circumstances? I have found that in The Idiot, for instance, each scene begins with what could well be the climax of some other play, even the most tense and exciting play. In Dostoyevsky there cannot be the free calm flow of action characteristic of Ostrovsky's plays. We arc dealing with a completely different approach, a different method of selecting circumstances. Unless this is found in staging Dostoyevsky the result will be a slicc-of-life drama, which is not Dostoyevsky. We must first possess the key in order to determine how the production should be ``tuned''.
Finding the scenic solution of a particular work means embodying in scenic forms the author's unique view of life, finding the correct viewpoint, holding up the mirror at the angle from which the author reflected the object and life.
This means finding a scenic solution appropriate to the author's intention, or, in the language of the theatre, finding the degree of convention, the nature of the feelings, of the given writer and play.
The great Stanislavsky left us a vast legacy, including the practical methods of achieving truth on the stage-his so-called ``system''. The first half of our century has seen the emergence and assimilation of the new principles represented by the great artistic experience of Stani- 162 slavsky and his theatre. But today an extremely difficult problem faces us. The laws of the actor's art discovered by Stanislavsky, that is, the laws of the actor's organic life on the stage, remain as valid as ever, but the method of achieving this truth has been elaborated by .some of his disciples mainly in one genre, the psychological drama. Stanislavsky in his practical work as stage-director showed himself a master at penetrating the most diverse genres. Suffice it to remember his Warm Heart and The Marriage of Figaro. But the method developed by his disciples and applied in theatrical practice today is really only applicable t:> one dramaturgical trend, and when we try to apply it to a work that illuminates reality in a somewhat different manner (Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mayakovsky and Shakespeare immediately spring to mind) we find many ``blank spots'' in it. In such cases we do not follow Stanislavsky's behests, we change them.
Take Molierc's Le Medecin Malgre Lui, for example, the scene where Sganarellc receives a beating. The whole scene is perfectly simple and straightforward, but it is incredibly difficult to avoid playing it according to the familiar laws of the psychological theatre. It is essential here to find other laws, the laws of people's theatre.
Before Stanislavsky complete anarchy reigned in the theatre. The great achievement of the founders of the Art Theatre was the fact that they led the whole company of actors to realism in the most precise •sense of the word, to counterbalance the histrionic, ``theatrical'' style that had previously been in vogue.
But fifty years have passed since this great reform, and we are still content to place the mirror directly in front of the object we are reflecting, when we ought to be concerned with more complicated matters, with developing our method further, with achieving truth by using the mirror to reflect the object from other, unexpected angles. In •other words we should go forward with Stanislavsky and not drag the theatre back to old, obsolete forms.
The experience of another great master of the Soviet stage is unfortunately often underestimated-Vakhtangov, who developed Stanislavsky's teaching on the basis of his method. Vakhtangov's Princess Turandot was his practical manifesto against the stifling of theatricality. It seems to me that while remaining a devoted follower of his great teacher and adhering to the law he had discovered, Vakhtangov went further than Stanislavsky. He tried to do in the highly conventional genre of the fairy-tale what Stanislavsky had done in the psychological drama. The whole production was based on direct communication with the auditorium, and showed that while this genre demanded application of the same laws as The Seagull, the different truth required a fundamentally different method.
163Vakhtangov is an example of a genuine masterly penetration of Stanislavsky's system. It seems to me that W arm Heart was most probably Stanislavsky's answer to Vakhtangov. Accepting Vakhtangov's challenge, and deep down inside him agreeing with him, Stanislavsky made his production combine psychological drama and grotesque.
I do not wish to employ existing definitions of genre since I find them far too general, and the important thing is to approach each play in an individual manner, to avoid generalising unwarrantedly.
If we make a deliberate attempt to define the individual features of a given play and writer, we shall find there is no such thing as comedy in general or tragedy in general. The terms drama, tragedy, comedy, and so on are so general as to bring us no nearer a correct solution. Nor does it help much if we qualify them with such epithets as `` sliceof-life'', ``lyrical'', ``romantic'', ``satirical'', ``salon'' and so on. If I have managed to understand an author properly I need not worry about finding a literary definition. This does not mean that we should completely ignore this question, but seven or eight terms are totally inadequate to express the great variety to be found in drama. A single term has to do for a tragedy by Shakespeare or Victor Hugo, Greek tragedy and Pushkin's Boris Godunov, and to lump together the works of Ilf and Petrov and Jerome Jerome under the one definition, comedy, is to conceal the tremendous difference in their humour.
Why did Chekhov call his plays comedies? He was terribly afraid of theatrical boredom and was afraid that his plays would be staged as dramas, and would thus fail to put across what he was endeavouring to present. He had a strong aversion for primitiveness, sentimentality and theatricality in the bad meaning of the word. Chekhov was polemicising with the theatre of his day. The Art Theatre had only just begun struggling for a new kind of theatre. He was still rankled by the recent failure of The Seagull at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, and was afraid of the ``accepted'' means of scenic expression. By writing ``comedy'' he was eliminating the danger. Let them play it as a comedy, it would be sad anyway. But it was not up to them to try and make it so.
It seems to me that in this Chekhov was struggling with the ubiquitous means of scenic expression of his time. If we recall Chekhov's conversations with Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko we can sec that he was constantly endeavouring to bring the interpreters nearer to the truth.
Our aim as directors is to ensure that the means of theatrical art serve to achieve the clearest and fullest expression of the author's intention and, by seeing life through his eyes, to find the standpoint chosen by the author himself for presenting and reflecting real-life •events. This is an extremely difficult task, and it must be solved 164 in all the components of production-pictorial, plastic, rhythmic and so on-in everything of which the director disposes for determining how the spotlight of the author's eye is trained on the stream of life, on the combinations of human relationships, on the conflicts, on the material environment in which people move and which the author needs in order to express his ideological standpoint, to reveal what it was that moved him to write his play. We must express all this in scenic terms, and there must be perfect correspondence between the author's wave-length at the time of writing and the wave-length on which the theatre company headed by the director is working, trying to find the scenic expression appropriate to the author's train of thought.
The director's job here is similar to that of the book illustrator-to penetrate the spirit of the author's imagination so that the picture accurately expresses his train of thought. Sometimes the correspondence is so remarkable that other artists arc forced to reckon with it. Even Picasso in his Don Quixote is unable to get away from Dore, for the latter's solution was so brilliant as to have become canonical. Time naturally dictates changes, and in Picasso's drawing full use was made of the means of graphic art available in the twentieth century, but Dorc's understanding of Cervantes, of the author's method of presenting reality is so brilliant as to defy all challenge. The power of scenic penetration into a dramatic work should be measured in exactly the same way. We must strive to find in the art of the stage what Dore found in graphic art.
I am not suggesting that the stage-director must be simply an illustrator. On the contrary, the director's job is to penetrate the essence of a work and use expressive means to create a corresponding new artistic image.
It is the dramatist who determines the content and form of a work. Our task is to hear, see and feel the author's individual awareness, the unique nature of a play, and translate this into scenic terms. Naturally, like the author, the director must be familiar with the people, the life and events presented in the play.
But the scenic image in every case must be sought within the work itself. Every author and every work has its own special system of conventions, its ``rules of play''. If the director does not like them, he should not attempt to produce the play. But if you like the play you should have the grace to discover and obey the author's rules and refrain from inventing your own. Indeed, discovering the ``rules of play'' is the director's prime task.
This does not mean that the director merely sees life as reflected by the playwright and that he is thus relieved of the duty of knowing 165 life himself. The point is that the ways of reflecting life for author and director are fundamentally different.
While for the dramatist life is the source of inspiration, for the director only the play can be the direct source of inspiration. The author reveals his attitude to life through the play, the director through his production of the play.
The director, like everybody else, sees life from his own particular angle. But when confronted with life reflected and transformed by the author, the director must take another look at life from the author's standpoint. He must determine as accurately as possible the standpoint from which the author regards reality, the palette, compositional devices, the focus and ``exposure time'', and all the individual features of the author's method of reflecting life. Only then will the knowledge, impressions and sense of life of the director and the cast be properly brought to bear on the production and clothe the text in flesh and blood, enriching the author's vision of life.
Only life will suggest to the director the appropriate ``rules of play'', the only ones suitable for the particular play in question, and the choice of expressive means that will ultimately determine the realism of the chosen convention.
Unfortunately, we often sec directors ``enriching'' a play with their own vision of life, ignoring the dramatist's standpoint. We can even recall productions where the director's attitude to life was in direct opposition to that of the author, so that we had the action of The Inspector-General transferred to St. Petersburg, Chatsky appearing now as a Decembrist, now as a liberal-chatterbox^ or Karandyshev in Ostrovsky's Dowerlesx Bride reciting verses by Yescnin! . . .
There arc cases where the author indicates his attitude by subtle hints and the director decides to make everything more explicit; or the aiithor expresses his attitude to people, facts and events in a forthright didactic manner and the director sees fit to ``soften'' the punch. Or the author is indifferent to details of the material environment and the director regards this as a weakness which he seeks to correct; or again the author has chosen to present the general through the particular and the director prefers an overall view.
As a rule directors are moved by the best of intentions when they perform these operations on a play. Often when commencing work on a production a director embarks on a painful search to decide whether to ``tone down'' or ``heighten'' the author, whether to ``reveal'' or `` conceal'', ``narrow down'' or ``expand''. There is a tendency to regard implicit trust in the author as a sign of impotence on the part of the director, so that for many it has become infra dig to follow the author.
But it is essential to accept the primacy of the author in deed as 166 well as in word. Otherwise the director will inevitably come into conflict with the content and form of the play and the form of his production will not correspond to the form of the work, but will even be opposed to it, despite all good intentions or progressive views.
The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.
It is essential for the director to think in the author's genre-key, to tune in to the author's wave-length. It is thus as important for me to find the author's genre as it is for the actor to find the fundamental core, the ``kernel'' of his role. If the actor has penetrated the core of his part he can live the role in any circumstances and not only at rehearsals and in the situations given by the author. So with the director. Once he has discovered the core of the play he is capable of writing one or several more acts, perhaps less skilfully than the dramatist, not only according to the logic of the work-which even the novice can do-but in the same key as the author would have done it.
In apprehending the nature of the author I make use of everything connected with the moment the work arose in his creative laboratory. I have to be able to conceive not only the real socio-economic situation in which the author lived but every aspect of his way of life, including, and indeed especially, his personal life. In short, I must find the impulse (which we can never rise to ourselves in the case of a genius) which promoted the appearance of the work in question.
Sometimes one comes across fascinating coincidences. Thus Lermontov wrote his poem The Caucasus on September 24, 1826. If we turn to his diary we find that he was travelling along the Georgian Military Highway between Vladikavkaz and Tiflis. He jotted down the following: ``... a terribly tiring journey. Am I ever going to arrive? The driver is a horrible bore and a boor to boot. I don't feel a bit inclined to talk to him.'' At some point the poet gave the order to stop, got out of the carriage and walked off into the mountains. Then he came back and we have another brief entry: ``We're off again . . . .'' It was in the intervening twenty minutes or so that Lermontov conceived the idea for his poem The Caucasus.
Or take Kuprin's reminiscences of Chekhov. Kuprin had come to Yalta to see Chekhov who was very ill at the time. He found Chekhov in extremely low spirits. All day some authoress had been insisting on seeing him but Chekhov's near ones had been holding her at bay. Eventually Chekhov's sister, Maria Pavlovna, relented and let her have her way. Poor Chekhov suffered real agonies for four hours with her, and when she finally left he was a pitiful sight. He could not speak to anyone and immediately retired to his room. Kuprin spent a sleepless night watching Chekhov's window where the lamp burned 167 beneath its green shade until morning. And in the morning Chekhov read his short story ``The Drama''. The same fact that was a sad, dramatic story for Kuprin was seen by Chekhov in a humorous light, and made into an amusing story where there is not a shadow of pain. My reason for citing these examples is that they illustrate very well how the connection between real-life events and the creative impulse is by no means always a straightforward one. An attempt to discover the origin of the creative process helps the director to tune in to the author's wave-length.
In order to grasp the genre and style of a play it is necessary to seek the emotional impulse that moved the author to write it. One can make manifold interesting discoveries provided one searches intently without dabbling in literary-historical analysis or abandoning the emotional criterion. It is possible to plough through countless volumes without coming any nearer to understanding a work, and it is possible to read very little and find something extraordinarily valuable and useful. The director's mood at the time when he began work on a production, that is at the stage where he is familiarising himself with the work itself, is of tremendous importance here. Every director must remember cases when a most interesting production failed to produce the expected effect on a person one felt was bound to appreciate it. I attribute this to the influence of a frame of mind on the work. There is the theory of conditioning in psychology. The organism is conditioned to some extent by environment-by temperature and various external irritants. Man's entire psycho-physical organism adapts itself to some extent to such factors, and this process of adaptation can also take place in the imagination.
I remember a most interesting experiment a leading Georgian psychologist conducted in the days when I worked at the Theatrical Institute in Tbilisi. The subject was asked to close his eyes and hold out his hands palms up, and two identical balls were placed on them, either wooden or metal, of exactly the same size and weight. Then he was asked which one was the heavier. He replied that they were both the same. Then a heavier ball was placed on one hand and he was asked: Is this one heavier? He said yes. Next the original ball was put back and he was asked if it was heavier. He said it was. Why? Because his organism had become adapted to the weight and he no longer felt the difference. The organism was tuned not directly but through the imagination.
This is the principle on which art is based. A person who is not naturally disposed to this will never make a good actor. A person with a purely rational mind where reason outweighs imagination cannot produce a real impact on others. Here is a whole scientific theory in 168 embryo form, which unfortunately has never been developed beyond this stage.
The fact that a particular production fails to impress me does not necessarily mean that it is bad. It could be that I was in a special frame of mind, that life had conditioned my attitude to what takes place on the stage. Thus our complex psychological processes are all reflected in our creative work and our perception of a work of art, so that the circumstances in which one reads a play assumes a special importance.
I attach singular importance to my first acquaintance with a work. I know there arc some directors who can acquaint themselves with a play in the bus or in the lobby of the Ministry of Culture. But I never do this, for I am afraid of getting a false impression. The first impression is extremely important, and we often let it slip.
When I speak of mood conditioning one's reading of a play, I have in mind the need to anticipate the nature of the feelings which one will have to meet later on, in the second part of our work, our work with the actors.
Another extremely important task is understanding the author's logic. For example, the logic of Dostoyevsky is quite different from the logic of Chekhov. Compared to Chekhov, Dostoyevsky is wordy. Chekhov insisted on conciseness, while Dostoyevsky's phrases are heavy and it is by no means always clear what he is getting at. His writing abounds in unfinished thoughts, and it is often necessary to reread a passage to discover its essential content.
In working on The Idiot we found that each small scene contained enough material for a five-act play. The scene at Ganya's house, for example, could easily be made into a separate full-length play. Yet the precise form, the ``completeness'' of Chekhov-so much so that you can feel the very music of the composition-is absent in Dostoyevsky.
Even the material world has a very different significance in a work by Dostoyevsky than in, for example, a work by Tolstoi. Remember how Tolstoi presents Prince Andrei's conversation with his father in War and Peace. He begins by describing old Bolkonsky's room in great detail, drawing our attention to the frame on the wall, the woodwork table and so on. Naturally, in a stage production of War and Peace none of this can be left out.
In Dostoyevsky's works on the other hand all our attention is focussed on the things that play a definite part in the development of the conflict, the action and the nature of the characters. If Nastasya Filippovna's portrait is mentioned in The Idiot it is because it will have a fateful influence on the life of Prince Myshkin. If Dostoyevsky describes the red sofa in Rogozhin's room, it is because it is here that 169 Myshkin and Rogozhin will lie after the murder of Nastasya Filippovna. If he draws our attention to the portrait of Rogozhin's father, and Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna notice an extraordinary likeness between father and son, this is not simply an atmospheric detail but is yet another link in the chain of events that will lead the heroes to their fatal end.
One must on no account introduce things on the stage that will not lead to the effect the author intended. This is a most important point if we are to penetrate the atmosphere, the life, of a work.
All these points must be analysed in order to understand the style and genre of a play.
There are some very crude distinguishing features indicative of the genre of a play, such as whether it is written in verse or prose. But we must concern ourselves with more complicated matters. Take dialogue, for example. Do the characters speak long lines, or is every little remark a new character? We often ignore such questions, considering them of slight importance and even primitive.
Or take stage directions. It is a common practice today, almost ``good form'', to completely ignore them. Yet Gorky deemed it worthwhile to give long descriptions of the scene of action, as much as half a page, and is there any reason why we would attach less importance to such directions than to the dialogue, the characters and so on? I am not suggesting that we should follow the directions slavishly. The aim should be fidelity to the essence rather than to the letter.
It is interesting to note that when the Moscow Art Theatre staged a production of The Philistines that closely followed the text of the play, Gorky insisted that they had not got it right. Yet when the same theatre did a production of 'The Lower Depths in which the designer Simov drew widely on his impression of life at Khitrov market and got away from the stage directions on the whole, Gorky was delighted. V. Dmitriyev's design for Yegor Bulychov was totally different from the solution suggested by Gorky in the stage directions, and yet Gorky was satisfied with the result. It follows that blind observance of the author's directions is not enough.
One must pay attention to the stage directions only in so far as they concern your main interest in a play, the author's purpose in writing it, his reasons for wishing to draw attention to certain things rather than others. We should devote most of our attention to the nature of the narrative. A play, whatever else it is, is at the same time a work of literature, and we should regard it as such at the first stage of our work on it, endeavouring to interpret the directions from a literary point of view-there is no need to be afraid of the word ``litcrary''-and read their meaning. We must pay attention to the manner in which 170 the directions are set forth, for they are the only places where the author himself addresses us directly in the play.
The stage directions have a direct conditioning effect on the work and it would be wrong to regard them as purely auxiliary and subsidiary.
The relationship between the actors and the audience is another factor determining the genre of a work, and the nature of this relationship is inherent in the very fabric of the play, in its content and form of literary expression. At the very beginning of the performance the actor informs the audience of the ``rules of play'' that are to be applied on this occasion. In some case this involves speaking directly to the audience, in others it means acting as though there were no audience. This communication with the audience can be very complex. Thus, by his very behaviour on the stage the actor can warn and hint, or encourage confidence. Moliere's Harpagon speaks directly to the audience, whereas in Chekhov's The Three Sisters it is as though there were a fourth invisible but impenetrable wall separating the stage from the auditorium. The relationship between actors and audience does not necessarily have to be openly declared but the director must always clearly define it if he is to determine the genre of the work.
In our production of When the Acacias Bloom at the Gorky Theatre the performance opens with an actor coming on and announcing: `` Today we are performing a play,'' to which another actor adds: ``A concert.'' This latter remark gives the key for the whole performance, the key in which the relationship between the actors and the audience is to proceed and to which all the actors must adhere throughout.
To take a simple example, we theatre folk have a tradition of getting together and performing improvised sketches for one another's benefit and entertainment. Here the nature of the feelings arises spontaneously, without rehearsal, and it is simply a question of beginning in a certain key and continuing in it. Such a get-together may be a success or a flop, witty or flat, but there is absolutely no doubt about the object and the nature of communication with the audience. If the general public were admitted the effect would be quite different, for a new audience would require new ``rules of play''.
One must have a very good knowledge of people's thoughts and interests in order to achieve the right sort of attitude to the circumstances in question and live at the auditorium temperature, as it were. Some sort of link across the footlights is inevitable anyway. Take a one-man sketch, that good old stand-by, a study of a fisherman, for example, performed by the dramatic actor Lebcdev and the comedian Arkady Raikin. They will naturally employ completely different means of communicating with the audience as dictated by their objectives. 171 Raikin's performance will be more concise and expressive in accordance with his aim of putting across as much as possible as quickly as possible, whereas Lebedev's performance will be more detailed and authentic, since his aim is to involve the audience in his scenic life to the best of his ability.
So far I am speaking in terms of the point of departure, without which it is quite impossible to present the author's world in a genuinely original manner.
Thus, the right to draw out the time is also contracted with the audience. It is not only technology, but a means of selection of the given circumstances.
In the finale of our production of Korneichuk's The Death of the, Squadron, when the sailors came on one by one, there were people who said: ``Come off it! Enough's enough!'' Such people had not accepted the ``rules of play''. Suppose you have somebody standing smoking in silence. The first second it is quite alright, by the third it is becoming a bit of a bore and by the fifth you may have a sneaking suspicion that someone is pulling your leg.
Thus understanding the genre nature of a play for the director means knowing what contact to establish with the audience. Often the director and actors feel this spontaneously, intuitively, but we ought to be endeavouring to make this a deliberate, conscious approach.
During rehearsals for Purveyors of Glory Stanislavsky created just the atmosphere the work required. Having turned in to the author's wave-length, he infected the actors with the power of his genius and in the course of rehearsals guided them into the appropriate nature of feelings. It was this that determined the style of the comedy, the degree of convention.
In working on The Fox and the Grapes we decided it should be played as a ``market-place'' debate. There was thus no need for authentic real-life details, and the scenic area and all the various elements of the production were subordinated to the debate on the meaning of freedom.
When we began rehearsing Gorky's The Barbarians we decided that the genre was tragicomedy. I saw the contrast between the humorous and the tragic to constitute the key to the solution of this work, and thus had to bear it in mind in selecting and combining the ``given circumstances''. We strove to stress it in every ``piece'' of the work in order to create a consistent line of action throughout.
It was necessary to ensure that the actor derived pleasure from the combination of humour and tragedy in his role, from the constant combination of hot and cold, black and white, and all this within the framework of the author's logic and external authenticity.
172I make a special point of the latter in this case, since unless this condition is observed it is only too easy to slip into the wrong genre, the genre of Gogol or Shchedrin, for example, who are wont to ignore strict external verisimilitude and in whose works a powerful element of psychological grotesque often holds sway. There is nothing of this in Gorky's combination of tragedy and comedy, and the acting must be styled accordingly.
As I see The Barbarians, the whole play is based on the principle of combining comedy and tragedy. At times Gorky exaggerates the comedy to the point where it becomes grotesque and truly horrifying. There are no exceptions in the play: every character who seems funny at first glance turns out to be profoundly human. Even Redozubov, who to begin with appears as a provincial scarecrow.
The humour lies only on the surface-Redozubov putting up posts in the middle of the road that are no earthly use to anybody, and insisting that his son wear a fur coat in summer to make him lose weight. But unless there is tragic paternal love and the drama of a life of failure behind this facade, unless one feels a touch of human warmth, the essence of Gorky's character will be missed entirely.
Or take Golovastikov. He is a mean snooper and spy, an extremely nasty piece of work, an epitome of vice. Yet in him all this is funny and is presented in the ``given circumstances''. However, there is another, more important thing, which is tragic. He is a martyr patiently bearing his cross, for he knows that he is intensely disliked by all and accepts it as his preordained lot. He is convinced that his deeds are the will of God, and this is not only humorous, it is horrifying. The essence of character is thus a combination of dispicability and martyrdom.
Or take the doctor, making his thirty-eighth declaration of love to Monakhova. When he gets down on his knees before her there must be a moment in which the audience experiences a feeling of awe at the sight of a human heart laid bare before them. But a moment later he drops his glasses and Monakhova exclaims: ``A fine lover you are!'', and he is once more laughable.
I regard this contrast between the humorous and the tragic to be the key to all the characters and the whole play. When Lidia Ivanovna says: ``How pitiful these women are!'' one is tempted to laugh, because she does not realise that she is every bit as pitiful as the women she is deriding. Here the humour is of a somewhat different kind, since she has a rather special nature. Yet even so, even in this, the most neutral of the characters in the play, the combination of humour and tragedy is undoubtedly present.
173The interpretation of The Barbarians as a tragicomedy, it seems to me, serves to bring out the author's idea most sharply and is appropriate to his particular manner, distinguishing him from say, Chekhov. If this approach is realised in every single element of the scenic action, the appropriate style of acting will emerge. That is why I was not content simply to take the ``given circumstances'' as they were but sought the key to selecting them, the manner of scenic acting necessary for this particular play. And I tried to use this key to open the characters in the play. This involved various tasks, some more difficult than others.
I have often seen Monakhov played simply as a tragic, awesome figure. But to forget that Monakhov was leader of the local firemen's band, that he was the ``life and soul'' of provincial town life, the most ``aristocratic'' figure on the local scene, to forget how proud he was to have for a wife the most sublime and remarkable woman in the whole town, is to lose the comic element in this character, so that one is left with a purely dramatic solution to the role which fails to reveal the true essence Gorky intended.
Let us take a more complicated case-Cherkun. The humour in this character derives from the fact that here is a man who while boasting strength and affirming the collapse of the old order, turns out, when put to the test, to be a typical soulless philistine. At the same time, he is horrifying in his inhumanity and indifference to his fellow men. If Cherkun is played in a rough, sharp manner, the character is flat. It is necessary to seek Cherkun's weakness in his strength. This is very subtly presented in the play itself. Cherkun displays resolution in driving away Dunka's helpless husband, yet is completely helpless when faced by the strong Monakhova. Cherkun combines apparent strength with inherent weakness.
Note how Gorky pulls the wool over the audience's eyes. Up to the middle of Act Three Cherkun is a perfectly irreproachable positive hero. There is only one warning detail that cautions us (like the green belt worn by Chekhov's Natasha) and that is his rude treatment of his wife. And what a great surprise lies in store for us in Act Four!
Determining the genre of a play helps us in our practical approach to what is known as the scenic nature of the feelings. This can be achieved in different ways, but it is essential to set oneself the task of discovering in a play those features which provide a clue to the only correct selection of the given circumstances. This is the beginning of the work which will bring us closer to apprehending the nature of the feelings in the acting and will help us later on when together with the actor we come to search for the motives and paths which will reveal the world of the play in question.
174Determining the genre of the play, later taken to its conclusion through the live actor, is the least explored sphere in the whole of our methodology today, a real terra incognita. The Soviet theatre has been very successful in penetrating the genre of plays from the point of view of means of scenic expression-the scenic solution, production devices, music, etc.-but we know very little about how this is expressed in the manner of acting.
The director must help the actor find the right key for his performance, help him determine the difference in the manner of performing different plays and authors.
Every author offers his own ``rules of play'', his own ``boiling point'', his own time count. To determine exactly what it is and reveal it via the actor is an extremely difficult but satisfying task. There are classic examples of this.
The Vakhtangov Theatre production of Princess Turandot has gone down in the history of the Soviet theatre because Vakhtangov and the whole company found the exact key to the play and to the audience, with their modern interpretation of an old fairy-tale.
The four masqucs-Tartaglia, Pantalone, Brighella and Truffaldinowerc the best possible means of expressing an ironic attitude to the tragic events of the life of Princess Turandot, Prince Kalaf, and King Altown. A great deal has been written about the production, and it can be taken as proven that such brilliance could never have been achieved without the inspired, bold, highly original acting of Shchukin, Simonov, Mansurova, Zavadsky and many others. They played the sages and the figures of state as naive as children, princesses who arc as capricious as spoilt society ladies, and femmes fatales every bit as ``fatalc'' as the heroines of the silent films in a remarkably serious and almost dramatic manner.
Stanislavsky's production of Warm Heart could never have been what it was but for the fact that Moskvin, Tarkhanov, Khmelyov and other members of the cast believed that this particular play of Ostrovsky's should be played in those particular years in a pungent psychological-grotesque style.
Our big trouble is that our actors tend to act exactly the same in all plays irrespective of their genre and style. In order to enter into the author's manner and style, into the genre, it is not enough to find the spatial solution, the degree of convention and authenticity in the action and environment, and various other aspects of the director's activity: this is not even half the job. The most important thing is to find the style of acting appropriate to this particular work and no other.
175All too often we are treated to productions where the director has found an interesting and basically correct interpretation, but the acting is exactly the same as it was in the production of the day before in the theatre's repertoire.
Sometimes an actor or actress senses the style quite spontaneously, intuitively, but to date our understanding of this is inadequate to provide the basis for a method. In the Art Theatre production of lartuffe, for example, in my opinion V. Toporkov was the only one of the otherwise excellent cast who acted as Molierc demanded.
It cannot be said that the rest of the cast did not act according to the logic of their roles or failed to achieve organic life on the stage. The trouble was that they were not acting in the emotional key necessary for Moliere's comedy.
While the Art Theatre has been remarkably successful in finding the author's style and the appropriate manner of acting in the plays of Chekhov and Gorky, Tolstoi's The Fruits of Enlightenment and A. Kron's Deep Reconnaissance, as soon as it comes to plays that reflect reality from a sharper angle and employ a greater degree of convention we are dealing not with a method applied consciously and consistently by the whole company but with a few instances of purely instinctive feeling for the author's style and manner.
It is necessary to find the buttons that must be pressed in order to open the door to the nature of the feelings of the author in question. Leonardo discovered the laws of perspective and they are permanently valid. We also have at our disposal laws that are permanently valid for portraying live human beings. But we must find different ways of applying these laws, and this is an extremely difficult task.
As I see it, it is a question of finding such techniques as will enable the actor to live and act in accordance with the nature of a particular work which has its own special slant on life, and not simply exist organically ``in general''. In other words it is a question of creating the one and only appropriate environment for such acting.
In this sense I regard Vakhtangov's Princess Turandot as a masterpiece not only by virtue of its ``socio-theatrical'' significance but also because of the brilliant way the organic life of the actors was found throughout the scenic action of a highly ``theatrical'' play.
The whole production was a vivid demonstration of Vakhtangov's famous slogan ``Even in the circus one can and must act according to the system''. While being highly theatrical in its external effects, basicimprovisation was subordinated to elements of the system.
It often happens that a director correctly grasps the genre of a play, but fails dismally to introduce it in his work with the actors. He is impatient to achieve the desired result and is unable to gradually and 176 consistently lead the actor towards it. And the actor too frequently wants to embrace what he considers to be the whole but is really something vague and general, endeavouring to draw this out from beginning to end.
I remember seeing a performance of The Three Sisters where this was very much the case. I was absolutely horrified by the way Natasha was played in Act One as a highly unpleasant person when the most important thing is to show what she has that could make an intelligent and subtle man like Andrei Prozorov fall in love with her. Natasha must be absolutely charming and attractive. There is just one warning detail later on-thc green belt. But this actress had already put all her cards on the table in the first act.
I repeat: for me the ideal examples of felicitous discovery of the appropriate style of acting are Warm Heart and Princess Turandot. This is an unattainable ideal, but one that we should nevertheless aspire towards.
I am not suggesting that I know how to reveal the nature of scenic feelings, that during my own rehearsals I am a hundred per cent successful in conjuring up a single nature of feelings all the time. In order to determine the nature of the feelings it is necessary to reveal the fundamental characters of the heroes and the actors' artistic credo. This is the stage of elementary multiplication tables, as it were, and we still have a long way to go to higher maths but one must have a high ideal in life.
Every new production should involve some new advance in art. And there is no panacea: whenever we come to examine the reasons for a failure we find that they are manifold.
Many chance elements creep in, there are various reasons to account for a failure to understand a work properly, and so it is difficult to find a general rule. Some critics do try to discern a general pattern by devising a theory and the proceeding to make the facts fit the preconceived design. Nothing of any use is going to come from this approach. What we need is a consciously defined ideal. And if you see & grain of truth somewhere, analyse it in order to derive benefit from it.
The question of genre is extremely complicated and very little has emerged by way of theories of its practical (scenic) application. Since aesthetics arc offering us so little in this respects, those of us who are not professional art theoreticians have no alternative but to seek the answers to these questions in practice. One thing is certain: unless we find the answers we arc not going to make any headway.
[177] __ALPHA_LVL1__ REALISING Once we have discovered the genre of
the play, we proceed to the task of translating it into scenic terms,
realising our conception in theatrical forms, when the degree of
convention, the whole material side of the production, has been
determined, the author's style is clear, and the director has already
anticipated the ``nature of the feelings'', the time has come to pass to the
next stage of the director's work-the shaping and realisation of the
conception.
The director must work on the first and second stages of a production independently, and only when he is familiar with all the material and has penetrated the spirit of the play, and has determined its genre, can he consider himself ready to work with the actors and set about shaping the plan of the work and realising it in concrete terms.
There are two basic approaches to work on the conception which are completely opposite.
One is to let the conception take shape in the course of work on the production, in the selection of circumstances, in collaboration with the actors. This can be regarded as an empirical approach, and the less preconceived ideas the director has the better.
178The other approach is for the director to know exactly what he wants beforehand, down to the last detail. In this case the director's conception must be as precise as an engineer's blueprint, admitting no alterations or chance modifications in the course of its concrete embodiment.
