An Actor Prepares

by Constantin Stanislavsky

  ‘Now do you see to what extent of realistic detail you must go in order to convince our physical natures of the truth of what you are doing on the stage?’

  He then proceeded to direct my physical actions, movement after movement, second by second, until coherent sequence was achieved.

  While I was counting the make-believe money I recalled the exact method and order in which this is done in real life. Then all the logical details suggested to me by the Director developed an entirely different attitude on my part toward the air I was handling as money. It is one thing to move your fingers around in the empty air. It is quite another to handle dirty, crumpled notes which you see distinctly in your mind’s eye.

  The moment I was convinced of the truth of my physical actions, I felt perfectly at ease on the stage.

  Then, too, I found little additional improvisations cropping out. I rolled up the string carefully and laid it beside the pile of notes on the table. That little bit encouraged me, and it led to many more. For example, before I undertook to count the packets I tapped them for some time on the table in order to make neat piles.

  ‘That is what we mean by completely, fully justified physical action. It is what an artist can place his whole organic faith in,’ Tortsov summed up, and with that he intended to conclude the work of the day. But Grisha wished to argue.

  ‘How can you call activity based on thin air physical or organic?’

  Paul agreed. He maintained that actions concerned with material, and those concerned with imaginary objects, were necessarily of two differing types.

  ‘Take the drinking of water,’ said he. ‘It develops a whole process of really physical and organic activity: the taking of the liquid into the mouth, the sensation of taste, letting the water flow back on the tongue and then swallowing it.’

  ‘Exactly,’ interrupted the Director, ‘all these fine details must be repeated even when you have no water, because otherwise you will never swallow.’

  ‘But how can you repeat them’, insisted Grisha, ‘when you have nothing in your mouth?’

  ‘Swallow your saliva, or air! Does it make any difference?’ asked Tortsov. ‘You will maintain that it is not the same thing as swallowing water or wine. Agreed. There is a difference. Even so there is a sufficient amount of physical truth in what we do, for our purposes.’

  5

  ‘Today we shall go on to the second part of the exercise we did yesterday, and work on it in the same way as we did in the first,’ said the Director at the beginning of our lesson.

  ‘This is a much more complicated problem.’

  ‘I dare say we shall not be able to solve it,’ I remarked as I joined Maria and Vanya to go up on to the stage.

  ‘No harm will be done,’ said Tortsov, comfortingly. ‘I did not give you this exercise because I thought you could play it. It was rather because by taking something beyond your powers you would be able better to understand what your shortcomings are, and what you need to work on. For the present, attempt only what is within your reach. Create for me the sequence of external, physical action. Let me feel the truth in it.

  ‘To start with, are you able to leave your work for a while and, in response to your wife’s call, go into the other room and watch her give the baby his bath?’

  ‘That’s not difficult,’ said I, getting up and going toward the next room.

  ‘Oh, no, indeed,’ said the Director as he stopped me. ‘It seems to me that it is the very thing you cannot properly do. Moreover, you say that to come on to the stage, into a room, and to go out again, is an easy thing to do. If so it is only because you have just admitted a mass of incoherence and lack of logical sequence into your action.

  ‘Check up for yourself how many small, almost imperceptible, but essential physical movements and truths you have just omitted. As an example: before leaving the room you were not occupied with matters of small consequence. You were doing work of great importance: sorting community accounts, and checking funds. How could you drop that so suddenly and rush out of the room as though you thought the ceiling was about to fall? Nothing terrible has occurred. It was only your wife calling. Moreover, would you, in real life, have dreamed of going in to see a new-born baby with a lighted cigarette in your mouth? And is it likely that the baby’s mother would even think of letting a man with a cigarette into the room where she is bathing him? Therefore you must, first of all, find a place to put your cigarette, leave it here in this room, and then you may go. Each one of these little auxiliary acts is easy to do by itself.’

  I did as he said, laid down my cigarette in the living-room, and went off the stage into the wings to wait for my next entrance.

  ‘There now,’ said the Director, ‘you have executed each little act in detail and built them all together into one large action: that of going into the next room.’

