by Sonia Moore
The director must see that the idea of the entire play, as well as every thought in each scene and in each phrase of the author’s text, is brought to maximum concreteness and clarity. As Meyerhold said, “The director must toss thoughts into the audience.” He must see to it that all the elements—such as sets, music, lights, and costumes—contribute to the whole performance; every pose, every mise en scène must bring out the inner content of the given moment on the stage. He must be able to “hear” each performer, each element of the performance as though it were an instrument in an orchestra.
The form of the production will be found when the director has his super-super-objective—his need to contribute to society—has his artistic views, and knows what he wants to say and why he wants to say it. When the director knows the answers, the form he finds will express the inner content of the play. The director’s solution is senseless if he does not understand what he wants to say and why. He must find the unique form for each play.
“Directing,” said Stanislavski, “is a precise science, not vague thoughts and fantasy.”
EUGENE
VAKHTANGOV:
THE DISCIPLE
Stanislavski’s greatest pupil, Eugene Bogrationovich Vakhtangov, was born on February 1, 1883, in Vladikavkaz (now Dzaudzhikau), North Caucasus region, Russia. After being graduated from gimnasia (high school) he went to Moscow to study in the university. The Moscow Art Theater made a great impression on him, and he began to be active in several dramatic groups. The fact that he wished to become an actor shocked his father, who had expected his son to follow him in the prosperous tobacco business; the two quarreled and never became reconciled.
During the eight years between gimnasia and his acceptance into the Moscow Art Theater in 1911, Vakhtangov played about fifty roles and staged about twenty plays. In 1909, he had entered a drama school directed by A. I. Adashev, an actor of the Moscow Art Theater, and had met Leopold Antonovich Sulerzhitski, who taught there. Neither an actor nor a professional director, Sulerzhitski was an enthusiast of the theater, believing it to be a powerful cultural, moral, and aesthetic influence. Actors, he believed, should be educated for such an important profession. Stanislavski considered Sulerzhitski a genius and was under his influence, as Vakhtangov was soon to be. Sulerzhitski played an important role in helping Stanislavski by using his experimental techniques with students in the Adashev school. Thus Vakhtangov learned about the System at the very beginning, and at once became Sulerzhitski’s favorite. He was impressed by Stanislavski and by Sulerzhitski’s views on the influence that a performance can have on an audience.
In the autumn of 1911, when Vakhtangov was accepted at the Moscow Art Theater, he was in direct contact with Stanislavski and with Nemirovich-Danchenko, the great director and co-founder of the Moscow Art Theater. Vakhtangov dedicated himself to fighting all “theatricality,” which, at that time, he considered the principal source of bad acting. He believed completely in Stanislavski’s teachings about building true life on the stage, and was convinced that the essence of theater was the building of “the life of the human spirit.” He was deeply impressed by Stanislavski’s way of analyzing a play to discover its essence. He became the System’s strongest adherent and soon became Stanislavski’s assistant.
Stanislavski was categorically against any final formulation or publication of his experimental work. Between 1912 and 1917, when his System was coming into existence, Vakhtangov, too, was searching for subtle means of discovering the inner life of a character, and he felt equally strongly about those who wrote on theories of Stanislavski which had not yet been published. As Stanislavski anticipated, his teachings were often distorted.
Stanislavski’s goal became Vakhtangov’s: to discover the idea of the play through the play’s characters. To do this, Vakhtangov believed actors must learn “reincarnation” by creating and living the inner experiences of the characters. As no one else had, Vakhtangov quickly grasped the importance of Stanislavski’s teachings, and Stanislavski recognized Vakhtangov’s immense talent and his faith in his System. He was soon giving Vakhtangov one assignment after another; he asked him to make a list of exercises, to work on scenes, and to show them to him; he was pleased with the results. The old actors of the Moscow Art Theater, who had resented the System, were deeply impressed and began to study it themselves.