I personally am against both these approaches. I am against the first because the artistic image is left to the mercy chance. If I concede that everything must arise of its own accord and my job is simply to organise the creative process, I am depriving myself of the opportunity of achieving an artistically integrated production and at the same time of the active role and sense of purpose that are the hallmark of the director's profession. This approach leads straight to dilettantism.
I am against the second approach because it deprives the actors of all opportunity for using their initiative and capacity for improvisation. The director is driving the actor into a Procrustean bed, where he is unable to make an active contribution. The director thereby loses the most precious and rewarding aspect of his work-collaboration between himself and the actors. The director's real job is not to draw up a precise plan but to discover the essential elements in each ``piece'' of the work, episode by episode, scene by scene, which decide the tone of the whole. To discover them, not make a blueprint of them. Once they have been found the director can proceed to realise his solution in practice, inspire the whole cast with them so that they become his co-authors.
Thus, after traversing the hard road from finding the ideal intention via the stage of understanding the genre of the material we come to the realisation of the plan, to the search for a concrete scenic solution. While at the first stage of work I protested against thinking in concrete scenic terms, at this stage I am all for embodying the conception in the ``flesh'' of the definitive solution.
What exactly arc the director's conception and the solution? There still exist sharp differences of opinion on this matter.
As I see it, the conception must comprise a civic, ideological interpretation of the work, not yet realised in concrete forms. The conception is the unrealised solution, the anticipation of the solution. The solution is the conception realised in all its scenic components, and above all in the actor.
The solution is the materialisation of the conception. The conception must contain ideas that serve as the basis for finding the solution. Basically, I see the conception as the attempt to convey the solution. How must one expound the conception in order to make it tangible rather than to convince the actors and oneself even that it is the right one? For this the following conditions must be observed. Firstly, one 179 must make sure that the basic subject of the work is clear, as the precondition. Secondly, one must follow closely the inner life of the characters.
The solution for each scene must be based on the psychological motivation of the characters' behaviour. A solution is only genuine provided it is linked with the psychology of the people whose clashes underlie the conflict and action of the play. The emotional stimulus of each scene must be clear in order to create the necessary environment to bring out the inner life of the play to the fullest extent. One must find the psychological tuning fork, so to speak, for each scene in order to give soul to the solution.
Finally, it is essential to say how all this will be expressed in concrete visual terms, how it will be related to the actual scenic embodiment. One must demonstrate that the solution one has chosen is the only valid one. Having forced yourself to formulate your conception you will have a definite criterion to go by and during rehearsals you will be able to test whether what you intended has been successfully realised or not, and if not, if it is because the actor has failed to realise your conception correctly, or if it is the conception itself that is at fault. Moreover, one must convey all this to the actors with conviction and in very definite terms.
Different directors will have a very different interpretation of a play even at the conception stage for the simple reason that every director sees the life that underlies the play in his own way, perceiving the events through the prism of his own individual personality. One director may insist on a pause, for example, where another will consider it unnecessary, and both will be right provided their solution is based on the logic of the characters' natures, which each of them will sec in his own way.
Thus when A. D. Popov expounded his conception of The Taming of the Shrew he was most concerned with the relationship between Katharina and Petruchio. The tradition in all theatres and all ages was to stress the strife between them, but Popov based his production on the idea that they fell in love at first sight. This was a fundamentally new approach, and it explains why the director was so interested in the relationship between Katharina and Petruchio, since it was the basis of his whole production.
But it is one thing to formulate one's conception in general terms and quite another to find concrete scenic expression for it. One of the basic principles of real art is generalisation, but it must always be achieved through the particular. It is thus essential for the director to choose among the given circumstances those which will best serve the super-objective. This will ensure that the solution has vitality and that 180 a really important human theme emerges. We strove to achieve this, for example, in our production of Sholokhov's novel Virgin Soil Upturned where the theme was a human feat and not simply the story of ;i good collective-farm chairman who got things working properly and made a success of things ``down on the farm''. This means that the solution has to be such as to interest and move anybody, and not only those in some way connected with collective-farm life. Only then will the play cease to be a propaganda piece on the subject of country life and pass muster as a real work of art. We must adhere to these criteria unless the play is to become a cold, indifferent, rational diagram, a ``study on a theme''.
Thus the director must speak of the real circumstances of a given scene, and not about such matters as at what point the revolving stage will go into motion and where the lights will fade.
A solution will only be a genuine solution when no other alternative seems possible. And this can only be on condition that the inner life of the characters is the leitmotiv of the director's expose. The inner life is not the text and the first logical explanation that strikes one. If that were the case, there would be no need for the theatre. The most important thing is how one understands a character's words, what lies behind them, what is going on. The solution can emerge from this.
If I simply tell the actors that in the finale of The Death of the Squadron the sailors will come on one after another, is that enough? Of course not. I must help them feel the need for this solution, and this involves showing how the sailors' behaviour is perfectly logical when they begin to wash the deck five minutes before scuttling the ship. This can only be done by revealing the sailor's mentality. Then I shall be able to prove that this is the only possible solution and thereby convince the actors that they can play a whole seven-minute scene in silence and sustain the interest of the audience.
If a director is not prepared to properly explain his conception to the actors then it is better not to mention it at all, for it is almost certain that he has no genuine solution to offer.
A nebulous solution is a frequent failing in our work. It is possible to base a production on essentially correct but general and vague reflections. But this is not to be regarded as a genuine solution, since all connection between the imagery of the work and the means of its scenic embodiment, that concreticity that is the very essence of the scenic image, will be lacking.
The director's solution means finding the direct connection between the essence of the ``ideal'' conception and the means of realising it, finding the way of expressing the essence of the play's content in visual terms and convince the audience of the correctness of your ideological 181 standpoint through an accurate scenic solution and its realisation in the actor. It is important not to plunge into reflections about the play but to see it in space and time, in definite tempo rhythm. For each work it is necessary to find the one and, only solution appropriate to the work, and author in question.
Only too often we tend to get carried away with discussing the play instead of searching for its concrete scenic solution. The result is an illustration rather than visual penetration of the essence of the play.
How then can one decide whether what one has found is a genuine solution or simply a ``mirage'', ``discussion on the theme'' and in the final analysis ``illustration''?
Visual expressiveness and feeling are the criteria of the genuinescenic solution.
This is not to say that the rational element is totally absent but simply that the process of cognising a work is the way from feeling to reason.
Take, for example, Act One of the play Mashenka by A. Afinogenov. Leonid Borisovich calls to see Professor Okayomov. Coming in to the dark room from the street he has the natural desire to turn on the light. This is a perfectly logical action that is psychologically justified. But for me, as a spectator, this has another meaning too: when this man enters the house he brings light and warmth with him.
The spectator will not grasp this other meaning unless it is percolated through his sensual perception. It is important that in an authentic, psychological play everything should pass through this medium. In Shakespeare the quality of this mediation is different, and it is different again in Pushkin's Mozart and fallen. It is important that the nature of the feelings be appropriate to the respective playwright.
The film Moulin Rouge about the life of the painter Toulouse Lautrec is a fine example of vivid expressiveness of this sort. Take the scene of the break-up between the hero and his beloved. He remains alone, with his painful reflections, and then comes the climax of the tragedy-he turns on the gas intending to commit suicide. It is six o'clock in the morning and he sits in his room, and we can hear the hiss of the escaping gas. Suddenly his eyes fall on his easel and he has a sudden urge to paint something for the last time. He approaches the easel, takes off his jacket and picks up a brush. He becomes so immersed in the creative process that when he begins to feel overcome he automatically opens the window and carries on. Fresh air and light flood the room and he is saved from death by his work.
Here the author has expressed a profound idea through a very simple situation with great psychological authenticity. If the artist did not die it was only because his creative work saved him. Every genuine solu- 182 tion is bound to excite the imagination of the audience. Unless this happens we simply perceive the bare rational idea and remain uninvolvcd emotionally.
A genuine scenic solution in my opinion must involve not only the features inherent in the conception, the concrete plastic and rhythmic forms, but also an unexpected clement that seems to blow open the author's text from the inside. This unexpected touch must be infectious and at the same time warranted and logically justified.
Unless this unexpected element is found the scenic solution will be insipid and uninspiring. Yet unless it is called for by the logic of the scene and the logic of life it will be pure sham and pretentiousness on the part of the director.
Only this combination of the unexpected and the logical can produce an interesting and felicitous scenic solution. I must repeat that the felicitous solution is not to be understood as a blueprint of the future production, but as a world expressed in terms of images where the actor can breathe freely, without feeling in any way confined.
Take the wedding scene in the Vakhtangov Theatre production of Arbuzov's Irkutsk Story. The guests are sitting singing round a vast table almost as big as the stage. Then somebody suggests they dance. Everybody lines up gaily on one side of the table and the revolving stage begins to turn so that the table is carried away to the side. This solution has vitality and even bravado, it has an element of surprise, but it is not simply a clever device thought up by the director Yevgeny Simonov for effect: it is dictated by inner necessity, by the emotional key of the whole scene.
I remember the time I was searching desperately for a solution for the finale of The Death of the Squadron where the crew are abandoning ship. What was the key to the tragedy of this moment? I realised that a ship is a sailor's home. But how was I to make a person who has nothing to do with the sea or the navy grasp the full impact of this tragic moment and feel all the pain the characters must have experienced?
In this case I employed the device of repetition to produce the unexpected element and the required emotional pitch.
The sailors leave the ship. The first one leaves in cool military fashion, then a second, then a third, and so on. From the point of view of establishing the basic logical chain, five or six might have been enough, and one could ring down the curtain. But no, the sailors continued to march off one by one-the fifteenth, the sixteenth .... This gave the audience the feeling of endless motion conveying the profound tragedy of the departure.
183This is not to say that repetition invariably produces an effect involving the unexpected element. It is a question of searching for the one and only possible solution in every individual case.
Shostakovich did this brilliantly in his Seventh Symphony. We listen calmly to the first and second beat, but by the fourth we feel anxiety stirring and by the twelfth we realise that we are witnessing a human tragedy. The composer achieved this effect by the simple device of straightforward repetition.
When I embarked on the production of Irkutsk Story I saw that the play contained no end of opportunities for director's cliches no matter how fresh the mise-en-scene and realisation of the theme might becliches in the solution for the Choir and the scenic area and all the external effects that seemed to be crying out to be employed. Thus, to begin with I faced a negative task, the task of dismissing all this, especially since the play gave plenty of scope for imagination.
There are certain dramatic works for which a director can hardly fail to find a solution appropriate to the author's idea. V. Rozov's plays are an example. In the numerous different productions of one and the same play of his I have noticed that practically all of them, to a greater or lesser degree, conveyed what was essential in the play for Rozov. Arbuzov, on the other hand, is one of those playwrights whose works are more often badly produced than well produced. In some productions all that should have been suppressed in the author simply forces its way to the surface. In Irkutsk Story there is a serious danger of it becoming a domestic melodrama. In the stage directions and the lines there is a great deal that a director ought to dismiss taking care, however, not to throw out the corn with the chaff.
Naturally, the first question we had to resolve was the function and significance of the Choir. I regarded the Choir not as an auxiliary, extraneous group of people but as dramatis personae living in the future and telling the audience about their own past which is the audience's present. This solution was suggested to me by the following line: ``A mighty hydro-electric power station was built in these parts in the middle of the twentieth century.'' Thus we have two sets of characters on the stage: one acting and the other reflecting on their own actions or the actions of their comrades. When they reflect, they exist in the year two thousand, for example, and the whole play is the story of their struggle for themselves, their struggle for purity, for purification from the slime of the past. When they reflect, they are people of the age of communism, when they act in the given circumstances of the play, they are people with all our contradictions and complexities.
The through-action of the play is thus a story of man's road of trials and soul-searching efforts to overcome, to transcend himself 184 and become Man with a capital M, the Man of the future. I regard this as a story/action at once brave and stereoscopically clear, without the embellishment usually associated with the word `` reminiscence''.
Thus, two levels emerged, two times, two ages, two forms of existence for the actors---``I am'' in the given circumstances and ``I am'' reflecting on these given circumstances, on my past actions.
It was necessary to find the appropriate expressive means for this. Hence the conventional device of dividing the stage area into two, a lower and an upper levels. When the actors are on the upper level they are in the future. When they come down to the lower level, to the area of fragmentary details, they are in the present. They have only to climb two steps and they are already able to contemplate what is happening today from the vantage point of centuries ahead. They mix and communicate with those who are acting below. Coming down to the lower level, Victor takes off his jacket and throws it to his comrades so that he is in his shirt sleeves and takes a cloth cap from his pocket. No change of make-up was necessary. We sought combinations which would enable us to resolve everything in the manner of the variety show. The whole creative process took place before the audience's very eyes.
Moreover, I tried to avoid direct indication, ``the pointing finger'', spelling things out for the audience, and to express everything through visual sensations. We did not hang up a calendar to help the audience determine the date of the action. The important thing for us was to establish for ourselves the nature of the relationship between the two time levels, so that the correct feelings could be imparted to the audience and the idea of the work, the author's purpose in writing it would be conveyed to them through this sensual perception which everyone would formulate in his own way.
A solution may or may not be controversial, it may be a success or a failure, it may or may not be understood. I am speaking here simply of the paths explored, the lines of thought. It goes without saying that there may be losses on the way, and that the most sincere and painful search may lead to incorrect results.
I wrestled for years with the problem of producing Woe from Wit. Everything I have said above about the scenic embodiment of the classics-about traditionalism, academicism and anthologism-fully applies to Griboyedov's great work. I had a dual attitude to the play. On the one hand, I loved the comedy with its noble and profound theme of the tragedy of wit, and on the other hand, I felt it was somewhat unscenic and archaic, and that the heavy text posed insoluble problems.
185Thinking of the various productions of the play I had seen, I realised that it was far more interesting to read than to see it performed on the stage. In reading it one derived pleasure from every word, but when hearing the same word pronounced on the stage it seems somehow terribly familiar, almost stale.
I remembered the story of how the work had first appeared. It began life as a seditious, clandestine chronicle of the age and was the most topical and actual work of the time. When Griboycdov read his expose in the form of a play to a carefully chosen group of friends, behind closed doors, by candlelight, the genuine flame of civic ardour arose immediately.
But most theatres staged it in such a way as to suppress the oratorial nature of the play, as a comedy of manners where every word had to be ``true of life''. The apogee of this aoproach was Stanislavsky's magnificent study published in Volume Four of his works, quite remarkable for its imaginative power and his ability to subjugate the entire text of the comedy to the logic of life, an interpretation which he unfortunately never realised in practice. Stanislavsky put an end to the conventional traditional manner and created a new tradition of the scenic embodiment of the play.
Yet for Griboyedov the play was simply a vehicle for the expression of political views. It was not so much a play as a fierce civic protest, written in play form. Griboyedov made no attempt to present an accurate picture of Moscow life and morals in the early nineteenth century. Perhaps the dramatic form was simply a necessary disguise? He attached no importance to it, and that is why he did not attempt any innovations in this respect, but chose a traditional and even rather a trivial theatrical structure. I repeat, the most important thing in the play is its civic pathos, its impassioned social plea. It was here that the key to its solution must be sought.
But how must the play be performed so that the vitality of Griboycdov's thought was present in the very nature of the actor's existence on the stage? I felt that this was the most difficult and at the same time the most important thing to achieve in the solution. In setting ourself the goal of conveying the publicistic aspect of the work to the audience we could not, even had we so wished, by-pass what Stanislavsky had done to bring realism into the acting of the play. But what Stanislavsky found was a means for us and not an end. On the basis of the laws of the organic life of the actor on the stage we had to find a publicistic and not a slice-of-life solution for Griboyedov's comedy.
Why was it, for example, that many of Russia's greatest minds, including Pushkin, regarded Chatsky as not very bright. Because he ``cast pearls before swine''. The tradition was for Chatsky to address 186 himself now to Skalozub, now to Famusov, now to Molchalin, whereas in fact his words should be addressed directly to the audience.
I remember reading in an old history of the theatre thatM. S. Shchepkin when he played Famusov addressed his lines to the audience thereby placing the other actors in an awkward position. The most realist of actors in the Russian theatre, Shchepkin sensed that this was essential to preserve the publicistic nature of the work.
Mr. N. and Mr. D., for example, must on no account be played in an entirely realist manner, in the narrow sense of the word. According to the established tradition it is necessary to see a live person behind Mr. N. and invent a biography for him and so on. Why then did Griboyedov call him simply Mr. N.? He could easily have given him a name had he so wished. We are thus clearly dealing with a special kind of typification which requires a different style of acting and a different nature of feelings to those to which we are accustomed.
Woe from Wit is addressed directly to the audience. It is not a question of occasional asides, but of the entire play being addressed to the audience. So I had an idea: why not have the play read rather than acted? Not literally of course. What I meant was that the manner of the acting should be similar to that of the famous reader of plays, Yakhontov, for example, with the same degree of convention. This seemed to me to be the right basis for the whole production and especially for the character of the hero, Chatsky. Then there would benothing artificial and phoney about Chatsky's monologues, for he would be addressing the audience and not the other characters.
As for the other characters, there must be a kind of struggle between various groups to win the audience to their side.
Let us see how the scene where Chatsky and Molchalin are together in Act Three worked in our production. Chatsky stands at one side of the stage and Molchalin at the other. Chatsky delivers his monologue about Molchalin and the audience understands roughly the following behind his actual words: ``Dear guests, Molchalin will come in any moment now. The time has come to find out whether it is really possible for such a preposterous thing to have happened as for Sofia to have fallen in love with this fool. Ah, there he is! Good day, Alexander Stepanovich. How do you like him then? Just listen to the things he says! He is a complete imbecile. You do realise, of course? How ridiculous! She can't possibly love a man like that!''
What about Molchalin? If he is really played as an imbecile, then the whole point is lost. He is no fool, far from it. But he realises that he can only occupy a place in the society of Famusov and Khlyostova on condition that he pretends to be no wiser than the others. Hence, to quote Saltykov-Shchedrin, his ``irresistible desire to seem more stupid 187 than his master''. This is the essence of Molchalin. And from this point of view, from the standpoint of his philosophy of life, he regards Chatsky as the fool.
That was how we determined the nature of the feelings, the manner of acting for this play. The cast was not to act as though their thoughts had only just occurred to them. The audience was perfectly familiar with the text of the play, it held no surprises for them, so there would anyway be no startling revelations in this direction. Since the actor was speaking lines that have long since entered our everyday vocabulary and become common household sayings, he delivers them as if to say to the audience: ``As you know...'' or ``It is common knowledge that....'' In this way the ground is prepared for every phrase, even the most well-worn, and the audience is involved in the conflict taking place on the stage.
Words were to be all-important in our production, and the visual elements were to be presented separately from the actor's life on the stage, indirectly. This is inherent in the fabric of the work itself, where Griboyedov has alternated the visual and verbal action. Thus, a monologue is suddenly interrupted by the stage direction: ``Not a word is spoken. The couple dance in silence''.
Directors are wont to devote endless effort to a detailed ``lifelike'' recreation of the ball scene. Yet this is quite unnecessary. The dances should transmit to the maximum Griboyedov's poetic rhythms. The waltz must last as long as the stage directions indicate, no more, no less. And perhaps nowhere as in this play are the stage directions such an accurate guide to the nature and rhythm of the interpretation. It is therefore quite wrong to have the words of a monologue accompanied by background music. The words and the music should alternate. Perfect accuracy of rhythm is essential here, and during rehearsals we used a metronome.
What about Chatsky's cry of ``Look!'' at the end of Act Three? This is far more than the final stop marking the end of the act. Something phantasmagorical occurs here, and it is necessary to find the appropriate visual means for expressing it. What exactly happens? The waltz is playing and then the dancing couples disappear so that Chatsky is left alone. He delivers his monologue and then turns and says: ``Look!'' and the waltz begins again. But this time it is not simply a waltz, it is the waltz as seen through Chatsky's sick imagination now that he has been practically driven out of his mind by the events that have taken place. How is this to be presented in scenic, visual terms?
We did it as follows. First the couples gyrate on the unmoving stage, but after Chatsky's monologue the couples are static and it is the stage 188 that revolves slowly, with the actors in fixed dance poses. Every character is in his own pose, which is however not exaggerated to the point of the grotesque. He is himself and no mistake but himself perfectly immobile. This phantasmogoric mime slowly slides by before Chatsky's inflamed imagination. I felt that the style of the work required this solution of presenting the phantasmogoric in immobility, since after such a dynamic, lively scene, only immobility could provide the necessary emotional pitch.
I repeat: our chief aim was to reveal the intrinsic publicistic essence of the play. This being so, we did not seek a precise genre definition. The play is a mixture of diverse genre elements. It combines the tragedy of wit in the Russia of Nicholas I, a satire of Famusov's society .and a straightforward comedy situation. The important thing is not an accurate definition of genre but an accurate choice of solution, and this is what we sought since only a sharp publicistic note, the fierce struggle between two irreconcilable philosophies of life, polemicism taken to the stage of open discussion involving the whole audience could make Woe from Wit of interest to, and directly valid for, the present-day audience.
There arc works of art that become a part of the lives of vast numbers of people, a part of ourselves, as it were.
We felt that Julius Fučik's Notes from the Gallows on which my production The Road to Immortality at the Lenin Komsomol Theatre in Leningrad was based was one such work. Every page, every line of this searing book produces a tremendous impact.
Shine, oh blessed sun! Thee I hail.
As in the radiance of dawning day
The lamp on my table turns pale,
So in the immortal sunlight of thought
Does false wisdom flicker and fade.
Welcome, oh sun! Avaunt thee, shade!
These words of the great Russian poet Pushkin serve as a perfect definition of the bright optimistic content of Fučik's book, written by a man who gave his life in the struggle against fascism but acquired immortality by virtue of his thought and his faith in a bright future for his people.
A genuine people's hero, Fučik embodies the best qualities of his people, drawing inexhaustible power of faith in victory from his boundless love for them.
The strength of Julius Fučik lies in the beauty and grandeur of his life's achievement, his courageous unremitting struggle against fascism, and the tremendous optimism which inspired that struggle.
189Another essential feature of his heroic activity is that his struggle against nazism was primarily a struggle for peace. The happy futurehe dreamed of and for which he gave his life was part of the general struggle of progressive mankind for freedom and happiness. This is why we cherish him so today, at a time when progressives round the globe are struggling for world peace. We can join Fučik in saying: ''We Communists love peace. That is why we are fighting. We are fighting against all who engender war. We arc fighting for a social system in which a criminal will never again be able to emerge and in the interests of a group of bosses send millions of people to their death, to the crazed fury of war for the destruction of values that the living need .... That is why we Communists are sparing no effort and do not fear sacrifices in the struggle for genuine peace.''
Fučik, the soldier of peace---this was the idea we tried to convey throughout the play.
As soon as the curtain went up on the First Act the audience saw a sign framed by the flags of the nations which read: ``In the name of progressive mankind the World Peace Congress has awarded the first honorary prize to the dauntless fighter for communism and brave son of his people, the writer Julius Fučik.'' And the play closed with the word Peace on the curtain in various languages.
An atmosphere of creative elan prevailed during work on the production. Everyone was eager to help bring out the basic idea of the play as clearly and vividly as possible. How did the production arise, what doubts assailed us, what problems did we have to grapple with, how did we overcome them, and what principles were we guided by in our work?
In his speech at the International Peace Prize presentation ceremony, Pablo Neruda said: ``We live in an age which in tomorrow's literature will be called the age of Fučik, the age of simple heroism. Historyhas known no work more simple and more noble than this book, just as few, if any, works have been written in more terrible circumstances. This is explained by the fact that Fučik was a New Man . . . .''
It was this characterisation of Fučik as a progressive people's hero, embodying the most typical features of the contemporary revolutionary that we endeavoured to stress in our production. We immediately felt the link between the destiny and feat of our hero and the destiny of other peace fighters. Fučik stood side by side with Nazim Hikmet, Pablo Neruda and the members of the French Resistance. But in a. spectacle about the life of the people's hero of Czechoslovakia Julius Fučik, it was important to find also the concrete aspect of his feat, •determining the distinctive nature of his heroic destiny.
In order to fully understand both the features common to all the 190 progressive fighters of our age and the features peculiar to individual Fučik, we made a thorough study of all the material we could find on the life and activity of Fučik himself and carefully examined the most vivid and significant facts in the biography of people's heroes of other countries who dedicated their lives to the struggle with fascism.
Fučik's individuality and charm are most powerfully reflected in his own Notes from the' Gallows, and it was clear that this should serve as the basis for our production, and that we must organise it in such a way as to preserve the characteristic features of thoughts and actions and his personal tone so as to ``resurrect'' Fučik and let him address the audience directly. Fučik must appear as he appears in the book he wrote shortly before his death, in the book which Pablo Neruda so aptly described as ``a monument to life created on the threshold of death''.
Our scenic tribute to Fučik was thus conceived as a stage version of his book. That is why our production dealt mainly with the last period of his life, spent in the Pankrac prison.
Several questions had to be answered in the course of work on the .script and the production. How were we going to present the essence of Fučik's life on the stage in its full amplitude? Would it be better to present separate pages from his biography, or try to cover his whole life, all its consecutive phases? We are full of admiration for Fučik's •whole life as writer, publicist and Communist. Our hearts go out to Fučik the man, with his joie de vivre, his sparkling humour, his tremendous charm, his total devotion and loyalty to his friends, and his implacable hatred for his enemies.
We cherish all that we know about the life and activity of our friend and comrade-in-arms, but the last four hundred and eleven days of his life spent in a fascist jail, where he wrote his book, are quite overwhelming. These four hundred and eleven days in which his courage was revealed with special force would have been impossible but for the preparation he had for it throughout his previous life, without the atmosphere in which he worked, breathed, loved and fought.
There are times when all that is best and most important in a man is revealed with special force, bringing him immortal glory. There are times when from the vantage point of experience a man can look back •over the path he has trodden and reassess his whole life. The time he spent in the Pankrac prison when he wrote his Notes from the Gallows was such a time in Fučik's life, the time when his whole life became an inspiring example to future generations of fighters for freedom, the people's happiness and peace.
The last four hundred and eleven days of Fučik's life brought him immortality, boundless admiration for his human feat and the love of honest men throughout the world.
191That is why we decided to show the last, decisive period of our hero's life, to show Julius Fučik in the most important and glorious moments of his heroic struggle.
No doubt another solution is quite valid-to show Fučik's whole life, strictly adhering to the continuity of events in his biography. But we felt that adherence to chronological sequence would weaken the dramatic impact, and that the last, prison period embodied the essence of his whole heroic life.
Only when we had answered this question could we pass or. to another, perhaps no less essential, question: How were we to preserve all the passion and emotional power of the original? How could we best bring out the strong conviction underlying all the ideas and actions of the author of the book and the hero of the play?
It was not simply a question of embodying the actual material of the book in scenic form: we must adhere to its principles, to the direct vision and sensation of life we find in it. The whole book is written like a kind of diary, where memories of the past are organically and naturally interwoven with clear, precise descriptions of the present, the whole lit by a real dream of the future.
This was what gave us the clue to the scenic solution, a solution which we felt to derive directly from the nature of the work itself: we based the structure of the play and the production on the alternation of two different time levels. One was Fučik's present life, his permanent battle with the Gestapo, his struggle for his fellow-prisoners, his search for ways of communicating with the outside world, with the Party, in short, all the aspects of his prison life and activity. The other was Fučik's past, the most vivid episodes in his life prior to his arrest. They were treated as arising in Fučik's memory and transporting the audience from the prison cell, now to clandestine meetings in the Jelinek's flat, now to one of Prague's picturesque suburbs, now to the sunlit hall of the Young Pioneers' Palace in Moscow.
This repeated alternation of two time planes gave us the key to the spatial solution. Thus we had two scenic areas corresponding to the two time planes: one, the main one, for the prison period and the other for the various remembered episodes from his past life.
We wanted to make it clear that the present level of Fučik's prison life and activity was the main, decisive one, and to have the plane of memory simply underlining and strengthening the impact of Fučik's prison life or providing a contrast with what is happening to him in the Pankrac jail. Accordingly, all the ``flashbacks'' must be connected with actual episodes from the hero's life. These were not to be hazy spectral images blurred by vague dreams and feelings, but always accurate, authentic scenes from Fučik's past.
192
Tatyana Doronina as Sophia and S. Yursky as Chatsky
UiOjf 30 fa UJOJJ
Scenes from Woe from Wit «
S. Yursky as Chatsky and V. Strzhelchik as Repetilov
Thus, in order to reveal all the depth and complexity of what Fučik feels when he learns quite by accident of the arrest of his beloved wife and faithful comrade-in-arms Gustina, we show their first meeting. This meeting brings out their remarkably close spiritual kinship. The bright cheerful scene highlights the tense drama of the present moment when Fučik learns that the person who is dearest of all to him has been arrested.
The ``flashbacks'' also served to show all the aspects of the characters' lives which could not be presented in the prison cell or the office of the fascist interrogator Bohm.
There was another important aspect of these reminiscences interrupting the main action. We intended that they should serve to embody the main message of the play, conveying its optimistic, life-affirming character. Fučik's whole life and outlook were permeated with a boundless love for the world and his fellow men. This talent for ``joy'', this ability to sec what was fine and noble, his passionate belief in a bright future for which he laid down his life with such courage, were to be felt in every one of the ``flashbacks''-in his memory of his meeting with his wife, the May Day celebrations in the prison and his recollections of his stay in the Soviet Union.
The nearer Fučik came to his tragic end the brighter and more positive the flashbacks became, the more they sounded in a major key. That is why one of our favourite episodes in the whole production was the scene at the Moscow Young Pioneers' Palace, where Fučik, surrounded by children, joined in a Soviet song with them.
This scene came near the end of the play, when Fučik already knew that he was going to be executed. It seemed to us that this scene, better than any other, would serve to present in clear visual terms the source of Fučik's inexhaustible strength, his confidence in the triumph of the ideas he was dying for. The image of the beautiful future is embodied for him in the image of happy Soviet children singing joyful songs.
It has often been said to me that the solution of The Road to Immortality was highly original and unusual. I think this is because Fučik's work on which our production was based is so unusual. We endeavoured to retain and stress all the characteristic features of Fučik's book in its scenic embodiment. For all of us who worked on the production this unusual solution seemed perfectly natural and logical, and indeed the only one possible.
We wanted every act, every scene in the play, indeed every word, to reflect the basic, determining features of Fučik's many-sided and purposeful personality. We felt it was important to convey the full drama of Fučik's struggle during imprisonment, to show Fučik's great achievement in and through the action. We wished to make the whole 193 scenic representation of the life of the hero who devoted himself to the future optimistic and passionate, and transmit all the fire and emotional power of Fučik's notes.
An soon as Fučik fell into the clutches of the Gestapo, his enemies were sure that it was all over for him and he would cause them no more trouble. The fascists did not realise that this was not the end, but the beginning of another stage of the struggle. They did not suspect for a moment that the man they had beaten unconscious who called himself Gorak, a teacher, would bring an accusation against them that was as powerful and irrefutable as it was simple.
The contrast between the shortsightedness of the fascist thugs and Fučik's courage and endurance, in the awareness that the future was his, had to be presented in the play and sustained throughout, from the first scene to the last.
We thus endeavoured to show Fučik's transformation from prisoner to victor, from accused to angry and merciless prosecutor.
We wanted to show throughout, from scene to scene, how the nearer Fučik came to his end, the more his enemies feared him and the stronger he became, deriving his strength from the justness of the great cause for which he was fighting.
That Fučik's faith in the future was strong and real was due to the fact that he had seen with his own eyes the triumph of the people's cause and freedom in the Soviet Union.
We endeavoured to show as vividly as possible throughout the remarkable spiritual kinship between this loyal son of the Communist Party and our Soviet people building communist society.
``May my name arouse no feelings of grief in anybody. I lived for a joyous life and I am dying for it and it would be unjust to place an angel of grief on my grave.'' We had to embody this behest of Fučik in the play dedicated to his memory.
Indeed, Fučik arouses not grief but pride in the strength of the human spirit and admiration for man's courage and tenacity. Gorky's words ``Man-it sounds proud'' make a fitting epigraph for a play about Julius Fučik.
In the first act we wanted to show how Fučik, after undergoing cruel physical torture, gradually comes to and begins to prepare for a new, even more difficult, responsible and decisive stage of the struggle. Fučik hardly utters a word throughout the act. Only at the end, •when the prison authorities are forced to tear up the already prepared report on the death of the prisoner, does Fučik say: ``Yes, we're alive, dammit, and we're going to fight.''