  After that my return into the living-room was subjected to innumerable corrections. This time, however, it was because I lacked simplicity and tended to string out every little thing. Such over-emphasis is also false.

  Finally we approached the most interesting and dramatic part. As I came into the room and started towards my work, I saw that Vanya had burned the money to amuse himself, taking a stupid half-witted pleasure in what he had done.

  Sensing a tragic possibility I rushed forward, and, giving free rein to my temperament, wallowed in overacting.

  ‘Stop! You have taken the wrong turning,’ cried Tortsov. ‘While the trail is still hot, go over what you have just done.’

  All that it was necessary for me to do was simply to run to the fireplace and snatch out a burning packet of money. To do it, however, I had to plan and push my moron brother-in-law aside. The Director was not satisfied that such a wild thrust could result in death and a catastrophe.

  I was puzzled to know how to produce and to justify such a harsh act.

  ‘Do you see this slip of paper?’ he asked. ‘I am going to set fire to it and throw it into this large ash-tray. You go over there and as soon as you see the flame, run and try to save some of the paper from burning.’

  As soon as he lighted the paper I rushed forward with such violence that I nearly broke Vanya’s arm on the way.

  ‘Now can you see whether there is any resemblance between what you have just done, and your performance before? Just now we might actually have had a catastrophe. But before it was mere exaggeration.

  ‘You must not conclude that I recommend breaking arms and mutilating one another on the stage. What I do wish you to realize is that you overlooked a most important circumstance: which is that money burns instantaneously. Consequently, if you are to save it you must act instantaneously. This you did not do. Naturally there was no truth in your actions.’

  After a short pause he said: ‘Now let us go on.’

  ‘Do you mean that we are to do nothing more in this part?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘What more do you wish to do?’ asked Tortsov. ‘You saved all that you could and the rest was burnt up.’

  ‘But the killing?’

  ‘There was no murder,’ he said.

  ‘Do you mean there was no one killed?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, of course, there was. But for the person whose part you were playing, no murder exists. You are so depressed by the loss of the money that you are not even aware that you knocked the half-witted brother down. If you realized that, you would probably not be rooted to the spot, but would be rushing help to the dying man.’

  Now we came to the most difficult point for me. I was to stand as though turned to stone, in a state of ‘tragic inaction’. I went all cold inside, and even I realized that I was overacting.

  ‘Yes, there they all are, the old, old, familiar clichés that date back to our ancestors,’ said Tortsov.

  ‘How can you recognize them?’ I asked.

  ‘Eyes starting with horror. The tragic mopping of the brow. Holding the head in both hands. Running all five fingers through the hair. Pressing the hand to the heart. Any one of
them is at least three hundred years old.

  ‘Let us clear away all of that rubbish. Clean out all of that play with your forehead, your heart and your hair. Give me, even if it is very slight, some action that has belief in it.’

  ‘How can I give you movement when I am supposed to be in a state of dramatic inaction?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you think?’ he countered. ‘Can there be activity in dramatic or any other inaction? If there is, of what does it consist?’

  That question made me dig into my memory and try to recall what a person would be doing during a period of dramatic inaction. Tortsov reminded me of some passages in My Life in Art, and added an incident of which he had personal knowledge.

  ‘It was necessary’, he countered, ‘to break the news of her husband’s death to a woman. After a long and careful preparation I finally pronounced the fateful words. The poor woman was stunned. Yet on her face there was none of that tragic expression which actors like to show on the stage. The complete absence of expression on her face, almost deathly in its extreme immobility, was what was so impressive. It was necessary to stand completely motionless beside her for more than ten minutes in order not to interrupt the process going on within her. At last I made a movement that brought her out of her stupor. Whereupon she fainted dead away.

  ‘A long time afterwards, when it became possible to speak to her about the past, she was asked what went through her mind in those minutes of tragic immobility. It seems that a few moments before receiving the news of his death she was preparing to go out to do some shopping for him. . . . But since he was dead she must do something else. What should it be? In thinking about her occupations, past and present, her mind ran over the memories of her life up to the impasse of the actual moment, with its great question mark. She became unconscious from a sense of complete helplessness.

