My Life in Pieces (18 page)

During this immediately post-revolutionary period, the question of whether the Moscow Art Theatre could survive at all, and if so, in what form, was widely and publicly discussed; Stanislavsky’s isolation within the company and the split with Nemirovich were open secrets (particularly since Nemirovich had become a member of the Communist Party and head of all Moscow’s dramatic theatres). Stanislavsky had become A Problem, widely acknowledged, even by the fiercest of young Turks, to be a great artist, a genius, perhaps, but perceived to be fettered, shackled, as they saw it, by his colleagues. His ambitious, rather operatic, production of Byron’s
Cain
was something of a fiasco, but with his 1921 revival of
The Government Inspector
, he was again at the forefront of theatrical ferment. The Khlestakov of Michael Chekhov (Anton’s nephew, and one of the most extraordinary talents to have emerged from the First Studio) was a startling experiment in the grotesque which violently divided audiences, some thinking it wilfully and incomprehensibly ugly, others believing it to be everything that modern acting might be: improvisatory in feeling, fantastical, poetic, dangerous. Stanislavsky aided and abetted Chekhov in his approach, and the production itself, controversial, fresh and bold, shared in all these qualities. Stanislavsky had reinvented himself.

Under intense pressure from overwhelming financial difficulties, the Moscow Art Theatre itself was by now reeling from the impact of the New Economic Plan. After a three-year gap during which the Kachalov/Knipper group had toured Europe, the company was now reunited and
Nemirovich drew up a plan for an international tour, on which the company embarked in September 1922; they did not return until August1924. The tour took in all the great European cities save only London, and entailed two separate visits to the United States, with six plays, to which were added two new productions on the road. It was as gruelling as these things invariably are, but, as we have seen, it immeasurably enhanced the already glowing reputation both of the Moscow Art Theatre and Stanislavsky himself; he was held to be the perfect paradigm of his own theories, or such of them as had filtered through to the West in publications by Stanislavsky’s colleagues Boleslavsky and Komisarjevsky. Both men had left Russia before the revolution, when the System was in its first form, in which the emphasis was strongly on emotion memory – an emphasis they duly passed on to their own students, of whom the most prominent was the young Lee Strasberg, who was in time to bring it to the Group Theatre and finally to serve it up in vulgarly simplified form at the Actors Studio as The Method.

On the 1923 tour, the great and the good, the intelligentsia and the artistic community, all flocked to see the work; practically without exception, they admired it. Stanislavsky himself was offered many opportunities to teach in America; he could have earned large sums of money, but, contrary to the dark suspicions of the artistic establishment in Russia, he never had any intention of leaving his native land, to which he was passionately devoted. He was a sincere if politically naïve supporter of the revolution, and remained so despite the increasing stranglehold exercised by the authorities after Lenin’s death. By 1924, when the company returned to Moscow, Stalin was Russia’s master. The new political circumstances called for new plays: the Central Repertory Committee, known in the fashion of the time as Glavrepertkom, was required to approve all such works. With great difficulty and over a long period of time, Stanislavsky managed to secure approval for a production of Bulgakov’s
The White Guard
, astonishing because of its sympathetic portrayal of the White Russian side in the Civil War. When it was finally performed, the play was a huge hit with the public, though violently denounced by all the critics. By one of the odder quirks of theatrical history, when some years later it was proposed to revive the production, Stalin himself demanded a private performance before agreeing to the revival. He loved it, subsequently returning to the theatre seventeen times; the reviews suddenly got better. Stanislavsky fought the official demand
for politically simplistic plays with great personal courage, insisting that exposure to such work killed off the actors’ talent. He continued his work in opera, and at the Art Theatre had a particular triumph with Beaumarchais’
The Marriage of Figaro
, seizing on the celerity and vigour of the play to put into practice his ever-evolving theory of physical action, establishing irresistible tempos for each section of the play, all the tempos integrated to provide an infectious sense of exhilaration. His production of
Armoured Train 14–69
satisfied the Commissariat, though two subsequent ‘approved’ plays flopped.