But this is not enough to go on, this is not enough to give the audience a clear picture of the man, of who the new occupant of cell num- 194 ber 267 really is and how he got there. Any kind of explanatory monologue or account of the past would hold up the action, slow down the pace and destroy the rhythm of gradually mounting tension.
We solved the question of Fučik's life before his imprisonment with three ``flashbacks''. First, his meeting with Honza Zika, a member of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party at the flat of Doctor Fried. Then, a conversation between Fučik and Gustina in a. train compartment. Finally, Fučik's last meeting with his comrades at the Telineks' flat, where he was arrested. With this we return to the cell.
In Act One the ``flashbacks'' took up most of the scenic time. Act Two was constructed quite differently. Whereas in the first act we had shown Fučik gradually regaining consciousness and saying: ``We're going to fight'', we now set out to show how he fought. It was the embodiment of the various phases and methods of this struggle that formed the content and through-action of our play.
Almost all the second act takes place in the cell. Our general approach to the solution of the first half of Act Two is best expressed in the following words from Fučik's book. ``But imprison two people together, and Communists at that, and in five minutes you will have a group that will put a spanner in the works of the Gestapo.'' And further on: ``Prisoner and solitude-one is wont to identify these two concepts. But this is a great mistake. The prisoner is not alone. The prison is a great united group, and even the most strict isolation cannot really isolate anybody, unless a man isolates himself.'' Needless to say, Fučik was not a man to isolate himself from his fellows.
Fučik's whole previous life made him the natural nucleus of the prison group. His cellmates, the old teacher Pesek and the worker Karel Malcc are drawn to him. We wanted to show how, inspired by the example of their new comrade's courage and tenacity, these people revealed their finest and most noble qualities. In his relationship with them, Fučik was able to strengthen this prison comradeship and ennoble it, raising it to the indissoluble brotherhood of men prepared to lay down their lives for the common just cause.
Fučik's work to unite the prisoners gradually develops throughout the second act, where we see this unity growing and expanding until it culminates in the jubilant May Day celebrations and the strains of the Internationale resounding throughout the prison.
Our aim in this act was to show Fučik's prison activities and the results. The audience sec revolutionary solidarity developing among the prisoners before their very eyes. At the beginning of the act many of the prisoners are still lonely, intimidated victims of fascism. By the end, influenced by Fučik, who has established strong ties of friendship 195 and loyalty with them, they have become determined fighters for their people's freedom and happiness.
Fučik is a true son of the people. He cannot live apart from the people, and he devotes all his finest powers to them, and they reciprocate. It was necessary to show on the stage how walls and prison bars cannot break the ties between the people's hero and Communist and the people.
The connecting link in the relationship between Fučik and the people continuing the struggle against fascism outside the prison was the warden Kolinsky. One of the focal points in the play was the scene where Kolinsky hands Fučik paper and a pencil. We intended to make this scene the turning-point in Fučik's prison life and struggle. With paper and pencil in his hands, he was once more armed for struggle. The weapon had been sent him by the Party and delivered to him by a comrade-in-arms.
The poignancy of the scene is heightened by the fact that the two men must continue to adhere to the rules of conspiracy. Outwardly, Kolinsky must continue to play the role of the rough fascist jailor. If the warden pacing the corridor outside happened to glance into Fučik's cell through the open door, he would never guess what was going on.
Suddenly Kolinsky says the Party pass-word, and quickly hands Fučik the paper and pencil. A short silent farewell ensues, and Fučik is alone once more.
The scene only lasts a few moments in the play, but an event of tremendous importance has taken place. Two men whom the audience had believed to be sworn enemies have become friends, joined in friendship for life and death.
In this scene we strove to achieve the utmost economy of action, setting and acting. Two men in the cell. A minimum of words and not a single superfluous movement. Here arc two comrades-in-arms who understand each other perfectly without uttering a word: the slightest glance or shade of expression is enough.
But in the next scene, set in the same cell, we required all the expressive means of the theatre to present what is probably the most vivid and pregnant episode in the whole of Fučik's prison struggle.
The scene of the May Day celebrations in the prison, which Fučik describes with such inspiration in his book depicts Fučik as an impassioned fighter who is constantly with the people and leading their liberation struggle.
Two men, two prisoners, arc there in the same ccll-Fučik and the old teacher Pcsek. They remember that today is May Day, the day 196 when the review of the militant forces of the proletariat takes place, and they decide to celebrate it here in the prison.
The window, now letting in bright sunlight, becomes the focal point of the scenic action.
We endeavoured to construct this scene in such a way as to give the audience the impression that the crowd of prisoners assembled in the yard for their morning exercise all have their eyes glued on Fučik, who is communicating with them through the window. We wanted the audience to feel that apart from the two men visible on the stage by the window, outside it, in the invisible yard, a countless army of people had gathered, people whose spirit was unimpaired by imprisonment.
When this illusion reached its culmination, the faint singing of the Internationale began, gradually swelling to a full throated choir. The ceiling of the prison slid away and the audience saw the high prison wall and the cell windows, and crimson cloths being waved.
All the means of theatrical cxpression-the sets, the lighting, and especially the music-were brought into play to convey the idea. The band began playing, and after Fučik's last words was joined by numerous voices singing the Internationale. The sounds of the anthem rose, and despite the shouts of the wardens and the slamming of doors, soon the whole prison was singing, and there was no stopping it.
Our aim in this scene was to put across the unity of people, divided by prison walls but nevertheless united in a monolithic group, living in unison, gripped by the same revolutionary fervour, demonstrating their loyalty and solidarity in the struggle against the enemies of their country and its people.
In Act Three we tried to show how Fučik became a serious threat to his fascist jailors, how the tables were turned and he became master of the situation. For this reason the central scene was the one in the Flora restaurant in Prague where the Gestapo Commissar Bohm takes Fučik in the vain hope of loosening his tongue.
Indeed, we planned this scene as the climax of the whole production. D. Volosov and M. Rozanov in the roles of Fučik and Bohm respectively spent the whole scene at table, and the episode derived its dramatic power from the fact that their conversation represented a decisive battle between two irreconcilable enemies, a duel between members of two opposed world views, two camps, the camp of peace and the progressive popular forces and the camp of fascism and darkest reaction.
Fučik won the duel. The prisoner emerged the master, and Bohm, who had power of life and death over Fučik and his comrades, nevertheless showed himself to be spiritually bankrupt and doomed.
197We had their conversation interrupted by the news over the radio of the nazi defeat on the Volga, our aim being to show how Bohm, after hearing of this serious blow to the fascist cause, felt the inevitability of the defeat of his miserable ``ideas'' as a representative of the ``master race''.
``Time we were getting back to prison, Bohm!'' Fučik says with a sarcastic smile. We wanted these words to express a profound and clear message. Bohm still has power over Fučik's fate, and is taking him back to prison. But Fučik is quite calm, in the knowledge that right is on his side, and in the quiet confidence with which he says these words we feel the judgment of history dooming the tormentors of the people to just retribution for their crimes. The accused and the prosecutor, Fučik and Bohm, have changed roles, and each of them now occupies the place he deserves in the life of his country and its future.
Although the whole production revolves round the hero, we could only reveal this complex character to the full through his relationships with the other characters that appear in Notes from the Gallows. The other characters, both his enemies and friends, or to use his own words, both the people and the puppets, were revealed through Fučik, in relationship to him.
Fučik's thoughts, ideas and actions embody the will and reason of the people who have sent him to his immortal feat and gives him the inexhaustible strength for the struggle.
Fučik's Notes from the Gallows contains the following magnificent passage. ``You retained only what was fundamental. Everything secondary, acquired, everything that smooths, weakens, embellishes the basic features of a man was swept away by a whirlwind in the face of death. Only the essence remained, the most simple: the loyal man remains loyal and the traitor betrays, the philistine despairs and the hero struggles.'' The aim of presenting these basic features that are revealed in moments of great historical trial underlay our whole approach to the characters. On the basis of the rather scant material on Gustina and Kolinsky, Lida Placha, the Jelineks, Skofepa and Karel Malec, we tried to create authentic, accurate characters of people with heroic spirits, simple, modest fighters for their people's happiness. Our task was to put across in a couple of scenes what was most essential in a character, so that his whole life and essence could be divined.
We presented the ``puppets'', the cowardly, stupid fascist thugs, Smetonz, Miiller and Patocka with merciless satire sometimes bordering on the grotesque.
In short, in our approach to the characters we tried to be faithful to the ideological and artistic principles of their embodiment in Fučik's immortal book.
198To pass to another example: what is the story of the conception and realisation of my production of The Optimistic Tragedy?
On a ship of the Baltic Fleet where a ``free anarcho-revolutionary unit'' had seized power in the first months of the Revolution, the Party appoints a woman Commissar. Gradually, relying on a small group of Communists, she breaks the resistance of the anarchist leader Vozhak and his group, first isolating him and then destroying him, and uniting the sailors in the First Naval Regiment of the Red Army.
Such is the basic story of Vishnevsky's The Optimistic Tragedy. But its real content is far broader, deeper and more significant. The play became a poetic hymn to the deeds of the Communist Party. Despite the fact that it ends with the death of the heroine, we are convinced that the Commissar's death is really only the beginning of immortality, the affirmation of the great cause of socialist revolution.
The intense drama of the action due to the exceptionally sharp conflict, the impassioned stage directions suggesting a mass of the most unexpected associations, and the apt, laconic language, abounding in images, revealing the author's vast knowledge of the sailors' life and manners at the time in question, the dynamic development of the plot, the elevated hcroico-romantic mood, the pathos, the passionate Party commitment and sharp didacticism-all this, moulded into a remarkably austere and monumental form, make The Optimistic Tragedy one of the masterpieces of Soviet dramaturgy.
It is not often that one has the joy of working on such a well- composed, artistically satisfying play.
What about the production?
Clearly, the heroic pathos of the action required a corresponding scenic solution. But along what paths should we proceed in the search for a form to suit the content? How were we to find the key to the style which constituted the artistic strength of this play?
The answer to these and many other questions involved in producing The Optimistic Tragedy were only found after a long, painful search. The conception took shape gradually in the course of work between the director, the stage manager and the designer and conversations with the composer, study of factual material used by Vishnevsky, in the process of the distribution of the roles and in arguments, involving the rejection of many solutions that suggested themselves, and further tireless searching.
I know of no other work where the title so accurately reflects the style, nature and content. The Optimistic Tragedy is indeed optimistic, and it is indeed a tragedy. The two arc both fully present and expressed with the passion and artistic sincerity that always characterised Vishnevsky's militant and virile writings.
199 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1972/PSD310/20061226/299.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2006.12.27) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [*]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nilWe have seen quite enough optimistic works, or rather superficially •optimistic works, on the Soviet stage in recent years. Indeed more than enough, for in many plays the optimism was unfounded since it was not based on any real achievements by the heroes. After all, the measure of any victory is above all the scale of the difficulties overcome on the way. Man's strength is revealed not in affected declarations and pathetic monologues, but in actions, in struggle with a real adversary. The stronger the adversary, the more important the victory.
But if there was quite enough optimism, tragedy in the true sense practically abandoned our theatres, and in my opinion quite unjustifiably. The war years with all the losses, deprivations, broken lives and unparalleled acts of heroism had an immense impact on our lives. These turbulent years, the nature of the events, should have been truthfully reflected in works of art, including theatrical works.
That was why all of us who worked on the production of The Optimistic Tragedy were so delighted to have the opportunity to achieve a truly poetic embodiment of the heroes of the revolutionary struggle. And although the events presented occurred several decades ago, depicted by a truthful and passionate artist, they arc extremely important, and indeed close, to present-day Soviet audiences. Our search for a solution was based on these considerations.
Over a quarter of a century ago the writer-militant and orator Vsevolod Vishnevsky wrote his complex, emotional play, which in many ways represented an innovation. He endeavoured to condense in his tragedy the vast sweep of the revolutionary period, the period that saw the birth of the world's first socialist state. He wanted to capture the most important features of this heroic time, show the common feat of the masses, the feat of millions of simple people who went out to fight for their future. His aim was to recreate the atmosphere of the first years of the Revolution, when life appeared in new and sometimes extraordinarily complex manifestations. I feel that the epic sweep and passion of the work were fully transmitted in the first production of The Optimistic Tragedy at the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow, twentyodd years ago.
But for me, working on the material as a director for the first time (although I had often thought about the play and dreamt of producing it) it was important to find not what could be read in it at the beginning of the early thirties, but what it held for us today, when we began work on it. We wanted to make our production genuinely contemporary, by which I mean that it should reflect the spiritual experience, outlook, thoughts and views of Soviet people today. This, we felt, meant ensuring that Vishnevsky's personal, highly individual voice was not drowned and lost in the general sound of the production.
200Mayakovsky gave the idea of the unity of the artist and the time he extols magnificent expression in the opening part of his poem Fine!
Time buzzing away
like a telegraph wire,
Heart and truth combine.
So it was
with the soldiers
or the land entire
Or in this heart
of mine.
The artist never dissolves in the historical events he is representing but becomes level with them, as it were, embodying himself, his revolutionary's heart, his Communist's soul in them. This was apparently the case with Vishnevsky in his The Optimistic Tragedy. At one time a fierce controversy raged around the play. Vishnevsky's opponents accused him of primitive didacticism and predicted that the play would not last long. But since then many eventful years have past, and The Optimistic Tragedy continues to draw audiences and retain all its inherent power. It seems to me that the evergreen nature of the play placed a special creative responsibility upon us when we came to work on a new production. This aspect of the work had to be conveyed to the audience in theatrical terms.
Naturally, it is not for me or anybody else who collaborated on the production to judge the results achieved. Between the conception and its concrete embodiment lies a hard road, and by no means everything materialises in the exact form the artist intends. Yet it is useful to compare the intention with the result, since such a comparison clearly reveals the correctness or fallaciousness of the artistic conception.
Our aim, then, was to ensure that Vishnevsky's live oratorial voice, addressing bold generalisations directly to our contemporaries and successors, was preserved throughout and never drowned out by theatrical means, weakened or depersonalised. It was this aim that dictated our solution of the outward form of the production, its tense rhythm, and the entire internal scenic development.
But we were perfectly aware that we would be betraying the author's intention if we failed to distinguish unique individual voices in the general chorus of his characters. We knew that in the reverse event we would simply be creating a kind of scenic oratorio, perhaps a requiem, and a very stirring one, but too abstract and devoid of the essence of theatrical poetry-thc real man and his destiny, his cause, his relations with other people. For it is in the matter of bringing out 201 the organic unity of the individual and the masses that we find most clearly manifested the features of Vishnevsky the dramatist that are most interesting and whose scenic embodiment poses the greatest problems.
I have already pointed out how the life reflected in this play is complex and contradictory. It is as though one had many streams each rushing turbulently and irresistibly along its own course. But the important thing is that all these streams eventually meet and flow together in a single powerful current-the main action of the tragedy. Our task was to show the significance of each of the individual human destiniespresented for the destiny of the whole group. We therefore endeavoured to understand each character as well as possible, and thus his personal destiny, his place in the events.
What did this involve?
I generally find it difficult to answer this question without resorting to allegory. There is an extremely interesting entry in the diary of the great French painter Delacroix, which says that ``all the resources of art are like the keys of a piano in the artist's hands: he strikes some, producing various sounds, and leaves the others silent''. Even when the keyboard is open before him, the stage-director often finds it difficult to choose the notes which, when struck, will reproduce the main melody of the production most fully and accurately.
The message of The Optimistic Tragedy is fully expressed, in my opinion, in one of the stage directions: ``We are immortal, the revolution is immortal.'' We chose these words to end our production on, taking them from the stage directions and having them addressed directly to the audience. We felt that it was appropriate to the whole logic of the work to have this idea expressed aloud as a voiced conclusion on the events that had taken place on the stage.
The Narrators have a very special place in the play, both as participants in the action and impassioned, committed commentators. In another play, First Cavalry, Vishnevsky referred to the Narrators as ``Our conscience, our memory, our awareness, our heart''. We wanted the author's civic conscience, poetic memory, revolutionary awareness and militant heart to be revealed doubly-in the words the Narrators address to the audience, and in the actual life of the characters, reproduced with great fidelity and respect for realistic detail.
One's first impression is that Vishnevsky's tragedy is written in a conventional form and that some of the stage directions are practically expressionist in manner. A first reading may therefore suggest an abstract solution of the scenic area and an equally abstract treatment for the heroes, making them mere mouthpieces for the author's views. But this is only a first impression, which, needless to say, is often deceptive 202 and misleading. If one submits to it, one is in danger of never going beyond a superficial assessment of the events and the characters, and failing to grasp the real message.
Indeed, the more one reads into the play, the deeper one delves below the upper layers into the complex and original world of the heroes, the clearer it becomes that the life it depicts, the atmosphere of the heroic struggle that develops there and the characters drawn in strong, sharp strokes by the artist's hand, must be not only concrete but eminently human. This was our understanding of the spirit of the tragedy which we were guided by in our choice of scenic forms.
There is nothing more difficult than trying to express the content of a play in a single formula. And when we groped our way intuitively towards the image of the play, we began to perceive the long difficult road along which the regiment-the first regular naval regiment, formed out of a disorderly, half-wild anarchist band-advances dauntIcssly for the revolution.
We felt that the stern tone of the play, its tremendous conciseness .and emotional intensity required an exceptionally concise arrangement of the scenic area. But at the same time we wished the sets to somehow convey the profound sense of frustration of the people deceived by the anarchists, a force which could only be checked by the iron will of the Bolshevik Party. I think Anatoly Bosulaycv's sets did this very well.
The solution of the mise-en-scene, tremendously important though it was, did not mean that we were anywhere near the end of the many problems to be solved. The most appropriate, visually impressive sets and the most expressive scenic painting cannot be a substitute for the live actor on the stage. The poetic truth of a production is only achieved when its main idea-which colour, light, music and all the other means of theatrical expression serve-is expressed in human characters.
Just as an architect designing a house should be concerned above all with making it convenient and comfortable for its future occupants, so the stage-designer should devise his sets with a view to providing the actors with an ambiance in which they will be able to bring out the essence of their roles to the maximum. The main hero of The Optimistic Tragedy is the people, and the people is made up of individuals who are very different but have certain things in common. We therefore sought the most expressive, striking features in each character that would help the audience understand not only the particular character in question but also his comrades.
Hence our interpretation of the Commissar not as a symbolic figure, embodying abstract features of the Party leader of the Civil War period, but as a human being with an individual, concrete psychology, 203 a woman who did not cease to be a woman just because her destiny had brought her to the front line of the revolutionary struggle. Whilebeing perfectly aware that there was nothing particularly new and unexpected in the aim we set ourselves, we realised that in the context of a heroic play its accomplishment involved a firm, principled approach. That is why we strove so persistently to ensure that the Commissar was not stripped of such natural features as weariness, womanly tenderness and carefully concealed anxiety.
This was how we solved the scene in which the Commissar writes a letter to her mother. Here the audience is able to catch a glimpse of her perfectly ordinary, human nature, and see that she too, like everybody else, is wont to be pensive and dream, and seek a spiritual refuge. We wanted the whole ambiance to help the actress reveal for a while these traits the Commissar was at such pains to conceal. We felt-and I think rightly so-that this solution, far from lowering the Commissar in the audience's eyes would raise her even higher and give added impact to her revolutionary deeds. The fact that a small, frail woman chose to challenge such fearsome people as Vozhak and Siply and was able to triumph over them is largely accounted for by the superiority of genuine humanity over blind, irrational, brute force, the superiority of noble human purpose over petty, coarse merccnariness.
Similarly, we wanted to make Vozhak and Siply too not symbolic figures but concrete bearers of a servile, inhuman ideology. Psychologically, these two characters who set themselves up as champions of the unrestricted freedom of the individual are really abject slaves. We strove to stress this with all the means at our disposal, including scenic hyperbole. But there are hyperboles and hyperboles. We, in our exaggeration, were on no account to violate or distort the realistic proportions of the work and destroy the realistic perspective we had chosen for its depiction.
Our idea was that the head-on collisions between different characters and the implacable struggle between different outlooks and habits should convey to the audience that the anarchists, while professing and demagogically preaching the principles of individual freedom were in fact mutilating, enfeebling and debasing the human personality.
We intended to make Vozhak and Siply a patent confirmation of this.
This idea naturally gave lead straight to anothcr-the idea that revolutionary organisation, and conscious discipline serve the real, as opposed to the illusory, emancipation of the individual, imparting truly indomitable strength to the human personality and providing the conditions for it to blossom fully. An exposure of the anarchist prejudices and misconceptions would be quite pointless unless a positive 204 idea, affirming the true social ideal, were not ultimately given concrete expression in the artistic images. I am not a scholar or critic by profession, and I realise that my explanations and the way they are expressed may leave much to be desired. But I make no claim to accurate formulations, since I regard them as purely auxiliary in my work as stage-director and not as a basic means of forming a conception. I and my colleagues were far more concerned with having a clear picture in our minds of what it was we intended to show the audience, in all its details and full plastic terms. It would be strange to say the least if I were to attempt to pass judgement on what we actually achieved in this respect and how correctly I envisaged the characters of the plav and cultivated them in my imagination, so to speak. For this reason, I only wish to mention a few of the considerations that compelled me, as a director, to do this rather than that.
I was convinced, for example, that it would be quite wrong to artificially belittle Vozhak. The audience must first be made aware of the strength of this man and only later perceive the nature and essence of this strength, which so rapidly and shamefully becomes weakness. This was essential if the audience were to believe in Vozhak's power over the unit and not feel that it was contrived. It must be made clear that Vozhak knew how to get his own way and it was no easy matter to free the people he had deceived from his influence. This was perfectly understood by Y. Tolubeyev who played Vozhak, and his qualities-his remarkable ability to convince and sincere existence on the stage-were just what was needed. My task as a director was to ensure that the action helped reinforce and emphasise the image created by the actor.
That is why we had Vozhak living apart from the rest of the unit, as though separated from the others by an invisible but insurmountable barrier. He is invariably accompanied by Siply, and there is always an empty space around them. We wanted there to be something ominous about this void in which Vozhak moves, and all the scenes in which he appears have the same, deliberately slow, heavy pace.
We wished to avoid simplifying Siply too. We wanted the audience to witness the disappearance of the last human features in this degenerate type, to see him gradually advancing towards complete moral bankruptcy, corroded by his need to taunt and destroy other people, and secure his own ends by means of cruelty and treachery. We felt it was far more important and interesting to adopt this approach than to simply debunk him in a straightforward, superficial manner. The base, laughable features in Siply speak for themselves. Our main concern was to show what was most dangerous and vile in him-his cursed tenacity and ability to trim his sails to the wind, features that arc far from funny. A. Sokolov's interpretation of the content of the role, it seems 205 to me, was suggested to him by just this desire to convey the repulsive, slippery nature of this venemous, degenerate individual.
The complicated and contradictory inner world of the sailor Alexci required special attention. This man, whom personal misfortune had embittered and led to declare a personal war on the whole world and eventually into the anarchist camp, in fact concealed tremendous spiritual strength. The struggle waged by the Commissar to save him represents the struggle of the Party for the hearts and minds, the 'life and happiness of millions of simple people slowly but surely advancing and coming to embrace the revolutionary cause. We wanted Alexei to be a true man of the people in our production, full of the simple vitality, humour and expansiveness which so often conceal a rich and complex nature. Alexei combines superficial bravado, and a dull longing for a noble goal in life, the courage of a mature soldier and sudden fits of childish fright, bitter experience and naive ignorance of life. We felt there was a danger in showing one facet without the other complementary one, exaggerating some features at the expense of others. In embodying this extremely important character, all of us involved, including the actor Igor Gorbachov, wished to achieve an organic blend of contradictory human traits.
It goes without saying that in describing our aims and intentions I do not presume to speak of what we actually gave the audience. It is up to them to judge for themselves, for they can do so more accurately and objectively.
However, I feel I must mention at least some of the aims that we failed to achieve in our production. It was our aim, for example, to blend the general romantic atmosphere of the play and the realistic details of the everyday life of the unit it contains. I feel that we were not entirely successful in this: instead of forming a harmonious compound the two elements rather tend to alternate. We intended that the Narrators should be fully-fledged participants in the action and not mere onlookers, but quite possibly in practice our solution left something to be desired in places.
The Narrators do not participate fully in the action and the development of events, and do not have any direct influence on the course of events. Yet it would be wrong to treat them as passive observers and commentators. The author's description of them as ``our conscience, our memory'', needs to be deciphered by the director. It is clearly not enough to understand and accept this qualification, it must be given concrete scenic expression and be embodied in the actors' behaviour and existence on the stage. We endeavoured to do this mainly by including the Narrators in the general rhythm of action that applied to the other characters. Instead of setting apart a special portion of the 206 stage area for them and restricting them to their own particular entrances and exits, we had them appear now on the forestage, now in the thick of events where the main characters of the tragedy live and move. In each of their appearances they were to act in accordance with the mood and circumstances of the given scene. Take the scene of the sailors' farewell ball, which begins with the laconic and sad words of one of the Narrators: ``A dance. The sailors' farewell ball. How many there were in those years!'' We pictured this ball as a sad occasion, pervaded with harsh poetry, at which the sailors' faces were suddenly lit up unexpectedly and their hearts were aflame. We regarded this scene where the sailors take their leave of their wives, mothers, sweethearts and children as an opportunity to reveal for a moment the personal private lives of the characters. The Narrators were to play an important part here: they were to represent the author's heart beating in unison with the hearts of the sailors about to set out on the hard road of battle. The Narrators were to emerge from the ranks of the sailors, as if emerging from their own past, that had remained at just such a sailors' ball as this, sad and unforgettable. I hardly think that we could have succeeded in realising our intention fully, but I think that it was important that we took as our point of departure in our search for a solution the author's original, and in many ways unique, idea.
I have already mentioned the fact that we strove to blend in our production the individual real-life details and broad visual generalisations, the general and the particular, the primary and the secondary. The first words the Finn, Vainonen, utters on the stage, ``A twilight mist and not a single soul to say a gentle word to a lonely sailor'', arc commented on in a detailed stage direction: ``The heart is moved by his despair, the alien accent and the eyes from which tears roll almost without cause, from the vast troubled silence of the world.''
These words can hardly be applied literally. It was necessary to find a way of expressing the idea indirectly and revealing the meaning of the author's sympathy for the ``lonely sailor'' through the whole atmosphere around him.
We felt it was not enough to achieve naturalistic gloom at the spot where Vainonen is assailed by this profound sadness. We wanted the very air to be so heavy and oppressive that Vainonen was obliged to address his words to himself and no one else. We wanted to show that the anxiety of this thin, restive and profound man in the old worn sailor's vest ultimately embraced the whole vast bulk of the ship and that it was broader, deeper and more significant than the sufferings of one man. This is what gave us the idea of having Ryaboi's bodysprawled on the sloping deck and first one sailor walking past from 207 right to left, then another from left to right,-and so on at the same slow pace, the pace of painful, exhausting reflection.
It was our search for great humanity and deep penetration into the hidden depths of man, the very essence of the human personality, that prompted us to restore the Commissar's monologue, which it had become the habit to omit. This monologue, although uneven, is imbued not simply with faith in the future but with a penetrating vision of that future, which is our present. It adds to our understanding of Commissar's inner life and at the same time builds another bridgespanning time, from the time the play was written and the time its heroes lived to the time when we, the descendants of these heroes, resurrect them on the stage.
Similarly, it was not simply to embellish the spectacle or because of an inclination for violent action on the stage that we introduced the battle scene. We felt that it would enhance the action and help the continuity, and supplement the characters, by showing them in such a tense moment of their lives. Following in the author's footsteps, we strove to convey a sense of this tension in moments, which determine a man's destiny and the success or failure of his cause.
It sometimes happens that a man has only to let himself go for an instant to bring all his past efforts and endeavours to naught. Vozhak felt he could already celebrate his victory over the Commissar, that his power was boundless. His stunted philistinc soul rejoiced and, longing to enjoy the fruits of his triumph, he began to celebrate. We wanted the forms of his celebration to reveal the inner Vozhak, his appalling taste and pathetic idea of what constitutes ``the good things in life''. Hence the gaudy carpet straight from some third-class tavern, the patriarchal samovar and the antediluvian gramophone. Hence the heart-rending strains of the old romance ``The Splendid Roses Shed Their Petals'' sung by Siply. Hence the whole pace of the scene, conveying the real essence of the anarchists' joyless revels.
The use of such inner contrasts is typical of Vsevolod Vishncvsky's artistic thought and the whole poetic rhythm of his tragedy. Vishncvsky is equally truthful when showing the negative side of life, portraying Vozhak and Siply, or when depicting the triumph of great revolutionary ideas, the triumph of the cause for which the Commissar fought. We wanted our production to give full-throated expression to this truth and to ensure that the story of the ``first naval regiment'' would stir the audience and make them think, that it would help to bring home to them all the grandeur of the people's revolutionary exploits for the triumph of the great cause of communism.
__*__ 208
The farewell ball
:enc from
'he Optimistic Tragedy
. Yan as Vainoncn and
. Sokolov as Siply
Every scenic solution must contain a tangible material element. This does not mean that the director finds this material solution throughout a play, at every link in the chain of events, but he must certainly endeavour to do so. I am not speaking of the scenic lay-out, which is always concrete, but of the atmosphere in which the action develops.
My favourite place in The Optimistic Tragedy is the transition from the waltz to the march in the finale of Act One. I did not arrive at my solution immediately, despite the fact that the following passage-thc march of the unit-had already been agreed upon with the designer.
A waltz strikes up and people begin to dance. The couples gyrate slowly. A girl clings to a sailor. A little girl says goodbye to the old boatswain's mate. And the strains of the waltz gradually change, passing into a boisterous march, cheerful and insistent, as though calling people back from their dreams to the world of reality.
The transition from the waltz to the march, their interpcnetration, was decisive in the solution not only of this scene but of the whole play.
I am speaking here of a hard, tangible material element in the solution. It may be at the beginning or at the end, or anywhere else you please, but without this element in the solution, it seems to me our profession cannot be artistic in the highest meaning of the word.
Once the visual solution of parts of the play have been found, the parts which set the basic tone of the production, one can try to embody the solution in collaboration with the actors, the designer and the composer, bearing in mind that unless each one of them feels that he is a co-author of the production there can be no true creative process. The director's role is not reduced, or restricted in any way by the fact that the solution is sought in collaboration with everybody else. There is no harm even in creating the impression that a solution has arisen automatically. One ought not to trumpet loudly: I have decided upon this solution and it's your job to carry it out! This approach simply kills all initiative, deadens the rehearsal process and makes it impossible for the actors to achieve a vital, improvisational state.
There is one more point worth examining while we are on the subject of the conception and the final solution of a production. Stanislavsky and Vakhtangov spoke a great deal of what they called ``the ball of attention''. Basically, Stanislavsky regarded the art of stage direction to consist in the ability to throw around an invisible ``ball of attention'' at various speeds and degrees of force from one subject to another. Stage direction is the organisation of this invisible process.
This involves artistic organisation of the play so that the audience's attention does not wander at will but is drawn to where the director wishes.
209In the dialogue too, everything must be calculated to ensure that the audience's attention is drawn to the right place, and they listen to the person they should be listening to at a particular moment.
Take the dialogue between Monakhov's wife and Cherkun in the last act of The Barbarians. It is in this scene that final stroke is put to the character of Monakhov, although he remains silent throughout. The culmination of the role, its super-objective, its basic idea, the through-action-are all revealed in these minutes.
Can we leave the audience to grasp this in retrospect? Certainly not. This means that a moment that provides the culmination of the role of Monakhov, must be found in the dialogue, in the words uttered by Monakhov and Cherkun, so that their scenic life organically includes Monakhov in such a way as to bring him into the foreground. It must be carefully and accurately solved, just as the conductor knows precisely where the bassoon comes in and the violins must play quietly.
If we wish a dialogue to focus attention on a character who is not taking part in it, we can hardly allow this dialogue to flow loosely and haphazardly as in life. It must be specially handled in order to ensure that every second the spectator is aware that he is listening, as in the cinema, when the picture takes precedence over the soundtrack and the important thing is not what a person is saying but how another person is listening. The theatre also makes use of this device.
Take the last scene of Simonov's The Fourth, where He leaves. When I was directing this scene my aim was to ensure that the other person on the stage did not attract the audience's attention for a single second. She was to move ``out of the camera's eye'', so to speak, as in a film. The whole scene was based on the principle that the audience should watch only Him, with Her playing a purely auxiliary role. Attention is only drawn to Her once and then only for an instant, when She says: ``And I don't want to go on living otherwise.''
