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The biography of Konstantin Stanislavski, the seminal Russian theatre practitioner, straddles two centuries, a world war, revolution, and lots of other terribly exciting things. The thing is, how, then, to work in a wikilink back to the article Konstantin Stanislavski without it looking nasty and obstrusive? We'll have to have a think about that one.

Family background

Stanislavski's house on Carriage Row, opposite the Hermitage Theatre, where he lived from 1903 to 1921.

Stanislavski had a privileged youth, growing up in one of the richest families in Russia, the Alekseievs. He was born Konstantin Sergeievich Alexeiev—"Stanislavski" was a stage name that he adopted in 1884 in order to keep his performance activities secret from his parents. Up until the communist revolution in 1917, Stanislavski often used his inherited wealth to fund his theatrical experiments in acting and directing. His family's discouragement meant that he appeared only as an amateur onstage and as a director until he was thirty three.

As a child, Stanislavski was exposed to the rich cultural life of his family; his interests included the circus, the ballet, and puppetry. His father, Sergei Vladimirovich Alekseiev, was elected head of the merchant class in Moscow (one of the most important and influential positions in the city) in 1877; that same year, he had a fully-equipped theatre on his estate at Liubimovka built for the entertainment of his family and friends, providing a forum for Stanislavski's adolescent theatrical impulses. Stanislavski started, after his début performance there, what would become a life-long series of notebooks filled with critical observations on his acting, aphorisms, and problems. It was from this habit of self-analysis and critique that Stanislavski's 'system' later emerged. The family's second theatre was added in 1881 to their mansion at Red Gates, on Sadovaia Street in Moscow (where Stanislavski lived from 1863 to 1903); their house became a focus for the artistic and cultural life of the city. Stanislavski chose not to attend university, preferring to work in the family business.

Early influences

Increasingly interested in "experiencing the role," Stanislavski experimented with the ability to maintain a characterisation in real life, disguising himself as a tramp or drunk and visiting the railway station, or disguising himself as a fortune-telling gypsy; he extended the experiment to the rest of the cast of a short comedy in which he performed in 1883, and as late as 1900 he amused holiday-makers in Yalta by taking a walk each morning "in character." In 1884, he began vocal training under Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, a professor at the Conservatory and leading tenor of the Bolshoi, with whom he also explored the co-ordination of voice and body. Together they devised exercises in moving and sitting stationary "rhythmically", which anticipated Stanislavski's later use of physical rhythm when teaching his 'system' to opera singers. A year later, in 1885, Stanislavski briefly studied at the Moscow Theatre School, where students were encouraged to mimic the theatrical tricks and conventions of their tutors. Disappointed by this approach, he left after little more than two weeks.

Stanislavski as the Knight in The Society of Art and Literature's 1888 production of Pushkin's The Miserly Knight.

Instead, Stanislavski devoted particular attention to the performances of the Maly Theatre, the home of psychological realism in Russia. Psychological realism had been developed there in the 19th century by Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Shchepkin. In 1823, Pushkin had concluded that what united the diverse classical authors—Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille and Calderón—was their common concern for truth of character and situation, understood as credible behaviour in concrete circumstances:

“ The truth concerning the passions, verisimilitude in the feelings experienced in the given circumstances, that is what our intelligence demands of a dramatist. ” — Pushkin's aphorism, 1830.

Gogol, meanwhile, campaigned against overblown, effect-seeking acting. In an article of 1846, he recommends a modest, dignified mode of comic performance in which the actor seeks to grasp "what is dominant in the role" and considers "the character's main concern, which consumes his life, the constant object of his thought, the 'bee in his bonnet'." This inner desire forms the "heart of the role," to which the "tiny quirks and tiny external details" are added as embellishment. The Maly soon became known as the House of Shchepkin, the father of Russian realistic acting who, in 1848, promoted the idea of an "actor of feeling." This actor would "become the character" and identify with their thoughts and feelings: he would "walk, talk, think, feel, cry, laugh as the author wants him to." A copy of Shchepkin's Memoirs of a Serf-Actor, in which the actor describes his struggle to achieve a naturalness of style, was heavily-annotated by Stanislavski. Shchepkin's student, Glikeriya Fedotova, was Stanislavski's teacher (she was responsible for instilling the rejection of inspiration as the basis of the actor's art and the stress on the importance of training and discipline, as well as the practice of responsive interaction with other actors that Stanislavski came to call "communication"). Shchepkin's legacy included the emphasis on a disciplined, ensemble approach, the importance of extensive rehearsals, and the use of careful observation, self-knowledge, imagination and emotion as the cornerstones of the craft.

As well as the artists of the Maly company, performances given by foreign star actors—who would often come to Moscow during Lent (when Russian actors were prohibited from appearing)—also influenced Stanislavski. The effortless, emotive and clear playing of the Italian actor Ernesto Rossi, who performed major Shakespearean tragic protagonists in Moscow in 1877, particularly impressed Stanislavski. So too did Tommaso Salvini's 1882 performance of Othello. Years later, Stanislavski wrote that Salvini was the "finest representative" of the art of experiencing approach to acting.

The Society of Art and Literature

Stanislavski with his soon-to-be wife Maria Lilina, playing Ferdinand and Louise in The Society of Art and Literature's production of Schiller's Intrigue and Love in 1889.

By the age of twenty-five, Stanislavski was well-known as an amateur actor. He made a proposal to Fyodor Sollogub and Aleksandr Fedotov (a theatre director and estranged husband of Glikeriya Fedotova) to establish a society that would unite amateur and professional actors and artists. The profits from his family's factory were particularly high in 1887-1888; Stanislavski decided to use the surplus 25,000-30,000 roubles to form the Society of Art and Literature, for which he had the Ginzburg House on Tverskaia Street converted into a luxurious clubhouse with its own large stage and exhibition rooms. To research the curriculum of the society's drama school, Stanislavski spent the summer of 1888 studying the classes and performances of the Comédie-Française in Paris. Under the auspices of the society, Stanislavski performed in plays by Molière, Schiller, Pushkin, and Ostrovsky, as well as gaining his first experiences as a director. With the guidance of Fedotov and Sollogub, Stanislavski finally abandoned the operatic conventions and theatrical clichés in his acting that he had mimicked from other actors' performances. In 1889 in the society's production of Aleksey Pisemsky's historical play Men Above the Law, he discovered his "principle of opposites," as expressed in his aphoristic advice to the actor: "When you play a good man, try to find out where he is bad, and when you play a villain, try to find where he is good." He became interested in the aesthetic theories of Vissarion Belinsky. From Belinsky he took his conception of the role of the artist, on which he based a moral justification for his desire to perform that accorded with his family's sense of social responsibility and ethics.

At this time Stanislavski warned in his diary:

“ Young actors, beware of your female admirers! Make love to them, if it amuses you, but do not discuss art with them! Learn in time to listen to, to understand and love the bitter truth about yourselves! And get to know those who can tell it to you. It is with them that you should discuss art. ”

On 5 July [O.S. 23 June] 1889, Stanislavski married Lilina (the stage name of Maria Petrovna Perevostchikova), with whom he had just performed in Intrigue and Love. Their first child, Xenia, died of pneumonia in May 1890 less than two months after she was born. Their second daughter, Kira, was born on 2 August [O.S. 21 July] 1891. In January 1893, Stanislavski's father died. Their son Igor was born on 26 September [O.S. 14 September] 1894.

