My Life in Pieces (17 page)

Armed with his discoveries, he announced them to the convened actors of the Moscow Art Theatre group. ‘I have discovered the principles of Art!’ he cried. ‘No you haven’t,’ they replied, ‘acting’s not like that at all.’ From then on Stanislavsky was something of a stranger in his own house. He eventually created a studio theatre in which to test and establish his ideas; over the remaining twenty-five years of his life he became more and more a teacher, modifying, adapting his principles, but never finally doubting the truth of those first discoveries. The founder members of the company never quite came round to them, though, and when he worked with those actors, he had to bargain with them, offering them bigger and better roles, in order to persuade them to think in terms of the strange neologised words in which he described his discoveries, some of them derived from the psychological texts he had read (by Ribot, for example), some by analogy with other sciences. The core of his approach is the idea of action: that every moment that an actor stands on stage, he or she
wants
something. The play consists of the actions the actor performs in order to get what he or she wants. He further elaborated this notion by proposing an overarching action (the super-objective) which is what the character wants in life, of which all the other actions are component parts. The actor must first identify his
wants
, then the obstacles that he
faces in order to fulfil them. Of equal importance is the question of character: who is it that does the wanting? Here he devised another series of exercises which were dedicated to discovering the character within the actor, rather than imposing an external image. But before this work comes the necessary preliminary work whereby the actor learns how to access the emotions required by the part; and this, Stanislavsky determined, could only come from within oneself: the actor’s
own
memories, both emotional and sensual. Only if the actor is in easy communication with his inner life and particularly with his sensual and emotional past will he have anything to bring to the role. Only if he knows what he wants in the play and what he does to get it will he know why he is on the stage. If he knows why he is on stage, the actor can never be self-conscious; and self-consciousness is the supreme evil, to be eliminated at all costs. Stanislavsky was tormented by what he called ‘the terrifying black hole of the auditorium’.

The above is a simplified rendition of the first phase of Stanislavsky’s work; Benedetti’s book (op. cit.) gives a much more thorough, rather more technical account. There are a number of objections to the theory: firstly, it can well be objected that not all actors are afflicted by self-consciousness. There are many actors, perhaps the majority, for whom the stage is the most natural place on earth; indeed, it is almost a definition of an actor that he is someone who feels more at home on a stage in front of a thousand people than he does in his own front room. A second objection to Stanislavsky’s theory is that though the actor has no point of personal contact with the character, he may be perfectly well able, from intelligence, observation and imagination, to create the character as written. Finally, it can be objected that plays are simply not written in this way; authors do not necessarily write their characters with objectives in the way that Stanislavsky describes. It is this last objection that has proved the most enduring: the Stanislavsky System can sometimes seem to be imposing something on the play that doesn’t exist within it, that the
truth
that Stanislavsky so avidly sought was one of his own imagining.

This objection was first articulated by Stanislavsky’s co-director Nemirovich-Danchenko, whose primary loyalty was always to the writer, and it was a contributory element to the almost ceaseless strife which existed between the two men from a very early stage in their working relationship. Nemirovich, himself a playwright and director, was a man of the widest possible literary culture, an acute and sensitive judge of
plays, far more so than Stanislavsky, as the latter freely admitted; it was he who, strongly opposed by Stanislavsky, passionately urged the qualities of
The Seagull
as a candidate for inclusion in the first season, even though it had been passed over for a prize in a competition in favour of a play of Nemirovich’s own. When in 1897 he and Stanislavsky had their historic first meeting at the Slaviansky Bazaar – a meeting which lasted fifteen hours – they had agreed that in their new theatre Stanislavsky would be responsible for Form, Nemirovich for Content, a tacit acknowledgement of Stanislavsky’s lack of judgement in these matters. In fact, as Nemirovich gleefully points out in his somewhat feline memoirs,
My Life
in the Russian Theatre
(a characteristically less high-flown title than Stanislavsky’s), Stanislavsky was what we now call dyslexic, and had the greatest difficulty memorising lines or repeating them accurately. Small wonder that Stanislavsky’s System places such emphasis on the physical and emotional rather than the verbal and intellectual. Interestingly, as the years went by, Stanislavsky became increasingly concerned with language, to the extent that by the end of his life he was writing (in his notes to his assistant on his late production of
Othello
; by then he was housebound), ‘To achieve the objectives (something extremely important and something actors always forget) he needs words, thoughts, i.e. the author’s text. An actor above all must operate through words. On stage the only important thing is the active word.’ In his earlier, logophobic days, Stanislavsky was obsessively driven by the need to take the theatre and acting out of the cerebral, mechanical area and release it into organic life, and it was this obsession that led to the new dimension in the acting of the Moscow Art Theatre; his final reconciliation with language was the culmination of his long journey towards an acting which was expressive at every level.