Thus, even in a simple dialogue we have not the right to let the audience's attention wander freely.
One must search for a special approach in each different case. It may be a conventional device, such as having the lights fade and training a spotlight on the important area. Far more difficult is the psychological approach, willing the audience to see what you want them to see at a particular moment.
In My Elder Sister there is a scene where the two sisters are criticising a young man's behaviour. During the conversation the uncle comes in, and they continue as though nothing had happened, until the uncle joins the conversation. How should this be handled? One can either show that they did not notice their uncle's entry or somehow make a point of it, for the scene undergoes a qualitative change as a result 210 of Ukhov's appearance. The answer is to throw the ``ball of attention'' to the uncle for a moment and then back again. But how? There arc various means of doing this. One could have the sisters exclaim: ``Oh, Uncle!'', for example. The course we chose was as follows. The sisters pretend that their uncle's appearance is of supreme indifference to them, and this automatically draws the attention of the audience to him, for they cannot help feeling that this is rather strange.
Are there any other criteria of the genuineness of a scenic solution? One of them is plastic, musical, rhythmic expressiveness.
The plastic solution must be so precise that it can be largely comprehended even without words. And, vice versa, if you shut off the visual aspect, what you hear should be sufficiently expressive to enable you to imagine it.
A real solution, in my opinion, must be such as to make everything perfectly clear to a sighted deaf person or a blind person who can hear.
The well-known director Alexci Popov pointed out that the director who does not bother about a visual solution is taking the easy way out. Say he is doing a scene from Tolstoi's Resurrection-tor example, Nckhlyudov's meeting with Katya in prison. As it is a prison, there must be a bench and two doors, one through which Katya is led, and another through which Nckhlyudov enters. What could be more logical? The bench is in place, and they sit down, and from here on everything proceeds as in life. How can one struggle against such ``solutions''? Popov offers a most interesting recipe: a conversation ensues between Nckhlyudov and Katya which represents a major psychological turning point for them both. Therefore, even if I watch the scene through thick glass and hear nothing, I ought to understand, at least to some extent, that something extremely important has occurred between these two people.
It goes without saying that words arc the most important thing on the stage, for it is mainly through words that the ideas of a work are conveyed. But speaking of scenic expressiveness, one cannot rely solely on words. In the visual emotive structure of the production, words arc only one of the several components, albeit the most important.
If we forget this, we shall simply succeed in murdering the spectacle that is an inalienable quality of the theatre.
Even the most highly psychological, philosophical play is always a spectacle, and this being so I insist that the combination of plastic and sound with visual expressiveness is of decisive importance in the director's conception and its realisation.
The climax of the Kamerny Theatre's production of Madame Bovary, was the scene where Emma runs away from Rodolph. Tairov wanted 211 to show the heroine's last road before her suicide. Running is something that is rarely conveyed successfully in the theatre, but here the director found a perfect plastic solution. Not a single word was uttered in this short scene. We have just the light and the music and the actress running on the spot. Yet it was intensely dramatic for the simple reason that it was not the flight per se that interested Tairov, but the flight as the hopeless end of Emma Bovary's tragic road. This was perfectly conveyed in an absolutely concrete form of scenic expression. Thus, by means of plastic expression, ``how'' expressed ``what'' with the maximum precision.
One must find precise physical action in order for the solution to acquire materiality. Not simply a physical action, but the physical action, the only one that is appropriate.
When we came to rehearse the first scene of Irkutsk Story, the shop scene, we were already perfectly clear about the facts of the play. Two girls are closing up shop. They have had a hard day. They have sold some roach. What is this grocer's shop exactly? A small stuffy premises where oil and paraffin, vodka and sweets that have lain a long time, and a quaint assortment of other things are sold. The girls spend the whole day working amid a great variety of strange odours. And now, to top it all, there's the matter of the roach.
After a long hard day's work they come out into the fresh air and sit on a bench, too exhausted to move. Victor and Sergei come and sit down beside them. They have also just finished work and are tired. They begin to exchange playful remarks and glances, all in the apparent absence of a plastic solution. Four people sitting in a row on a bench, with their legs stretched out, practically motionless flirting listlessly. And we suddenly felt that life was flowing in its proper course when humour sprang from the appropriate physical existence. The whole scene of Sergei and Valya's meeting acquired an unexpected sharpness. Thus, from the point of view of the inner logic of this picture, the very absence of plastic expression was the correct solution.
If this solution is taken to its logical conclusion, expressed in plastic form, then a detail may become the unexpected and unforeseen solution for the whole scene.
The closer the subject of a play is to real life and the less convention there is in the writer's reflection of life, the more we must approach reality in our solution. In this case details can become the solution. But every piece of the work must be revealed in such a way as to ensure that these details are not purely descriptive but express the essence of the work. This is especially true of psychological drama and the play of manners. Only where such a detail is dictated by the logic of the action and the conflicts between the characters and transmits the 212 atmosphere of the scene and the essence of the conflict can it be regarded as a solution.
During rehearsals of Rozov's In Search of Happiness Vladimirov and I gave a great deal of thought to finding a solution for the finale of Act One where Olcg grabs his father's sabre and begins to hack away at the furniture. We had grasped the main idea: this was an expression of youthful protest and revolt. But we lacked the details that would prise open the scene and reveal its inner content.
We found our solution quite by accident in the course of our study of the play. According to the facts of the play Oleg's revolt followed from his having accidentally overturned an inkpot on the table. We decided to make this a turning-point in the hero's psychological state, a sudden swing from respect for the fine-polished furniture to complete contempt for it. Oleg takes the inkpot and calmly pours it over the table. Oleg's upsurge of passion, his inner protest, is expressed in the very calm with which he behaves. All that followed was secondary and subsidiary because the detail we had found expressed the turning-point and had become the solution.
This is an example of the way a detail can become the sought-for factor making possible the complete solution of a scene, and hence the conflict of a whole play.
Although it is important to express the general through the particular, this is only true where the particular is warranted, logical and unexpected, like the solution as a whole. It is not enough for it to be logical, although this alone involves a great deal. If it is only unexpected, we are dealing with pure artifice, a contrived device that expresses nothing. A device in itself is impermissible on the stage, it must always be called for. But if a vivid and unexpected detail is found that accurately conveys the essence of the scene, it becomes an essential part of the general solution. The value of an artistic device depends on it being appropriate to the nature of the author's aim. Otherwise it will have no intrinsic value.
I make one of the last stages of my work on a production its rhythmic organisation. Generally speaking, a director cannot sense the rhythm in advance: it arises from the relationship between the parts of the internally constructed whole. In the conception it is hardly present, and then only as a rational hypothesis. Rhythm is an element that has such a real impact on the process of work that it can only be solved in the course of practical work on a production. I can never anticipate the rhythmic structure of a spectacle. It is one of the last and decisive phases that arises from direct contact with the ready production. I can only sense it vaguely in my conception, and often mistakenly. One feels sure that the action will have a certain rhythm 213 and then finds that quite a different one emerges in practice. The rhythm pace of each scene and of the production as a whole derives from the contextual relationship of each scene.
Thus, to turn to The Death of the Squadron once more, I felt that the pace should be extremely fast in the scene where the sailors abandon the ship. But practice suggested something quite different-what had seemed extremely monotonous rhythmically in theory became a device producing strong emotional impact.
A scenic solution is only valid when it is embodied in the actor. The solution for every scene must be based on close study of the characters' inner life. A solution will be purely formal unless your search has involved the discovery of psychological truth. Any work must be based on live human conflicts. It is necessary to find the emotional stimulant that will help you find the ambiance, the atmosphere, which expresses the inner flow of ``the life of the human spirit'' to the fullest extent. It is the combination of ambiance and inner life that determines whether or not the conception is convincing.
This involves finding a combination of what happens in life prior to, after, and parallel with the action, either in contrast or in unison with what is happening. It is this combination, consciously organised, that creates the atmosphere.
Take the contrast in Pushkin's Banquet During the Plague. The events in the play have nothing whatsoever to do with the plague, but the fact that they take place at such a time creates a highly tragic atmosphere.
What was it that gave me the clue to the atmosphere in the Act Three of The Barbarians? We have a perfectly fortuitous celebration, developing according to the established rules, by inertia. This is a feint in relationship to the events occurring in the characters' lives.
A visual solution must involve atmosphere. Atmosphere is the emotional colouring that must be present throughout.
I deliberately stop now and then to interpret in detail certain elements of Stanislavsky's system, for in the majority of cases directors and actors play havoc with them. The terminology used by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko has lost its original meaning and become a collection of formulae which each director interprets to suit himself. 1 have never met two directors who agreed as to the meaning of such a term as Nemirovich-Danchenko's ``second plane''.
This remarkably meaningful term has been debased and cheapened. It is something so difficult to put into practice that in my whole experience I have not come across more than a dozen productions in which it was present. We are always hearing people say: ``And what second plane are we going to have here?'' The actors have yet to master 214 their roles, the production still lacks any semblance of a coherent solution, and yet the director is talking of the second plane or even a third, fourth or tenth plane! How can there possibly be talk of a second plane when even the first plane has not taken shape!
This careless, disrespectful attitude to the terminology of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko has meant that we directors simply fail to understand one another, as though we were speaking different languages. Yet Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko struggled for clear-cut, accurate definitions, for having each term carry a clear, precise meaning. Why should we presume to substitute one concept for another? We ought to wage a fierce struggle against such mutilation and adulteration of the ``system''.
What exactly is the ``second plane''?
For me it is the highest ideal in the scene, the part, the act, the production, the final objective of all art. I always associate it with an emotional sensation produced by the work as a whole which can be expressed in such words as ``transparent'', ``stuffy'' and so on. It is atmosphere but not in the ordinary, everyday sense of the word. It is the emotional atmosphere of the work which makes it a work of art.
The second plane presupposes the harmony of all the component elements of the production. It arises from the process of life on the stage, from the development of the conflict, from the whole course of action, from its period atmosphere and from all the means of scenic expression such as the sets, lighting and music.
Naturally it can only be found in a genuine, highly artistic work. Occasionally it arises irrespective of the quality of the work, but in such cases it is generally a matter of chance.
I can only presume to give examples from my own productions, but I am not claiming that in the productions I refer to a second plane was in fact present. I shall simply discuss what I was aiming to achieve.
In Act One of The Three Sisters we have a birthday celebration. I decided to make the second plane a requiem. Everyone is making merry, trying to create a gay, relaxed and comfortable atmosphere, a sense of general wellbeing, and I tried to present this on the surface. But at the same time it was necessary to transmit the feeling that the birthday celebration somehow had not come off.
What arc the most frequent misinterpretations of the concept of the ``second plane''?
Very often it is confused with the image solution. But the image solution is something concrete and must be expressed in terms of the means of which the director disposes in the given production. The second plane is an abstract, sensual concept, which adds a certain psychological and emotional colouring to the solution. It is something 215 the director felt in the play, but does not necessarily have to express in words.
Even more often the second plane is confused with the subtext. We frequently come across references to ``the actor's second plane'' in articles.
What exactly is this supposed to mean? When directors try to explain, it generally transpires that what they are really referring to is the subtext. All the articles and books on the subject cite the scene of the farewell between Tuzenbach and Irina in the last act of The Three Sisters as the classic example of the actor's second plane.
But this belongs entirely to the sphere of the logic of the actor's existence on the stage and has nothing at all to do with the second plane. The fact that Tuzenbach goes to fight a duel is a major fact of the play engendering a certain subtext, or what Stanislavsky referred to as the ``undercurrent'' of the text.
The subtext is a very simple concept. It is merely a thought that is not expressed in words. We never say all that we arc thinking. This does not mean that people arc mendacious, but simply that the thought process does not correspond to words uttered. Thought always contains far more than words. A person can be speaking of one thing and thinking about many at the same time.
The subtext arises from the facts of the play and the rhythm of the characters' behaviour. It is a concrete, practical term, and there is no need for us to replace it with any other.
Finally, it is necessary to distinguish between the second plane and the atmosphere of the whole production, the individual scenes and pieces of the play. Atmosphere is also a concrete concept, deriving from the facts of the play. The second plane derives from emotional shades, on which the real-life atmosphere is based.
Thus the second plane is the emotional reaction the play as a whole produces. It is extremely difficult to achieve it in practice. That is why I regard it as the higher mathematics of stage art. This concept must on no account be debased and vulgarised by the substitution of other perfectly precise and concrete concepts.
Stage direction is a practical art. It is best explained by concrete examples. This is rather difficult, since the artist cannot be objective about his own creations.
Sometimes he sees far more in his work than there really is; sometimes he sees less. A conscientious, self-critical director suffers agonies when he watches his own production in the theatre. He feels the whole audience must be struck by the shortcomings he notices. Conversely, he is most upset when the audience overlook what he regards to be .a telling touch. One thing is certain: far more benefit can be derived 216 from attending a rehearsal and seeing a director at work than from reading his articles or books.
Stanislavsky insisted that art cannot be taught, that the most one can do is prepare a person, create the most favourable conditions for inspiration and live feeling to arise.
My descriptions of my productions and references to certain scenes from them should not be understood as suggestions or advice, let alone instructions for producing this or that play. My aim was simply to stress that the solution is a chain of logically justified and warranted actions, that in the chain of events the inner life always has its outward expression and that there is always a complex relationship between words and physical actions, and pauses and details can express the most involved emotional experiences.
Other people's solutions, however remarkable, however well described -with drawings, plans and photographs-will never enable a director or actors to create a real work of art.
A production is worth nothing if it is only a copy of an original. Singing in someone else's voice cannot provide aesthetic pleasure.
I have done two productions of Korneichuk's The heath of the Squadron in my time. Although the first was fairly successful, I realised when I came to the second that, with different actors and in a different theatre, there could be no question of repeating it. The ``pattern'' of the role that suited one actor in one theatre would be quite unsuitable for another actor in a different theatre. What was fine for the vast stage of the Lenin Komsomol Theatre would be quite out of place on the stage of the Gorky Theatre. New music and new sets were required.
There are those who maintain that it is better to do something outstanding filched from somebody else than something that is one's own but mediocre, or that there is nothing shameful in a young director borrowing from an experienced one, since it is a matter of ``learning the trade''. I simply cannot agree with this pseudo popular wisdom. Creative conceptions cannot be taken on hire like televisions or refrigerators. You cannot train your own imagination by using somebody else's head. Nobody would think of sending his pal to a rendezvous with his girl friend instead of going himself on the grounds that he is better looking or more experienced.
Stage direction is a painful but immensely satisfying process. Anybody who does not enjoy it would be better employed elsewhere.
There is nothing more satisfying for a director than a successful rehearsal in which real creative contact has been established with the cast, and from which an interesting detail has emerged or a solution been found for an exceptionally difficult scene.
217There is no greater happiness for a director than a rehearsal where his imagination has infected the actors and aroused them to creative thinking, where an invisible bridge has been built between him and the whole cast.
Stanislavsky, in his practical work as stage-director, preferred rehearsals to actual performances. This is perfectly natural, for it is in the nature of our profession that after the first performance a production somehow detaches itself from the director and begins to live an independent life of its own.
For the actors it is quite another matter: for them every performance is something quite new. The actor lives his role dozens if not hundreds of times, laughs and cries, suffers and falls in love, jokes and fights. And if the logic of the action brings him to the logic of the feelings, he experiences the joy of creation in every single performance.
Attempts to achieve results without working for them, bypassing the creative process, kill all the joy of creation. One cannot teach results. One can only point to the process, describe the chosen path, indicate the direction.
When the director and the actors are clear in their minds about what is happening, about the circumstances in which the characters live and move, then a joyous creative atmosphere will attend the rehearsals. Only in such an atmosphere do successful mises-en-scene arise, successful and expressive tones, rhythms and compositions.
I am making no new discoveries. I am simply describing how I work, and saying what I think about our profession.
[218] __ALPHA_LVL1__ WORK WITH THE ACTORS 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 219 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.
I feel I must also warn the reader in advance that in what follows the terms used are only tentative.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. 220 Acting can on no account be regarded as modern in the absence of this capacity for intense thought.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 221 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 222 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
223Applied 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.
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.
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.
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
224
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 225 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
226Actors 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 227 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stanislavsky's term ``faith and imagination'' implies a different kind of faith in each particular role.
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.
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 228 hears but not his partner. The nature of such asides is an important factor determining the style of acting.
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.
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''.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If a work is written in the form of a pamphlet and not in the form 229 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
230The 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
231There 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 232 director had spoken for three hours forty minutes. Unfortunately, this is very typical.
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.
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.
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.
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 233 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 234 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 235 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.
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.
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.
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.
[236] __ALPHA_LVL1__ METHOD The method of active analysis is in
my opinion the most perfect method of work with the actor, the
crowning achievement of Stanislavsky's lifelong search in the sphere of
methodology.
Although I had the good fortune to meet Stanislavsky a few times, I mainly acquired my knowledge and understanding of his method through pupils and followers of his, who were my teachers, and from my own practical work. My understanding of his method is individual and subjective, and far be it from me to suggest that it is the only valid one. I must ask the reader to regard what I have to say not as an objective account of Stanislavsky's teaching but rather as a number of conclusions I have reached on the basis of my practical work in the theatre.
If asked what I consider to be the essence of the method of active analysis, I should say that it is a method which ultimately makes it possible to reproduce the extremely intricate ``life of the human spirit'' on the stage through the simplest sequence of physical actions, in a manner that, far from being a simplification, fully conveys the vast, profound, all-embracing concept that is man.
Stanislavsky reached this simple conclusion only after a long, intense search. His acting theory was intimately related to life from its in- 237 ception, and it was developed, deepened and altered in direct interdependence with practice. A superficial knowledge of Stanislavsky's theory may give rise to the impression that the system in its original form was contradicted by much of what Stanislavsky said shortly before his death. In actual fact, the evolution of Stanislavsky's views simply confirms how consistent he was.
To begin with, Stanislavsky regarded thought as the prime factor in the creative process. Thus, at the first stage of his search, he came up with the subtext and a little later with the inner monologue, where the human character was revealed mainly through the intellect.
From the very outset Stanislavsky dismissed emotion, the feelings, as the stimulus for rousing the life of the role. This thesis remained intact right up to the last. Emotion is regarded as purely derivative, and an actor who relies on the subconscious in the creation of his role will inevitably be led to worn cliches.
For a long time it looked as though the whole secret was to rely on thought, the conscious, deliberate evocation of the necessary emotions. This is basically true as a question of priorities, and the law ``from the conscious to the subconscious'' has retained its validity to this day.
Nevertheless, it transpired that this was not the only secret, and that the problem was in fact more complicated than it had seemed.
The next stage in Stanislavsky's creative search was concerned with the volitional factor, the ``will'', which produces the necessary emotions and leads to the right results. For a long time this thesis was the basic tenet of the system. To this period belong the concepts of objective, through action, and all that has remained valid to the present day.
Stanislavsky's teaching revolutionised dramatic art. The old approach where everything was left to the free play of intuition and inspiration and only a few brilliant individuals elaborated their own personal method, which was possibly adopted by a handful of pupils at most, was replaced with a creative process following a precisesystem when Stanislavsky formulated his laws of acting. Beginning work with round-the-table rehearsals, with careful analysis of the characters and ideas, Stanislavsky raised the art of the theatre and the actor to unprecedented heights.
However, when his new system achieved recognition and began to win over more and more supporters, Stanislavsky's restless, eternallysearching mind was assailed by doubts, and he discovered dangers in it which might eventually do much serious damage to the actor's art. He felt the greatest danger to be passivity, the actor relinquishing more and more his active role to the director in the process of creative search.
A second danger is one-sidedness, the actor's one-sided development, in that during the period of analytical work on the part his physical 238 apparatus remained inactive, so that he acquired the ability to think about the part and analyse the dramatist's material, but not to act.
Stanislavsky was so concerned over the lack of opportunity for harmonious development of the actor's entire apparatus, spiritual and physical, in the creative process, that he began to review his whole system and shortly before his death developed a new system, subsequently known as the method of active analysis.
Stanislavsky came to the conclusion that only physical action rouses reason and will, ultimately evoking the feeling that is the theatre's raison d'etre. He had finally discovered the basic stimulus in the process that would lead the actor ``from the conscious to the subcon- scious''.
Stanislavsky's system is the most realistic acting method in existence, based as it is on the complete unity of the physical and the spiritual that is found in life itself, where the most complex spiritual phenomenon is expressed through a consistent sequence of physical actions.
Basically nothing seems to have changed from the first version of the system. Such concepts as through action, communication, ``pieces'' and objectives are retained. One important thing, however, has changed: previously all these elements enabled the actor to ignore for a long time the physical side of the role and keep it separate from the spiritual. There was a gap between the actor's rational, intellectual preparation for the role and his complete physical unpreparedness and helplessness. The shortest way to organic action on the stage is to introduce the physical life of the role at the very first stage of work, •eliminating this gap.
When we overload the actor with facts about the role, the circumstances of the play, he becomes like a rachitic child, his puny body bending under the weight of his overlarge head, stuffed full of information. At the same time, he remains quite helpless as regards the most important thing of all-thc physical embodiment of the role.
Thanks to the method of active analysis we can embark on what we might call ``physical reconnaissance'' at the initial stage of work on the role, that is, we get inside the role and explore it with our arms, legs, back, and all our physical being. Here it is necessary to understand exactly what is happening and endeavour to achieve the final result. There is no need to search for the correct intonation for this or that phrase at the play reading: it is the action underlying the role that must be sought.
If we compare the spiritual aspect of human relationships in Moliere and Chekhov, it might appear that everything is very simple in Moliere's plays and that the events are perfectly clear and straightforward. In actual fact, however, the spiritual life underlying the action in 239 Moli\`ere's plays is every bit as complicated as in Chekhov, and it is simply a question of adopting a different method of investigation, taking into account the different nature of the work and the different ``rules of play'' given by the author.
The aim of the play-reading stage in the method of active analysis is the actor's preparation for attempts to enter into the real confrontations of the play. This involves fully understanding the nature of the main conflict and the given circumstances.
The director's task is extremely difficult in the process of search for the correct action. It requires great pedagogical skill on his part to ensure that the entire intellectual and spiritual complex is conveyed in the simplest possible form of expression, directed towards a concrete result. The actor's role in this process is exceptionally active, since he must bring into play his whole ``psycho-physical'' apparatus.
Thus, the essence of the method is that every minute, every second of the scenic action is an uninterrupted confrontation. The director must remember that there is no scenic life without conflict.
We understand this perfectly well in theory, but in practice we are often content to have two people on the stage talking in a ``life-like'' manner. Everything appears to be perfectly natural and authentic. After all, not every conversation is an argument or scandal. Thus we are content to have a ``likeness'' of life thereby sinning against the main thesis of the system, the need to reveal conflict, without which even the most idyllic scene is impossible.
We have no right to a superficial understanding of conflict as a clash between diametrically opposed viewpoints. It is far more subtle and profound than this: different standpoints in an argument, different groups of given circumstances, in which people exist, and which do not permit them to openly express their conflict, although it exists. Unless we find the hidden conflict, unless it underlies the scene, there can be no question of genuine action.
It goes without saying, it is far easier to discover the physical action in a scene where the conflict is patent and expressed in a direct physical clash.
But what about a well-concealed chain of physical actions which must be expressed in a ``bout''?
It is essential to produce a score for the life of each character with a continuous chain of inner conflicts, a score which ultimately reveals the clashes between groups, action and counter-action. Only then can a production be said to be constructed according to the method.
If each character is given a line of conflict, however mild its scenic
expression may be at times, this will help create the atmosphere of the
scene through the most diverse inner actions. For every character it is
240
Emma Popova as Maria Lvovna and S. Yursky as Professor Polczhayev
necessary to find the essence of conflict expressing his content, according
to which the atmosphere and the line of behaviour for each character
is created. Then we come to what Vakhtangov called ``the ball of
attention'', drawing the attention of the audience to what the director
considers to be the most important thing in a scene at a particular
moment.
When the action of all the characters has been found, the atmosphere has been created, and attention drawn to the essential point, the desired counterpoint of the scene is achieved.
The chain of conflicts, reaching the point of ``psychological boxing'', so to speak, produces the score of the production. To the uninformed it might appear simplification, reduction of the philosophical and psychological depth of the work to a primitive level. In actual fact, all that is most profound and complex in dramatic art is ultimately expressed through the most simple physical action.
The depth of ideological content and emotional infectiousness can only be brought out when the one and only appropriate physical action capable of ``blasting open'' a piece, and the whole play, and expressing the author's creative intention is found in every case.
How is the work process organised according to the method of active analysis?
Many regard as an essential feature of the method the practice of working on etudes. I disagree. The etude is simply a means of gaining a better understanding of the action and its essence, a pedagogical aid. In working on etudes, the actors' attention is distracted from the play itself, and they find analogous given circumstances and act in these circumstances. The material is similar but not identical to that of the play. As I see it, the essence of the method of active analysis consists in determining the appropriate sequence of events in the play itself. The director and the cast must try to split the play unto a chain of events, proceeding from the most important to the minor ones, to find what is called the molecule of scenic action, the ultimate unit beyond which the action cannot be split any further.
Having established the chain of events, it is then necessary to find in them the sequence of conflicts out of which the action emerges already clearly-shaped. It is not at all easy to discover the precise conflict that ``blows open'' the author's text, for it is a question of finding not a conflict in general, but the one and only conflict which will produce the logic ultimately inherent in the text.
This requires of the director a trained sense of real-life logic and an ability to reveal the human psychology through action. He must possess a sense of the truth without which the most correct theses are worthless.
The greater his knowledge of life and people, the easier he will find
Emma Popova as Maria Lvovna
The finale
241
it to use the system in his work and the sooner he will assimilate its
creative principles and make them his own. When Stanislavsky says
that a stage action must be internally justified, logical, consistent and
feasible in real life he is addressing an artist who knows life so well
that he is able to determine exactly in every single case what is typical
and what is not, what reflects its development and characterises the
direction of this development.
When Stanislavsky said ``We love great and small physical actions for the clear sense of truth they evoke'' he was stressing the fact that all the elements of his system without exception were intended to serve a single major purpose, the truthful and profound reflection of real life. He never thought of the truth of scenic action as anything other than the equivalent of the internal intellectual and emotional truth of the part. As I see it, this is the only possible interpretation of the whole complex system Stanislavsky devised.
It is possible to know and understand everything perfectly well in theory, in the abstract, but the system has no value at all unless the director has a practical knowledge of the logic of real-life and scenic truth. This is where the director's professional capability and the degree of his giftedness are manifest.
Once we have determined correctly the sequence of events in a play and established their logic accurately and organically, and established the chain of conflicts, we may then proceed to search for the concrete action in the clashes between two, three, or ten partners, as the case may be. Two is the minimum, without which there cannot be action or development of a conflict. (The problem of the soliloquy must be examined separately, as a special form of scenic action).
One begins search for the action through active clashes in the conflict. This can be done using the author's text of the play or on the basis of an approximate text, but the conflict must be the ``one and only'', so to speak. If the active conflict is not revealed immediately, one must resort to an etude as an aid to the actors, to help rouse their imagination, so that they can gradually come to grasp and feel the conflict. But it must be borne in mind that the etude is not an end in itself and should only be employed sparingly, as required. The aim is to discover the conflict, to find the right clash between the characters, to solve the conflict right there on the stage.
If the chain of events that forms the groundwork of the whole action is established logically and accurately, the method of active analysis will ensure that the actor's behaviour is logical and truthful. This is the shortest road to the logical and truthful existence of the actor on the stage.
What difficulties are encountered here?
242
The first difficulty is that of finding the one and only possible conflict that is intrinsic in the text of the play. At the first stage of work on his role the actor tends to be drawn towards outward expression of the text, towards intonational colouring irrespective of the conflict. Heis drawn towards old habits which generally lead him away from the artistic goal.
Thus a new difficulty arises for the director: he must be infinitely patient and demanding in the matter of bringing out the one and only possible conflict in every given case. The methods used may be various and must be established in advance by the director, but on no account has he the right to depart from the essence of the conflict that underlies the whole chain of the action which he has discovered and thought out beforehand.
There are two sides to this problem. The first is that the construction itself requires strict logic. But even where this has been achieved the second aspect of the problem ariscs-an unremitting struggle must be waged to ensure that the conflict is realised in every single scenic action and that it underlies every link in the chain of events of the play.
What is required of the actor for mastery of the method?
In his creative search the actor must sustain spontaneity and a capacity for improvisation. The director must ensure that the whole team ate in a constant state of creative improvisation. Unless the actor is prepared to improvise at every moment he will achieve nothing, however conscientious he may be. This is why the method of active analysis so often encounters opposition from experienced actors. Their habits, developed reflexes and professional experience lead them to involuntary inner protest against the method. They may even accept it in theory, but this is purely formal acknowledgement and in fact they remain hostile to it.
An actor with a hard crust of habits and developed reflexes has his own fixed views on the means of presenting life on the stage, and is either unable or unwilling to accept the principle of lively improvisation. He follows the text, the words, and although he makes no open protest against active exposure of relationships and circumstances he is, in effect, unable to work according to the method.
This is not to say that active analysis comes easily to all young actors. Many are unreceptive to it, since it requires an exceptionally flexible and versatile talent. Conversely, a talented actor who has lived a long life in art not as a hack but as a truly creative artist, will have been prepared by his experience for work according to the method of active analysis.
So it is not a question of age. Take for example the young and gifted actress R. who played the partisan heroine Zoya Kosmodemyan- 243 skaya very successfully. Her performance was a sensation and a great deal was written about her. She was an extremely emotional and excitable person by nature and her success in this role was due to the fact that she was perfectly suited for the part. The audience believed in her as Zoya alright, but since everything was based on an outward display of emotion, she never went any further. And nobody ever managed to get her to return to the correct path. She might take steps in the right direction during rehearsals, but at the dress rehearsal or the first night she returned to the path that had once brought her such outstanding success. She has done nothing interesting or in any way significant since.
By contrast, take Larikov who worked in our theatre. At the age of seventy he still had the ability and desire to achieve something new. People with such a rich nature have a natural affinity for the method and there is no need to convince them of the advantages of our method of work. People like Larikov are completely free from bad influences and are so immune to falsehood that they cannot be led astray. He will always remain a fine actor, one of the very best kind.
It also happens that even an extremely intelligent, well-educated actor, well-read and with the most progressive artistic views, is unable to master the method because of certain reservations or inhibitions. An actor must believe in the director, he must believe that the director has established the chain of conflicts correctly and is leading the actors along the right path.
Does the method of active analysis require that the director come to rehearsals with a ready plan or should he seek the solution together with the actors? The director must have a clear idea of the sequence of events beforehand, but there is no reason why it should not be modified and altered in the course of rehearsals. The director must be a step ahead of the actors, but they must work together as a team to decide on details because, although he can and should determine the essence of the conflict in a given passage himself, the director cannot decide how the actor ought to express it. He cannot know in advance how the conflict will turn out in the process of active search. The director must not be a slave to his own inventions. If he sees that hehas made a mistake, if practice shows that he has taken the wrong direction, he should not insist upon his ``discovery'' simply in order to maintain his own authority. For this would not be true authority. The director must be clear as to what he is getting from the actors, and therefore all creative questions must be solved jointly with them. Only this approach can ensure truly creative activity by the actors at rehearsals, without which a truly artistic result is impossible.
244The chain of events is the path to the production solution, an intrinsic part of the director's conception. The chain of events cannot be established outside the through action of the play. Thus it is the production conception and solution realised in consistent, accurate development of the conflicts that the audience will be following in the performance. The real production is born when the director introduces his solution into a play which has been constructed and tested in work with the actor on the action sequence. The through action is the scenic expression of the underlying idea of the play, which is the reason for producing it. At the first stage of work I try to follow the author in the sequence of scenes, only I do not allow the actors to speak the exact text, since when an actor learns his lines right at the start there is a danger that he will be led astray.
Stanislavsky said that during the first stage of work the actor must be deprived of the words and given an outline of the given circumstances, the exact physical actions being indicated, and that he should be made to perform these actions according to the logic of the author's thought. If these actions are accurately chosen, if they are based on truth, approximately the same words as those used by the author will arise during rehearsal. Expressing the author's idea in their own, sometimes clumsy, words, the actors arrive at the sense of the work through the action, developing the meaning of the play to its logical conclusion. In this way the author's text can be made to arise in its true essence, and not as a result of mechanical learning of the lines.