In 1893 Stanislavski first met the great realist novelist and playwright Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy re-wrote the fourth act of his The Power of Darkness along the lines of Stanislavski's suggestions in 1896. He was another important influence on the development of Stanislavski's thought; his What Is Art? (1898) promoted immediate intelligibility and transparency as an aesthetic principle. The Moscow Art Theatre would be Stanislavski's response to Tolstoy's demand for simplicity, directness and accessibility in art.

Early work as a director

Stanislavski as Othello in 1896. This production of a Shakespearean classic was to demonstrate his virtuosity as a director, actor and designer.

Stanislavski described his production of Tolstoy's The Fruits of Enlightenment in February 1891 as his first fully-independent directorial work. His directorial methods at this time were closely modeled on the disciplined, autocratic approach of Ludwig Chronegk, the director of the Meiningen Ensemble, whose productions of Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night, as well as a number of plays by Schiller, Stanislavski had studied enthusiastically during their second visit to Moscow in 1890. The Ensemble's general approach included historical accuracy in set, props and costumes and complex crowd effects achieved through a tightly-drilled rehearsal process. Its use of off-stage sound to produce the illusion of a reality beyond the visible stage particularly impressed Stanislavski. Their productions demonstrated a model for artistic achievement with relatively unskilled actors that Stanislavski was to adopt for the early part of his career as a director. Writing years later in his autobiography My Life in Art (1924), Stanislavski described Chronegk's approach as one in which the director is "forced to work without the help of the actor."

From 1894 onwards, as part of his painstaking rehearsals for Karl Gutzkow's melodrama Uriel Acosta and Shakespeare's Othello, Stanislavski began to assemble detailed prompt-books that included a directorial commentary on the entire play and from which not even the smallest detail was allowed to deviate in rehearsals. By means of a rigid and detailed control of the mise-en-scène, including the strict choreography of the actors' every gesture, in Stanislavski's words "the inner kernel of the play was revealed by itself." Whereas the Ensemble's effects tended toward the grandiose, however, Stanislavski introduced lyrical elaborations through the mise-en-scène that dramatised more mundane and ordinary elements of life, in keeping with Vissarion Belinsky's ideas about the "poetry of the real." Analysing his production of Othello (1896), Jean Benedetti observes that:

“ Stanislavski uses the theatre and its technical possibilities as an instrument of expression, a language, in its own right. The dramatic meaning is in the staging itself. [...] He went through the whole play in a completely different way, not relying on the text as such, with quotes from important speeches, not providing a 'literary' explanation, but speaking in terms of the play's dynamic, its action, the thoughts and feelings of the protagonists, the world in which they lived. His account flowed uninterruptedly from moment to moment. ”

He suggests that Stanislavski's task at this stage was to unite the realistic tradition of the creative actor inherited from Shchepkin and Gogol with the director-centered, organically unified naturalistic aesthetic of the Ensemble's approach. That synthesis would emerge eventually, but only in the wake of his directorial struggles with symbolist theatre and an artistic crisis in his work as an actor. "The task of our generation," Stanislavski wrote as he was about to found the Moscow Art Theatre and begin his professional life in the theatre, is "to liberate art from outmoded tradition, from tired cliché and to give greater freedom to imagination and creative ability."

Creation of the Moscow Art Theatre

See also: Moscow Art Theatre

In 1896 Stanislavski discussed with Nikolai Efros his ideas for a scheme to establish a network of touring theatre companies that would bring high-quality drama to the surrounding area of selected towns. He proposed to call them "open" or "accessible" theatres, in a bid to avoid alarming the authorities with their connection to the dangerously democratizing "popular theatre" movement that was spreading across Europe, spearheaded by Romain Rolland.

It was Stanislavski's historic meeting with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko on 4 July [O.S. 22 June] 1897, however, that would create what was called initially the "Moscow Public-Accessible Theatre" but which came to be known as the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). Their eighteen-hour discussion—lasting from lunch at 2pm in a private room in the Slavic Bazaar restaurant to 8am the following morning over breakfast at Stanislavski's family estate at Liubimovka—has acquired a legendary status in the history of theatre. Nemirovich was a successful playwright, critic, theatre director, and acting teacher at the Philharmonic school, who was also committed to the idea of a popular theatre. Their abilities complemented one another: Nemirovich needed Stanislavski's directorial talent for creating vivid stage images and selecting significant details, while Stanislavski needed Nemirovich's talent for dramatic and literary analysis, his professional expertise, and his ability to manage a theatre. Stanislavski later compared their discussions to the Treaty of Versailles, their scope was so wide-ranging; they agreed on the conventional practices they wished to abandon and, on the basis of the working method they found they had in common, they worked out the policy of their new theatre. Together they would forge a professional company with an ensemble ethos that discouraged individual vanity, selecting actors from Nemirovich's class at the Philharmonic school and Stanislavski's amateur Society of Art and Literature group, along with other professional actors; they would create a realistic theatre of international renown, with popular prices for seats, whose organically-unified aesthetic would bring together the techniques of the Meiningen Ensemble and those of André Antoine's Théâtre Libre (which Stanislavski had seen during trips to Paris). Responsibility was to be shared between them on the basis of their individual strengths, with Stanislavski overseeing production and Nemirovich in charge of the repertoire and literary decisions; each had a veto.

Given that Stanislavski's family's assets amounted to some 8 million roubles at the time, Nemirovich assumed initially that Stanislavski would fund the theatre as a privately-owned business, but Stanislavski insisted on a limited, joint stock company. Stanislavski would only ever invest an initial 10,000 roubles in the MAT. With an annual salary of 4,200 roubles each, Stanislavski and Nemirovich were to represent the interests of the acting company in the business, though with the aim of transferring control to the actors eventually. Viktor Simov, whom Stanislavski had met in 1896, was engaged as the company's principal designer.

At Pushkino in 1898, Vsevolod Meyerhold prepares for his role as Konstantin to Stanislavski's Trigorin in the Moscow Art Theatre's production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull.

For want of suitable rehearsal space in Moscow, the company met in Pushkino, isolated 50 miles from the city. In his opening speech on the first day of rehearsals, 14 June 1898, Stanislavski stressed the "social character" of their collective undertaking: "We are striving to create the first rational, moral, and public-accessible theatre," he said, "and we dedicate our lives to this high goal." In an atmosphere more like a university than a theatre, as Stanislavski described it, the company was introduced to his working method of extensive reading and research and detailed rehearsals in which the action was defined at the table before being explored physically. Throughout June and July the company rehearsed productions of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Sophocles' Antigone, Hauptmann's The Assumption of Hannele, Pisemsky's Men Above the Law, Lenz's The Tutor and Alexei Tolstoy's Tsar Fiodor Ioannovich. It was at these rehearsals that Stanislavski's life-long relationship with Vsevolod Meyerhold began; by the end of June, Meyerhold was so impressed with Stanislavski's directorial skills that he declared him a genius.