Vakhtangov was soon in great demand among the numerous Moscow theatrical groups. Drama schools competed for his time. In poor health but full of enthusiasm, Vakhtangov taught what he had learned from Stanislavski. Vakhtangov was the first to teach young actors that their task is not only to find the right intonation and to “feel” the role, but to learn the science of acting. “An actor must live and think as the character,” he said. “The character is the organic union of the life of the character and the life of the actor. An actor must assimilate the character’s life.” Vakhtangov taught his students to observe in such a way as not only to copy the external line of behavior but to understand the unbreakable tie between the inner life of a person and its external expression. He taught them to bring on stage the unexpected, interesting truth, not the worn-out one. An actor, he said, must offer something new to those who come to see him. And, like Stanislavski, he believed that in the theater everyone is equally important—every actor, every stagehand. His actors also learned what it meant to be in love with art. To teach the System, as Vakhtangov himself said, was the mission of his life.
On January 15, 1913, a group of young actors whom Stanislavski had entrusted to Vakhtangov became the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theater under the guidance of Stanislavski and Sulerzhitski. In November of the same year, Vakhtangov staged a play by Hauptmann called Festival of Peace in the First Studio. He succeeded in making the actors live the characters’ inner experiences, but Stanislavski was highly critical of his failure to restrain them from what he called “inner hysteria.” This, said Stanislavski, was acting “in a trance,” which he considered a deformity. The actors were performing for themselves, he said, not for the audience.
That same year, a group of young people came to Vakhtangov and told him that although they did not want to become professional actors they were eager to learn what the theater could offer them. Vakhtangov agreed to teach them. To help the group financially, Vakhtangov, in 1914, agreed to stage Lanin’s Estate by Boris Zaitsev. He did not like the play but had yielded to his students’ enthusiasm for it. The production was such a complete failure that Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko forbade Vakhtangov to work outside the Moscow Art Theater and the First Studio. However, Vakhtangov continued to work with this group * secretly; it soon became the Vakhtangov Studio and later was called the Third Studio of the Moscow Art Theater; after Vakhtangov’s death it became the Vakhtangov Theater. There he had the artistic freedom for which he had longed.
In 1914, Vakhtangov created his best role, Tackleton in the First Studio’s dramatization of Dickens’ Cricket on the Hearth. Without losing the organic truth of the role, he had become the master of sharp expressiveness; clearly and precisely he disclosed the inner essence of the character through the external form. In 1915, Vakhtangov staged his second work at the First Studio, a play by H. Berger called The Deluge. Both directorial works were in the tradition of the Moscow Art Theater. At this point Vakhtangov leaned more to naturalism than Stanislavski ever did. When Stanislavski made some changes in The Deluge, Vakhtangov accused him of being too theatrical and of working against his own principles. However, there were some embryonic hints of what he was to express in later works.
In staging Ibsen’s Rosmersholm in 1918, Vakhtangov demanded complete “reincarnation” without the help of costumes, sets, or make-up. He insisted that the actors must believe what the characters believe. This was still the early Vakhtangov, who believed that actors must develop in themselves the characters’ points of view. Any difference between the actor and the character must be erased, he said, and an actor must think not about the character but only as the chara
cter. Some critics accused Vakhtangov of being too much under the influence of Expressionism, which was then fashionable, especially in Germany. The Vakhtangov of 1911–1918 was carrying Stanislavski’s ideas to an extreme.
From one extreme, Vakhtangov went to another, and took as his motto: “Play your point of view of the character, not the character.” But Stanislavski, who had begun to review his own ideas about the actor’s identification with the character, stated that to merge with the character does not mean that an actor must entirely approve of him. The character’s mentality, intentions, and feelings must be evaluated, he said, but an actor need not have the same mentality. An actor must understand the essence of the character, but, if necessary, he must be critical about it. The essence of the character must be disclosed through the logic of actions. It is possible for the actor to become the character and at the same time to disapprove of him or accuse him, said Stanislavski.