The actor' must be allowed to depart from the actual lines of the play, but he must attempt to act immediately. Once the essence has been found, it is easy to substitute the original lines for the approximate words. The actors must assimilate their lines gradually, in the course of rehearsals. The final text will arise when the action has been expressed in full accordance with the author's logic. Sometimes it happens that the actors' own, approximate words persist longer than is necessary and represent a threat to the purity of the original text, and so it becomes our duty to make sure the actors keep to the text beyond a certain point.
In the case of plays written in verse the problem is somewhat more complicated. The conditions of the existence of the characters is not the same as in a prose play, and require an immediate sense of poetic form on the part of the actors. But the idea of work according to the method is roughly the same.
The director who has the courage to proclaim that he employs the method of active analysis bears a great responsibility, just as the director who says ``I work according to Stanislavsky's system''. I personally, am not prepared to say that I work according to the method 245 of active analysis. All I can say is that I try to approach it and discover it in my daily practical work at rehearsals.
Use of the method brings out all the qualities of a director and above all his ability to work with the actors, to carry them along with him, and offer them correct guidance and direction. It is not simply a question of training the actors in the framework of the play one happens to be working on. The profession of stage direction involves an important pedagogical element, it involves training the actor in general.
Misapplication of the method can ruin actors, so that the director's will becomes an evil, stifling all that is alive and creative. If an actor fails to understand the method, the result will be a personal failure. If the director misunderstands it, the result is a general disaster, for only an extremely talented actor can master a role when he is up against a bad director, and such examples arc extremely rare.
The director bears the responsibility for the successful development of creative personalities. Just as an unsuccessful surgical operation can put a patient's heart out of action, so bad direction can destroy the actor's soul. This means that, in addition to ability, a director must possess a strong sense of responsibility.
It is not my intention to make directors feel afraid of the method, and I must say that in speaking of responsibility I have in mind all the director's work and not only active analysis. If you are working correctly you are basically approaching the method. If you achieve good results at rehearsals spontaneously, as it were, then assimilation of the method of active analysis will enable you to achieve even better results. Declarations of adherence to the method are quite uncalled for. There is no point in saying ``I have turned over a new leaf and tomorrow I am going to begin working according to the method of active analysis''. I suggest that you try using the method in a couple of scenes of the production you are currently engaged on, preparing the other scenes as usual. It is best to test it for yourself to begin with. On no account should you take the attitude of the omniscient director who wants to use a progressive method but is unable to achieve anything because the actors just don't understand him and are quite incapable. There is of course nothing easier than blaming the actors, but this can never serve as a real justification for a director. What is needed is a humble approach, recognition of the fact that you still have something to learn. The director is always duty bound to blame himself for the actor's failures. If you are successful in nine cases out of ten, then you possibly have grounds for supposing that someone else is to blame for a failure.
I repeat: we tend to take the view that we know everything and the 246 actor simply does not understand us. This is an erroneous and pernicious attitude. The method of active analysis must on no account be thrust down people's throats. The thing to do is to organise a team of like-minded people, people who share your beliefs. You should try to inspire them with your ideas and on no account foist anything upon them. Never browbeat the actors, but try to influence them in such a way that they follow you of their own free will and never feel that you are imposing your own will on them. When you have succeeded in creating the necessary working atmosphere then you can proceed to get what you want patiently and insistently.
Thus, while it is essential that directors should try to employ the method, it is equally essential that they understand the full implications of doing so before taking any step in that direction.
Ideally, of course, your team of actors should only include people in whom you have faith, people who have shown themselves to be capable of genuine creative work or who are gifted and potentially capable. Ideally, incapable people should never be allowed on the stage. It is bad for the reputation of the theatre, bad for the gifted actors and bad for them, too. Ideally, a company should be chosen according to the same principle for both a major theatre and the smallest theatre. In practice, however, we arc often forced to compromise, even in the major theatres. In practically every production there is somebody with whom we are dissatisfied. Although one can never expect the ideal situation in practice, it is important that we should aspire towards it. During the process of rehearsal, the actors gradually begin to sense a difference between themselves in the given circumstances and the character they are playing. Thus, the actors find the elements of the part arise of their own accord, as it were. With some actors the process is quicker, with others slower, but however that may be, if it takes place organically, without the actor forcing himself, it is essential to sustain the process, which leads to transformation and ``reincarnation'' in the role.
There is no room for pedantry here: it is essential to be alert and responsive here. The method, like the whole system, turns into its opposite if you continue to ``school'' the actor when he has already entered into the role. I once remember a young director rebuking an actor who had read his part magnificently at the very first rehearsal, and saying ``No, no, no! Don't act yet, please. . . We know nothing yet. . . Start from scratch!'' No good can come of a slavish observance of the ``rules'' and attempts to force the actor to adhere to a strict pattern, ignoring the fact that he is entering into the feelings of his part naturally. Stanislavsky used to let Moskvin off rehearsals when he was ready well before the other actors.
247As soon as the actor feels at home in the given circumstances of his part and succeeds in identifying himself with the character and sharing his feelings, he will unconsciously acquire the features of the character/ part. Then comes the most magic moment in the actor's art, which it is the basic purpose of Stanislavsky's system to induce, and which is summed up in Stanislavsky's brilliant formula ``from the conscious to the subconscious''. The chief purpose of the method of active analysis is to promote this process of transformation, the actor's ``reincarnation'' in the role.
Many directors hold that investigation of the role should begin with the action and that the feelings should be developed at some later stage. This is not so. The method of active analysis involves search for the action producing the appropriate feelings. This process cannot be divided into stages. The actors must be brought into real conflict from the very first rehearsals.
Let us suppose a first rehearsal is in progress. N. is standing by the window and M. is writing his diary. It would seem that nothing at all is happening, and yet it is here that the conflict begins and it must be revealed in the very first dialogue, and not only revealed but taken to its logical limit. It is here that the objective is realised and in this realisation of the action everything must be at once brought to the maximum; there can be no special transition to the feelings.
The process of transition from ``I am'' to ``I am'' in the given circumstances is accumulation of the character/part in all its manifestations. Although this is a gradual process, it is nevertheless essential to endeavour to achieve the necessary power of che conflicts, and hence of the feelings, from the very first rehearsal. This involves maximum activity of the actor's psycho-physical being as the only way of inducing this process, which goes parallel to all his searches and germinates unconsciously.
If an actor living according to the logic of Othello feels an irresistible desire to strangle Desdemona, then he is acquiring features which are not his own but Othello's. This is an unconscious process, which the method of active analysis is intended to produce. The method enables the actor to evoke this process in himself so that he gradually acquires the ability to think and speak like Othello without having even become fully acquainted with the man into whose skin he has ``inserted himself'' through a chain of uninterrupted actions. The feelings can arise at the very first rehearsals, if evoked by appropriate action. If the actions are followed truthfully the feelings will arise automatically, unconsciously. If they fail to arise then something is wrong with the process itself. The most important thing ultimately is to achieve the correct feelings.
248 THE THIRD WATCH by G. Kapralov and S. Tumanov at the Gorky Theatre, Leningrad, 1970 IV. Strzhelchik as Bauman and Y. Kopclyan as Morozov Scene from The Third Watch V. Strzhclchik as Bauman and Yclena Ncmchenko as Nadya Scene from The Third Watch Scene from The Third Watch V. Strzhelchik as Bauman
At play readings, when investigating the logic of events and justifying the nature of the conflict for oneself, everything in the action must be taken to its logical conclusion, carried out to its fullest extent. Gradually, parallel to this process, the subconscious comes into play. Both these processes, I repeat, must be going on simultaneously, and the process of active search must on no account be separated from the process of acquiring the feelings.
One of the fundamental elements in our work is imagination, which must be flexible, active and responsive to concrete stimuli. But in order to work properly, the imagination needs ``fuel'' which comes from observation of life, requiring constant attention to life in all its manifestations.
I have said it before and I'll say it again: the director must study life and not only study it but train himself to use all his experience of life as fuel for his imagination. It is quite possible that a person who has seen a lot in his time and lived a rich and full life may find himself quite unable to apply his knowledge and experience to good effect in art, for the simple reason that his imagination is limp and passive. It is rather like putting firewood into a stove that draws badly: however much you put in you'll never get it to blaze.
A man may have travelled all around the world and yet be unable to tell you what he has seen. Another person may have spent all his life in the one place yet seen so much and be able to transmit his impressions in such an interesting manner that you are amazed how the other man could have seen so much and yet not really ``noticed'' anything.
It is essential to train the imagination to work in the right direction, so that when you are working on a production it will help you with appropriate associations from your ``store''. But in order to ``see'' correctly, an artist must get away from a utilitarian perception of the world and get his imagination to work in a way which is of no use to the layman but is essential to the actor and director.
Suppose you are travelling along the Georgian Military Highway when the bus breaks down and you all get out while it is being repaired. ``What a gorgeous view!'' one person will exclaim. Another will yawn and grumble that he's fed up with all these mountains and hopes there's not much further to go. A third will imagine how the poet Lermontov stood here and conceived his poem The Caucasus. Their imaginations all work quite differently, the same scene producing totally different associations. For one it is simply a beautiful view, for another a mass of rocks, and for a third a stimulus to penetrate the human soul, an urge to know how a great work of art arose.
A person normally selects what he has a practical need for, but the The finale. Bauman's funeral 249 artist must overcome ordinary practical considerations, for his purpose and need are different from the layman's.
Thus you can be constantly enriching your store of fuel for the imagination. You have stored up numerous observations and thoughts, and at some rehearsal you find an association evoked which is just what you need. Every artist must accumulate a vast store of observations in order to be able to give fuel to his imagination as the need arises. In the case of stage-directors, our attention should mainly be on the internal relationship between phenomena and events, and we must train ourselves to make this a lifelong process, to make it a major purpose of our lives. In this way we shall ensure that man with his complicated psychological life always occupies the ``centre of the stage'', as it were, in our work.
The most difficult thing of all in our profession is to transfer the language of the feelings to the language of action. This requires a welltrained imagination.
The director proceeding to work according to the method of active analysis encounters numerous difficulties of a non-artistic nature. Thus, it is no easy matter to induce a well-known actor with an established reputation to search for physical actions when he is quite convinced that he knows perfectly well how to speak and act in such and such a scene without going back to this ``kids' stuff''. One has to be very diplomatic and have one's own special strategy and tactics, as it were.
If actors are not very amenable to the method, the director, rather than attending to the diplomacy of struggling with the deep-rooted prejudices of those who prefer the torpor of familiar methods to the excitement of experiments whose outcome is unpredictable, should concentrate on himself. Since the method is based on the director's thinking being specially trained in the right direction, one must begin by training oneself in order to have the right to demand as much of the actors. Perhaps, after all, the actors are right not to take the director's word for it. Rather than accusing others of conservatism, we should do better to consider what our own faults may be.
I do not refer to those self-styled ``masters'' who have no desire to try anything and simply say: ``Well, go on, show me!'' But let us imagine that we have a company of actors ready and willing to try anything. Are we really ready to lead them? Only when the director is sure of himself, confident of his own powers, can he turn to thinking of the tactics to employ in order to win adherents to the new method.
Sometimes a director sets about trying to do something with great zeal and energy but completely fails to achieve practical results, which -only serves to discredit the method.
250How can the director convince the actor that he is right? By helping him to achieve not only the joy of discovery in the process of rehearsal work but success with the audience. Then the actor will believe in the director and be willing to follow him. Unless the actor achieves this, however inwardly prepared he may be to attempt the new, he will never be able to believe that it is really justified.
All your efforts should be directed towards finding the way to bring out the actor's individual personality to the maximum, and here dogmatism is enemy number one.
Once a new director came to work in our theatre who employed the method and never missed an opportunity to announce the fact. Nothing came of his efforts. Stanislavsky himself insisted that his method was not to be forced on people. Once this director came up to me and said: ``But you do exactly the same, only without talking about it.''
No doubt he was right. The important thing is to have the method within oneself, as it were. It is not essential to profess it openly. Then the actor will achieve what you need naturally, unconsciously. One must not treat the actor as a school pupil. Many actors resent being given to understand that they are being re-educated.
Practice shows that there are ways of leading the actor to the desired results without hurting his pride or belittling him in front of his fellows. Sometimes directors lack tact and ``go to war'' on the actor with the method.
The director must enlist the actor's support for his conception, and place him in a state of constant examination and responsibility as for something he has chosen to believe in himself.
Strange as it may seem, very often instead of keeping the actor in a state of activity, we place ourselves in the position of an examinee through our verbosity, enabling the actors to judge us and giving sceptics ample opportunities. If you place the actor in the position of having to do something he won't have time for anything else.
We directors often fail to make use of the weapon when it is placed in our hands. We have power, and if we know how to make proper use of this weapon there should never arise situations where we are judged and the actors are bored and disaffected.
It must be borne in mind that a method docs no more than lead us towards a solution, it does not provide a solution.
The director must always be just that little way ahead of the actors if there is to be genuine creative co-operation. Only a director who is able to arouse the actors' enthusiasm and make them feel not his right to exert power over them but an inner need and desire to go along with him, is a real director in the full sense of the word as the person who directs a stage production.
[251] __ALPHA_LVL1__ WORK WITH The stage design for a production is
another major problem the director encounters in his work on a
production. Since I cannot possibly give this question exhaustive treatment
here, I should like to examine a few individual aspects which I regard
as being of fundamental importance.
In the complex process of producing a play, a director has to deal with various artistic ingredients and mix them so that they interact. Just as a composer orchestrating a work writes a different part for each instrument and accords it a certain place in the whole, so the director must treat the ingredients of each piece of a play symphonically. Scenery does not exist as an extraneous element in a production but as an organic part of the general conception, and in relationship to people acting on the stage.
Although both directors and designers understand this perfectly well in theory, all too often in practice the design is not properly combined with the other elements and fails to interact with them, having as though a parallel existence to what is created by the director and the actors. Yet the main thing is to ensure that the design occupies its proper place, serving its own function in the general artistic solution of the production.
252When the designer, beginning his work before rehearsals have started, devotes his attention to the solution of the specific tasks of design without reference to the total visual entity of the production, giving free play to his imagination, sometimes alone, sometimes in co- operation with the director, in choosing the colours, lighting and other visual elements, the result is likely to be a work of art in its own right, which may be interesting and successful in itself but bears no relation to the production since the live actor has been ignored and is somehow expected to fit in with a ready-made ``picture''. This approach (a vivid example of which is provided by many of the designs for opera, including those by such an outstanding artist as Fedorovsky) is inadmissable for a dramatic production in my opinion, as indeed I suspect it to be for opera too.
It is necessary to determine precisely the function and place of visual elements in creating the artistic statement of a production. Design that fails to take into account the actor and the scenic process of the given work may or may not be valid as an independent work of art. In any case the design must be in perfect harmony with the general conception, the scenic solution of the work, its atmosphere and the live people who will be acting on the stage. Only thus is a complete, integral work of scenic art possible, in which the stage designer will be playing one of the roles, an important, responsible and essential role, but only in the context of a compound artistic entity where all the ingredients serve the aim of illuminating the meaning of the play.
Yet only too often stage designs are no more than a picturesque background, more or less well-organised artistically, existing separate from, and parallel to, the dramatic action. On receiving the play, the designer paints a picture on the theme, the composer writes a symphony or a few separate numbers, the director devises the scenic action, and all these elements exist on parallel lines, as it were, which, as we know, never meet. The actor acts in the ``picture'' produced on the theme of the play and the action is accompanied with music inspired by the play, but they do not form a compound entity for they are simply a collection of separate art forms between which there is no interaction, whereas what is required is the fusion of various art forms so that each of them is transformed and acquires a new quality in the new compound entity that is produced. This is what true synthesis means: that each of the artistic elements that goes to make up the total entity is transformed and becomes different from what it was in its original ``pure'' form. Moreover, this transformation must take place as the result of subordination to the main factors-the actor and the scenic action.
253I.~Fedotov's designs for Popov's production of Long, Long Agodynamic curtain arrangements combined with fragments of different scenes of action-may not have been valid as a work of art outside the context of the play, but it represented a fine visual solution expressing the ideas and content of the play. Being subordinate to the scenic action, to the conception of the production, this solution acquired a decisive role in the realisation of the general conception.
When a designer produces a flat on the theme of a given play the result is a picturesque two-dimensional solution, whereas the third dimension of space is absolutely essential in the theatre.
The existing system of training stage designers is largely responsible for this. We have schools that turn out designers extremely proficient in stage machinery and the technical side of stage design. At the same time designers also come to the theatre from art colleges where the only difference between their course and those of other future painters is that they are required to take their subjects from plays. As a result, these colleges are turning out ordinary painters and not stage designers with an understanding of the special requirements of our art.
We have already seen how the director's solution involves determining the author's view of life, the standpoint from which he observes the life reflected in the play, and determining the extent to which all the ingredients of the production should be formalised, the degree of convention to be adopted.
This degree of convention, this means of presenting life, must also be determined by the designer when he embarks on his search for a solution. No machines can tell him what will be more suitable-an illusionistic set, with black indicating endless space and various fragments suggesting the necessary atmosphere, or an ordinary box set, whether he will need to employ the methods of graphic art or easel painting. Only his ability to feel the author and the work, on the one hand, and his artistic, visual sense, on the other, will enable him to determine the degree and quality of convention and formalisation appropriate to the work in question. This extremely important sphere of work on a production will only be successful provided the degree of convention appropriate to the existence of the actors on the stage is found.
The correspondence between man and ambiance involves creating an intimate, indissoluble relationship between the two. It is not, I repeat, not a question of making the material environment a background for the action. Very often a fine production is marred by the fact that the actor is completely unrelated to his material environment, so that truth on the stage is impossible.
The Sovremennik Theatre did a production of Five Evenings in which everything on the stage was painted light blue, a solution that 254 bore absolutely no relation to the intrinsic life of the play or even of this particular production. Not a single detail of the scenery was appropriate to the authentic life the director and the actors had created. It was simply an attempt to be ``modern'' at all costs. It is significant that when the theatre revived this production they rejected these formalised sets in favour of a box set.
On the other hand, imagine Hamlet produced by Peter Brook with illusionistic scenery. All truth would be lost and it would ring false, for its effect derives from the highly formalised ambiance in which the action takes place.
Whatever it is that accounts for the correspondence between actor and ambiance-sometimes the designer succeeds in expressing the author better than the director or the actors-the important thing is to achieve genuine fusion between the actor and the material environment.
I tend to regard ``complete'' sketches which have their own independent artistic value as a danger for the director, since it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make them an element in the general solution. I am not suggesting that the sketches should have no intrinsic artistic merit, for it would be absurd to expect the designer not to give full expression to his conception, but I do feel that all the ingredients of a production, including the design, should be in a process of development and not ``ready-made''.
V. V. Dmitriyev was a superb painter, but his sketches were simply a point of departure for the creative process during which his designs underwent changes and alterations as he came to understand the artistic structure of the work and all its details better. Dmitriyev never regarded his sketches as blueprints that must be strictly adhered to.
Dmitriyev's design for The Three Sisters, the combination of conventional leg drops and naturalistic birch trees with extremely authentic falling leaves created just the right atmosphere for the play. The sets were by no means illusionistic. They were more conventional than those in the first Art Theatre production of the play. But they represented a perfect correspondence between the actor and the material environment, an ideal solution of the plastic image as part of the artistic solution of the production as a whole.
When speaking of the degree of convention, it must be borne in mind that absolutely everything in the scenery plays an important rolcthe felicitous plastic image, individual details, the nature of the materials used-and also that one and the same detail produces an entirely different effect, acquiring a different quality, in every individual case. The mud, damp earth and clay that became synonymous with naturalism in the Art Theatre production of The Power of Darkness many years ago, represented genuine realism in Tallin's sets for Deep Re- 255 tonnaissance, producing the degree of authenticity necessary for this production, as did the use of unpainted, unworked wood.
Properties and materials are not inherently formal or naturalistic. The same chair can be used as a symbol, an authentic detail, or an unnoticeable but essential element of the set. The important thing is to link the environment and the properties with the play, on the one hand, and the actors, on the other. At the junction, like a traffic- controller, stands the director, whose task is to achieve a counterpoint from the various elements of the production and subdue them to one idea, one solution.
The scenery plays an enormous part in creating the scenic atmosphere. But here, too, it is essential to understand exactly what this involves, for the designer usually endeavours to create a ``unison'' embodiment of the atmosphere.
I remember seeing a production of West Side Story in England where a love scene took place on an attic staircase with washing hanging nearby, not exactly a poetic setting-and yet the scene, far from suffering from this solution, acquired a special poignancy and expressiveness.
The kind of solution where all the expressive means are in unison, as it were, is rather more suitable for ballet than for the dramatic theatre. It is far more difficult to create an atmosphere by a combination of various, often contrasting, elements, but it is worth the effort for the achievement of a genuinely artistic result.
In creating the decorative side of a production we must remember that it is necessary to arouse the imagination of the audience. We should offer to the imagination something that will stimulate it in the right direction for a particular play and a particular scene.
It seems to me that the way our work is organised, whereby the designer embarks on his job before rehearsals have begun, is not always conducive to the creation of a correct plastic and artistic image. Only when the details as well as the general solution have become clear can the appropriate setting be determined accurately and the designer assigned the necessary tasks.
The designer should not be assigned his task by the director: he should be there in the melting-pot of rehearsals in order to be able to create the setting which will enable the actor to express himself to the fullest extent.
At the initial stage of work on Unequal Battle at the Gorky Theatre, we felt that the play required an illusionistic setting, loaded with genre details, and only when we had achieved the final solution did we realise our mistake. Thus overloaded with authentic real-life details, our production was going to be earth-bound and practically 256 devoid of poetry and didacticism. We realised this, and so did the designer, but unfortunately too late, for the sets had already been completed.
An attempt at a systematic, logical account of the various stages of collaboration between the director, myself, and the designer, A. F. Bosulayev, on The Optimistic Tragedy would probably run roughly as follows.
Vishnevsky's The Optimistic Tragedy is an impassionated account by a participant in the civil war of how the Party organised and rallied the masses for the struggle against the Whiteguards and the interventionist forces and forged the defensive might of the young Soviet Republic.
The Optimistic Tragedy is an epic, a forward-looking epic, directed from the past to the present in the name of the future.
For the people of today, ``for our descendants, our future, for which, you remember, we once longed on ships'', the author tells the story of a naval regiment which ``followed its road to the end''.
The regiment's road, the gradual transformation of a motley anarchist band into a powerful, disciplined unit of the regular Red Army of the young Soviet state comprises the essence of the through action of the play. We pursued this idea further....
The regiment's road was to be the leitmotif of the plastic-decorative solution of the production. The regiment's road in absolutely everything-the road of ideological reorientation under the influence of the Commissar, the Party's envoy, the road of battles and feats of arms from Kronstadt to the streets of Petrograd, across the expanses of the Ukraine to the Taurian steppes where the Commissar meets her end, the road from the confined, stuffy cabins of warships to the unrestricted freedom of open native fields, the regiment's road reflected in changes in the sailors' clothing from the colourful anarchist masquerade to the austere military uniforms, torn to shreds in battle by the end of the last scene, the road of courage and daring, and the road of immortality.
Thus the ``inner'' course of the play gave birth to the appropriate dynamic solution of the production as inexorable advance.
For a road implies movement. And in The Optimistic Tragedy it is the uninterrupted march of the sailors-both outward, physical ( Kronstadt-thc Ukrainc-Tauria) and inward, ideological (from anarchy to discipline).
Thus, the primary element of the designer's solution was a ``road''- curving round the scenic area.
This constructional solution was strictly logical and justified and at the same time provided a complete vivid, almost symbolic visual statement, expressing the essence of the ideas and events of the play.
257Vishnevsky called his play a tragedy. Let us take a look at his stage directions, full of highly emotive imagery. Thus, at the beginning: ``A scorching, cloudless day. Its radiance is unbearable for the northerner's eyes. The whole surface of the land is shining. The regiment is marching along an ancient road. The brightness is increased by the fact that the regiment is dressed in white. It comes down to stand like a vast choir facing the audience''. Or again: ``An anxious, uneasy silence. Hardly discernible horizon. Storm clouds''. And, finally, at the end of the play: ``Rhythms of the regiment! They sound as a call to battle, powerful and insistent, admitting no hesitation, a naked rending burst and jubilant six-gun salvoes flying over the plains, the Alps, and the Pyrenees. Everything is alive. Dust shines in the morning sunlight. A countless number of living creatures. Everywhere there is the movement, throb, hum and bustle of inexhaustible life. Delight wells up in the breast at the sight of a world that has given birth to people who spit in the face of the old lie of fear of death. The arteries pulse. Like the flow of mighty rivers bathed in light, like the overwhelming, aweinspiring forces of nature, terrifying in their growth, raw, coarse, colossal sounds are heard, purged of all mclody-thc roar of cataclysms and the torrents of life''.
Vishnevsky insistently and methodically repeats the same motive--- ``A scorching, cloudless day'', ``Hardly discernible horizon. Storm clouds'', ``Dust shines in the morning sunlight'', ``Their eyes reflect the sun''.
The cosmic scale of the stage directions, and the whole image structure of the work-everything is calculated to evoke a clear, vivid, precise artistic association-the sky as a grandiose background to the action of the tragedy.
This suggested to Bosulayev the second element of his solution-the horizon, changing throughout the scenic action, the sky now fathomless blue with fluffy white clouds, now with menacing storm clouds tinged blood-red from the light of fires, now leaden-grey and close to the ground, now bright with the blinding radiance of a sunny day.
In the finale, the two elements, the road and the sky, were combined in the magnificent image of the Milky Way, the boundless star- spangled heavens spread above the captive sailors as a symbol of their road to immortality.
Naturally the genre nature of the play, its sweep and the entire emotive image structure, dictated a conventionalised solution, free of realistic details, in order to focus the audience's attention on the actors and bring out the characters to the fullest extent.
However, closer analysis of the dramatic structure of the work, its language and stylistic features, revealed that it was really an organic 258 compound of two genres. On the one hand, there was the heroic-epic layer, most fully expressed in the elevated style of the Narrators and seme of Vishnevsky's stage directions (quoted above). On the other hand, the play abounds in authentic period details of naval life in those days, expressed in the almost slangy speech of some of the characters (especially Siply and the leader of the anarchist reinforcements) and to be found scattered throughout the play in the form of extremely neat turns of speech and spicy sailor's humour.
The third basic element of the designer's solution arose from collation of these two genre layers. This third element was combination of a conventionalised solution of the general scenic area with authentic details accurately characterising the scene of action and sparingly inscribed on the basic formalised background.
Such details were: the machine-gun cart in the Commissar's camp scene; the gaudy carpet and cushions with kissing doves, clearly `` requisitioned'' from the local inhabitants, in Vozhak's camp, the polished-up samovar where a strange brew was made of moonshine and expensive wines ``acquired'' somewhere, in the same scene; the telegraph poles of the temporary telephone line stretching into the distance; the great stone mass of ancient ruins, overgrown with moss and blackened with age, where the group of sailors under the Commissar fought a fierce battle in encirclement; the mirage-like silhouettes of proud poolars and Ukrainian peasant cottages arising amid spurting fire during the night battle, the familiar Admiralty spire rising into the grey Petrograd sky and the lion with its paw on a cast iron cannonball in the scene where the naval regiment leaves for the front.
The principle of combining a formalised stage area with authentic details-whether weapons, costumes or various other theatrical accessories required in the course of the action-became the basis of the decorative-plastic solution of the production.
Another important question to be solved in the course of co- operation between the designer and the director was that of how to embody in the concrete visual form of plastic imagery the ``relay of generations'' theme that is such an essential aspect of the work, how to give scenic embodiment to the appeal ``from the past to the present in the name of the future''.
Once more the answer was suggested by Vishnevsky's stage directions, in accordance with the ideological objectives we had set ourselves, in the spirit of the elements of the solution which the designer had already found-the road, the sky and the combination of conventional organisation of the stage area with absolutely authentic details.
At the very beginning of the play Vishnevsky refers to the sailors of the regiment who ``followed their road to the end'' as ``a vast choir'', 259 ``dressed in white''. At the end he says ``The sailors stand their nerves and strength taut and alert-full of courage. Their eyes reflect the sun. The gold names on the ships glitter''.
It was the collation of these two passages from the stage directions that produced the ``full circle'' solution of the beginning and the end, the prologue and the epilogue of the tragedy.
In the prologue the sailors stand in perfect order all dressed in white like a symbol of a dream of a bright, happy future, with the red banner of proletarian revolution fluttering above them. This compact mass on the road curving round and upwards, with a boundless blue sky with fluffy white clouds in the background, is an image of the past in the present. These people imagined the present as cloudless, radiant happiness, and they fought for this dream without sparing themselves and died for it, washing with their blood the sacred banner of revolution now fluttering above them. The Narrators address the auditorium, the present, in their name, in the name of the legions of nameless warriors who lay down their lives during the civil war.
In the epilogue, when the Commissar dies, the sailors, their clothing seared by the flames of heroic battle, pay homage to her in exactly the same mise-en-scene as in the prologue-on the same road curving round and upwards, against the same fathomless azure sky, beneath the same blood-red banner. The Commissar's dying words ``Keep up the good reputation of the navy'' sound as an appeal to posterity, to us, the people of today, to keep pure and undefiled the revolutionary cause for which our fathers and grandfathers gave their lives.
A. F. Bosulayev embodied all these elements in his sets. The road became the main element of the permanent set, built on the revolving stage. By turning the stage and showing it from different angles with the odd concrete detail precisely indicating the scene of action, we made the spiral of the road serve now as the lower deck of the warship, now as part of the seafront from which the regiment sets out on its long journey from Kronstadt to Tauria, now as a dusty country trail in the wide-open spaces of the Ukraine, by the side of which stood the miserable hovel where the Commissar had her headquarters, now as an ancient burial mound somewhere in the Taurian steppes surmounted by a Scythian stone statue standing as it had stood for over two thousand years.
For the sky, we had a cyclorama onto which different ``skies'' were projected from the gridiron as required, according to the tempo/rhythm and emotional tone of the scene in progress.
The fact that the play is simply divided into three acts in which the .action flows on uninterruptedly except for the occasional Narrators' monologues and protracted, emotional stage directions which are too 260 general to provide an indication of the scene of action meant that a great deal of work had to be done to divide the play into scenes and episodes and determine the exact scene of action in each case on the basis of the actual content. Moreover, the stage area had to be organised in such a way as to provide some permanent place for the Narrators so that scene changes could be carried out smoothly while they were addressing the audience. Our solution was to give the Narrators the forestage and the orchestra pit with narrow ``aprons'' specially thrown across it, with steps leading down to the auditorium. For the major scene changes the curtain was brought down on the permanent set.
The production owed a great deal to Bosulayev's bold, original ideas and his ability to organise the scenic area, his flair for technical inventions and genuine artistic talent.
For our production of The Ocean we invited designer S. S. Mandel to come and work for us, on what was an extremely difficult task. My requirements were as follows. No ships or ships' cabins, houses or streets on the stage. A solution must be found which would ensure unbroken action, since the slightest interruptions would spoil the rhythm of the play. The most important scenes being those in which the characters think, it was necessary to find ways of bringing them as close as possible to the audience. The theatre could not be expected to build ships on the stage and even if it could Stein's play does not require them, for it is not only about the navy. Illusionistic sets would tie the play down to the navy. Besides which they tend to be bulky and unwieldy. Cabins on naval vessels are low and confined.
Designer: But we have the right to alter and tamper with the real dimensions of a cabin. After all, this is the stage.
Director: Yes, but there is a special charm in a small cramped cabin. A conventionalised theatrical cabin will be false, just as peasant hovels in opera tend to be false, big enough to contain a two-storey house.
Designer: A cabin can be small, as in life, or big, as in the theatre. What is needed in The Ocean?
Director: Both at the same time. I and the actors must not be cramped, while the audience must see a small cabin as in life.
Designer: How can we combine the two?
Director: I suggest we depict the cabin instead of building it: not by painting or projecting it, but by having a photograph, a real photograph of the scene of action.
Designer: That's an interesting idea. We could have the photograph depict not the whole cabin or room, but only a part.
Director: That's right. And depict it from whatever angle we require. Just the ceiling for example. Have you noticed that one of the 261 major differences between a cabin and an ordinary room is the ceiling?
Thus, in conversations with the designer, in the designer's studio, in arguments and experiments, the conception of the stage design for The Ocean was born. We reached agreement on the general principles of the solution fairly quickly. These were laconicism and rejection of naturalistic authenticity and illusionistic effects. All the time the designer, director M. Rekhels and myself were strongly tempted to suggest naturalistic details such as falling snow, waves and so on. We even introduced fines for every suggestion calculated to produce a spectacular or picturesque visual effect.