Chekhov, Gorky, and Ibsen

See also: MAT production of The Seagull

In 1898, Stanislavski co-directed with Nemirovich the first of his productions of the work of Anton Chekhov. The MAT's production of The Seagull was a crucial milestone for the fledgling company that has been described as "one of the greatest events in the history of Russian theatre and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama." Despite its 80 hours of rehearsal—a considerable length by the standards of the conventional practice of the day—Stanislavski felt it was under-rehearsed and threatened to have his name removed from the posters when Nemirovich refused his demand to postpone its opening by a week. Stanislavski played Trigorin, Meyerhold played Konstantin, and Olga Knipper played Arkadnia. The production's success was due to the fidelity of its delicate representation of everyday life, its intimate, ensemble playing, and the resonance of its mood of despondent uncertainty with the psychological disposition of the Russian intelligentsia of the time. To commemorate this historic production, which gave the MAT its sense of identity, the company to this day bears the seagull as its emblem. Stanislavski went on to direct the successful premières of Chekhov's other major plays: Uncle Vanya in 1899, Three Sisters in 1901, and The Cherry Orchard in 1904. Stanislavski's encounter with Chekhov's drama proved crucial to the creative development of both men. His ensemble approach and attention to the psychological realities of its characters revived Chekhov's interest in writing for the stage, while Chekhov's unwillingness to explain or expand on the text forced Stanislavski to dig beneath its surface in ways that were new in theatre. By 1922, however, Stanislavski had become disenchanted with the MAT's productions of Chekhov's plays—"After all we have lived through," he remarked to Nemirovich, "it is impossible to weep over the fact that an officer is going and leaving his lady behind" (refering to the conclusion of Three Sisters).

The playwrights Anton Chekhov (left) and Maxim Gorky (right) in 1900.

In 1902, Stanislavski directed productions of two of Maxim Gorky's plays at the MAT, The Philistines and The Lower Depths. In 1904 both Gorky and Savva Morozov terminated their relationship with the MAT in the wake of conflict with Nemirovich. Gorky returned to Nizhny Novgorod to establish a theatre of his own, for which both Stanislavski and Morozov were to provide financial support. Stanislavski saw in Gorky's new venture an opportunity to develop the network of provincial theatres that he hoped would reform the art of the stage in Russia, of which he had dreamed since the 1890s. He sent some pupils from the Art Theatre School—as well as Ioasaf Tikhomirov, who ran the school—to work there. By the autumn, however, after the censor had banned every play that the theatre proposed to stage, the project was abandoned. Despite Stanislavski's attempts to persuade him otherwise, in December 1904 Gorky refused permission for the MAT to produce his Enemies and declined "any kind of connection with the Art Theatre."

Along with Chekhov and Gorky, the drama of Henrik Ibsen formed an important part of Stanislavski's work at this time. In the first decade of the MAT, Stanislavski directed Hedda Gabler, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck, and Ghosts.

Symbolism, the Theatre-Studio, and the Revolution of 1905

See also: Theatre-Studio

In 1904, Stanislavski finally acted on a suggestion made by Chekhov two years earlier that he stage several one-act plays by the Belgian symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. The ideas of Valery Bryusov and the Russian Symbolist movement represented the avant-garde in Russia at the time. Bryusov called for a form of acting that released the actor's creativity and the audience's imagination from the limitations of the conventions of realism; in practice, though, Stanislavski struggled to realise a theatrical approach to the static, lyrical qualities of Maeterlinck's symbolist drama. When the triple bill consisting of The Blind, Intruder, and Interior opened at the MAT on 14 October [O.S. 2 October] 1904, the experiment was deemed a failure.

Design (by Nikolai Ulyanov) for Meyerhold's planned 1905 production of Hauptmann's Schluck and Jau at the Theatre-Studio he founded with Stanislavski, which relocated the play in a stylised abstraction of France under Louis XIV. Around the edge of the stage, ladies-in-waiting embroider an improbably long scarf with huge ivory needles.

Soon after, however, Meyerhold returned to Moscow with the results of the experiments he had conducted with his "New Drama Association" in the Ukraine and Georgia. Stanislavski responded positively to Meyerhold's new ideas, which prompted Meyerhold to propose a "Theatre-Studio" (a term which he invented) that would function as "a laboratory for the experiments of more or less experienced actors." The Theatre-Studio aimed to develop Meyerhold's symbolist aesthetic ideas into new theatrical forms that would return the MAT to the forefront of the avant-garde and Stanislavski's socially-conscious ideas for a network of "people's theatres" that could reform Russian theatrical culture as a whole. Bryusov became involved as its literary advisor and helped to define the company's artistic principles. Officially attached to the MAT but actually subsidised privately by Stanislavski himself, the Theatre-Studio was inaugurated on 15 June [O.S. 3 June] 1905. When it presented scenes from Maeterlinck's The Death of Tintagiles, Hauptmann's Schluck and Jau, and Ibsen's Love's Comedy on 23 August [O.S. 11 August] 1905 at Pushkino, Stanislavski was encouraged. When the work was performed in a fully-equipped theatre in Moscow, however, it was regarded as a failure and the studio folded. From the Theatre-Studio's failure Meyerhold drew an important lesson: "one must first educate a new actor and only then put new tasks before him," he wrote, adding that "Stanislavski, too, came to such a conclusion." Meyerhold would go on to explore physical expressivity, co-ordination, and rhythm in his experiments in actor training (which would found 20th-century physical theatre), while, for the moment, Stanislavski would pursue psychological expressivity through the actor's inner technique. Reflecting in 1908 on the Theatre-Studio's demise, Stanislavski wrote that "our theatre found its future among its ruins." Nemirovich disapproved of what he described as the malign influence of Meyerhold on Stanislavski's work at this time.

Stanislavski engaged two important new collaborators in 1905: Liubov Gurevich became his literary advisor, while Leopold Sulerzhitsky became his personal assistant. He revised his interpretation of the role of Trigorin, with Meyerhold reprising his role as Konstantin, when the MAT revived its production of Chekhov's The Seagull on 12 October [O.S. 30 September] 1905. Stanislavski was able to persuade Gorky to allow the company to perform his Children of the Sun, which opened on 5 November [O.S. 24 October] 1905 under Stanislavski's direction. This was the year of the abortive revolution in Russia. Stanislavski signed a protest against the violence of the secret police, Cossack troops, and the right-wing extremist paramilitary "Black Hundreds", which was submitted to the Duma on the 2 November [O.S. 21 October]. Rehearsals for the MAT's production of Aleksandr Griboyedov's classic verse comedy Woe from Wit were interrupted by gun-battles on the streets outside. Stanislavski and Nemirovich closed the theatre and embarked on the company's first tour outside of Russia.

European tour and artistic crisis

The MAT's first European tour began on 22 February [O.S. 10 February] 1906 in Berlin, where they played to an audience that included Max Reinhardt, Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and Eleanora Duse. "It's as though we were the revelation," Stanislavski wrote of the rapturous acclaim they received. The success of the tour provided financial security for the theatre, made a significant impact on European theatre, and garnered an international reputation for their work. The tour had also provoked a major artistic crisis for Stanislavski that was to have a significant impact on his future direction. From his attempts to resolve this crisis, his 'system' would eventually emerge. Sometime in March 1906—Jean Benedetti suggests that it was during An Enemy of the People—Stanislavski became aware that he was acting without a flow of inner impulses and feelings and that as a consequence his performance had become mechanical. He spent June and July in Finland on holiday, where he studied, wrote, and reflected. With his notebooks on his own experience from 1889 onwards, he attempted to analyse "the foundation stones of our art" and the actor's creative process in particular. He began to formulate a psychological approach to controlling the actor's process in a Manual on Dramatic Art.