Soon afterward, Vakhtangov began to proclaim, that “In theater there must be theater.” He gave a different kind of importance to the actor’s use of his personal experiences. There are better ways to build a live character, he said. He made it clear that an actor’s own emotions are worthless unless they reach the audience, that there is no art if an actor’s tears do not affect the audience. Following Stanislavski’s teachings, Vakhtangov searched for the strongest means to affect the actor, who, in turn, would affect the audience. He refused to allow accidental behavior on stage—accidental details which did not express anything. An intuitive, logical solution is the result of logical, conscious work. The subconscious, he said, would function if it received nourishment sent to it by the actor consciously. Stanislavski was then in the process of searching for a “conscious means to the subconscious.”
Since Vakhtangov’s own childhood had been unhappy, he had at first planned to give much attention to his son. But his wife and child seldom saw him. Vakhtangov rehearsed during the day, performed at night, and worked with the actors on the System after a performance. His reputation grew; he remained dedicated to the realization of Stanislavski’s goals. He dreamed of a studio as the heart of the theater. And he dreamed of a school to provide new talent continually. He aimed to educate actors and directors. He longed to find epic plays which would represent the spirit of the times.
In 1920, Vakhtangov staged Chekhov’s The Wedding in his Studio. At first he demanded from actors only the truth in the play’s circumstances. But when he restaged it in 1921, he led the performers to extremes of external characterization. Magnified characters that grew into symbols now became characteristic of all Vakhtangov’s productions. In The Wedding, he satirized the world of the petit-bourgeois and projected Chekhov’s condemnation of such life.
But it was with his new version of Maeterlinck’s The Miracle of Saint Anthony, * with which the Third Studio opened its new theater in November 1921, that Vakhtangov marked his establishment of theatrical form. Greatly exaggerated externally, it was always alive within. The precision and rhythm of the performance were on the highest artistic level. The paradox was striking; the comedy was now a tragic farce. The only live human beings, the saint and the maiden, moved among dead figures, whose automatic movements instantly stopped in strange formations. Vakhtangov made actors into character-symbols through sharp satire of the mannerisms of the Belgian bourgeoisie. He did not permit the uncontrolled expression of inner life; every movement, gesture, intonation had to be studied thoroughly. Actors were made to achieve clear, precise form. Every idea, he said, demands its own form of expression, and the idea and the form of each work are unique, unrepeatable. Vakhtangov did not decide the form in advance; it developed through the discovery of the essence of the play. The Miracle of Saint Anthony aroused enormous interest. Vakhtangov was now considered the progressive director who would lead the theater to new heights.
Vakhtangov staged Strindberg’s Erik XIV at the First Studio. In working on it he emphasized that he was following Stanislavski’s principles of inner technique merged with external form. It was Stanislavski who emphasized the importance of word, phrase, voice, thought, gesture, rhythm, plastic movement, he said; the First Studio was searching for expressive theatrical form for true inner experiences. Erik XIV opened in 1921 and was met with both admiration and criticism; it provoked heated discussions.
The form of Erik XIV was so different from what had been done before that it was considered a revolution in the Moscow Art Theater and the First Studio. Vakhtangov projected his interpretation of the play through every gesture, pose, and scene. Costumes were stylized, and the make-up created an impression of masks of suffering. Stanislavski approved of it; the form was thoroughly justified and the actors lived on stage. Vakhtangov had clearly achieved new heights in the theater.
While Vakhtangov worked on Erik XIV, Stanislavski was staging Gogol’s The Inspector-General. The brilliant actor Michael Chekhov rehearsed the leading roles in both plays. Vakhtangov helped Chekhov to achieve Stanislavski’s demands, and the results obtained by Chekhov under the two directors were remarkable. Michael Chekhov’s Khlestakov in the Gogol play was overwhelming in its grotesqueness. Vakhtangov was jubilant; he saw that Stanislavski also was trying to go beyond naturalism. Stanislavski was so impressed by what Vakhtangov achieved with Michael Chekhov that he asked Vakhtangov to work with him on his role of Salieri. It was a unique combination—Stanislavski acting and Vakhtangov directing.