These disappointments were swallowed up in the celebrations for the Moscow Art Theatre’s thirtieth anniversary: the worldwide impact that the company and Stanislavsky’s teachings had made is reflected in the roll-call of congratulatory telegrams: from Chaplin, Fairbanks and Swanson in the United States, Craig in England, Reinhardt in Berlin. The latter went one further, and gave Stanislavsky a car which had cost him 30,000 DM. However, at the Gala which was the theatre’s own celebration of itself, Stanislavsky, playing Vershinin in Act One of
The Three Sisters
, suffered a major heart attack. He managed to make it to the curtain call, but that was the end of his career as an actor. He was sixty-five. Thereafter, for the remaining twelve years of his life, he existed in a curious, oblique relationship to the theatre with which his name was more or less synonymous. He planned productions (including a disastrous
Othello
) from his apartment, issuing detailed production plans and guidelines for his assistants, but he rarely visited the theatre or the rehearsal room; occasionally actors would come to his apartment. The results were predictably unsatisfactory. A great deal of his time was spent on the planned six volumes in which he would describe his System: the first was to be called
A
Pupil’s Diary at a Drama School
. On the advice of his American friend and translator, Elisabeth Hapgood Reynolds, this was divided up into the two books now known as
An Actor Prepares
(originally, and more precisely known as
An Actor’s Work on Himself Part One
) and
Building a
Character
(
An Actor’s Work on Himself Part Two
); they are very much part of the same text and should be seen as such. Their division has further confused an exposition of complex exercises already somewhat scuppered by the clumsy dialogue form in which Stanislavsky perhaps unwisely chose to write, though their influence has been enormous; almost all subsequent systems are a reaction to Stanislavsky’s, for or against.

His health became ever more precarious; his heart condition was complicated by emphysema. When he died, in 1938, at the age of seventy-five and surrounded by every conceivable honour, he was still trying to refine and clarify the latest developments in his System. He had had a
rap
prochement
with his old pupil Meyerhold, from whose aesthetics he had vehemently distanced himself; it seems that near to the point of death he began to see him as a possible successor. There was no
rapprochement
with Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was not in Moscow when Stanislavsky finally gave up the ghost. He had been in Stanislavsky’s thoughts only days before, however, and made an emotional oration at the memorial service, all the more resonant for the prolonged hostilities that had prevailed between the two men. ‘Immortality begins here. Enamoured and sacrificial devotion was the pivot in the creative life of the deceased. And when I wondered what we should adopt as our guideline in art, I decided it was most of all his attitude to art. We may argue over the artistic issues that we argued over when Konstantin Sergeievich was alive. But this, his stupendous sacrificial attitude to art, is something incontestable. And what I would like for all my comrades of the Art Theatre present here is to make one vow beside the coffin: let us vow that we shall treat the theatre with the same profound and sacred devotion that Stanislavsky did. Let us adopt that as the great motto left us by him. Let us vow to behave as he behaved.’

Stanislavsky’s own peroration in
My Life in Art
provides his own epitaph, comparing himself to a gold-seeker: ‘I cannot will to my heirs my labours, my quests, my losses, my joys and my disappointments, but only the few grains of gold that it has taken me all my life to find. May the Lord aid me in this task!’

How could one not love such a man? And yet, and yet. I was unable to
articulate my objection to his work until many years after I first encoun
tered it, and when I did it was something of a revelation. The Drama
Centre’s Stanislavsky training was in the hands of a remarkable, perma
nently gum-chewing American actress called Doreen Cannon, who was a
pupil of the actress Uta Hagen, one of many American actor-teachers to
have rebelled against Lee Strasberg’s limited conception of Stanislavsky’s
work and tyrannical teaching methods. I reviewed Strasberg’s
A Dream of Passion
in 1988, for the
Sunday Times.

Lee Strasberg never committed his method to print during his lifetime. He wrote a brief introduction to Diderot’s
The Paradox of Acting
, and the 9,000-word entry on Acting in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, and there exists a transcript of some of his classes,
Strasberg at the Actors Studio
in book form.
A Dream of Passion
was to be his summa, and its working title was
What is Acting? From Stanislavsky to the Method
. Alas, he died before completing it. The book that his editors have made from the existing material is an account of his personal development. It is pleasantly, plainly, written and contains a certain amount of anecdotal biographical information, an account of several exercises (some of them hovering on the edge of primal therapy) and a central section on Stanislavsky.