Productions as research

Stanislavski's activities began to move in a very different direction: his productions became opportunities for research, he was more interested in the process of rehearsal than its product, and his attention shifted away from the MAT towards its satellite projects—the theatre studios—in which he would develop his 'system.' On his return to Moscow, he explored his new psychological approach in his production of Knut Hamsun's symbolist play The Drama of Life. Nemirovich was particularly hostile to his new methods and their relationship continued to deteriorate in this period. In a statement made on 8 February [O.S. 27 January] 1908 Stanislavski marked a significant shift in his directorial method and stressed the crucial contribution he now expected from a creative actor:

Sugar and Mytyl in Stanislavski's production of The Blue Bird (1908).

“ The committee is wrong if it thinks that the director's preparatory work in the study is necessary, as previously, when he alone decided the whole plan and all the details of the production, wrote the mise-en-scène and answered all the actors' questions for them. The director is no longer king, as before, when the actor possessed no clear individuality. [...] It is essential to understand this—rehearsals are divided into two stages: the first stage is one of experiment when the cast helps the director, the second is creating the performance when the director helps the cast. ”

Stanislavski's preparations for Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird (which was to become his most famous production to-date) included improvisations and exercises to stimulate the actors' imaginations; Nemirovich described one in which the cast imitated various animals. In rehearsals Stanislavski sought ways to encourage his actors' will to create afresh in every performance. He focused on the search for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the characters are seeking to achieve at any given moment (what he would come to call their "objective" or "task"). This use of the actor's conscious thought and will was designed to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly. Noting the importance to great actors' performances of their ability to remain relaxed, he also discovered that he could abolish physical tension by focusing his attention on the specific action that the play demanded; when his concentration wavered, his tension returned. "What fascinates me most", Stanislavski wrote in May 1908, "is the rhythm of feelings, the development of affective memory and the psycho-physiology of the creative process." His interest in the creative use of the actor's personal experiences was spurred by a chance conversation in Germany in July that led him to the work of French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot. His "affective memory" contributed to the technique that Stanislavski would come to call "emotion memory." Together these elements formed a new vocabulary with which he explored a "return to realism" in a production of Gogol's The Government Inspector as soon as The Blue Bird had opened. At a theatre conference on 20 March [O.S. 8 March] 1909, Stanislavski delivered a paper on his emerging 'system' that stressed the role of his techniques of the "magic if" (which encourages the actor to respond to the fictional circumstances of the play "as if" they were real) and emotion memory. At this time he also began to develop his ideas about three trends in the history of acting—"hack" acting, the art of representation, and the art of experiencing (his own approach)—that were to appear eventually in the opening chapters of An Actor's Work.

Stanislavski and Olga Knipper as Rakitin and Natalya in
Ivan Turgenev's A Month in the Country in 1909.

Stanislavski's production of A Month in the Country (1909) was a watershed in his artistic development. Breaking the MAT's tradition of open rehearsals, he prepared Turgenev's play in private. They began with a discussion of what he would come to call the "through-line" for the characters (their emotional development and the way they change over the course of the play). This production is the earliest recorded instance of his practice of analysing the action of the script into discrete "bits." At this stage, his technique involved identifying the emotional state contained in the psychological experience of the character during each bit and, through the use of the actor's emotion memory, forging a subjective connection to it. Only after two months of rehearsals were the actors permitted to physicalise the text. Stanislavski insisted that they should focus on playing the actions that their discussions around the table had identified. Having realised a particular emotional state in a physical action, he assumed at this point in his experiments, the actor's repetition of that action would evoke the desired emotion. As with his experiments in The Drama of Life, they also explored non-verbal communication, whereby scenes were rehearsed with actors interacting "only with their eyes." The production's success when it opened in December 1909 seemed to prove the validity of his new methodology.

Late in 1910, Gorky invited Stanislavski to join him in Capri, where they discussed actor training and Stanislavski's emerging "grammar." Inspired by a popular theatre performance in Naples that utilised the techniques of the commedia dell'arte, Gorky suggested that they form a company, modelled on the Medieval strolling players, in which a playwright and group of young actors would devise new plays together by means of improvisation. Stanislavski would develop this use of improvisation in his work with his First Studio.

Staging the classics

See also: MAT production of Hamlet

In his treatment of the classics, Stanislavski believed that it was legitimate for actors and directors to ignore the playwright's intentions for a play's staging. A play could be adapted "to the actor's inner experiences," he explained to a skeptical Nemirovich during rehearsals for the MAT's revival of Griboyedov's Woe from Wit in 1914. To support his position, Stanislavski cited Gogol's advice to "take any play of Schiller or Shakespeare and stage it as contemporary art demands" and Chekhov's delight at the MAT actor Ivan Moskvin's creative departure from Chekhov's intentions in his characterisation of Epikhodov in their production of The Cherry Orchard.

File:Craig's design (1908) for Hamlet 1-2 at Moscow Art Theatre.jpg

Symbolist Shakespeare at the MAT: Craig's 1908 design for Stanislavski's production of Hamlet (1911-12). This staging of act one, scene two prompted an ovation, which was unheard of in mid-performance at the MAT.

Stanislavski's collaboration with Edward Gordon Craig on their production of Hamlet is particularly important in the history of performances of Shakespeare's tragedy and is a landmark production of 20th-century theatrical modernism. With it, Stanislavski hoped to prove that his recently-developed 'system' for creating internally-justified, realistic acting could meet the formal demands of a classic play, while Craig conceived of it as a symbolist monodrama in which every aspect of production would be subjugated to the play's protagonist: the play would present a dream-like vision as seen through Hamlet's eyes. Despite these contrasting visions, the two practitioners did share some artistic assumptions; the 'system' had developed out of Stanislavski's experiments with symbolist drama, which had shifted the emphasis of his approach from a naturalistic external surface to the subtextual, inner world of the character's "spirit." Craig and Stanislavski were introduced by Isadora Duncan in 1908, from which time they began planning the production. A serious illness of Stanislavski's, however, delayed its opening until 5 January 1912 [O.S. 23 December 1911]. Despite hostile reviews from the Russian press, the production attracted enthusiastic and unprecedented worldwide attention for the theatre, with reviews in Britain's The Times and in the French press that praised its unqualified success; the production placed the MAT "on the cultural map for Western Europe" and it came to be regarded as a seminal event that has influenced the subsequent history of production style in the theatre.