In view of the need to focus attention on the characters and their complicated relationships we were compelled to reduce the scenic area. This we did by having two pairs of leg drops, sailcloth stretched over metal frames, which just about halved the width of the stage. These tapering sail-leg drops served to focus the audience's attention on the action proceeding in the remaining scenic area. The designer and I worked together, sorting through photographs of cabins and rooms, ships and piers, choosing suitable ones, cutting them, and deciding on their position and size. Some of the photographs were blown up to eight or ten metres in length, others to three or four.
For Masha's room at Kilometre Eight we chose a photograph of an enormous lampshade, for the pier, a photograph of a lifeboat being lowered from an enormous ship. For Zub's cabin we used two photographs, one of warship's gun-tower (upstage right) and the other of a corner of the stateroom (downstage centre). For the street scene we simply had a photograph of a large cloud. All the photographs were hanging free against a black background, a rhythmic extension of the tapering leg drops.
The black-and-white photographs of different shape and size indicated the scene of action in an authentic and at the same time conventional manner. On the one hand, what can be more authentic than a photograph? On the other hand, what could be more conventional than a flat black-and-white photograph suspended between sail-leg drops.
The photographs depicted everything, and furniture placed below or in front of them made the stage big and small at the same time. The problem of furniture was solved, but there still remained the problem of ensuring unbroken action. How should the scene changes be done? Well, the photographs could be raised and lowered, and better still, one could be raised and another lowered simultaneously. But what about the furniture? To close the curtain or darken the stage would mean interrupting the action. Was there not some way of changing the furniture without lowering the lights or having property people 262 coming on, without the actors leaving the stage? Something like an escalator in the Underground?
This apparently insoluble problem gave the whole company most interesting food for thought. One thing was clear: it could not be done using the old familiar stage machinery. A new piece of machinery, something like a conveyer belt, was needed. So the designer and the theatre's engineer got to work and produced just what we needed-a two by fifteen metre conveyer belt, on which the furniture could be placed and transported to the centre of the stage together with the actors, ``carrying off'' the preceding scene simultaneously. We simply had the lights lowered slightly and subdued music playing during these rapid changes. This conveyer, placed immediately behind the curtain and stretching the whole width of the stage, apart from ensuring effortless transposition from one scene to another keeping the action flowing uninterruptedly, brought the actors as close as possible to the audience, forcing them to act ``close-up'' as it were.
Since the photographs depicted the fountains in the gardens of the Peterhof Palace, cabins, rooms, and numerous other scenes of action, we needed to reduce the furniture to a minimum. Thus, we had only a bunk and a chair in Chasovnikov's cabin, a table and two armchairs in Zub's cabin, a beer and mineral water stand in the park and so on.
We are not always sufficiently bold or consistent in realising our conceptions. In The Idiot we chose to base the stage design on the principle of fragmentation, but during work with the designer I had riot the courage to take this principle to its logical conclusion, to a more laconic and conventionalised approach. As a result, the production was somewhat overloaded with superfluous representational details which inclined it towards that ``illusionistic realism'' that ruled the stage in the Soviet theatre for so many years, where directors and designers strove to achieve outward verisimilitude rather than visualimaginative expression of the idea to the extent and quality of conventionality a work required. Only in our second, revised version of the production did we manage to ``unload'' the stage as far as possible, leaving only those items necessary to reveal the idea and basic conflict to the fullest extent. Realism is not illustration and representation of real life, but the expression in terms of images of the idea the work was written to put across. Illustration is the greatest enemy of imagery.
[263] __ALPHA_LVL1__ MUSICIf one imagines dramatic art as a symphony orchestra, then music is one of the instruments in that orchestra. In other words, it has to be properly integrated with all the other `` instruments'' to produce the artistic whole.
Music is coming to play an increasing role in the drama theatre, but unfortunately it is not always assigned its proper function. The chief bane here is ``illustration'', which leads straight to vulgarity and melodrama. We usually find music accompanying the actor, illustrating whatever he happens to be doing. It is commonly employed as an auxiliary element intended to reinforce the action.
This aspect of production tends to be left to the director's discretion, to his personal taste and intuition, as it were, and very often the result is an extremely primitive use of this important expressive means.
I am referring to the music introduced by the individual theatre as a psychological element, and not to the music that derives from the ``given circumstances'' of a work and is part of its very fabric, and simply cannot be dispensed with. For some reason theatre folk and critics pay very little attention to this matter: the latter tend to ignore music, and indeed design too, in their analysis of a production. Yet music, if handled properly, can produce an extremely powerful impact on the audience. Since the theatre disposes of this expressive means and its use is increasing, it is time we made a conscious effort to determine certain principles governing its use.
264We are only concerned here with the dramatic theatre, since music clearly has quite different functions and purposes in opera, where it is the basis of the work and the medium through which everything is expressed.
It seems to me that music in the drama is a very dangerous weapon to handle, and that there is one rule that must invariably apply: music should only be used when it is indispensable. In order to decide whether the music is really necessary in a production, one has only to try and dismiss the music, imagine that for some technical reason there can be no music in today's performance and ask oneself whether or not the performance can take place anyway. If it can, then the music was not really necessary, since it was not an organic part of the production. Could Princess Turandot, for example, be performed without music? Clearly it never could.
Another thing that must be borne in mind is the genre key of the work. The question is whether the author's method of presenting life, the degree of convention involved, calls for the introduction of music as an element of the production. There are certain dramatists (Gorky, for example) into whose works I simply cannot imagine music being introduced. Thus, one must first of all decide the functions the music will have in the conventions agreed upon with the audience.
I feel that music can only produce a real emotional impact through contrast. Here the important thing is to decide ``contrast with what?'' Thus, the music and the actors may be contrasted to the scenery and all the other elements, or the music and the scenery may ``ally'' against the actor. It is essential to accurately determine the place of the music in relation to the other elements of production. Chekhov, superb dramatist that he was, understood this very well. Suffice it to recall the magnificent use of music in The Three Sisters-the march in Act Four. This is a perfect example of the device of contrast: at the moment when the sisters say goodbye to their dream a joyous march strikes up to which the regiment marches off.
Great dramatists were also, as a rule, brilliant directors, and we are hard put to find a case where the music was not used according to the principle of contrast in a work. We may not always be able to grasp at first sight what exactly it is in contrast with, but only very rarely does it sound in unison with a character.
This should be the goal of the stage-director today. I should say that the only genre where a unison musical solution is possible is parody.
In the Gorky Theatre production of The Death of the Squadron the sailors abandon the ship in the last scene to the strains of rousing, triumphant music. This is the tragic climax of the production.
In our production of The Idiot we have a musical theme that creates 265 a highly tense atmosphere around Myshkin, who goes around with a smile on his face as though unable to hear it. Imagine how ghastly it would be if the actor ``played to the music'', expressing anguish and a premonition of impending disaster.
One more example. In the Moscow Stanislavsky Theatre production of First Day of Freedom you have a deserted town, music and a man coming onto the stage arousing a sense of fear, desolation and solitude, while the scenery is quite idyllic. Here we have a dramatic contrast between the music and the actor on the one hand and the scenery on the other.
There is also the case where the music carries the theme of one of the characters in contrast to all the others. Thus, in our production of A Memory of Two Mondays we have a scene where Mister Eagle is accompanied by music, while the life of all the other characters is in complete contrast to his life and behaviour. However, since the music is in unison with one of the characters and everything else is contrasted to him and this music, the whole has a symphonic ring.
In a certain American film there was a scene where the hero and heroine board an ocean liner amid a gay festive atmosphere of music, flowers and happy smiling faces. The liner draws slowly away from the quayside and the camera remains fixed so that a life belt gradually comes into our field of vision with the word ``Titanic'' on it. And the louder the crowd shouts from the quayside and the louder the music plays, the more powerful the impact of that fateful word ``Titanic'' for it spells death.
Whatever may be said about good, interesting, appropriate application of music, I remain firmly convinced that it will always be most expressive in a production if used according to this principle of contrast. Nevertheless, I do not intend to dictate any general formulae and insist that they are valid in all situations, since every production requires its own particular solution.
A play where music is an organic element of the dramatic structure is The Optimistic Tragedy, in which the author actually thinks in sweeping musical-rhythmic images. If there are dramatic works which do not seem to necessarily require music, Vishnevsky's play is unthinkable without it: here it is one of the main means of revealing the •emotional state of the characters and provides the rhythmic transition from one scene to another, thereby serving as a major unifying factor in the action.
From the very first lines of the work one is struck by the way the author thought in musical images. Here are the opening words. `` Musical introduction. A roar of overwhelming power and sadness. Rapid bursts of powerful delight, stirring and breathtaking. The din of human 266 activities, an anguished cry `Why?', a frenzied search for answers and discoveries.'' Later on, we find these ``musical stage directions'' cropping up throughout the play. They help us create the right atmosphere and intensify the action at times when the emotional tension reaches such a degree that words seem useless and even a nuisance.
``In the silence, somebody's boundless human pain, which can only be given musical expression'' Vishnevsky writes in one of the stage directions early in the play. The final stage direction at the end of Act One runs, in part, as follows: ``The first movements of the dance. The first couples have moved into the lyrical wave of the waltz which is at once sad and militant.... A slightly repressed sadness in the rhythms .... Armed men intersect the rhythms. A signal vibrates, calling the men into line .... The waltz writhes in a death agony .... The sailors have moved off .... A flash of bronze. The regiment roars out a thunderous song.'' These words are like a lyric tale expressed in music of the ``sailors' farewell ball'', of the naval regiment leaving for the front.
The musical features given by the author-the tempestuous rhythms of the regiment setting out on its road to glory, the stinging anguish of the last farewell waltz and the vibrating alarms calling the men to form up-all this, together with the general emotional colouring of the scene calls forth in our imagination an image of epic sweep, a universalised image of farewell to those marching off to war.
Thus, ``musical commentaries'' help us make a concrete generalisation, while the generalisation takes the form of a complete musical-artistic image imbuing Vishnevsky's stage directions with colossal emotional power.
The director felt that the stage direction at the end of Act One represented a definite musical programme for the composer.
Now let us look at the beginning of Act Two. ``An uneasy, threatening silence. Hardly discernible horizon. Storm clouds. The regular movement of the chain .... Music conveys the first sounds of battle .... The roar of battle gradually fades away in the air. A night attack has passed before us. The music conveys the battle fading away into the distance and morning advancing over the sea. The sounds are harmoniously clear and pure and enter the blood.''
Here the author's ``musical commentary'' is somewhat different. We are not given a precise indication of what the music should be like, as in the case cited above, but only the general theme which the composer should elaborate.
Similarly in the finale of Act Two: ``The regiment stands in a precise mass. It has moved off. Sweeping, stirring rhythms .... The movement of the regiment is magnificent''.
267In Act Three where the dramatic action comes to a climax the ``musical commentary'' is again different, once more acquiring its former concrete, ``programme'' character.
After the capture of the group of sailors led by the Commissar, we have the following stage direction: ``A musical prelude, full of the themes whose roar has just faded, feverish excitement, expectations of death and dialogues with fate. Night birds cry over the plain, while the captive sailors sleep hugging the earth''.
In the grand finale, after the death of the Commissar: ``A musical appeal breaks the silence ... a naked, rending burst.... Like the flow of mighty rivers bathed in light, like the overwhelming, awe-inspiring forces of nature, terrifying in their growth, raw, coarse, colossal sounds are heard, purged of all melody-the roar of cataclysms and the torrents of life''.
I have already spoken of the two genre layers in Vishnevsky's tragedy: the exalted, heroic pathos of the author's stage directions and the Narrators' lines, and the concrete sketches of sailors' life and the period details of the civil war years. Everything that has been cited above provided the basic material, the point of departure for the composer in creating the music for the first genre layer. This music must have an independent significance and be an artistic component of the production alongside the text of the play, the actors' skill and the scenery.
But the author also gave indications in the play of the need for music for the second layer, music which we stage-directors generally refer to as the ``internal music'', and which, although important has no independent artistic value.
How were the general principles of the production solution realised in the work of the composer?
The combination of convention with real-life authenticity that underlay the general solution was expressed in the music by a clear distinction between the fundamental, independent music, written entirely by Kara Karayev, and the ``borrowed'' music, selected by him for guitar or choir, and in some cases orchestrated.
Moreover, as in the play itself, so in the music the conventional was organically fused with vivid, lively ``period'' elements and authentic colour. The division between the two musical layers was strictly adhered to and the two were often interwoven and used to enrich each other in the general fabric of the production.
Take, for example, the ``Sailors' Waltz'', specially written by Kara Karayev for the sailors' farewell ball scene. The music evokes associations with dozens of other waltzes and is strangely familiar while being at the same time fresh and original. It is started on the accordion and 268 then taken up by the orchestra, combining the charm of authentic ``period'' intonations and devices with a profoundly poetic image of farewell pain that provides the emotional background for the whole scene. When the same melody is played by Alexei on the accordion, we perceive it as an old, familiar tune.
The same applies to the ``March of the Regiment'', which sounds just like the marches to the strains of which sailors set off for the front during the civil war and at the same time is a symbol, an image reflecting the heroic spirit of those times.
Or take the ``Variag'' melody, begun on the accordion and taken up by the orchestra in the scene of the battle by the stone wall, which is one of the musical leitmotifs of the production, associated with the selfless courage of the sailors.
The regiments ``road'' found musical expression in the afore- mentioned ``March of the Regiment'' and also in the sweeping march-like ``Party Theme''. The ``March of the Regiment'' and the ``Party Theme'' were the musical leitmotifs of the production, in different variations according to the dramatic intensity of the events, building up to full pitch in the finale.
The ``March of the Regiment'' is first heard as a stern swelling theme in the scene of the sailors' departure for the front. In the finale of Act Two it sounds again, this time quietly, as a gently insistent call, illustrating as it were the formation of the First Naval Regiment. It is heard again, before the night watch scene, in sharp, precise rhythms, expressing the firm step of the regulars of the Red Army, ``where every man knows where he is going and why''. In the last scene, ``In Captivity'', the march sounds as the roar of battle, a hymn of triumph and liberation. It changes sharply in the last bars, where the sailors appear bearing the dying Commissar, expressing anxious anticipation.
The ``Party Theme'' is a powerful, integrated piece of music, which gradually, in the course of the play, becomes the theme of the Commissar heroic life, based on the same musical material.
The Commissar has failed in her attempt to unite ``members of the Communist Party and sympathisers''. The sailors have all left except for the stubborn ``little Finn'', Vainonen. He and the Commissar stand alone on the vast deserted deck.
``Commissar: You're alone?
``Vainonen: You're alone too, Commissar.
``Commissar: No. There's the Party.''
Here the ``Party Theme'' comes in for the first time, clearly and precisely, not yet in its complete form, but already expressing power and strength, and faith in the triumph of the Party's great cause. The theme returns after the scene at the anarchist camp, this time dramatic- 269 ally, not so much the theme as its various elements creating an impression of general alarm with the piercing notes of the trumpet calls and restrained pizzicato of the strings.
After the night battle scene, when the Commissar gets the demoralised anarchists to reform and leads them into the attack, the ``Party Theme'' sounds as a triumphant brass fanfare, in a major, assertive tone, ending with sharp finality. When, after a pause, the ``Farewell Waltz'' plays, full of lyrical sadness as an old memory, the necessary musical-emotional contrast is created for the transition to the scene where the Commissar sits down on a rough stool to write a letter to her mother in her faraway home town of Petrograd.
The events build up towards a climax. The Commissar has decided to begin battle with Vozhak. Once again the ``Party Theme'' sounds forth, this time in a sharp, imperative, purposeful manner.
The ``Party Theme'' plays at the beginning of Act Three, creating an atmosphere of anxious, almost tragic premonition, with the trumpets sounding warning notes.
When, betrayed by Siply, the small group of men under the Commissar are smashed, encircled and pressed back to the stone wall, Alexei siezes his accordion and the strains of ``Variag'', so dear to the sailors' hearts, spread over the steppe, to be taken up by the orchestra. The sailors prepare to counter-attack and once again the ``Party Theme'' swells up as a stirring melody forcing us to relive the scenes of base treachery and unequal struggle. This time the ``Party Theme'' is imbued with tragic feelings and sounds as a solemn march of triumph and respect for those who die rather than surrender.
When the curtain rises to reveal the magnificent spectacle of the southern night sky with the countless stars of the Milky Way, a Nocturne begins with gently quivering strings, illustrating the calm grandeur of nature. The captive sailors lie side by side ``hugging the ground'' and once more stirring emotional contrasts arise in the music.
When the ``Party Theme'', now the Commissar's Theme, plays for the last time in the scene of the Commissar's death, it is like a requiem, dedicated to the immortality of the fighters of the revolution.
Description of the enemy camp plays an important part in the musical side of the production, and is embodied in the ``Enemy Theme''. It first makes its appearance in the night battle scene when the sailors crawl forward towards the barbed wire, intent on the imminent attack. It is a violent, treacherous, ugly theme, played by solo wood instruments. In the night watch scene it appears again, cautious and furtive this time, emphasising the tense atmosphere before the enemy assault.
After Vainonen has been treacherously killed by Siply, the ``Enemy Theme'' swells threateningly, gradually lashing the whole orchestra, 270 ugly and dully-mechanical, culminating in a frenzied, inhuman din of trumpets and triumphant, strident trombones. It is drowned out by the feverish rattle of the machine-gun as the small group of sailors fight desperately with their backs to the wall to withstand the enemy onslaught.
The ``relay of generations'' theme at the beginning and end was given musical expression in the ``Sailors' Paradise Theme''. This appears in the prologue as a bright, cheerful flow of harmonies with the occasional intervening deep trumpet calls. When the same theme, unaltered, sounds once more in the epilogue, the beginning and the end-the present and the past-are musically related, emphasising the closed-circuit composition of the work.
In addition to the aforementioned themes, Kara Karayev wrote a prelude, a kind of overture, to the accompaniment of which the Narrators come down through the audience and mount the stage to take their place on the enormous rostrum from which they will address the spectators.
In our production, the Narrators were directly included in the action of the play and their ``interruptions'' also given musical expression. The ``Narrators' Theme'' is in a deeply reflective mood, expressing vital questions and the painful search for answers.
The Nocturne, which we have already mentioned, stands somewhat apart from the rest of the music. The composer conceived it as a lyrical contrast between the fading din of battle and the calm grandeur of nature.
Although the orchestra was not very numerous, with all the limitations this involved, Kara Karayev managed to produce music that has artistic value in its own right, with all the wealth of timbre, colours and shades of a diverse and brilliantly executed orchestration.
The ``internal music'' in our production was strictly `` documentary'' and designed to create local colour, and period detail and atmosphere. Usually such music is chosen by the director and may then be orchestrated by the composer.
The ``internal music'' may play diverse roles in a production. Sometimes it provides an additional psychological stroke to a character,, sometimes it creates the necessary atmosphere, and sometimes it serves to give emotional relief after a particularly tense scene or a comic contrast to some dramatic event.
The rollicking ``Barinya'', the melancholic ``Yablochko'', ``Siskin'' played as a solemn march at the Commander's entry, the ``Variag'' played before the fierce hand-to-hand battle with the enemy-all this music, played by Alexei on the accordion, provides additional strokes to his portrait. All this is given by the author. We, for our part, introduced several songs of the period in addition.
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Thus, in the dialogue between Alexei and the Commissar, we had Alexei, in an attempt to assert his independence, enter playing the already familiar ``Sailors' Waltz'', followed in swift succession by a hypersentimental rendering of the gypsy romance ``Dark Eyes'' and the rollicking ``Char-a-banc''. After the dialogue Alexei exits singing the civil war favourite ``Tsiplyonok'', a kind of anarchist anthem.
To the wild strumming of a guitar, Vozhak hoarsely drones ``Hostile whirlwinds sweep above us . . .,'' esconced in state amid the plunder. ``Into the battle fierce, sacred and just. . .,'' he continues, energetically stirring a strange brew of moonshine and stolen wines in an enormous samovar. ``Left, right, forward march, the workers....''
The grotesque incompatibility of the revolutionary ``Varsoviennc'' and the ambiance in which it sounds is like profanation of the revolutionary cause and stresses Vozhak's essential hostility to the revolution.
With a lump in his throat, Siply sings the saccharine folk-cum-thieves romance ``The Splendid Roses Shed Their Petals'', dreaming of the Commissar. ``When the war's over, I wouldn't mind marrying a woman like that!''
``Only you, my dear, sit by my bedside . . .,'' he sings throbbing with emotion-and a moment later orders two perfectly innocent people to be shot. Thus this romance helps to bring out the monstrous combination of sniveling sentimentality and brutality in Siply's character.
After the arrest of the Commander and the Boatswain's Mate, Alexei and Siply's rendering of the song ``Sleep Mine Own Child'' in front of the Commissar is full of gloating triumph.
The old sailors' song ``The Open Sea'' appears twice in the course of the play, each time with a special function, creating a certain atmosphere. The first time, during the lower deck scene, the first scene in the play, it wells up from the crew's quarters to accordion accompaniment full of pain and hopelessness. ``Comrade, I haven't the strength to stand watch, said the stoker to the stoker....''
This hushed protracted singing gave a special colouring to the dialogue between Vainonen and Alexei about the future. Alexci's insistent questions acquire ever new shades: ``So it's all going to be alright?'', ``For those who get killed too?'' ``Perhaps you can tell me what it means now, to be alright?''
The song sounds the second time in the captivity scene. The sailors sit in a group around the Commissar. In reply to the demand of the Officer of the enemy forces that they give away their forces' positions, the sailors begin to sing, at first softly, then louder and louder. The singing unites them, makes them feel the power of their comradeship, their superiority over the enemy.
272The Officer is furious. ``A Bolshevik strike!'' he screams. But the song swells into a mighty chorus, a vast choir singing an old song familiar from childhood days.
Here then the song has a completely different function. It helped us create the atmosphere of comradeship among the sailors, and disrespect and scorn for the enemy. At the same time the tune and the words were such as to enable us to avoid an excessively forthright solution, giving the scene a latent sadness, natural in people doomed to die.
At the end of Act Two the familiar ``Tsiplyonok'' comes up again,, but this time in a completely different manner, producing comic relief.
The sixth scene (Vozhak's camp) is crammed with dramatic events. After the farcical interrogation, the captured officers arc shot. The last battle between the Commissar and Vozhak builds up to the maximum dramatic pitch. But Vozhak has been shot and the Commander and the Boatswain's Mate have been freed, and the sailors are eagerly awaiting further developments.
The text contains the following stage direction: ``Suddenly, singing is heard from somewhere, drawing nearer and nearer . ...'' A voice cries: ``Anarchist reinforcements!'' With a great deal of noise and the usual lack of discipline a new mob of sailors appears, wearing their weapons anyhow.
On the basis of the words ``Suddenly, singing is heard from somewhere, drawing nearer and nearer'', we made this entry musical, but not by means of a song. In our production, the anarchist unit arrives quite unaware that Vozhak has been shot, led by a highly picturesque ``band'' with piccolos, violins, a trombone and a huge drum with cymbals, playing ``Tsiplyonok'' as a solemn march. This absurd, grotesque assortment of instruments and the highly ironic orchestration of the tune together with the wild and woolly appearance of the contingent of reinforcements with their menacing banner of the skull and crossbones on a black background after all we have just witnessed, creates a highly comic effect and relieves the tension.
Thus, the ``internal music'', serving the most various purposes, gave us extra opportunities to develop the characters, create atmosphere and organise strictly rhythmic transitions between the scenes and episodes in the play.
I have been speaking only of what I personally consider to be of importance, the main principles underlying the musical side of a production. These principles must be found, for it is a very sad state of affairs when such an important aspect of theatrical production depends entirely on the director's whim and intuition as is so often the case today.
[273] __ALPHA_LVL1__ TRAINING So far we have been dealing with the
director's work on a production. There is also another important side
to his job-training the company.
Ideally, the creation of a company is the creation of a team of people who share the same artistic views. But today it involves tremendous problems, since we are dealing not only with a motley assortment of diverse personalities (which can be perfectly alright) but with people who have had a vastly different training as regards artistic views and methods. We generally divide them into the gifted, the not-so-gifted, and the ham. This is our only criterion for selecting actors. But it is quite insufficient.
There are gifted actors who have been ``crippled'' by their previous experience, and also less gifted actors who have mastered a correct method, so that the abovementioned criterion is wholly inadequate.
We talk a great deal, but to little or no avail, about the organisational forms of the theatre. Not such forms in general, but the ones that fetter the artistic life of a company. Take ``standard'' staff, for instance. It is quite unnatural for anything in art to be ``standard''. It would be inestimably more natural for the number of actors, the presence or absence of an orchestra, the number of directors and designers or of 274 new productions, to be determined according to the artistic credo of a given theatre, the artistic personality of the person who heads the theatre company, rather than on the basis of general principles applied to all theatres indiscriminately. I hold that no effort must be spared to ensure that theatres become live artistic bodies. This, I am convinced, should be our goal. All kinds of ``standardisation'' tend to make the work of theatre managers easier, and this often results in the theatre being tedious and uninspired.
We often hold forth on the need to adopt high principles in the matter of forming a theatre company, and yet I cannot think of a single theatre where these principles are applied in practice-for instance, in competitive tests.
This is an extremely important and progressive method, but it cannot be said on the whole to have fulfilled the hopes and expectations placed in it. Today, competitions have become in most theatres simply a means of getting rid of unwanted actors. This is essential for the vitality of the company, but it is wrong to reduce the competitive system to its mere organisational aspects.
If approached from a correct artistic standpoint, competitions can be a way of ensuring the formation of a company whose members share the same creative views, the same methods and principles. This should be their main purpose.
But many actors and directors have never given a moment's thought to this vital question of common views. How often do we see an actor going over to another theatre for the simple reason that he wants to work under the guidance of a particular director he admires and to whom he feels spiritually akin? So rarely that it constitutes the exception to the rule rather than the basic principle underlying relationships in the theatre which it ought to be.
We know that a theatre cannot exist without new blood, without replacements. The trouble is that it sometimes becomes perfectly clear that a person has chosen the wrong profession long before retirement age, when it is too early for them to retire on a pension and too late for them requalify for another profession. The whole problem is thus to find a sensible solution on a state scale that would involve the least amount of human losses. The mistake was committed long ago when the permanent companies were formed, for the simple reason that the opportunity to adopt a correct creative approach was let slip at the initial, formative stage.
This means that a gradual process of reform is now necessary, a search for organisational forms conducive to the assembling of actors and other stage workers with common views under the guidance of n stage-director with whose creative aims they sympathise.
275In this respect the Gorky Theatre in Leningrad only recently epitomised the general situation obtaining in the Soviet theatre.
When I came to the theatre, the company consisted of 79 members including a motley assortment of 22 actors whose only reason for being there was the ability to act, irrespective of what and how. Since the situation was such an extreme one, we managed to obtain a reshuffle such as no Soviet theatre had seen for a long time. During a singleseason 38 people, or practically half the company, left the theatre, new people came, so that we were left with only twenty per cent of the original company, all the rest being newcomers.
I am not suggesting that this is that high principle to which alt theatres should adhere. It was simply a practical necessity in this case, without which work could not possibly have continued properly. Only now, at this new stage, do we intend to hold competitions with a view to dismissing not bad actors, but actors who do not share our artistic views. After a comparatively short period of collaboration we are in no position to say to a person: ``You're a fine actor, but you're not one of us.'' That would be premature. Some time must pass before this becomes obvious, before we have the moral and artistic right to make such decisions.
But forming a company is only one aspect of the matter: there is also the question of training it. How ought we best to proceed?
Since a theatre is neither an actors' studio nor a drama school, the main thing is rehearsals. It is necessary to be so exacting at every single rehearsal that everyone feels a sense of challenge, feels that the ideal has still to be achieved. Although the members of our company were all highly intelligent and cultured people, and although they all aspired towards the same artistic goals, great confusion reigned when it came to questions of method. Many of our actors graduated from Moscow and Leningrad drama schools and colleges in the same period, and yet they spoke a completely different language as regards terminology and the fundamentals of acting method.
We therefore decided to hold ``creative Wednesdays'', special study sessions where the main purpose was to establish a common language. Such apparently clear, unambiguous terms as ``objective'', and ``through action'' even were understood quite differently by different actors. So we decided to make a bold new start-from scratch.
The whole company attends these sessions and we discuss basic theatrical issues, questions of a ``common language'', of creative aims and ethics. We endeavour to discuss all matters in an impartial but frank, sincere manner, without any reservations.
This is an extremely useful practice as regards training the company, providing opportunities for discussion of a performance, of factors 276 obstructing progress at rehearsals, such matters as egoism on the part of an actor in his relationship with his partner, and so on. We endeavour to determine the positive and negative factors in our work, our real achievements, and what is holding us back. We sum up our activities over the past week. These meetings provide a moral and professional forum where we make an honest effort to learn-which is an essential condition for any real team of artists.
It is most important, for example, to analyse audience success in the case of a production with which we ourselves are not really satisfied, with a view to distinguishing between real and false success. This is a difficult task, but one without which we can make no headway in our work.
It is important to analyse a rehearsal, to understand, for example, why today's rehearsal was a failure artistically, or why it was better than yesterday's, to understand the essence of the creative processes. We are wont to pass over all these things in embarrassed silence, or only talk about them in a gloomy, matter-of-fact manner, rather than in the lively tone and the detail that genuine art requires.
The company must learn not to be influenced by favourable reviews. It is very pleasant to learn that one's work has been appreciated, but we should not allow success to go to our head, and ``in the family'', as it were, we must take a more sober view of things. When the actress N. was praised to the skies, we told her, ``Don't be too flattered by the praise. Carry on working on the part. What you have shown to date is by no means first class.'' But when she was severely criticised we gave her our full support, and told her that despite certain defects she was on the right track.
Things like this are tremendously important to an actor's development. It is essential to strike a balance between not letting success go to his head and making sure he does not lose faith in himself.
In this sense one of the worst things of all is to train a company in the spirit of satisfaction with their achievements and refusal to rest on their laurels. It is the job of the head of the company to ensure a healthy spirit of dissatisfaction, so that despite public accolade the company is constantly aware of still having a long way to go. For this, the head of the company needs to overcome in himself any feeling of complacency and learn to accept criticism from the actors without regarding it as a personal affront. I know this is not always easy, but it is absolutely essential. His authority does not depend on an atmosphere of adulation, on an ``alleluia chorus'' sung by the company, for this is not conducive to the artistic development of either the director or the actors. One must be constantly prepared to face new difficulties and overcome them.
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A theatre must wage a continual struggle for its own principles, but the unity of the company on the basis of these principles must not be allowed to lead them to turn a blind eye on their own defects. Unity of artistic views does not mean an amnesty for one another's weaknesses. There is nothing easier than launching a combined attack on others, but the important thing is to learn to speak the truth to one another within the team.
The actor must on no account be allowed to fear criticism, to feel that strong criticism of his performance in a particular instance places him in conflict with the director. On the contrary, he must always feel free to speak frankly about achievements and failures, provided he does so from an honest, sincere standpoint.
Frankness and a highly-principled attitude will never undermine the unity of the company as some directors seem to fear. On the contrary, they promote team unity.
Every member of the company must be encouraged to feel personally responsible for every production. We are often ardent supporters of a production from an egoistic point of view rather than in the interests of the whole company. An actor who is not working in a particular production or has not been given the role he wanted, the role he felt was ``his by right'' tends to occupy a neutral standpoint at best; at worst he may be an ill-wisher. This saps the company from the inside. Genuine, active concern by every member of the company for the common cause is a sine qua non for a truly creative atmosphere.
At the Gorky Theatre we have practically managed to ensure that nobody is ever offended over the distribution of roles, or if they are, then only temporarily and without letting it come to the surface. How did we achieve this? To tell the truth, first through fear and later through understanding.
For instance, there was one actor who had achieved fame in heroic roles and played umpteen parts in ``cloak and dagger'' plays, an actor who played in a somewhat histrionic manner. In the years before I joined the company he had bagged all the best roles and practically ruled the theatre. Once he was given a small role in a three-minute scene, which hurt his pride. We did this deliberately, so that he would come and speak his mind on the subject. He did not. Why? This was no time for capriciousness: 38 members of the company had recently been dismissed. He decided it was best to swallow his pride and concentrate on doing this small role to the best of his ability. Which he did.
