An Actor Prepares

by Constantin Stanislavsky

  ‘How could I have got hold of the art of mere reproduction?’ Paul could not understand.

  ‘Let us find out by your telling us more about how you prepared your Iago,” suggested the Director.

  ‘To be sure that my feelings were externally reflected I used a mirror.’

  ‘That is dangerous,’ remarked Tortsov. ‘You must be very careful in the use of a mirror. It teaches an actor to watch the outside rather than the inside of his soul, both in himself and in his part.’

  ‘Nevertheless, it did help me to see how my exterior reflected my sensations,’ Paul insisted.

  ‘Your own sensations, or the sensations prepared for your part?’

  ‘My own, but applicable to Iago,’ explained Paul.

  ‘Consequently, while you were working with the mirror, what interested you was not so much your exterior, your general appearance, your gestures, but principally the way in which you externalized your inner sensations,’ probed Tortsov.

  ‘Exactly!’ exclaimed Paul.

  ‘That is also typical,’ remarked the Director.

  ‘I remember how pleased I was when I saw the correct reflection of what I felt,’ Paul continued to reminisce.

  ‘You mean that you fixed these methods of expressing your feelings in a permanent form?’ Tortsov asked.

  ‘They became fixed by themselves through frequent repetition.’

  ‘Then in the end you worked out a definite external form for the interpretation of certain successful parts in your role, and you were able to achieve their external expression through technique?’ asked Tortsov with interest.

  ‘Evidently yes,’ admitted Paul.

  ‘And you made use of this form each time that you repeated the role?’ examined the Director.

  ‘Evidently I did.’

  ‘Now tell me this: did this established form come to you each time through an inner process, or after it was once born did you repeat it mechanically, without the participation of any emotions?’

  ‘It seemed to me that I lived it each time,’ declared Paul.

  ‘No, that was not the impression that came to the spectators,’ said Tortsov. ‘Actors of the school we are discussing do what you did. At first they feel the part, but when once they have done so they do not go on feeling it anew, they merely remember and repeat the external movements, intonations, and expressions they worked on at first, making this repetition without emotion. Often they are extremely skilful in technique, and are able to get through a part with technique only, and no expenditure of nervous force. In fact, they often think it unwise to feel, after they have once decided on the pattern to follow. They think they are surer to give the right performance if they merely recall how they did it when they first got it right. This is applicable in some degree to the places we picked out in your playing of Iago. Try to remember what happened as you went on with your work.’

  Paul said that he was not satisfied with his work in other parts of the role, or with the appearance of Iago in his mirror, and he finally tried to copy an acquaintance whose appearance seemed to suggest a good example of wickedness and cunning.

  ‘So you thought you could adapt him to your own uses?’ Tortsov queried.

  ‘Yes,’ Paul confessed.

  ‘Well, then, what were you going to do with your own qualities?’

  ‘To tell the truth, I was simply going to take on the external mannerisms of my acquaintance,’ admitted Paul frankly.

  ‘That was a great mistake,’ Tortsov replied. ‘At that point you went over to sheer imitation, which has nothing to do with creativeness.’

  ‘What should I do?’ asked Paul.

  ‘You should first of all assimilate the model. This is complicated. You study it from the point of view of the epoch, the time, the country, condition of life, background, literature, psychology, the soul, way of living, social position, and external appearance; moreover, you study character, such as custom, manner, movements, voice, speech, intonations. All this work on your material will help you to permeate it with your own feelings. Without all this you will have no art.

  ‘When, from this material, a living image of the role emerges, the artist of the school of representation transfers it to himself. This work is concretely described by one of the best representatives of this school, the famous French actor, Coquelin the elder. . . .‘The actor creates his model in his imagination, and then, just as does the painter, he takes every feature of it and transfers it, not on to canvas, but on to himself.’ . . . He sees Tartuffe’s costume and puts it on himself; he notices his gait and imitates it; he sees his physiognomy and adapts it to himself; he adapts his own face to it. He speaks with the same voice that he has heard Tartuffe use; he must make this person he has put together move, walk, gesticulate, listen and think like Tartuffe, in other words, hand over his soul to him. The portrait ready, it needs only to be framed; that is, put on the stage, and then the public will say either, “That is Tartuffe,” or, “The actor has not done a good job.” . . .’

  ‘But all that is frightfully difficult and complicated,’ said I with feeling.

  ‘Yes, Coquelin himself admits it. He says: “The actor does not live, he plays. He remains cold toward the object of his acting but his art must be perfection.” . . . And to be sure,’ added Tortsov, ‘the art of representation demands perfection if it is to remain an art.

  ‘The confident answer by the school of representation is that “art is not real life, not is it even its reflection. Art is in itself a creator, it creates its own life, beautiful in its abstraction, beyond the limits of time, and space.” Of course we cannot agree to such a presumptuous defiance of that unique, perfect and unattainable artist, our creative nature.