The stormy relationship with Nemirovich-Danchenko (they scarcely spoke for several years) is only lightly alluded to in
My Life in Art
, and Nemirovich is constantly praised in its pages. Despite the tensions and storms so common in theatrical partnerships (Welles and Houseman, mac Liammóir and Edwards), between them they sustained an extraordinary level of creativity and exploration over a period of some forty years, through three wars and three revolutions, encompassing the reigns of Nicholas II, Lenin and then Stalin, each of which brought its burdens. Nemirovich, with his elegant psychological acuity, is able to describe
Stanislavsky with a vividness that Stanislavsky is unable to match, but there is in Nemirovich an absence of the generosity that is so characteristic of the other man. Thus Nemirovich’s account of meeting Stanislavsky for the first time: ‘Stanislavsky always presented a picturesque figure. Tall, distinguished in stature, he had an energetic bearing and his movements were plastic, though he did not give the impression of giving the slightest thought to this plasticity,’ he writes, affably. Then comes the stiletto: ‘As a matter of fact, this apparent beautiful casualness had cost him immense labour: according to his own words, he had spent hours and years in developing his gestures before the mirror.’ The more or less affectionately mocking tone is characteristic, and seems to have been a not uncommon response to Stanislavsky, with his passions and obsessions; he was known throughout the company, Nemirovich says elsewhere, as ‘big baby’. Another, altogether more savage, pen-portrait of him occurs in Bulgakov’s novel
Black Snow
, a naked act of revenge on Stanislavsky for the treatment that the author received at his hands during the rehearsals for his play
Molière
. In its pages Stanislavsky appears as Ivan Vasilievich, dippy, manipulative, stupid, and arrogant, and no doubt there is an element of truth in the picture. Ruled by his vision, he was not quite in the world, and thus not always capable of seeing people in their situations. Perhaps the most acute thing ever said of him was the remark of his colleague, the great actor Kachalov, that Stanislavsky always saw the artist in the person, but he didn’t always see the person in the artist. Few, however, ever accused Stanislavsky of insincerity in his quest for new and vibrant life on the stage. In
My Life in Art
he presents himself as baffled, slow, obstinate, vain, foolish, sometimes even despotic, but it is hard not to love him, despite or because of this. However selective his account of the 1911
Hamlet
which he co-directed with Edward Gordon Craig, it is clear from it that Craig ran circles round him. Stanislavsky was unable to believe that a great artist could behave unlike a great man. The innocence of his world view is a constant thread in the book, but that innocence, allied to an iron determination to pursue his quest, becomes curiously touching.

For the facts of Stanislavsky’s life, Benedetti’s 1988 biography is very useful, and there are whole shelves of memoirs by pupils and assistants.
My
Life in Art
is not an autobiography, much less a detailed account of the Moscow Art Theatre. It is, if anything, a spiritual autobiography, an account of a seeker’s stumbling path towards the mysteries, and as such
has much in common with, for example, Reshad Feild’s books of Sufic initiation, or the many books by the pupils of Gurdjieff. Stanislavsky’s view of the art of the theatre, and specifically the art of acting, is essentially esoteric: only true adepts will gain enlightenment and know one day the bliss of arriving at the centre of their own creativity. Despite their practical and detailed nature, Stanislavsky’s exercises are not unlike the exercises of certain spiritual disciplines: their purpose is refinement and concentration of the spirit, whereby the divine part of man can shine forth to the greater benefit of humankind. He is quite explicit about this: ‘there is another all-powerful Artist who acts in mysteries and ways unknown to us on our superconsciousness.’ It is in his later works that he attempts to describe the elements of his System; in
My Life in Art
he outlines his mission. The book is full of incidental felicities – the fine opening chapter evoking the Russia of his childhood; the brilliant descriptions of individuals, Rubinstein, Gorky, Maeterlinck, Chekhov; the detailed impressions of extraordinary performers; the gripping accounts of the creation of a great theatre company under every kind of duress. But it is above all an affirmation of the possibilities of the arts of theatre and acting and an inspiration to anyone who believes that these things really matter, and have the power seriously to influence human life.