There was another case of an actress who was used to leading roles in everything-in Russian and foreign classics, in modern plays- overstepping the mark and being most rude to the director. I sent for her 278 and told her that she was behaving abominably, and that it was not her job to criticise the director during rehearsals, but that she should concentrate on her role, taking his suggestions into account. The following conversation ensued.
``I'm afraid I have no intention of behaving any differently from the way I am used to behaving,'' she announced.
``In that case we cannot possibly continue working together,'' I replied.
``Then I shall resign,'' she said. She went to the manager, but I had time to warn him by telephone not to ask her any questions or enter into any discussion with her, but to simply sign her letter of resignation. He did, and her request was accepted. An hour later she took it back.
At that time we decided that in the interests of the company we should dispense with those actors who might be necessary from a purely artistic standpoint but whose presence prevented us from putting into practice the principles of ethical training of the company.
There were other cases: an actor who had always played the same type of part and who was given a different kind of role to play in order to help remove the rust of familiar cliches, came to have faith in us since this brought him audience success. This was the principle underlying our ``re-education'' activity-inspiring faith and trust.
To begin with, every time an actor was deprived of a role that had been regarded as ``his by right'', this was judged, from many years of habit, as a sign that the director was unfavourably disposed towards the actor in question. ``M. has been given a three-minute incidental role. That's the end of him!'' This attitude had to be overcome. So in the next production he was given the ``star'' part. This was extremely baffling, at first, but only at first. Gradually everybody came to realise that the fact that an actor did not get the role he counted on or was given a minor part did not mean he was being got at.
Today I can call the actors together and say: ``Here are three people who can play this role. Let's do an etude to decide who's best.'' The two who ``drop out'' in the process no longer feel snubbed. In this way we have managed to achieve a most important result-faith in the theatre management. We can now behave perfectly freely without danger of treading on anybody's toes. Only an inveterate enemy of the theatre could possibly conceive that anything we do is not for the common good.
Some directors are willing to ensure a quiet life for themselves by giving in to anybody who is ready to put up a fight with them over roles. This path, in my opinion, leads straight to disaster. One cannot expect to make everybody happy and some people won't be silenced anyway, so that the director will simply be torn to pieces as soon as 279 he turns his back. There can be no question of proper management in this case, especially as the company is not so easily fooled. As soon as the actors feel that a play has been chosen simply to pacify somebody, the director will fall a victim to his own lack of principles.
All these problems exist in the theatre and require solving. Creative sessions, on Wednesday or any other day of the week, are absolutely essential if all these problems are to be solved. They influence the theatre's whole work and teach the actors to be exigent towards themselves and one another. Thus, by this natural process we managed to achieve results that elementary labour discipline had failed to produce.
However, it should surely prove possible to find time amid all our complex tasks-performances, rehearsals, and all the multitude of activities the theatre involves-time to develop new forms so as not to forget that the theatre is an art and as such demands imagination and constant mental alertness. As I see it, this requires above all constant self-development and improvement by the actor and the stage-director, profound respect for their work and high demands of themselves and others. This is a complicated and delicate process. An actor may not always be capable of reasoning in a clear, coherent fashion, but he is still by his nature more of an artist than another who can express himself well. One must on no account be a purist here!
Each of us must search in his own way, following his own special path. Only too often we go parallel to art without actually penetrating it as we should, resting content with the ready recipes our experience suggests to us. This is simply taking the easiest way out and is not productive of valuable results.
Moulding an ensemble is perhaps the most complicated and delicate part of the stage-director's job, requiring an excellent knowledge of the actor's spirit. It is vital if we are concerned with developing the theatre rather than simply putting on the next production. There is, of course, another approach. The director goes to the town of N. to do a few productions there and then go on to the town of M., a university town by the sea, an extremely pleasant place to live. There is nothing to stop one from adopting this approach. But if it is a question of building up a theatre, and creating a team of fellow-artists with similar views and aims, there is no getting away from the problem of training this team. And here moral and artistic matters are interwoven.
When I was first asked where I wanted to work, in a small travelling
theatre as chief stage-director or in a big permanent one as assistant,
I chose the former, for the simple reason that I wanted to build up
my own theatre. I was still very young and it was a question of
starting out from scratch. Moreover, things were by no means as easy as
they are today, there were far more compromises to be made, both
280
material and artistic. However, that did not stop me from dismissing
the manager's wife, who had absolutely no right to be acting on the
stage. I was a complete unknown while the manager was one of my
direct superiors, and it would undoubtedly have been far easier not to
risk antagonising him by dismissing his wife. But matters of principle
must be decided without delay. The company is waiting for you to
make a decision, and you cannot afford to avoid it or postpone it.
But there is no point in taking such steps if your aim is simply to do the next production rather than build up a company. The great trouble with many stage-directors today is that they are making no effort to build up a theatre, and without this foundation all the fine words about community of ideas in art are patently worthless. This explains why one is hard put to these days to find a single theatre in the provinces that represents a professional entity. (Yet there were such theatres as long ago as before the Revolution-one has only to remember the fine companies directed by Sinelnikov and Samarin.) Hence the notorious escalator of ``promotion''. Hence the absence of artistic soil in which to build up truly integrated theatrical ensembles.
Sometimes a young director attracts attention with an interesting production with a small theatre company and is immediately transferred to a large one. Not surprisingly nothing good comes of this, because this was not a creative leap and the director can only develop and improve his abilities in a certain ambiance. Instead of being ``promoted'' to a large theatre, he should be allowed to develop among people who have faith in him, who have recognised him as their artistic leader, in an environment in which he is able to bring his budding talent to fruition. It is most important to take into account relationship between the director's personality and views and the people he is working with, the company. This is a vital creative factor for the emergence of innovations in stage direction, new artists and new companies.
All these problems-of both an artistic and ethical order-must be solved. Nemirovich-Danchenko was quite right when he pointed out that life in the theatre is an endless chain of compromises, and that the main thing is to choose the minimum compromise. A life without compromises, although possible in theory, requires abstract-ideal conditions, which no stage-director can ever hope to have. In concrete conditions one must seek the minimum compromise for the step forward one wishes to take, and this is extremely difficult for stagedirector and actors alike.
The Art Theatre has some enormous achievements to its credit,
thanks to the work of its brilliant founders. But often we have cause
to reflect sadly on how little those who followed in their footsteps
have done in the line of ``educating'' the company. It sometimes seems
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that of their experience in this field all that remains is a few abstract
formula like ``the theatre begins at the cloakroom'' and there is no
real attempt being made to apply their principles in ethical ``education''.
Yet if we sweep these problems under the carpet today, we are
committing a crime from the point of view of the future, from the point
of view of building up the theatre. Although we and the actors will
obviously find this the easiest course, the very foundations on which
a theatre should be built will then collapse. If the stage-director is
prepared to devote a couple of hours to solving these problems of an
ethical order he will be doing a great deal for his theatre, although it
may cost him more effort and frayed nerves than five straight
runthrough rehearsals.
Far be it from me to take it upon myself to solve all the problems connected with forming and ``educating'' a company, whether of a professional and methodological or a civic and human nature. Yet I feel bound to raise them, since they are so vital.
Without this basis there can be no question of producing a creative atmosphere in the theatre, the conditions necessary for genuine creative work. It is not enough to simply concern ourselves with rehearsals and stage production: we must help produce a new generation of actors and stage-directors.
Today the problem of training the company, the problem that A. D. Popov was so concerned about in his latter years, has acquired great actuality, for only on the basis of the moral-ethic code he spoke of can we hope to discover modern art forms.
We live in an age where great events taking place in the world concern the individual to an ever greater extent. As technology develops and we belong more and more to a ``mass'' society, so the interest in every individual personality increases.
And if we succeed in training actors in such a way as to enable the theatre to speak of contemporary life in a contemporary language we shall be able to fulfil the great tasks our Party and people have set us, and for which all of us, and above all we stage-directors, bear a high, personal responsibility.
[282] __ALPHA_LVL1__ MEETING For our first meeting with Shakespeare
we wished to choose a work unencumbered with theatrical cliches, a
work free from the deadweight of familiar, traditional styles of
performance. Henry IV seemed to satisfy these requirements. Moreover,
I was attracted to this chronicle by the tremendous wealth of ideas it
contains. The paradoxical friendship between Falstaff and Prince
Harry, the future King Henry V, the triumph of the Renaissance spirit
in the atmosphere of a Medieval power struggle, with all its sinister
ambition and petty strife leading to a fierce war-these ideas and their
implications had long since fired my imagination and I longed to
attempt their scenic embodiment.
In the scene at the ``Boar's Head'' Tavern where Falstaff and the Prince act a scene at court, Falstaff in the role of the Prince addresses Prince Harry as Henry IV: ''. . . banish not him (Falstaff) thy Harry's company; banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.'' For me these prophetic words were the key to the main idea of the play. Prince Harry has earned a permanent place in literature thanks to his friendship with Falstaff. After turning his back on Falstaff he has a place in history as King Henry V, but ceases to be as human being, as a moral character that is an artistic masterpiece. The Prince reformed 283 and gained power but lost his real humanity. His human essence was poisoned by ambition. The Prince's thirst for power put an end to the revels, to natural joie de vivre.
True humanity in the play is represented by Falstaff, the plump, cowardly drunkard, the blasphemous liar and whoremonger. In this Shakespeare achieved something without parallel in world literature. The ideal of genuine humanity is embodied in the thoughts and deeds of this holder of all vices. Falstaff rejects the concept of honour because he is being called upon to sacrifice his life in the name of formal honour, to give his life for the king in a war brought about by onegroup of ambitious men putting their forces against another group of ambitious men in a ferocious power struggle. The war has nothing at all to do with the interests of the common people and is cruel and shattering in its senselessness, for whatever its outcome the common people will be losers. In this sense Falstaff is undoubtedly Shakespeare's most truly ``popular'' hero, an epitome of the author's sympathy with the common folk. His revelry and debauch, his departure from the established code of behaviour, is the only possible form of protest against medieval dogma. Falstaff is an embryo of the Renaissance in the Middle Agesdissatisfaction with the present and impatient longing for the future. Falstaff regards fellowship as something that knows no bounds of clan or kinship loyalties, as wild, tempestuous, inebriating, full of fancy and invention, generous talent and poetry. He is against all mental blinkers, and rejects the old, effete concepts for the God of freedom and natural, unconstrained behaviour, free expression of the human spirit. Falstaff sees Prince Harry above all as a man who, like himself, rejects the conventions of court life. Falstaff's tragedy is that he fails to make this Prince a Man with a capital M. He had the misfortune to love him. When the Prince spurned him, he was tearing out his heart and trampling it underfoot, yet at the same time he was tearing out his own heart, robbing himself of the most important thing he had.
Prince Harry leads a double life, as it were, from the very beginning of the play. At first we thought of deferring the monologue that begins ``I know you all. . .'' until somewhat later in the play in order to conceal for the time being his potential betrayal of Falstaff and not have all the cards on the table at once, so to speak. But we soon realised that Shakespeare, genius that he was, had his good reasons for having these lines in the very first scene in which the Prince appears. Such is the boldness of genius, creating a dialectical character, a character who lives in several dimensions simultaneously. Consummate artists of the stature of Shakespeare, Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky are able to get away with creating a premonition of the end, for their characters do not need suspense, a thread of intrigue in the plot. They can in- 284 timate the end right from the start and still carry us along with them imperiously and boldly, gripping us with unexpected manifestations of character on the way.
One theme of the play then is the fellowship between the Prince and Falstaff. Another theme is King Henry V, the conspirators, and the war. So we have a contrast between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance germinating within it, bursting it open, as it were. Prince Harry is the connecting link between these two themes. Achieving power, he deprives himself of freedom. The King and Falstaff are incompatible.
In what key should this chronicle be played? The most important factor is the nature of communication with the audience which dictates the solution in the production of any classic play. Here we chose to act according to the alienation effect principle-the actors showing the audience Falstaff, Harry and Hotspur. We act in the style of itinerant players such as those that appear in Hamlet, a troupe that travels around from one castle or palace to another, giving performances on a makeshift stage. In other words, the typical fairground farce of the Middle Ages. Such is the principle underlying the mise-en-scene. But the most important thing is to express this through the actors in a natural, organic manner. It is a question of overcoming the tendencies to stifle the live nature of the theatre which, in the pursuit of other ends, began with the Meiningen Players in the last century. We are all brought up in the spirit of the new psychological theatre. With Shakespeare this must be dismissed in favour of another kind of theatre, new to us. And having found it, we must retain it as the core while acting according to the laws of psychological theatre. In this connection Vakhtangov made an extremely important discovery when he insisted on the difference between play-acting and theatricality. Stanislavsky recognised a rational kernel in the theatrical, sensing that a dialectical combination of various trends would be possible. It is impossible to perform Shakespeare without theatricality in the best sense of the word.
Henry IV is neither a tragedy nor a comedy, but a history, a chronicle, and it is essential to bear this simple fact in mind. The events presented are real historical events. Falstaff is a fictional character, but he too can be regarded as having his real-life prototype. We have tried to give special emphasis to the historical events by separating them from the ``fairground farce'', while ensuring that the two are organically combined, as they needs must be, on the same stage.
The musical solution was also devised in accordance with the `` fairground farce'' principle underlying the production. The stage directions in Shakespearean plays contain ample reference to drums and alarums. 285 In our production there would be only drums and trumpets. The drums maintain the rhythm of the scene, while the trumpets carry the theme. The trumpets sound between scenes, the drums during the action. I must confess I was greatly influenced by my impressions of the Japanese Kabuki Theatre, and I felt that this musical device would be most appropriate here.
The mise-en-scene was based on the principles of the ``fairground farce''. The theatre with the ``proscenium barrier'' is diametrically opposed to the nature of the Shakespearean theatre. We tried to overcome the ``barrier'' by throwing an apron stage over the orchestra pit projecting into the auditorium, and having the backdrop where the house tabs would normally be. Thus, the audience is watching the play from three sides. An enormous crown hangs above the apton-a symbol of ambition, and at the same time serving as a light source-and there is a lift in the centre to facilitate scene changes.
The theme of Act One of our production is Life and the theme of Act Two-Death. Each of these themes has its climax. In Act One this is the scene in the ``Boar's Head'' Tavern, and in Act Two it is the end of the war with a mound of corpses, among which Falstaff lies pretending to be dead. I intended to make this mound of corpses as realistic as possible, in order to destroy completely the ``fine spectacle'' aspect of war and battle, to ensure there was no Walter Scott element in Shakespeare. Director Sergei Bondarchuk made a fine spectacle of war in his War and Peace, and yet Tolstoi loathed war. A genius cannot admire war in any of its manifestations.
In the late thirties, the leading Shakespeare authority, Morozov, interpreted Henry IV as a monarchist play. The Prince is a fine, noble man, who played, joked and revelled with Falstaff and then ``reformed'' and rejected such baseness. No doubt this is a valid interpretationsuch is the scope and range of Shakespeare's work that it admits a practically unlimited number of interpretations. But I feel that this interpretation is quite impossible today.
Despite the humorous, and even farcical nature of many scenes, it is essential to convey the gravity and poignancy of human destiny. The recruits are funny, but they are basically full of terror at the thought of impending death, each one expressing fear in his own way.
The special theatrical key of the play must be given immediately in the prologue. The audience must at once be made to feel that serious matters can be put across in the language of the ``fairground farce''.
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Work on the composition of the play, which continued right up to the premiere, finally produced the following form: two acts divided into eleven scenes in all, with a prologue and epilogue.
ACT~I
Scene I. London. The Palace. Scene II. London. An Appartment of the Prince's. Scene III. Northumberland Castle (The Rebels). Scene IV. The ``Boar's Head'' Tavern in Eastcheap. Scene V. London. The Palace.
ACT~II
Scene VI. The rebel camp near Shrewsbury.
Scene VII. Gloucestershire. Before Justice Shallow's house.
Scene VIII. The battle.
Scene IX. After the battle.
Scene X. King Henry IV's appartments.
Scene XL The coronation of Henry V.
PROLOGUE
Shakespeare's Personification of Rumour is a monologue delivered by an actor as an induction to the play. In our production it is a manyheaded hydra. I did not wish to have an actor come on, recite verses and go off again, not to return. I wanted to introduce the image of Rumour into the very fabric of the work, clothe it in sensory form and link it with Shakespeare's philosophy. I wanted to impart to Rumour a note of triumph. The witches in Macbeth and various spirits and fairy-tale characters in Shakespeare's later works who are cynical and omniscient because they have perceived eternity are the prototypes of my interpretation of Rumour. They know that all human efforts to acquire power, wealth and love end in death. They are at once higher than humans because they know the value of their efforts and lower than humans in that they cannot know the joy of living and faith in the meaning and purpose of life. The bacchanalia at the beginning of the performance, the coarse, cynical laughter of the know-alls personifying Rumour, ever ready to lie and betray, are intended to arouse the audience and bring about their active involvement in the performance, forcing them to pass their own judgements on the characters and events.
A crowd of hideous creatures-whether they are female or neuter it is hard to say-bursts onto the stage with wild cries and screams, circl- 287 ing in a savage dance, jubilating at the thought that the audience are about to see yet another spectacle of human folly and vanity leading to misfortune. This is the scum of the earth that has only one `` advantage''---immortality and knowledge, contemptible immortality and contemptible knowledge. Then they depart, to appear again through gaps in the curtains. Gaily, like clowns, they speak of how things repeat themselves, how Rumour lies, how it shuffles the cards, shaking the world with total ignorance.
Instead of having a Prologue reciting his lines, I wished to have a tuning fork, giving the note of tragicomedy for the performance.
ACT~I
SCENE~I. THE PALACE
A complete contrast to the prologue. Medieval asceticism. Outward calm with violent passions raging beneath the surface. The conspiracy already exists although it has not yet been formulated. Henry Percy (Hotspur) 's refusal to return the Scottish prisoners captured in battle is not simply petulance, it is a direct challenge to the royal authority. Hotspur will never again use his sword to serve the King's interests. A threshold has been crossed and there is no going back. The full intensity of the conflict, the irreconcilability of interests, must be conveyed right from the start. The Northumberland family, who had originally helped put Henry IV on the throne, have borne a grudge against the King for a long time. They felt they had been insufficiently rewarded for the risk they took in supporting Bolingbroke's usurpation of power. They are now the King's enemies, and the King cannot fail to sense this immediately. Worcester provokes the King by reminding him of his family's services, and the King dismisses him, thereby disgracing him in public. This is the last straw for the conspirators. The King has himself given them an excuse. The scene must be played in such a way as to make it clear that if not today, then tomorrow, an excuse would have been found. The King has sensed opposition before the action opens, that is why he is so strict about the observance of court etiquette. He keeps coming in and out of the room, obliging his erstwhile friends, elderly people, to keep on kneeling. Since he is losing his real power over these people, he feels he has to exercise the attributes of power at least, the established court etiquette.
After the King leaves, the conspirators come out into the open.
Worcester, Hotspur and his father try to whip up their hatred for the
King. Worcester, the ``grey cardinal'' who would prefer to shelter
behind his bellicose and implacable nephew, puts his cards on the
288
Henry IV (V. Strzhclchik) and Prince Harry (O. Borisov)
The ``Boar's Head'' Tavern
table. He wants unconditional participation in Percy's conspiracy. Each
one of them is thinking only of his own petty interests, the conflict is
quite formal, based as it is on wounded pride and swollen ambition.
Nobody thinks of the real consequences of the internecine struggle
they are promoting.
This scene has none of the romantic flight we associate with Walter Scott or Victor Hugo and which is definitely not a feature of Shakespeare, where everything is virile, austere and wisely simple.
SCENE~II. AN APPARTMENT OF THE PRINCE'S
This is perhaps the most difficult scene in the whole play. It is here that the relationship between Prince Harry and Falstaff is presented, here alone that the complex, contradictory nature of this relationship that is of singular importance for the play is to be discovered.
The friendship between the heir apparent and the elderly Falstaff is founded on the fact that they understand each other, something that is far more rare than is generally recognised. They are practically inseparable. The Prince is drawn to Falstaff because he is so fascinatingly ``different'' with his patent disregard for the accepted norms of behaviour in the medieval capital, his great knowledge and understanding 01 people, his inventiveness, his propensity for endless friendly ``stag'' conversation.
The dialogue, abounding in vivid images and similes, and scintillating wit, must be put over with the maximum of verve and spontaneity, to convey the feeling that the characters could go on indefinitely without ever running dry. This is typical of Shakespeare in general. The actors must revel in this word play, in their ability to ``invent'' similes, metaphors, synonyms, aphorisms, and so on. They must assimilate the dialogues and feel that they arc their own, and speak in a perfectly free and unrestrained manner, rejoicing at every thrust and parry, at every verbal triumph over their ``opponent''.
This time Falstaff has decided to deliver a few useful precepts to the heir apparent: ``Marry, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us. that arc squires of the night's body, be called thieves of the day's beauty: let us be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon ...''
''. . . But, I pr'y thec, sweet wag, shall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king? and resolution thus fobbed, as it is, with the rusty curb of old father antic, the law? Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief.''
The Prince agrees with him and develops Falstaff's line of thought. But each of his remarks ends with something unpleasant for Falstaff: 289 reference to the gallows, the idea of appointing Falstaff hangman and not judge. Falstaff is forced to drop this theme and embark on another, reassuming the initiative: ''. . . But, Hal, I pr'y thee, trouble me no more with vanity.'' The Prince is thoroughly enjoying himself. It is all rather more like the buffoonery of a court jester, albeit on intimate terms with him, than a discussion of his future government, even in jest. The Prince himself does not realise that he does not permit full friendly intimacy with Falstaff, according him the role of his favourite buffoon. Although Falstaff senses something of the sort, for the moment he attaches but slight importance to it, and goes on with the game of words, testing his conjectures again and again. Falstaff greatly prizes his friendship with the Prince, for he loves him dearly. He sees Harry's devotion to him as a confirmation of his own principles and his own merit. At the same time, he realises that he cannot be passive in the development of their relationship, that he must constantly provide new food for Harry's sated imagination, constantly divert and entertain him. Thus, when Poins appears with the suggestion that they rob some merchants he immediately pounces upon the idea. What could be more fun! Especially together with the Prince, in whose company they need hardly fear punishment. The Prince, however, refuses: it is far too straightforward an undertaking for his taste. When later, in Falstaff's absence, Poins suggests that robbing the merchants be combined with tricking Falstaff, the Prince readily agrees. Tricking Falstaff and then listening to his lies is much more like fun! Poins plays on Falstaff's gift for buffoonery, thus assessing his role for the Prince. But what he cannot understand is that the Prince's interest is in Falstaff's imagination. The Prince knows in advance that Falstaff's account of how he robbed the merchants and how he was then himself robbed will be a brilliant cascade of wit, full of flights of fancy. Poins the pragmatist has no difficulty in persuading the Prince where Falstaff failed. He has not a scrap of sympathy for Falstaff, unlike the Prince, although he, too, only expresses it once: ``Wcre't not for laughing, I should pity him.'' As I have already mentioned, at first we thought of transferring the Prince's monologue beginning ``I know you all . . .'' to some later point iu the play so as not to reveal the Prince's true attitude at once. But Shakespeare's powerful logic, the logic of genius, convinced us that the monologue was in place. The Prince's character must be conveyed immediately to show the gradual accumulation of those qualities that led to his betrayal of Falstaff. It is important to show that the Prince regarded Falstaff and the others as temporary companions on his life's road. Falstaff's inquisitive mind has forced this unusual young man to give attention to what was ignored by others, by those who failed to smell the aroma of natural gaiety, carousing and risky ventures.
290
S C E N E III. N 0 R T H U M B E R L A N D C A S T L E (T H E R E B E L S)
The conspirators have cverything-courage, determination, hatred for the king, even the archbishop's blessing-and yet the main thing, harmony, is lacking.
The first clash is between Percy and Glendower. Even in this medieval atmosphere, Glendowcr's obscurantist philosophy strikes a dissonant note. His pompous assertion ''. . . at my birth the front of heaven was full of fiery shapes'', and his conclusion ``These signs have mark'd me extraordinary'' is so vain as to be almost comical. Percy is infuriated by G!endower's preposterous pride, and by every word he utters. This helps him conceal his own lack of confidence, his dissatisfaction with the conspiracy, in which everybody, himself included, is pursuing his own selfish interests. He feels sure that the conspiracy is doomed to failure. Here Shakespeare is presenting a theme he treats in many of his Histories: the theme of inertia and indecision, where people embarking on some exceptionally difficult undertaking arcostensibly more bold and energetic the less confidence they have in a successful outcome. The character with his decision is like an arrow in flight, or like an archer pulling back the bowstring although he already realises that the battle is lost. Here Percy plays both the archer and the arrow. This is expressed in the fury with which he attacks Glendower, sensing deep down inside him that a few human weaknesses could be forgiven in the interests of the desired unity.
The second, more important, indication that the conspiracy is doomed to failure is the carving up of the map of England. It thus emerges that the positive programme of the plotters boils down to dividing the country into ``three limits very equally''. Once more, Percy alone realises the pettyness of such a programme, but, unable to suggest anything positive, he begins bargaining over his portion. He provokes Glendower again, deliberately heightening the conflict. This is not simply his fiery nature, but once more an expression of dissatisfaction with his co-plotters, fury resulting from his impotence to change anything. This can be expressed in plastic terms by having the map on the floor and making the conspirators use daggers when pointing to it. Thus Percy toys with his dagger, ready at any moment to use it for its intended purpose. He seems to desire it, constantly bating the hottempered Glendower. There must be a point when they rush at each other's throats. Only the presence of the Archbishop, Worcester and Mortimer restrains them from a senseless fight. They are reconciled. Yet the whole atmosphere contradicts the closing lines of the episode;~
291Mortimer: These promises are fair, the parties sure,
And our induction full of prosperous hope.
Only the clever Worcester feels all the historical irony of the past and future.
It is essential to feel the maturity of Shakespeare's thought. Only Shakespeare could feel so poetically and accurately the connection between times and human actions. We feel that every step his characters take is dictated by the eternal movement of time.
SCENE~IV. THE ``B O A R' S HEAD'' TAVERN IN EASTCHKAP
This is the longest scene in our production, and embodies a mctaphor-an island of life in a sea of death.
While the ambitious Percy is paving his way to becoming the first man in the realm, his antipode, the lawful heir to the throne, is revelling in a tavern amid rogues and prostitutes, ``squires of the night's body'', terrorising peaceful Londoners.
While in Scene Two we saw Falstaff as the Prince's guest, here the Prince is in Falstaff's ``den''. This is practically Falstaff's home, and he can feel himself the master of the house. Falstaff's authority has suddenly grown in the eyes of Mistress Quickly, the landlady of the tavern, since he brought Prince Harry there. This raised Falstaff's ``stocks'' as a man and as a person who is really no stranger in high society.
After the gloom of Northumberland castle, where the conspirators had been engaged in counting their chickens before they were hatched, we wanted this scene to contain a climax of drunken revelry and ribaldry, spiced with coarse wit and sparkling aphorism. Whatever else may be said of this life, it is Life with a capital L. This is Falstaff's kingdom, a small oasis of the Renaissance. Here wit, inventiveness and vitality hold sway, and there is no room for the hypocrisy and constraint of medieval morality. Anyone who is merry and carefree is welcome. The Prince basks in this atmosphere while waiting for his hour to strike, and draws strength from this cup of health.
The scene must begin with a flourish, on the high note in which it
is to
continue. The Prince is enjoying himself while waiting for Falstaff,
anticipating the pleasure he is going to derive from tricking him.
Everything goes as planned. Falstaff behaves as had been predicted
and
plays up to his beloved Prince, who is full of admiration for his
inventiveness and resourcefulness, his ability to squirm out of what
would seem to be the most hopeless situations. The scene of the bating
of Falstaff turns into a triumph for Falstaff. The verbal battle, the
292
attempt to expose him as a liar, ends with his brilliant counter-thrust,
``Why, hear you, my masters: was it for me to kill the heir apparent?
Should I turn upon the true prince? Why, thou knowcst I am, as valiant
as Hercules: but beware instinct; the lion will not touch the true
prince.'' There is no answer to that one. Falstaff has won, his wit
proved greater and more fertile than the trick planned by Poins. This
is the apogee of gaiety, high-water mark of the revelry, the last splash
in calm waters, the fellowship of wit and friendship. Dance and song
round off the revels. The song must be wild and boisterous, unbridled
in the best sense of the word, gay and abandoned.
The news of the war marks a turning-point in the scene. Up to then the theme of the King and the conspiracy and the theme of Falstaff and the Prince ran parallel: from here on, from the moment the Prince learns of the war and is more deeply affected by the news than he wishes to show, the two themes merge-in the Prince. He is already thinking along different lines, and the important moment is approaching when Harry will be able to show the world that he is not what he seems to be. The difficulty for the actor here is that he has somehow to convey all his personal hatred for Percy and his ambition without giving it outward expression, and not reveal it until the end of the scene, after he and Falstaff have done their performance of the King and the Prince. For the time being everything is held in check and concealed, impatience being revealed simply in somewhat increased concentration and introspection. Perhaps his movements become less expressive, perhaps his mind wanders for a moment to thoughts of the near future, of the inevitable clash with his chief enemy, Percy, of how he is going to stun the world with his transformation. The important thing is that in this war, in this clash between two camps, between the King and the conspirators, everyone is thinking only of himself, of his own selfish interests. It remains for history to decide. Shakespeare rightly excludes all considerations of a nobler order from the play. Only Falstaff's rejection of the whole existing order, expressed in his disregard for accepted principles, make one think of the fate of the state, and the people in this country rent by internecine strife between the court and the feudal barons. The fact that Falstaff takes nothing seriously, scoffs at the conventions of contemporary life, eats, drinks, and makes merry, and indulges in dreams and wild flights of fancy-this expresses the scorn of the healthy human essence in man for artificial, contrived relationships. This is the only possible form of protest under the circumstances. Here everything is in reverse-with vice condemning virtue. Virtue turns out to be evil, and vice, or what is commonly accepted to be vice, acquires tremendous philosophical and historical value and survives throughout the ages.
293
The improvised scene enacted by Falstaff and the Prince on the theme of what will happen when the Prince appears in response to his father's summons is one of the most important episodes in the play. Above all it is necessary to convey the beauty of Shakespeare's poetry, the power and vividness of the images, the poetic transitions, the mixture of the serious and the comic.
During this short ``play within a play'' the actors should begin with the famous Brechtian alienation effect and gradually pass to the direct expression of their feelings, to highly emotional acting. At first they arc really ``acting a part'', but they gradually begin to say the serious things they would normally not have dared put into words. It is easier to say what you really think when you are pretending to be somebody else.
Thus, the amusing performance becomes progressively more dramatic and ends on a tragic, prophetic note, when the Prince/King replies to Falstaff/the Prince's plea not to banish Falstaff: ``I do, I will . . . .''
To begin with the Prince plays himself and Falstaff plays the King. Then they change roles. Thus, both of them play Henry IV, but since the Prince knows him far better than Falstaff does, he imitates almost exactly his gestures and intonations. This is a gay improvised performance on the subject: ``What will happen when the Prince appears before the King?'' But the situation is complicated by the fact that from the moment he learned of the war from Falstaff, the Prince has changed sharply inwardly, although this is not expressed outwardly. On learning of the war, the Prince adopts the mocking, humorous tone in which Falstaff informed him of the conspiracy. But inwardly he is now in deadly earnest. The war gives the Prince an ideal opportunity to really show himself, to astound and conquer, and, what is especially important, triumph over Percy Hotspur. Playing the scene in the throne room with Falstaff, he realises that everything has changed, and from now on he is no longer speaking as the King, but as himself. He tells Falstaff what he really thinks, which is in fact roughly what the King thinks. Falstaff senses something new in the Prince's tone, and feels slightly put out by the insults heaped upon him. This tirade was somehow different from their usual playful mutual vituperation and teasing. ``Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that boltinghutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in Years?'' the Prince asks. ''. . . That villainous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old whitebearded Satan.'' Then, as sharp as the crack of a whip comes his threat to banish Falstaff: ``I do, I will . . . .'' At this point the arrival 294 of the Shcrrif is announced, but Falstaff is far more \Vorried about the Prince's inexplicable behaviour. His old doubts seem to be confirmed, his vague premonitions seem to be coming true. The Prince fails to understand his truly prophetic words, which go beyond the framework of this scene and indeed of the whole play: ``... banish not him thy Harry's company: banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.'' So indeed it was. It is not Prince Harry, the future King Henry V who immortalised Falstaff, but Falstaff who immortalised his crowned partner. It is thanks above all to Falstaff that the play lives on throughout the ages.