  ‘Artists of the Coquelin school reason this way: The theatre is a convention, and the stage is too poor in resources to create the illusion of real life; therefore the theatre should not avoid conventions. . . . This type of art is less profound than beautiful, it is more immediately effective than truly powerful, in it the form is more interesting than its content. It acts more on your sense of sound and sight than on your soul. Consequently it is more likely to delight than to move you.

  ‘You can receive great impressions through this art. But they will neither warm your soul nor penetrate deeply into it. Their effect is sharp but not lasting. Your astonishment rather than your faith is aroused. Only what can be accomplished through surprising theatrical beauty, or picturesque pathos, lies within the bounds of this art. But delicate and deep human feelings are not subject to such technique. They call for natural emotions at the very moment in which they appear before you in the flesh. They call for the direct co-operation of nature itself. Nevertheless, “representing” the part, since it follows our process in part, must be acknowledged to be creative art.’

  3

  At our lesson today, Grisha Govorkov said that he always feels very deeply what he does on the stage.

  To this Tortsov replied:

  ‘Everyone at every minute of his life must feel something. Only the dead have no sensations. It is important to know what you are feeling on the stage, because it often happens that even the most experienced actors work out at home and carry on to the stage something which is neither important nor essential for their parts. This happened to all of you. Some of the students showed off their voices, effective intonations, techniques of acting; others made the spectators laugh by their lively activity, ballet jumps, desperate over-acting; and preened themselves with beautiful gestures and poses; in short, what they brought to the stage was not what was needed for the roles they were portraying.

  ‘As for you, Govorkov, you did not approach your role from its inner content, you neither lived it nor represented it, but did something entirely different.’

  ‘What was it?’ Grisha hastened to ask.

  ‘Mechanical acting. To be sure, not bad of its kind, having rather elaborately worked out methods of presenting the role with conventional illustrations.’

  I
shall omit the long discussion raised by Grisha, and jump directly to the explanation by Tortsov of the boundaries which divide true art from mechanical acting.

  ‘There can be no true art without living. It begins where feeling comes into its own.’

  ‘And mechanical acting?’ asked Grisha.

  ‘That begins where creative art ends. In mechanical acting there is no call for a living process, and it appears only accidentally.

  ‘You will understand this better when you come to recognize the origins and methods of mechanical acting, which we characterize as “rubber stamps”. To reproduce feelings you must be able to identify them out of your own experience. But as mechanical actors do not experience feelings they cannot reproduce their external results.

  ‘With the aid of his face, mimicry, voice and gestures, the mechanical actor offers the public nothing but the dead mask of non-existent feeling. For this there has been worked out a large assortment of picturesque effects which pretend to portray all sorts of feelings through external means.

  ‘Some of these established clichés have become traditional, and are passed down from generation to generation; as for instance spreading your hand over your heart to express love, or opening your mouth wide to give the idea of death. Others are taken ready-made, from talented contemporaries (such as rubbing the brow with the back of the hand, as Vera Komissarzhevskaya used to do in moments of tragedy). Still others are invented by actors for themselves.

  ‘There are special ways of reciting a role, methods of diction and speech. (For instance, exaggeratedly high or low tones at critical moments in the role, done with specifically theatrical “tremolo”, or with special declamatory vocal embellishments.) There are also methods of physical movement (mechanical actors do not walk, they “progress” on the stage), for gestures and action, for plastic motion. There are methods for expressing all human feelings and passions (showing your teeth and rolling the whites of your eyes when you are jealous, or covering up the eyes and face with the hands instead of weeping; tearing your hair when in despair). There are ways of imitating all kinds of types of people, various classes in society (peasants spit on the floor, wipe their noses with the skirts of their coats, military men click their spurs, aristocrats play with their lorgnettes). Certain others characterize epochs (operatic gestures for the Middle Ages, mincing steps for the eighteenth century). These ready-made mechanical methods are easily acquired through constant exercise, so that they become second nature.

  ‘Time and constant habit make even deformed and senseless things near and dear. As for instance, the time-honoured shoulder-shrugging of Opéra Comique, old ladies trying to look young, the doors that open and close by themselves as the hero of the play comes in or goes out. The ballet, opera, and especially the pseudo-classic tragedies, are full of these conventions. By means of these forever-unchanging methods they expect to reproduce the most complicated and elevated experiences of heroes. For example: tearing one’s heart out of one’s bosom in moments of despair, shaking one’s fists in revenge, or raising one’s hands to heaven in prayer.

  ‘According to the mechanical actor the object of theatrical speech and plastic movements—as exaggerated sweetness in lyric moments, dull monotone in reading epic poetry, hissing sounds to express hatred, false tears in the voice to represent grief—is to enhance voice, diction and movements, to make actors more beautiful and give more power to their theatrical effectiveness.

  ‘Unfortunately, there is far more had taste in the world than good. In the place of nobility a sort of showiness has been created, prettiness in place of beauty, theatrical effect in the place of expressiveness.