Increasingly absorbed by his teaching, in 1913 Stanislavski held open rehearsals for his production of Molière's The Imaginary Invalid as a demonstration of the 'system.' As with his production of Hamlet and his next, Goldoni's The Mistress of the Inn, he was keen to assay his 'system' in the crucible of a classical text. He began to inflect his technique of dividing the action of the play into bits with an emphasis on improvisation; he would progress from analysis, through free improvisation, to the language of the text:

“ I divide the work into large bits clarifying the nature of each bit. Then, immediately, in my own words, I play each bit, observing all the curves. Then I go through the experiences of each bit ten times or so with its curves (not in a fixed way, not being consistent). Then I follow the successive bits in the book. And finally, I make the transition, imperceptibly, to the experiences as expressed in the actual words of the part. ”

Stanislavski's struggles with both the Molière and Goldoni comedies revealled the importance of an appropriate definition of what he calls a character's "super-objective" or "super-task" (the core problem that unites and subordinates the character's moment-to-moment tasks). This aspect of his work impacted particularly on the productions' ability to serve the genre of the plays, as an unsatisfactory definition produced tragic rather than comic performances.

Other European classics directed by Stanislavski include: Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, and Othello, an unfinished production of Molière's Tartuffe, and Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro. Other classics of the Russian theatre directed by Stanislavki include: several plays by Ivan Turgenev, Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, Gogol's The Government Inspector, and plays by Tolstoy, Ostrovsky, and Pushkin.

Studios and the search for a 'system'

See also: First Studio, Second Studio, and Third Studio

Stanislavski's PA and assistant director Leopold Sulerzhitsky in 1910. He led the First Studio and taught the elements of the 'system' to its members.

Following the success of his production of A Month in the Country, Stanislavski made repeated requests to the board of the MAT for proper facilities to pursue his pedagogical work with young actors. Gorky encouraged him not to found a drama school to teach inexperienced beginners, but rather—following the example of the Theatre-Studio of 1905—to create a studio for research and experiment that would train young professionals. Stanislavski created the First Studio on 13 September [O.S. 1 September] 1912. Its founding members included Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, Richard Boleslavsky, and Maria Ouspenskaya, all of whom would exert a considerable influence on the subsequent history of theatre. Suler (as Gorky had nicknamed Sulerzhitsky) was selected to lead the studio. Suler taught the elements of Stanislavski's 'system' in its germinal form: relaxation, concentration of attention, imagination, communication, and emotion memory. In a focused, intense atmosphere, the work at the First Studio emphasised experimentation, improvisation, and self-discovery. Following Gorky's suggestions about devising new plays through improvisation, one aspect of its experimental work searched for "the creative process common to authors, actors and directors."

Stanislavski created the Second Studio of the MAT in 1916, in response to a production of Zinaida Gippius' The Green Ring that a group of young actors had prepared independently. With a greater focus on pedagogical work than the First Studio, the Second Studio provided the environment in which Stanislavski developed the training techniques that would form the basis for his manual An Actor's Work.

A significant influence on the development of the 'system' came from Stanislavski's experience teaching and directing at his Opera Studio, which was founded in 1918. He hoped that the successful application of his 'system' to opera, with its inescapable conventionality and artifice, would unite the work of Mikhail Shchepkin and Feodor Chaliapin and demonstrate the universality of his approach to performance. From this work Stanislavski's notion of "tempo-rhythm" emerged, which he was to develop most substantially in part two of An Actor's Work (1938). A series of thirty-two lectures that he delivered at the Opera Studio between 1919 and 1922 were recorded by Konkordia Antarova and published in 1939; they have been translated into English as Stanislavsky on the Art of the Stage (1950). Pavel Rumiantsev documented the studio's activities until 1932; his notes were published in 1969 and appear in English under the title Stanislavski on Opera (1975). Stanislavski invited Serge Wolkonsky to teach diction and Lev Pospekhin (from the Bolshoi Ballet) to teach expressive movement and dance at the Opera Studio. He attended both of their classes as a student.

From the First World War to the October Revolution

Stanislavski spent the summer of 1914 in Marienbad where, as he had in 1906, he researched the history of theatre and theories of acting in order to clarify the discoveries that his practical experiments had produced. His studies included books by Luigi Riccoboni, his son François Riccoboni, Rémond de Saint-Albin, Adrienne Lecouvreur, Gustave Doré, August Wilhelm Iffland, and Benoît-Constant Coquelin, the theories of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Denis Diderot, and the history of the previous two centuries of theatre.

When the First World War broke out, Stanislavski was in Munich, from where he intended to return to Russia via the Swiss border with his wife and Gurevich. "It seemed to me," he wrote of the atmosphere at the train station in an article detailling his experiences, "that death was hovering everywhere." Their train was stopped at Immenstadt, where they were denounced as Russian spies and ordered to disembark by German soldiers. Held in a room at the station with a large crowd with "the faces of wild beasts" baying at its windows, Stanislavski believed they were to be executed. He remembered that he was carrying an official document that mentioned having played to Kaiser Wilhelm during their tour of 1906 that, when he showed it to the officers, produced a change of attitude towards his group. They were placed on a slow train to Kempten. Gurevich later related how during the journey Stanislavski surprised her when he whispered that:

Stanislavski as Famusov in the 1914 revival of Griboyedov's Woe from Wit.

“ [E]vents of recent days had given him a clear impression of the superficiality of all that was called human culture, bourgeois culture, that a completely different kind of life was needed, where all needs were reduced to the minimum, where there was work—real artistic work—on behalf of the people, for those who had not yet been consumed by this bourgeois culture. ”

In Kempten they were again ordered into one of the station's rooms, where Stanislavski overheard the German soldiers complain of a lack of ammunition; it was only this, he understood, that prevented their execution. The following morning they were placed on a train to Lindau, where they were allowed eventually to enter Switzerland. From there they proceeded after a few days through Geneva to Marseilles, where a boat took them via the Dardanelles to Odessa. On 26 September [O.S. 14 September] 1914 Stanislavski arrived in Moscow.

Turning to the classics of Russian theatre, that autumn the MAT revived Griboyedov's comedy Woe from Wit and planned to stage three of Pushkin's "little tragedies" in the spring of 1915. Stanislavski continued to develop his 'system,' explaining at an open rehearsal for Woe from Wit his concept of the state of "I am being." This term marks the stage in the rehearsal process when the distinction between actor and character blurs (producing the "actor/role"), subconscious behaviour takes the lead, and the actor feels fully present in the dramatic moment. He stressed the importance to achieving the state of "I am being" of a focus on action ("What would I do if...") rather than emotion ("How would I feel if..."): "You must ask the kinds of questions that lead to dynamic action." Instead of forcing emotion, he explained, actors should notice what is happening, attend to their relationships with the other actors, and try to understand "through the senses" the fictional world that surrounds them. As part of his preparations for his role in Pushkin's Mozart and Salieri, Stanislavski created a biography for Salieri in which he imagined the character's memories of each incident mentioned in the play, his relationships with the other people involved, and the circumstances that had impacted on Salieri's life. When he attempted to render all of this detail in performance, however, the subtext overwhelmed the text; overladen with heavy pauses, Pushkin's verse was fragmented to the point of incomprehensibility. His struggles with this role prompted him to attend more closely to the structure and dynamics of language in drama; to that end, he studied Serge Wolkonsky's The Expressive Word (1913).

The French theatre practitioner Jacques Copeau contacted Stanislavski in October 1916. As a result of his conversations with Edward Gordon Craig, Copeau had come to believe that his work at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier shared a common approach with Stanislavski's investigations at the MAT.

On 11 January 1917 [O.S. 30 December 1916] Stanislavski's assistant and closest friend, Leopold Sulerzhitsky, died from chronic nephritis. Reflecting on their relationship in 1931, Stanislavski said that Suler had understood him completely and that no one, since, had replaced him.

Revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War years

Stanislavski as General Krititski in Ostrovsky's Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man. His performance was particularly admired by Lenin.

Stanislavski welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 and its overthrow of the absolute monarchy as a "miraculous liberation of Russia." With the October Revolution later in the year, the MAT closed for a few weeks and the First Studio was occupied by revolutionaries. Stanislavski thought that the social upheavals presented an opportunity to realise his long-standing ambitions to establish a Russian popular theatre that would provide, as the title of an essay he prepared that year put it, "The Aesthetic Education of the Popular Masses." Vladimir Lenin, who became a frequent visitor to the MAT after the revolution, praised Stanislavski as "a real artist" and indicated that, in his opinion, Stanislavski's approach was "the direction the theatre should take." The revolutions of that year brought about an abrupt change in Stanislavski's finances when his factories were nationalised, which left his wage from the MAT as his only source of income. On 29 August 1918 Stanislavski, along with several others from the MAT, was arrested by the Cheka, though he was released the following day.

During the years of the Civil War, Stanislavski concentrated on teaching his 'system,' directing (both at the MAT and its studios), and bringing performances of the classics to new audiences (including factory workers and the army). In January 1919 he began his "Creative Mondays" seminars at the MAT, which explored theatre aesthetics. Later in the year he gave lectures on the 'system' at the MAT and the Second Studio. He was also involved with the Habima Theatre company (a group of Jewish Palestinian actors based in Moscow who performed plays in Hebrew); between September 1920 and April 1921 he taught them elements of his 'system' and worked on scenes from Woe from Wit and The Merchant of Venice. In 1917 the son of Stanislavski's old tutor Fyodor Komissarzhevsky published a book on the 'system,' despite not having been trained in it; infuriated, Stanislavski considered legal action. In 1919 Michael Chekhov published an article on the 'system' in the magazine of the Proletcult organisation. Stanislavski's secretary, Vladimir Volkenstein, published a monograph on Stanislavski in 1922 that stressed the importance of physical action in the 'system'; due to its description of his conflict with Nemirovich, the book caused Stanislavski some embarrassment.

On 5 March 1921 Stanislavski was evicted from his large house on Carriage Row (opposite the Hermitage Theatre), where he had lived since 1903. Following the personal intervention of Lenin (prompted by Anatoly Lunacharsky), Stanislavski was re-housed at 6 Leontievski Lane, not far from the MAT. He was to live here until his death in 1938. The house contained a large ballroom that he used for rehearsals, teaching, and performances, which following his Opera Studio production of Eugene Onegin (1922) became known as the Onegin Room.

On 29 May 1922, Stanislavski's favourite pupil, the director Yevgeny Vakhtangov, died of tuberculosis.

MAT tour to the United States

In the wake of the temporary withdrawl of the state subsidy to the MAT that came with the New Economic Policy in 1921, Stanislavski and Nemirovich planned a tour to Europe and the USA to augment the company's finances. The tour began in Berlin, where Stanislavski arrived on 18 September 1922, and proceeded to Prague, Zagreb, and Paris, where he was welcomed at the station by Jacques Hébertot, Aurélien Lugné-Poë, and Jacques Copeau; while there, he also met André Antoine, Louis Jouvet, Isadora Duncan, Firmin Gémier, and Harley Granville-Barker. He discussed with Copeau the possibility of establishing an international theatre studio and attended performances by Ermete Zacconi, whose control in performance, economic expressivity, and ability both to "experience" and "represent" his role impressed him.

From left to right: Ivan Moskvin, Stanislavski, Feodor Chaliapin, Vasili Kachalov, Saveli Sorine, in the USA in 1923.

The company sailed to New York and arrived on 4 January 1923. When reporters asked about their repertoire, Stanislavski explained that "America wants to see what Europe already knows." David Belasco, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Feodor Chaliapin attended the opening night performance, on 8 January 1923. Thanks in part to a vigorous publicity campaign that the American producer, Morris Gest, orchestrated, the tour garnered substantial critical praise, although it was not a financial success. A letter by John Barrymore was published in which he wrote that the performance of The Lower Depths given on 19 January was the greatest theatrical experience of his life. As actors (among whom was the young Lee Strasberg) flocked to the performances to learn from the company, the tour made a substantial contribution to the development of American acting. Richard Boleslavsky, who had been able to extend his visa thanks to an invitation from Stanislavski to act as an assistant director to the company, presented a series of lectures on Stanislavski's 'system' (which were eventually published as Acting: The First Six Lessons in 1933). The interest generated led to Boleslavsky's decision to establish the American Laboratory Theatre, along with another of Stanislavski's former students, Maria Ouspenskaya, later that year. There they taught the 'system' as they had encountered it in its early stages at the First Studio; Stanislavski had, by this time, already developed it much further, giving greater attention to physical actions and objectives. A performance of Three Sisters on 31 March 1923 concluded the season in New York, after which they travelled to Chicago, Philadelphia, and then to Boston.

At the request of a US publisher, Stanislavski reluctantly agreed to write his autobiography, My Life in Art, since his proposals for an account of the 'system' or a history of the MAT and its approach had been rejected. He returned to Europe during the summer where he worked on the book and, in September, began rehearsals for a second tour. The company returned to New York on 7 November and went on to perform in Philadelphia, Boston, New Haven, Hartford, Washington, D.C., Brooklyn, Newark, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Detroit. On 20 March 1924 Stanislavski met President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. They were introduced by a translator, Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, with whom he would later collaborate on An Actor Prepares. The company left the US on 17 May 1924.

Soviet productions

Stanislavski's production of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Days of the Turbins in 1926.

On his return to Moscow in August 1924, Stanislavski began with the help of Gurevich to make substantial revisions to his autobiography, in preparation for a definitive Russian-language edition, which was published in September 1926. He continued to act, reprising the role of Astrov in a new production of Uncle Vanya (his performance of which was described as "staggering"). With Nemirovich away touring with his Music Studio, Stanislavski led the MAT for two years, during which time the company thrived. In 1925 he took the company on tour in the Caucasus and Southern Russia.

At the suggestion of Pavel Markov, its new literary manager, Mikhail Bulgakov was approached to adapt his novel The White Guard, although Stanislavski was unsure of the adaptation's merits until he saw a run-through in the early summer of 1926, after which he took over its direction. With a company fully versed in his 'system', his work focused on the tempo-rhythm of the production's dramatic structure and the through-lines of action for the individual characters and the play as a whole. "See everything in terms of action" he advised them. Aware of the disapproval of Bulgakov felt by the Repertory Committee (Glavrepertkom) of the People's Commissariat for Education, Stanislavski threatened to close the theatre if the play was banned. After being re-worked and re-written, The Days of the Turbins (as the adaptation was entitled) opened on 5 October 1926. Despite substantial hostility from the press, the production was a box-office success. The German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who saw the production during his visit to Moscow, admired its scenic design but was unimpressed with the play, describing it as "an absolutely revolting provocation."