When the Habima Studio group, whose performers spoke Hebrew, came to Moscow from the provincial Polish town of Bialystok, they asked Stanislavski to guide them. A few talks with Stanislavski made such an impression on the leaders of the group that they closed Habima and told the actors that they must study before they could reopen for public appearance. As a result, only a few remained; most of the members left, disappointed. Stanislavski recommended his best disciple, Vakhtangov, to teach the Habima actors the System. At the beginning of 1922, Vakhtangov staged their production of The Dybbuk, originally written in Russian by S. Anski. Stanislavski had suggested it to the Habima players, and the poet Bialik had adapted and translated the play into Hebrew.
In The Dybbuk, Vakhtangov guided the actors into a grotesque style without letting them forget Stanislavski’s principles of inner truth. Grotesque, he said, was the style which expressed vividly the profound content of the play. His aim was to project the conflict of human feelings and destinies with inhuman laws that are the product of legends and superstitions, the world of fear affecting man’s soul.
Vakhtangov interrupted the long nights of rehearsal only to swallow some bicarbonate, which was difficult to obtain in the hungry and cold Moscow of those days of revolution and civil war. The bicarbonate eased the pain of cancer for a while. With his coat on and a hot-water bottle at his side, Vakhtangov continued the work. When Habima lacked funds for sets and costumes, Vakhtangov would invite guests, entertain them, show some scenes, and ask for help; next day, Habima would have enough money. Sometimes I looked on as Vakhtangov, with unerring artistic intuition, showed the actors how people who spend their life in temples behave, how they eat, sleep, talk. He found a different theatrical rhythm for each character. He demanded intonations that could be understood without an understanding of Hebrew. “Forget the superfluous imitation of life,” he said. “Theater has its own realism, its own truth. This truth is in the truth of experiences and emotions that are expressed on stage with the help of imagination and theatrical means. Everything must be brought to the spectators with nothing but the colorful devices of theater.” Every moment was given the utmost expressiveness, and all the symbols of the play were made clear. Vakhtangov gave birth to a theater of profound thought and experience united with powerful imagination in a variety of forms.
The Dybbuk opened on January 31, 1922. Drama critics were full of praise: “Every gesture, every intonation, every step, pose, and acting detail is brought to such technical perfection that one can hardly imagine anything superior….” “Each moment was perfect, the most precise, the
most absolute….” “We saw theater in the precise, pure, and liberated meaning of the word….”
While staging The Dybbuk, Vakhtangov, gravely ill, his pain increasing every day, directed at the First Studio, where he also performed in The Deluge, in addition to directing his own Third Studio. In the spring of 1920, Vakhtangov had become interested in Schiller’s Turandot; later he preferred Carlo Gozzi’s original version. In Turandot, Vakhtangov wanted the audience to feel as if they were present at a feast. “No feast, no performance. Our work is senseless if there is no holiday mood, if there is nothing to carry the spectators away. Let us carry them away with our youth, laughter, and improvisation,” said Vakhtangov. Actors worked on each word, gesture, and intonation until it seemed absolutely spontaneous, as if improvised.
During rehearsals of Turandot, actors competed in invention. A scarf became a beard; a lampshade became the emperor’s hat; breadbaskets, spoons, and so on became parts of theatrical costumes. A typewriter and modern suitcases were used. Vakhtangov chose the best, and eventually Turandot took on the pure holiday mood he wanted. The matchless Vakhtangov brought to the stage a beautiful lightness. It was not a false theatricality, a director’s whim; more than ever, Vakhtangov demanded the truth of inner experiences, and led his performers toward a vivid, colorful, internally full theater.
Rehearsals of Turandot started after eleven p.m., when his own performance ended, and lasted until about eight in the morning. Though I was not in its cast at the time, I never missed a rehearsal. Vakhtangov’s dedication to the theater, his inexhaustible creative energy, overwhelmed me. His demands for discipline were so severe that actors were actually afraid of him. We knew that Vakhtangov had arrived by the sudden silence in the Studio. He could bring actors to elation with his praise, and I saw them weep over his cruel criticism. Vakhtangov’s sparkling, ironical humor, his sharp intelligence, artistic sense, limitless energy, and, above all, his hatred of all that was vulgar, commanded admiration and respect. He was the trusted and respected leader.