  ‘The very worst fact is that clichés will fill up every empty spot in a role, which is not already solid with living feeling. Moreover, they often rush in ahead of feeling, and bar the road; that is why an actor must protect himself most conscientiously against such devices. And this is true even of gifted actors, capable of true creativeness.

  ‘No matter how skilful an actor may be in his choice of stage conventions, because of their inherent mechanical quality he cannot move the spectators by them. He must have some supplementary means of arousing them, so he takes refuge in what we call theatrical emotions. These are a sort of artificial imitation of the periphery of physical feelings.

  ‘If you clench your fists and stiffen the muscles of your body, or breathe spasmodically, you can bring yourself to a state of great physical intensity. This is often thought by the public to be an expression of a powerful temperament aroused by passion.

  ‘Actors of a more nervous type can arouse theatrical emotions by artificially screwing up their nerves; this produces theatrical hysteria, an unhealthy ecstasy, which is usually just as lacking in inner content as is the artificial physical excitement.’

  4

  At our lesson today the Director continued the discussion of our exhibition performance. Poor Vanya Vyuntsov came in for the worst of it. Tortsov did not recognize his acting as even mechanical.

  ‘What was it, then?’ said I.

  ‘The most repulsive kind of over-acting,’ answered the Director.

  ‘I at least did not have any of that?’ I hazarded.

  ‘You certainly did!’ retorted Tortsov.

  ‘When?’ I exclaimed. ‘You yourself said that I played——!’

  ‘I explained that your acting was made up of moments of true creativeness, taking turns with moments——’

  ‘Of mechanical acting?’ The question burst out of me.

  ‘That can be developed only by long work, as in the case of Grisha, and you could never have had the time to create it. That is why you gave an exaggerated imitation of a savage, by means of the most amateurish kind of rubber stamps, in which there was no trace of technique. Even mechanical acting cannot do without technique.’

  ‘But where did I get those rubber stamps, since this is the first time I have even been on the boards?’ said I.

  ‘Read My life in Art. There is a story about two little girls who had never seen a theatre, or a performance, or even a rehearsal, and yet they played a tragedy with the most vicious and trivial clichés. Even you have many of them, fortunately.’

  ‘Why fortunately?’ I asked.

  ‘Because they are easier to fight than strongly rooted mechanical acting,’ said the Director.

  ‘Beginners like you, if you have talent, can accidentally, and for a short space of time, fill a role very well, but you cannot reproduce it in a sustained artistic form, and therefore you always have recourse to exhibitionism. At first it is harmless enough, but you must never forget that it has in it the seeds of great danger. You must struggle with it from the very first moment so that it may not develop habits which will cripple you as an actor and side-track your native gifts.

  ‘Take your own example. You are an intelligent person, yet why, at the exhibition performance, were you, with the exception of a few moments, absurd? Can you really believe that the Moors, who in their day were renowned for culture, were like wild animals, pacing up and down a cage? The savage that you portrayed, even in the quiet conversation with his ancient, roared at him, showed his teeth, and rolled his eyes. Where did you get any such approach to the role?’

  I then gave a detailed account of nearly everything that I had written in my diary about my work on my role at home. For better visualization I put some chairs around according to their place in my room. At parts of my demonstration Tortsov laughed heartily.

  ‘There, that shows you how the very worst kind of acting starts,’ said he, when I had finished. ‘When you were preparing for the exhibition performance you approached your role from the point of view of impressing the spectators. With what? With true organic feelings, that corresponded to those of the person you were portraying? You did not have any. You did not even have a whole living image, which you could have, if only externally, copied. What was there left for you to do? To grab the first trait that happened to flash into your mind. Your mind is stored full of
such things, ready for any occasion in life. Every impression, in some form or another, remains in our memories, and can be used when needed. In such hurried or general descriptions we care very little whether what we transmit corresponds to reality. We are satisfied with any general characteristic or illusion. To bring images to life, daily practice has produced for us stencils or external descriptive signs, which, thanks to long usage, have become intelligible to everyone.

  ‘That is what happened to you. You were tempted by the external appearance of a black man in general, and you hastily reproduced him without ever thinking about what Shakespeare wrote. You reached for an external characterization which seemed to you effective, vivid and easy to reproduce. That is what always happens when an actor does not have at his disposal a wealth of live material taken from life. You could say to any one of us, “Play for me immediately, without any preparation, a savage in general.” I am willing to wager that the majority would do just what you did; because tearing around, roaring, showing your teeth, rolling the whites of your eyes, has from time immemorial been intertwined in your imagination with a false idea of a savage. All these methods of portraying feelings in general exist in every one of us. And they are used without any relation to the why, wherefore or circumstances in which a person has experienced them.

  ‘Whereas mechanical acting makes use of worked-out stencils to replace real feelings, over-acting takes the first general human conventions that come along and uses them without even sharpening or preparing them for the stage. What happened to you is understandable and excusable in a beginner. But be careful in the future, because amateurish over-acting grows into the worst kind of mechanical acting.