The Prince's estrangement must not only be expressed in words. There must be a moment when he looks at Falstaff as he has never looked at him before. This moment must be prolonged, so that the audience, the other characters, and Falstaff himself, have time to feel that the Prince is about to betray his plump Jack to the Sherrif. But immediately the tension relaxes. The Prince laughs, hugs Falstaff and says: ``Go, hide thee behind the arras . . . .''
The inevitability of the breach between Prince Harry and Falstaff involving the renunciation by the Prince of genuine humanity as the price of his ambition must be conveyed throughout, by the whole development of events in the play. It is essential to stress the primacy of objective conditions over the subjective intentions of the Prince. Falstaff must be alarmed not so much for himself as for the Prince. He regrets that his work (if it may be so called) has been in vain. There will be no other Prince in his life-Harry is his one and only. He had been mistaken in believing that he had found a disciple and friend, and that his love for him was reciprocated. Falstaff will do his best to forget this scene.
At the end of the scene, the Prince, left alone, brings us back to the developing events. Everything that he has accumulated up to now in the course of the play is expressed in the short, impassioned speech:
``The land is burning; Percy stands on high; And either we or they must lower lie.''
There words bring us back to the conspiracy, which has crossed the threshold from peace to war.
SCENE~V. L O N D O N. THE P A L A C E
With the hindsight of history we can see that King Henry IV, who ruled in England in the fifteenth century, was more progressive than his opponents, the rich feudal barons who were trying to tear the country assunder and drag it back to feudal fragmentation.
295Henry IV was strong in his desire for unification of the state. He had been convinced of his ability to achieve this all his life, even before he became King, or before there was any suggestion that he might one day ascend the throne. As a man who had usurped the throne, it was frequently to his sense of his own strength that he referred in order to appease his conscience and justify himself, convincing himself of his rights as a strong, energetic, intelligent man who would certainly be better for England than a weak, vacillating, easily- influenced man like Richard II. An interesting parallel is provided by Fyodor loannovich and Boris Godunov in Russia. Despite all the differences in the actual characters and situations, they are alike as regards the moral content imputed by literature and art.
``O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows! When that my care could not with hold thy riots, What wilt thou do when riot is thy care?''
The King's thoughts arc turned to Prince Harry, the heir apparent. Harry Percy seems to the King to be a far more desirable candidate for the crown than the wayward, dissolute Prince Harry, who is far removed from court affairs and responsibilities. What was the point of his long life of treachery and deceit if there was nobody to whom he could pass on the crown? The King is far more worried about this than about the conspiracy.
A moment of weakness, some clear manifestation of physical exhaustion which will later lead to death is here an expression of a spiritual ailment. It is a good idea sccnically to show the King as weak and despondent before the decisive battle with the rebels which he is going to win. The King does not reveal this weakness cither to his supporters or his enemies, but Shakespeare makes him reveal it to the audience, when he is alone with the audience-alone with his thoughts.
In general, Shakespeare's heroes take the audience into their confidence more readily than the other characters for Shakespeare's plays are completely devoid of moralising.
It is more interesting to indicate the apparent strength of the conspirators and the apparent apathy and lethargy of the King, especially since all the circumstances are on (the King's side-power, the palace, troops, and the whole weight of legality and the establishment. Even historical necessity.
The conspiracy would not be so very serious were it not for the thoughts embarrassing the King. In his time he had betrayed Richard, and now his former friends, who had helped him then, are betraying him. The heir is far from what he would have desired. He has no wise, 296 devoted people behind him. ``O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows!'' might well be interpreted as ``O poor me! . . .''
The conspiracy is most inopportune. The King has already dealt with many of his enemies, and would gradually have dealt with his ``friends''. Probably Worcester was next on the list. But the cunning Worcester had felt this and this was the main reason for his adherence to the conspiracy. He has a talent for uniting dissatisfied elements and inciting them to action.
Today the Prince appears in answer to his father's summons as casual and playful as ever, indeed, even more so, for today he has a surprise in store for his father. His whole behaviour is based on savouring this surprise in advance. He might jostle a page, or give brother John a mighty whack on the back. He bends his knee before his father with the hypocritical expression of obedience, but with a silent challenge.
But his unsuspecting father sees it all as the usual impudence, and cannot conceal his irritation. The scene must be taken to the maximum degree of acuteness: the King, unable to control himself, deals the Prince a hard blow. The King's drama is that he loves this wayward son of his far more than his other sons, who are obedient and virtuous in their behaviour. The Prince emerges the winner from this bout. The King has lost control of himself, while the Prince is smiling, silently rejoicing. They are left alone, the King looking anxiously at his son, sprawled on the floor. The Prince, wiping away the blood and regarding his father with a smile of mocking superiority, says:
``And God forgive them that so much have sway'd, Your majesty's good thoughts away from me!''
It is here that Harry first reveals his true self to his father. His short monologue must be so powerful and convincing that the King's words-``Thou shalt have charge and sovereign trust herein''---seem the only possible conclusion.
This scene, too, is very difficult for the actors, since there is extremely little ``leeway'' for sharp conflicts and swings. Unless the Prince has managed to accumulate fierce hatred for Percy who has once more crossed his path, and an ardent desire to convince his father of his real essence and his willingness to struggle to the death, by the time he comes to his monologue, then the King will remain unconvinced by his words beginning ``Do not think so, you shall not find it so ... .''
What another, lesser dramatist would have needed a whole act to convey, Shakespeare manages to compress into a single short scene.
297
ACT~II
The composition is broader, deeper and more varied than in Act I, all the main currents of the plot having merged into a single stream. It is as though a machine, assembled and put into operation in the first act, is now working at full capacity, all the different components in action, working ceaselessly and irreversibly.
There are many episodes, now of a calm, epic nature, gradually building up, now sharply interrupting the rhythm. There is war and peace, the end of one reign and the beginning of another, and a tragic end to friendship, betrayal, and awakening.
SCENE~VI. THE REBEL CAMP NEAR SHREWSBURY
The rebel camp stands facing the King's camp and the two sides are parleying. All the time there must be the feeling that peace is within sight, that there are no real reasons for a bloody battle. But the machinery of war has been set in motion and vanity, the/ prime motive of the whole campaign, is at stake, pride pitted against t>ride, so that the conflict is unavoidable. Yet the customary ritual is observed, giving a semblance of a desire to negotiate. The scene must evoke conflicting feelings: on the one hand, the logic of reason demands peace, yet, on the other hand, peace is already out of the question, since the camps are drawn up and the weapons are ready for use. Even were it not for Worcester's treachery, something would have pushed the lever in the logical direction. The pace is slow and unhurried, and the situation is conveyed in virile, restrained terms. The conversation between Worcester and Vernon, the rebel envoys, is extremely important, despite the abovementioned facts of the situation. Worcester decides to conceal from Harry Percy the King's proposals for peace, and manages to sway Vernon. Worcester realises that war is his only chance of saving his own neck, and he frightens Vernon, convincing him that in any case they will be made to pay for what they have already done. He is right: the King is indeed insincere in his talk of peace. Here the personal goads on the social, and individual selfishness provokes a mass tragedy.
The conversation between Worcester and Vernon represents the last moments of peacetime. This is the beginning of a new time for England and all her people. The end of peace and the beginning of war. This must be expressed laconically and in close-up. Two men, Worcester and Vernon, are alone on a vast, bare stage.
298SCENE~VII. GLOUCESTERSHIRE. BEFORE JUSTICE SHALLOW'S HOUSE
After the tense atmosphere of the last scene, the closeness before the thunder storm, we find ourselves in a serene world of dotage and senile decay. Justice Shallow and his friend Justice Silence are engaged in a perfectly prosaic activity. The aim is to make their occupations appear extremely unmanly. They are winding wool, and sneeze from the tickle in the throat it gives them. This scene interrupts the action at a dramatic moment, according to the Shakespearean principle of ``In the meantime . . . .'' In the meantime, while the atmosphere is building up for a storm near Shrewsbury, which is soon to become an historic battlefield, in the summer heat of provincial England two old dodderers are nattering and engaged in a petty squabble. Nothing happens, nothing at all. The conflict is completely puerile, as stressed by the endless harping on the same old theme. Each of the wranglers only sees the stye in the other man's eye. Shallow's questions about the price of sheep and oxen should pervade the whole scene. His memory is lamentable. Yet both Shallow and Silence are oozing with selfimportance, as though they are discoverers of profound truths. The important thing here is to achieve a comic contrast between their manner and the content of their conversation. One of Shakespeare's most pungent themes, which he treats in all genres, from the comic to the tragic-the theme of death-here expresses the philosophical pretentions of the old men. The line ``We shall all follow, cousin'', repeated over and over again, is intended to produce a comic effect. Apart from this pathetic truism, they have absolutely nothing to say on the subject. Moreover, the whole scene should create the impression that Shallow and Silence have long since ``followed'', that they arc already, practically speaking, in the world of beyond.
Although this scene is not essential to the plot of the play and could therefore conceivably be omitted, I regard it as being of paramount importance. In this respect there is something of a parallel between this scene and the third act in some of Ostrovsky's plays, like A Profitable Job or The Last Sacrifice. Many theatres omit them in their production without damage to the plot. Yes as a result much of the philosophical and social meaning of the play is lost, the writer having deliberately chosen to make a condensed analysis of social phenomena in a digression from the main action. This is that social background which distinguishes the classic work of art from pedestrian imitations on an identical theme.
The two old men chatter on, hardly deigning to look at each other, basking in sun, enjoying the peace of passionless old age. Each actor 299 Emacs-File-stamp: "/home/ysverdlov/leninist.biz/en/1972/PSD310/20061226/310.tx" __EMAIL__ webmaster@leninist.biz __OCR__ ABBYY 6 Professional (2006.12.27) __WHERE_PAGE_NUMBERS__ bottom __FOOTNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ [*]+ __ENDNOTE_MARKER_STYLE__ nil must create a microcosm for the part, for the two characters both live in their own little world. It is almost idyllic. Real life only bursts in in the odd remark about Falstaff, with whom, it emerges, Shallow had studied and caroused in his student days, and about the recruits Fal- staff is mustering in this area. So these cabbages do, after all, have some connection with the war and the soldiers, and decide somebody's fate .... Although menacing notes must not be allowed to destroy the comic nature of the scene, they must sound more and more clearly as the scene progresses. The arrival of the cheerful Bardolph and his hearty greeting, interrupting the calm, slow flow of the dialogue.rather in the spirit of the theatre de Vabsurde, must make the two of them speechless with fright. It is left to Bardolph himself to help them over their state of shock. Any outside irritation has the impact of a bomb explosion on them. Falstaff is at once amused by the old pair and irritated by Shalow's reminiscences, which are sheer invention for the most part. Falstaff, who has retained his youthful vigour of mind, and whose feelings and imagination have not been blunted in the slightest by time is rather put out by the patent decline of the companion of his youth. His good humour returns, however, when he remembers that Shallow was little better in his younger days. But Falstaff does not scorn the protestations of devotion to him, which Silence is especially eager to express, and even promises to present them at court for a small ``loan'' of a thousand pounds for his ``pains''.
The recruits arrive. Five different expressions of terror. One expresses his fear in a forced display of courage, another in complete stupor, another in abject cringing and begging to be let off. These small parts pack great meaning for the play as a whole. They must be vivid, memorable characters impressing themselves on the minds of the audience. Here we are given another slant on the war-those that are going to fight and die in the name of raging ambitions, the cannon fodder. They have every reason to be afraid, for they are doomed. Nobody understands this better than Falstaff, and he regards letting a couple of them go home for a small fee as an act of natural charity. And it is the two most able-bodied that he lets go, for, according to his reasoning, it makes no difference who is going to provide the cannon fodder in this senseless war that does not concern him unduly.
The entire scene must be constructed on the principle of the rondo. At the end we return to the atmosphere of senile decay-but it is no longer the cloudless atmosphere it seemed at the beginning. The idyll has been destroyed.
300
SCENE~VIII. THE BATTLE
The scene at the rebel camp must begin on a sharp, high note, to bring us back to the war with a jolt. Percy reacts to Worcester's words ''There is no seeming mercy in the King'', as though to slap on the face: ``Did you beg any? God forbid!'' This is the signal for action. The order is given to attack, there is a moment of farewell, and the rebels launch their first attack on the King's camp. The Battle of Shrewsbury has begun.
The battle must be shown in all its grim reality, so that there is nothing ``picturesque'' about it. The fighting must be fierce and exhausting. The people are not there to fence but to kill one another. The irreconcilable enmity must gradually build up to a climax from the duels between Douglas and Blunt ``semblably furnish'd like the King himself'' to the final bout between Harry and Percy Hotspur. In every case the characters must fight themselves to a standstill. The winner is the one who is able to make one last small thrust and pierce his enemy so that it is like slaughtering a meek animal rather than killing a man. The final thrust must be as simple as wriggling a finger.
These duels are close-ups of war. They are preceded by long- shotfrontal attacks by the two armies. Percy's troops attack with their backs to the audience, and it is as though the King's men are bearing down on the spectators. This is the beginning of the battle. The machinery of death has been set in motion. Right up to the last moment it must seem as though the slaughter might be avoided. But as soon as the battle has begun, its grim rhythms must convey its ineluctability. The unnatural becomes the natural reality. The only person who does not submit to necessity is Falstaff. He is a dissenter even in war. Falstaff is always himself and it is not for us to soften or embellish his cowardice and irresponsibility. By accepted standards Falstaff behaves badly. But the whole point is that Falstaff is the only character in Shakespeare's histories who does not submit to the hypnosis of the military machine. He has only to put his hands over his ears and silence reigns. What is this war really all about? What is its purpose? What are people being called upon to die for? So that Percy and his relations can divide the country into ``three limits''? Or in order to strengthen the royal power? Such is the meaning of the rich, impassioned monologue about honour being an empty word, the meaning of Falstaff's emphatically ``unmilitary'' behaviour. He alone is out of step, and that is why he has marched to us across the centuries more successfully than any, with his tangible flesh, his acumen and scathing irony. The champion of death, Douglas, and Falstaff, the champion of life, represent the two poles of this war.
301SCENE~IX. AFTER THE BATTLE
The stage is heaped with corpses. This image must appear suddenly, out of darkness. The full horror of war is to be seen in the battlefield when the fighting is over. The crown is lit with a bright red light from within, and a trumpet plays a slow, calm, elegiac, perhaps even tragic, melody. This scene is one of the climaxes of the play. The triumph of death. The moment comes when the victors realise they have won, calm down and cease to kill and the vanquished retreat. No .. dramatist has so much bloodshed on the stage as Shakespeare, and yet nobody treats the theme of death with such profound humanity. In this respect Shakespeare's genius was far in advance of his time. For him death is material to the point of an agonising sensation of decay. In the face of death all men are equal, the king lies down with the beggar.
``Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?'' ``At supper ....
``Not where he eats, but where he is eaten ....
``Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.''
Such images connected with thoughts of death, which were given most detailed and profound expression in Hamlet, arc developed in one way or another in practically every one of Shakespeare's plays. In Henry IV the dying Percy says: ``... no, Percy thou art dust, And food for . . . .'' ``For worms, brave Percy,'' says the Prince, who has slain his chief rival and continues, in characteristic Shakespearean fashion: ``fare thee well, great heart!''
This respect for the dying man, recognition of his services, is a fitting tribute to an opponent who has lost an honest fight. The Prince had fought with a man he respected, and so might easily have been in his position, and the dead man is no longer an enemy, but a victim of fate, a victim of circumstances, which man is powerless to control. That is why the death of one man in Shakespeare is always equivalent to the death of many. The sunlight fades, the heart stops beating, the arms go weak, the legs stiffen-we have a tangible impression of a life departing and the whole world with it. Once, twice, or more-it makes no difference. Perhaps that is why despite the abundance of corpses in Shakespear's plays, he remains a great humanist. One man's death entails the death of dozens, hundreds, thousands. Every man departs this world but once.
Falstaff feigns death in order to live. Upon his ``resurrection'', he
accuses the dead of counterfeiting: ``to die, is to be a counterfeit; for
he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man...''
302
And to think that this was written over four hundred years ago!
Falstaff's ``shocking'' attitude, his almost indecent ``battle'' with the dead
Percy against the background of a heap of corpses, is a culmination of
the tragicomic treatment of death in Shakespeare.
This diverse festival of death is the outcome of the ambition of people who tried to fight against circumstances and the inexorable advance of history.
The King and his son were destined to triumph from the start, according to the historical necessity of social progress.
SCENE~X. KING HENRY IV'S APPARTMENTS
Ten years have passed since the Battle of Shrewsbury; ten years in which the King has dealt with various conspiracies and struggled fiercely and ruthlessly to defend the royal power and assert the principle of absolutism; ten years of anxious thoughts and doubts about the succession. But since this general pattern has not been interrupted by any momentous events, the time lapse is hardly felt in the play. The next important moment is the beginning of the King's illness. The stronger his power waxes, the more his physical strength wains. The closer he comes to death, the more he realises the vanity of power. ``And wherefore should this good news make me sick?'' As his physical strength ebbs, his perspicacity and mental subtlety increases. It is because he is more interested in the moral aspect of things that he regards his son's act of stealing the crown as a foolish action. For him it is above all a matter of lack of filial piety. Nonetheless, so great is his love for his son and his pride as founder of a new dynasty, that the King forgives him. He even seems to have forgotten about it, and eagerly offers him the benefit of his experience.
``..............O foolish youth!
Thou seek'st the greatness that will overwhelm thee.''
Despite this warning, the King realises that when he dies his son will succeed him as the lawful heir, and this he regards as his greatest service to his son. Having usurped the throne of England himself, he will be handing on the crown to a lawful heir. He himself took up the heavy burden of unlawful power and bore it for many years, but he will not be transmitting this burden to his son. Harry will have other problems.
This scene is more than the culmination of the father and son theme. It contains the moral conclusion of the entire play, and paves the way for the betrayal in the last scene. As I see it, the Prince's betrayal of 303 Falstaff in the final, coronation scene is already determined here. Some supporters of Prince Harry and King Henry V criticise us for an uncharitable interpretation of the part. They insist that the Prince took the crown in perfectly good faith, sincerely believing his father to be dead, that he was only taking what is his by right, and that he explains his action so convincingly that the offended King, who has awoken for a while before falling asleep again, this time forever, believes him and forgives him, and even loves him more than before. They suggest that the Prince does not really spurn Falstaff, but gives him a chartcc to reform and return to him. We thus stand accused of simplifying the complex character of the Prince and making him a negative instead of a positive character.
As for the subsequent relations between King Henry V and Falstaff, there exists another play where we learn how Falstaff dies a piteable, lonely death, completely forgotten by the King. Of course, there is always the argument that this was simply because Falstaff did not in fact reform. But surely this really means that he did not reform in the eyes of the King, who has placed his whole life entirely in the service of affairs of state. Falstaff remained a moral dissenter. But why should we adopt the viewpoint of the King rather than of Falstaff?
It is in this light that the stealing of the crown is to be interpreted. Prince Harry believes that his father is dead. But how few words he finds to express his grief, and how triumphantly and engrossedly he toys with the crown! Placing the crown on his head, he exclaims ``Lo, here it sits!'' and at this point the big crown lights up again. The two crowns on the stage at once are symbols, not of power, but of ambition. This is the Prince's ultimate dream. The triumph of the crown signifies the destruction of the man. There must be irony here, of a tragicomic nature. The Prince, a clever, cautious man, capable of waiting patiently for years for his moment to come, is siezed with impatience as soon as he gets his hands on the toy of his dreams. The more winning, witty and lively the Prince is throughout the play, the more bitter the moment he becomes the King should be. His shame, his feeling of guilt towards his father, helps him to find a convincing justification. But does it really convince his dying father, the King, completely? I think not. Yet what can the King do but give his blessing to his energetic son? It is his victory, after all, albeit a Pyrrhic victory.
In Dostoyevsky's novel The Possessed there is a chapter entitled
``Prince Harry'', which contains the following passage. ``But very soon
rather strange rumours reached Varvara Petrovna. The young man
(Nikolai Stavrogin-G.T.) had suddenly taken to riotous living with
a sort of frenzy. Not that he gambled or drank too much; there was
only talk of savage recklessness, of running over people in the street
304
with his horses, of brutal conduct to a lady of good society with whom
he had a liaison and whom he afterwards publicly insulted .... It was.
added, too, that he had developed into a regular bully, insulting people
for the mere pleasure of insulting them. Varvara Petrovna was greatly
agitated and distressed. Stepan Trofimovich assured her that this was
only the first riotous effervescence of a too richly endowed nature, that
the storm would soon subside and that this was only like the youth of
Prince Harry, who caroused with Falstaff, Poins and Mrs. Quickly, as
described by Shakespeare. This time Varvara Petrovna did not cry out,
'Nonsense, nonsense!'as she was very apt to do in later years in response
to Stepan Trofimovich. On the contrary she listened very eagerly, asked
him to explain this theory more exactly, took up Shakespeare herself
and with great attention read the immortal chronicle. But it did not
comfort her, and indeed she did not find the resemblance very striking.''
Dostoyevsky, a great admirer of Shakespeare, made fun of this rather flattering analogy for Stavrogin, because he perceived in the Prince's complex character permanent devotion to a single aim, a singleness of purpose, which far from detracting from the Prince's spiritual wealth, is what makes him unique in literature. A ``reformed'' Prince would hardly have interested Shakespeare, any more than a Hamlet who was really mad. Shakespeare's intention has nothing to do with Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky's didactic aims. The only thing that Prince Harry and Stavrogin have in common is the fact that they remain true to themselves from start to finish. Any other similarity is purely superficial.
SCENE~XI. THE CORONATION OF HENRY V
The short final scene of the coronation has long been a foregone conclusion.
The chiming bells and the townsfolk running about the stage convey the appropriate festive atmosphere. Gradually the stage becomes more and more crowded. The last to arrive are the puffing, triumphant Falstaff, with Shallow and Silence and his friends from the ``Boar's Head'' Tavern. Their hour has struck. Their beloved Harry, their former ``charge'', is being crowned King of England. Falstaff delivers his monologue about a man spattered with mud from the road with great clan, conveying the agonising impatience of the loving heart to meet the object of its affection. This is a declaration of love for the Prince. An extremely noble, banly, poetic declaration, revealing Felstaff's frankly lyrical nature. The more eagerly Falstaff waits, the more terrible the new King's appearance is. Henry is a crowned corpse. Possibly Falstaff realised this immediately but he has longed for this meeting 305 and he must speak to his Harry. Perhaps the King is obliged to bear himself like that, but in a minute he will burst out laughing and hug him, as he did in the old days. Falstaff realises that this is the final test. He suffers the reverse he had anticipated deep down inside him. His hope that it is all a joke is shattered, and the most important thing now is to maintain his dignity. This he succeeds in doing.
EPILOGUE
Rumour returns to say a few words from Henry V.
``And let us, ciphers to this great accompt. On your imaginary forces work.''
__*__There is always some gap between the conception of a production and its realisation. Some things turn out better than expected, others fail altogether. We realise that we undertook one of the most difficult works in the whole of world literature, and we understood from our own experience why this play has been so rarely performed on the Russian stage. But the joy of communion with Shakespeare makes it all worth while, and provides a basis for further difficult and rewarding exploration.
[306] __ALPHA_LVL1__ LISTThe Marriage by Nikolai Gogol. Young Spectator's Theatre, Tbilisi.
~1935The Musician's Order by D. Daille. Young Spectator's Theatre, Tbilisi.
~1936The Great Heretic by I. Personov and G. Dobrzhynsky. Young Spectator's Theatre, Tbilisi.
Blue and Pink by A. Brushtein. Young Spectator's Theatre, Tbilisi.
~1937The Trojan Horse by F. Wolf. Young Spectator's Theatre, Tbilisi.
~1938Vanyitshin's Children by S. Naidyonov. Griboycdov Theatre, Tbilisi.
~1939A White Sail Gleams by Valentin Ka- tayev. Young Spectator's Theatre, Tbilisi.
Day of Judgement by V. Shkvarkin. Griboyeclov Theatre, Tbilisi.
~1940Restless Old Age by L. Rakhmanov. Young Spectator's Theatre, Tbilisi. Kremlin Chimes by Nikolai Pogodin. Griboycdov Theatre, Tbilisi. Fairy-tale by M. Svctlov. Young Spectator's Theatre, Tbilisi. The Liar by Carlo Goldoni. Rusiavcli 307 Theatrical Institute, Tbilisi. Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare. Rustavcli Theatrical Institute, Tbilisi.
~1941Lad from Our Town by Konstantin Simonov. Griboycdov Theatre, Tbilisi. General Suvorov by I. Bakhtcrcv and A. Razumovsky. Griboyedov Theatre, Tbilisi.
~1942School for Scandal by R. B. Sheridan. Griboyedov Theatre, Tbilisi. Blue and Pink by A. Brushtein. Rustaveli Theatrical Institute, Tbilisi. She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith. Griboyedov Theatre, Tbilisi. / pettegolezzi delle donne by Carlo Goldoni. Rustavcli Theatrical Institute, Tbilisi.
~1943Lyonushka by Leonid Lconnv. Griboycdov Theatre, Tbilisi. Time and the Conways by J. B. Priestley. Rustaveli Theatrical Institute, Tbilisi.
Wild Money by Alexander Ostrovsky. Griboycdov Theatre, Tbilisi.
~1944Even a Wise Man Stumbles by Alexander Ostrovsky. Rustaveli Theatrical Institute, Tbilisi.
The Gardener's Dog by Lope dc Vega. Griboycdov Theatre, Tbilisi. The Philistines by Maxim Gorky. Rustaveli Theatrical Institute, Tbilisi.
The Naval Officer by A. Kron. Griboycdov Theatre, Tbilisi.
~1945The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman. Griboyedov Theatre, Tbilisi.
~1946The Mistress of the Inn by Carlo Goldoni. Rustaveli Theatrical Institute, Tbilisi.
Long, Long Ago by A. Gladkov. Griboyedov Theatre, Tbilisi.
~1947The Victors by B. Chirskov. Kazakh Academic Theatre, Alma Ata. The Victors by B. Chirskov. Russian Drama Theatre, Alma Ata. How the Steel Was Tempered by Nikolai Ostrovsky. Touring Realist Theatre, Moscow.
~1948Friends and Comrades by V. Mass and M. Chervinsky. Touring Realist Theatre, Moscow.
~1949Somewhere in Siberia by I. Iroshnikova. Central Children's Theatre, Moscow.
The Secret of Eternal Night by K. Lukovsky. Central Children's Theatre, Moscow.
Somewhere in Siberia by I. Iroshnikova. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad. From the Spark by S. Dadiani. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad.
308 ~1950The Spanish Curate by John Fletcher. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad. Students by V. Lifshits. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad.
~1951An American Tragedy based on Theodore Dreiser. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad.
The Road to Immortality by V. Bragin and G. Tovstonogov. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad.
The Storm by Alexander Ostrovsky. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad.
~1952Silk Counterpane by A. Kakhar. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad. The Death of the Squadron by A. Korneichuk. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad.
An Ordinary Affair by A. Tarn. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad. Donbas by B. Gorbatov. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad.
~1953 Story of the Steppe by Y. Pomcshchi-
kov and N. Rozhkov. Lenin Komsomol
Theatre, Leningrad.
New Men based on Nikolai Chcrny-
shevsky. Lenin Komsomol Theatre,
Leningrad.
On Happy Street by Y. Printsev. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad.
The Travellers by Ewan MacColl. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad. Messieurs et Mesdames Pompadours by Saltykov-Shchedrin. Comedy Theatre, Leningrad.
~1955First Spring by G. Nikolaycva and S. Radzinski. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad.
The Optimistic Tragedy by V. Vishnevsky. Pushkin Theatre, Leningrad. Riisalka by Dargomyzhsky. Kirov Palace of Culture, Leningrad.
~1956The Insulted and the Humiliated adapted from Dostoyevsky. Lenin Komsomol Theatre, Leningrad (as Stage Manager). Nameless Star by M. Sebastian. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
When the Acacias Bloom by P. Vinnikov. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad. Sixth Floor by A. Gchry. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
~1957The Fox and the Grapes by G. Fi-
gucircdo. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
The Idiot adapted from Dostoyevsky.
Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
The Optimistic Tragedy by V. Vishncv-
sky. National Theatre, Prague.
The Optimistic Tragedy by V. Vishnev-
sky. Budapest Theatre, Budapest.
~1958Signor Mario Is Writing a Comedy by A. Nikolai. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
309 ~1959The Trail by I. Dvoretsky. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad. Five Evenings by A. Volodin. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad. The Barbarians by Maxim Gorky. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
~1960Irkutsk Story by A. Arbuzov. Goiky Theatre, Leningrad. A Memory of Two Mondays by Arthur Miller. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad. Semyon Kotko by S. Prokofiev. Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre, Leningrad. The Death of the Squadron by A. Korneichuk. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad. The Fox and the Grapes by G. Figucircdo. Lenfilm Studios, Leningrad.
~1961The Defiant Ones by N. E. Douglas and H. J. Smith. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
The Ocean by A. Stein. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
The Fourth by Konstantin Simonov. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad. Thunder on Platan Street by G. Rouz. Leningrad Television. My Elder Sister by A. Volodin. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
~1962The Divine Comedy by I. Shtok.
Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
Woe from Wit by Alexander Griboye-
dov. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
The Ward by S. Aleshin. Gorky Theatre,
Leningrad.
Before Supper by V. Rozov. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad (as Stage Manager).
~1963'Virgin Soil Upturned by Mikhail Sho-
lokhov. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
// My Comrade Calls by V. Konetsky.
Central Television, Moscow.
The Avenger, adapted from G. Weiscn-
born. Leningrad Television.
~1964Once Again about Love by E. Radzinski. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad (as Stage Manager).
~1965The Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad. Even a Wise Man Stumbles by Alexander Ostrovsky. Wspolczesny (Warsaw Contemporary Theatre), Warsaw. Visual Song, a concert spectacle by students of the State Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography, Leningrad.
~1966Of Mice and Men by J. Steinbeck. A student production at the State Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography, Leningrad.
It's Ages Since... by Vera Panova. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
~1967The Philistines by Maxim Gorky. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
310Traditional Reunion by V. Rozov. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad. West Side Story by L. Bernstein and A. Laurents. A student production at the State Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography, Leningrad. A Matter of Conviction by E. Hunter. Leningrad Television. The Truth, Nothing But the Truth by D. Ahl. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
~1968 A Moon for the Misbegotten by E.
O'Neill. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
Happy Days of an Unhappy Man by
A. Arbuzov. Gorky Theatre,
Leningrad.
Henry IV by W. Shakespeare. Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
~1970Restless Old Age by L. Rakhmanov.
Gorky Theatre, Leningrad.
The Third Watch by G. Kapralov and
S. Tumanov. Gorky Theatre, Lenin-
grad.
REQUEST TO READERS
Progress Publishers would be glad to have your opinion of this book, its translation
and design and any suggestions you may have for future publications.
Please send your comments to 21, Zubovsky Boulevard, Moscow, USSR.
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Georgi Tovstonogov, one of the foremost Soviet stage-directors, has a firmly-established international reputation. A People's Artist of the USSR and Lenin Prize winner, he has for many years been managing-director of' the Gorky Theatre in Leningrad, one of the country's finest companies.
Every Tovstonogov production bears the stamp of his vivid, highly individual creative talent, combining interesting and profound ideas with expressive scenic forms.
The Profession of the Stage- Director is a lively, stimulating account, providing a fascinating insight into the methods of work and ideas of a master of one of the most difficult of all artistic professions. Tovstonogov expresses his views and opinions in a vigorous, forthright manner, drawing widely on his own vast experience.
This book will undoubtedly be welcomed by theatre-folk and theatregoers alike.
Progress Publishers will soon put out the following books in English translation.
LENIN PRIZE WINNERS. SOVIET STARS. THEATRE, MUSIC. ART (1967--1970), the fourth book of a series about the work of outstanding men and women in Soviet art, winners of the Lenin Prize from 1967 to 1970.
AT THE BIDDING OF THE HEART by Mikhail Sholokhov. This is a collection of articles covering a wide range of psychological and creative problems by one of the Soviet Union's major authors.
__NOTE__ (tx-chk-footnotes) (progn (delete-hook 'local-write-file-hooks 'lb-tx-chk-^^) (delete-hook 'local-write-file-hooks 'lb-tx-chk-trailing-dash)) (lb-ht "en/1972/PSD310" nil)) [313]