Stanislavski's fast and free-flowing production of Pierre Beaumarchais' 18th-century comedy The Marriage of Figaro opened on 28 April 1927, having been rehearsed since the end of 1925. In an attempt to make the classic play relevant to a contempary Soviet audience, he re-located its action in pre-Revolutionary France and emphasised the democratic point of view of Figaro and Susanna, in preference to that of the aristocratic Count Almaviva. Figaro "isnt a hero in the sense of our own recent turbulent revolutionary times," he argued, but "for his period he is a rebel, a representative of the people." At Stanislavski's request, Aleksandr Golovin's scenic design emphasised a contrast between the shabby poverty of the servants' quarters and the opulence of the salon above. Stanislavski trimmed the play's five-act structure to eleven scenes, employing a revolve to quicken scene-changes and to keep the audience engaged in the story. His working methods contributed innovations to the 'system': the analysis of scenes in terms of concrete physical tasks and the use of the "Line of the Day" for each character. In preference to the tightly-controlled, Meiningen-inspired scoring of the mise-en-scène with which he had choreographed crowd scenes in his early years, he now worked in terms of broad physical objectives. Actors responded truthfully to the circumstances of scenes with sequences of improvised adaptations that attempted to solve concrete, physical problems. Stanislavski also developed his notion of the "Line of the Day." In order to justify his or her behaviour on-stage, the actor elaborates in detail the events that supposedly occur off-stage, in order to form a continuum of experience (the "line" of the character's life that day). This means that the actor has developed a relationship to where (as a character) he has just come from and to where he intends to go when leaving the scene. The production was a great success, garnering ten curtain calls on opening night. Thanks to its cohesive unity and rhythmic qualities, it is recognised as one of Stanislavski's major achievements.

With a performance of extracts from its major productions—including the first act of Three Sisters in which Stanislavski played Vershinin—the MAT celebrated its 30-year jubilee on the 29 October 1928. While performing Stanislavski suffered a massive heart-attack, though he continued until the curtain call, after which he collapsed. With that, his acting career came to an end.

A manual for actors

See also: An Actor's Work and An Actor Prepares

While on holiday in August 1926, Stanislavski began to develop what would become An Actor's Work, his manual for actors. Writing in the form of a fictional student's diary, he based the character of the tutor on his old teacher Komissarzhevski (as well as himself), the tutor's assistant on Suler, and the protagonist on Vakhtangov (also, as well as himself). The protagonist's name is Kostya Nazvanov—Kostya is a familiar form of Konstantin, while Nazvanov means "Chosen One." The tutor is called Tortsov, which connotes "Creator," while the other students have names such as "Fatty," "Brains," "Beauty," and "Arguer." Dialogues between Tortsov and the students predominate. Throughout the writing process Stanislavski worked closely with Gurevich, who served as his editor. She encouraged him to adapt his examples (such as the loss of an expensive broach or counting large bundles of banknotes) to the realities of Soviet life.

In 1929 he stayed at the spa in Badenweiler where he was joined by Elizabeth Hapgood, who soon began to work on a translation into English. On 22 April 1930 in Nice he signed a contract with Hapgood that granted her the power to negotiate contracts for the publication of his books on the 'system' in all languages since, as a Soviet citizen, he was unable to establish US copyright himself. Ideally, he felt, his account of the system would consist of two volumes: the first would detail the actor's inner experiencing and outer, physical embodiment, while the second would address rehearsal processes. Since the Soviet publishers used a format that would have made the first volume unwieldy, however, in practice this became three volumes—inner experiencing, outer characterisation, and rehearsal—each of which would be published separately, as it became ready. The danger that such an arrangement would obscure the mutual interdependence of these parts in the 'system' as a whole would be avoided, Stanislavski hoped, by means of an initial overview that would stress their integration in his psycho-physical approach; as it turned out, however, he never wrote the overview and many English-language readers came to confuse the first volume on psychological processes—published in the USA as An Actor Prepares (1936)—with the 'system' as a whole.

The first volume was largely complete by August 1930. On 3 November 1930, he returned to Moscow. Unimpressed with the draft, Gurevich encouraged him to include more of the material he had already written, especially that which explained "bits and tasks" (or "units and objectives"); she also suggested including the three-fold distinction between the "art of experiencing," the "art of representation," and the "stock-in-trade" approaches to acting from a draft called Various Trends in the Theatre. Stanislavski confirmed that he now thought in terms of two distinct versions, an American and a Soviet edition—"I am only thinking of America, a completely bourgeois country" he wrote in response to her repeated concerns about the suitability of many of his examples to contemporary Soviet experience, adding that in the Soviet edition "all the examples, all the characters will have to be changed." In his discussions with Gurevich he elaborated a plan in which the Russian An Actor's Work on Himself would be the first in a sequence of eight books (that would include My Life in Art) covering all aspects of theatre-making.

He returned to working on the book in the summer of 1931 in Uzkoe, where he met George Bernard Shaw. By this time, the two editors—Hapgood with the American edition and Gurevich with the Russian—were making conflicting demands on Stanislavski. Gurevich became increasingly concerned that splitting An Actor's Work on Himself into two books would not only encourage misunderstandings of the unity and mutual implication of the psychological and physical aspects of the 'system,' but would also give its Soviet critics grounds on which to attack it: "to accuse you of dualism, spiritualism, idealism, etc." Frustrated with Stanislavski's tendency to tinker with details in preference to addressing more important missing sections, in May 1932 she terminated her involvement. Hapgood echoed Gurevich's frustration.

Returning to Nice in the autumn of 1933, Stanislavski worked on the second half of An Actor's Work on Himself. By 1935 a version of the first volume was ready for publication in America, to which the publishers made significant abridgements. A significantly different and far more complete Russian edition, An Actor's Work on Himself, Part I, was not published until 1938, after Stanislavski's death. The second part of An Actor's Work on Himself was published in the Soviet Union in 1948, while an English-language variant, Building a Character, was published a year later. The third volume, An Actor's Work on a Role, was published in the Soviet Union in 1957, while its nearest English-language equivalent, Creating a Role, was published in 1961. The differences between the Russian and English-language editions of volumes two and three were even greater than those of the first volume. In 2008 an English-language translation of the complete Russian edition of An Actor's Work on Himself was published, with one of An Actor's Work on a Role following in 2010.

Development of the Method of Physical Action

While recuperating in Nice at the end of 1929 onwards, Stanislavski began a production plan for Shakespeare's Othello. Hoping to use this as the basis for the second part of An Actor's Work, the Work on a Role, his plan offers the first exposition of what would become his Method of Physical Action.

In the rehearsal process of working on a role (as distinct from the actor's training) he had come to distrust Emotion Memory as a technique to be used in lieu of an instinctive identification with a character's situation, given its propensity for encouraging self-indulgence or hysteria in the actor. Its direct approach to subconscious, he felt, more often produced a block than the desired expression of feeling. Instead, an indirect approach via a focus on actions (supported by a commitment to the given circumstances and imaginative "Magic Ifs") was a more reliable means of luring emotional response.

When the actor "thinks of physical actions," he wrote in the plan, "he thinks, independently of any act of will, of the 'Magic Ifs' and 'given circumstances' which have been established during the working process" (since the actions contain the Ifs and circumstances) such that "the subtext comes of itself" blah blah... need to clean this up and draw out the sense of the quotation p.326-327.

"We shall create the line of his action, the life of his body, and then the life of his spirit will be created indirectly by itself."