Bringing a repertory of Chekhov and Gorky plays with them, the Moscow Art Theatre came to America in 1924 where they were seen by an enthusiastic audience – including the twenty-three-year-old Lee Strasberg. He immediately enrolled in the school founded by two MAT company members who had decided to stay behind. In due course, he and a couple of friends founded the Group Theatre, which, after a few glorious years, folded, whereupon Strasberg opened the Actors Studio, not a drama school in the usual sense, but a kind of forum in which his students would offer exercises to him to criticise. The Strasberg System was known as The Method.

Essentially, it consisted of Stanislavsky’s formulations as found in his first book,
An Actor Prepares
. These formulations are all eminently sensible, and were obviously a useful antidote to the staginess of the contemporary Russian theatre. They are, however, the very least you can expect of an actor, a mere beginning, though admirable for drama students. Having got so far, Stanislavsky then continued to elaborate and in some cases radically alter his system, for the obvious reason that presenting a semblance of real life on the stage is not what all plays call for; in fact, very few plays fail to demand a very great deal more.

These developments, however, were ignored by Strasberg. He had discovered the true faith, which was called Emotional Truth. That was the ultimate yardstick of any performance. And who decided what was emotionally true? Why, Strasberg, of course. Despite reports coming out of Russia about Stanislavsky’s revisions and his new insistence on physical action, Strasberg became, in Harold Clurman’s words, ‘a fanatic about emotion’. And of course, the results were often startling. A degree of emotional self-expression such as had never been seen before took the
American theatre by storm, and the material was ready to hand. A number of extraordinary performers, Dean, Monroe, Brando, passed through Strasberg’s hands, some briefly, some becoming dependent on his steadying presence. Monroe could hardly act at all without either him or his wife Paula being in the vicinity. All this emotional discharge burnt up the screen, and electrified the world. Every young actor wanted to be like an American actor, wild, passionate, real and so very very NOW. Almost at a stroke, an entire tradition of American acting, articulate, witty, intelligently passionate – the tradition of Tracy and Hepburn and Cagney and Bogart – realistic but not ‘real’ was made to seem false, while people were expected to pay good money to watch actors working up to and away from their feelings.

There is not a word in Strasberg’s book to suggest that he sees any purpose to the theatre other than watching people having emotions. The tone of the book is somewhat combative, because even at the time of his death (1982) the tide was turning. It is now fully turned. Emotion has ceased to be the ultimate goal of American actors, because it has failed to animate any but the tiniest range of plays. Strasberg’s failure as a director with the legendarily bad production of
Three Sisters
, which provoked the audience to chant in unison with the mannered stumblings of Sandy Dennis when the play appeared at the Aldwych Theatre, was an early indication of this, but most recently a new and brilliant generation of American playwrights appeared with other demands to make, verbal and linguistic demands. Strasberg’s book betrays what might be called logophobia: a deep distrust of words which must always result in a terrible sameness of acting; after all, there are a limited number of emotions to permutate – it is his words that make one playwright different from another. Not according to Strasberg. ‘The words prepare the actor to carry out the activities desired by the author.’ With the distrust of words comes an inevitable distrust of intelligence.

All great acting – Olivier’s, Brando’s, Laughton’s, Maggie Smith’s – is great because of piercing contact made with the thought processes of the character: thinking what the character thinks, hearing what the character hears, seeing what the character sees. Not according to Strasberg. ‘It does not matter so much what the actor thinks,’ he writes, ‘but the fact that he is really thinking something that is real to him at that moment.’ This technique, known as ‘substitution’ is a deadly practice, killing off the actor’s mental responses. He describes ‘the primary characteristic of the
stage’ as ‘the non-existent reality’. But the reality
does
exist: it is the words. The most baleful result of his influence is the present widespread unresponsiveness of actors to language. No matter how brilliant the visualisation of either the character or his world, it can only fully live in the words of the play, their texture, their rhythm, above all, in their meaning.