From a chronological point of view,
My Life in Art
ends somewhat indeterminately with the revolution of 1917 – the Third Revolution, as Stanislavsky calls it – and the temporary break-up of the company. Physically divided by the civil war, a third of the actors were stuck in Moscow, while the rest, including Knipper, Chekhov’s widow, and Kachalov (Craig’s Hamlet), toured Europe. It is perhaps worth sketching in the remaining twenty-one years of Stanislavsky’s life. Events both within the Moscow Art Theatre and in the outside world were unrelenting and traumatic. On a personal level, Stanislavsky was shattered by a public humiliation administered to him by Nemirovich-Danchenko. Alarmed at the amount of time taken for rehearsals of a revival of Dostoevsky’s
The
Village of Stepanichikovo
(one of the company’s early successes), Nemirovich had, in February 1917, on the very brink of the Kerensky Revolution, taken over the play’s direction. Stanislavsky, who had been co-directing with the actor Moskvin, was floundering in the part of Rostanov. Dissatisfied with his original much-acclaimed interpretation, but unable to achieve the breakthrough into something better, he was
attempting to reconceive the part in terms of his new theory of the through-line, the super-objective: what was Rostanov’s overall purpose? What was his goal in life? He found it hard to decide. Finally, at a dress rehearsal and in full view of the company, Nemirovich took the part away from him and handed it to another actor, telling him that he had ‘failed to bring the part to life’. Stanislavsky accepted this savage treatment without demur, agreeing that it was the best decision both for the production and for the company, but he never again created a new role. The incident did nothing to improve relations between the company’s two directors. Even before the
Stepanichikovo
incident (Stanislavsky had intended to write about it in
My Life in Art
under the title
The Village of
Stepanichikovo: My Tragedy
, but lacked the heart to do so), they had been at loggerheads. In April 1916, Nemirovich-Danchenko had been formally ratified as sole managing director of the company. Stanislavsky thenceforth proposed to separate himself from the main theatre and focus his efforts on his studio at home in Leontievski Lane. Increasingly he saw the future of his work in a studio context.

His own financial circumstances had undergone a radical transformation with the revolution. The family business, which he had diligently maintained (he was a model and much-loved employer) was sequestrated by the authorities and turned into a cable factory. Despite the considerable hardship involved, he took it stoically. He only hung on to his apartment by the skin of his teeth, after the intervention of the cultural commissar Lunacharski. Meanwhile, he was as ever trying to secure the future of the theatre, not materially but spiritually. He maintained his lifelong vision of the theatre as one of the key custodians of the community’s soul, a distinctly un-Marxist position, but one unexpectedly supported by Lenin, who was instrumental in ensuring the theatre’s reopening with its traditional repertoire. Post-revolutionary cultural life had splintered into a hundred new tendencies during that glorious and short-lived epoch which threw up and actively encouraged the wildest and most stimulating of experiments. Stanislavsky’s students Boleslavsky and Vakhtangov, both among the most radical of theatrical explorers, worked in the Moscow Art’s Second and Third Studios. The results of their work were often to Stanislavsky’s intense displeasure, but they became highly influential. Stanislavsky himself tirelessly lectured on his System and the future of the theatre. His own work focused increasingly on the opera; ironically, since in
My Life in Art
whenever he wants to
denounce dead acting, he describes it as operatic: ‘like a tenor’, ‘like a bass’ (although he would equally often cite his friend Chaliapin as the ideal actor, the perfect exemplar of everything that he taught). He found, like many another director from the so-called straight theatre, that the singers were more than willing to learn from him; unlike some of his fellow actors, they had no prejudice against his System, which was instantly applicable to their work. This sustained contact with music and its essentially rhythmic and lyrical qualities made him ever more aware of that lack in his work to which he refers on many occasions in the pages of
My
Life in Art
: his vocal and physical limitations, and his failure to address directly the questions of the physical manifestation of the text, its
incar
nification
, as his translator quaintly but memorably puts it. This became a central preoccupation over the succeeding years, as he continued his quest in ever more surprising directions, constantly seeking the ideal definition of his art.