This shift in approach corresponded both with an increased attention to the structure and dynamic of the play as a whole and with a greater prominence given to the distinction between the planning and the performance of a role. In performance the actor is aware of only one step at a time, he reasoned, but this focus risks the loss of the overall dynamic of a role in the welter of moment-to-moment detail. Consequently, the actor must also adopt a different point of view in order to plan the role according to the dynamic of its overall action; this involves the actor adjusting his or her performance by holding back at certain moments and playing full out at others. A sense of the whole thereby informs the playing of each episode. Borrowing a term from Henry Irving, Stanislavski came to call this the "perspective of a role."

Every afternoon for five weeks during the summer of 1934 in Paris, Stanislavski worked with the American actress Stella Adler, who had sought his assistance with the blocks she had confronted in her performances. Given the emphasis that Emotion Memory had received, under the influence of Richard Boleslavsky, in Lee Strasberg's training at the Group Theatre in New York, Adler was surprised to find that Stanislavski rejected the technique except as a last resort. Instead, he recommended an indirect pathway to emotional expression via physical action. Stanislavski confirmed this emphasis in his discussions with Harold Clurman in late 1935. The news that this was Stanislavski's approach would have significant repercussions in the US; Strasberg angrily rejected it and refused to modify his version of the 'system.'

In contrast to his earlier method of working on a play—which involved extensive readings and analysis around a table prior to any attempt to physicalise its action—Stanislavski now encouraged his actors to explore the action through its "active analysis." He felt that too much discussion in the early stages of rehearsal confused and inhibited the actors. Instead, focusing on the simplest physical actions, they improvised the sequence of dramatic situations given in the play. "The best analysis of a play," he argued, "is to act it in the given circumstances." If the actor justified and committed to the truth of the actions (which are easier to shape and control than emotional responses), Stanilavski reasoned, they would evoke truthful thoughts and feelings.

The roots of the Method of Physical Action stretch back to Stanislavski's earliest work as a director (in which he focused consistently on a play's action) and the techniques he explored with Meyerhold and later with the First Studio before the First World War (such as the experiments with improvisation and the practice of anatomising scripts in terms of bits and tasks). He first explored the approach practically in his rehearsals for Three Sisters and Carmen in 1934 and Molière in 1935.

Political fortunes under Stalin

Following his heart attack in 1928, for the last decade of his life Stanislavski conducted most of his work writing, directing rehearsals, and teaching in his home on Leontievski Lane (which in 1938 was renamed "Stanislavski Lane" as part of his 75th birthday celebrations). In line with Joseph Stalin's policy of "isolation and preservation" towards certain internationally-famous cultural figures, Stanislavski lived in a state of internal exile in Moscow. This protected him from the worst excesses of Stalin's "Great Terror."

A number of articles critical of the terminology of Stanislavski's 'system' appeared in the run-up to a Russian Association of Proletarian Writers conference in early 1931, at which the attacks continued. The 'system' stood accused of philosophical idealism, of a-historicism, of disguising social and political problems under ethical and moral terms, and of "biological psychologism" (or "the suggestion of fixed qualities in nature"). The playwright Aleksandr Afinogenov, with whom Stanislavski worked when the MAT rehearsed his play Fear in September 1931, leveled the last of these accusations, though when Stanislavski invited him to offer alternative terms, he was unable to do so. The 'system' was attacked again at a second conference at the end of the year.

In the wake of the first congress of the USSR Union of Writers, chaired by Maxim Gorky, in August 1934, Socialist realism was established as the official party line in aesthetic matters. While the new policy would have disasterous consequences for the Soviet avant-garde, the MAT and Stanislavski's 'system' were enthroned as exemplary models.

Opera-Dramatic Studio and the final phase of the 'system'

Given the difficulties he had with completing his manual for actors, in 1935 while recuperating in Nice Stanislavski decided that he needed to found a new studio if he was to ensure his legacy. "Our school will produce not just individuals," he wrote, "but a whole company." In June he began to instruct a group of teachers in the training techniques of the 'system' and the rehearsal processes of the Method of Physical Action. His wife, Lilina, also joined the teaching staff. Twenty students (out of 3500 auditionees) were accepted for the dramatic section of the Opera-Dramatic Studio, where classes began on 15 November 1935. Stanislavski arranged a curriculum of four years of study that focused exclusively on technique and method—two years of the work detailed later in An Actor's Work on Himself and two of that in An Actor's Work on a Role. Once the students were acquainted with the training techniques of the first two years, Stanislavski selected Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet for their work on roles. He worked with the students in March and April 1937, focusing on their sequences of physical actions, on establishing their through-lines of action, and on rehearsing scenes anew in terms of the actors' tasks. By June 1938 the students were ready for their first public showing, at which they performed a selection of scenes to a small number of spectators.

An heir in the theatre

From late 1936 onwards, Stanislavski began to meet regularly with Vsevolod Meyerhold, with whom he discussed the possibility of developing a common theatrical language. In 1938, they made plans to work together on a production and discussed a synthesis of Stanislavski's Method of Physical Action and Meyerhold's biomechanical training. On 8 March, Meyerhold took over the rehearsals for Rigoletto, the staging of which he completed after Stanislavski's death. On his death-bed Stanislavski declared to Yuri Bakhrushin that Meyerhold was "my sole heir in the theatre—here or anywhere else." Stalin's police tortured and killed Meyerhold in February 1940.

Stanislavski died in his home at 3:45pm on 7 August 1938, having probably suffered another heart-attack five days earlier. Thousands of people attended his funeral. Three weeks after his death his widow, Lilina, received an advanced copy of the Russian-language edition of the first volume of An Actor's Work on Himself—the "labour of his life," as she called it. Stanislavski was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, not far from the grave of Anton Chekhov.

Sources

Primary sources

• Stanislavski, Konstantin. 1936. An Actor Prepares. London: Methuen, 1988. ISBN 0413461904.
• ---. 1938. An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary. Trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. ISBN 041542223X.
• ---. 1950. Stanislavsky on the Art of the Stage. Trans. David Magarshack. London: Faber, 2002. ISBN 057108172X.
• ---. 1957. An Actor's Work on a Role. Trans. and ed. Jean Benedetti. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. ISBN 0415461294.
• ---. 1961. Creating a Role. Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. London: Mentor, 1968. ISBN 0450001660.
• ---. 1963. An Actor's Handbook: An Alphabetical Arrangement of Concise Statements on Aspects of Acting. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. London: Methuen, 1990. ISBN 0413630803.
• ---. 1968. Stanislavski's Legacy: A Collection of Comments on a Variety of Aspects of an Actor's Art and Life. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. Revised and expanded edition. London: Methuen, 1981. ISBN 0413477703.
• Stanislavski, Constantin, and Pavel Rumyantsev. 1975. Stanislavski on Opera. Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. London: Routledge, 1998. ISBN 0878305521.

Secondary sources

• Allain, Paul, and Jen Harvie. 2006. The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415257212.
• Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521434378.
• Benedetti, Jean. 1989. Stanislavski: An Introduction. Revised edition. Original edition published in 1982. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413500306.
• ---. 1998. Stanislavski and the Actor. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413711609.
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• ---. 1999b. "Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre, 1898-1938." In Leach and Borovsky (1999, 254-277).
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