  ‘I think you will agree that those ten minutes of tragic inaction were full enough of activity. Just think of compressing all of your past life into ten short minutes. Isn’t that action?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ I agreed, ‘but it is not physical.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Tortsov. ‘Perhaps it isn’t physical. We need not think too deeply about labels or try to be too concise. In every physical act there is a psychological element and a physical one in every psychological act.’

  The later scenes where I am roused from my stupor and try to revive my brother-in-law proved to be infinitely easier for me to play than that immobility with its psychological activity.

  ‘Now we should go over what we have learned in our last two lessons,’ said the Director. ‘Because young people are so impatient, they seek to grab the whole inner truth of a play or a role at once and believe in it.

  ‘Since it is impossible to take control of the whole at once, we must break it up and absorb each piece separately. To arrive at the essential truth of each bit and to be able to believe in it, we must follow the same procedure we used in choosing our units and objectives. When you cannot believe in the larger action you must reduce it to smaller and smaller proportions until you can believe in it. Don’t think that this is a mean accomplishment. It is tremendous. You have not been wasting the time you have spent, both in my classes and in Rakhmanov’s drills, in centring attention on small physical actions. Perhaps you do not even yet realize that from believing in the truth of one small action an actor can come to feel himself in his part and to have faith in the reality of a whole play.

  ‘I could quote innumerable instances which have occurred in my own experience, where there has been something unexpected injected into the stale, routine acting of a play. A chair falls over, an actress drops her handkerchief and it must be picked up, or the business is suddenly altered. These things necessarily call for small but real actions because they are intrusions emanating from real life. Just as a breath of fresh air will clear the atmosphere in a stuffy room these real actions can put life into stereotyped acting. It can remind an actor of the true pitch which he has lost. It has the power to produce an inner impetus and it can turn a whole scene down a more creative path.

  ‘On the other hand we cannot leave things to chance. It is important for an actor to know how to proceed under ordinary circumstances. When a whole act is too large to handle, break it up. If one detail is not sufficient to convince you of the truth of what you are doing, add others to it, until you have achieved the greater sphere of action which does convince you.

  ‘A sense of measure will also help you here.

  ‘It is to these simple but important truths that we have dedicated our work in recent lessons.’

  6

  ‘This last summer’, said the Director, ‘I went back, for the first time in a number of years, to a place in the country where I used to spend my vacations. The house where I boarded was some distance from the railway station. A short cut to it led through a ravine, past some beehives and a wood. In the old days I came and went so often by this shorter route that I made a beaten track. Later this was all overgrown with tall grass. This summer I went through again. At first it was not so easy to find the path. I often lost my direction and came out on to a main high road, which was full of ruts and holes, because of heavy traffic. Incidentally it would have led me in the opposite direction from the station. So I was obliged to retrace my steps and hunt for the short cut. I was guided by old memories of familiar landmarks, trees, stumps, little rises and falls in the path. These recollections took shape and directed my search. Finally I worked out the right line and was able to go and come to the station along it. As I had to go to town frequently I made use of the short cut almost daily and it soon became a distinct path again.

  ‘During our last few lessons we have been blocking out a line of physical actions in the exercise of the burned money. It is somewhat analogous to my path in the country. We recognize it in real life but we have to tread it down all over again on the stage.

  ‘The straight line for you is also overgrown with bad habits which threaten to turn you aside at every step and mislead you on to the rutted and worn highway of stereotyped mechanical acting. To avoid this you must do as I did and establish the right direction by laying down a series of physical actions. These you must tread down until you have permanently fixed the true path of your role. Now go up on to the stage and repeat, several times, the detailed physical actions that we worked out last time.

  ‘Mind you, only physical actions, physical truths, and physical belief in them! Nothing more!’

  We played the exercise through.

  ‘Did you notice any new sensations as a result of executing a whole sequence of physical acts without an interruption?’ asked Tortsov. ‘If you did, the separate moments are flowing, as they should, into larger periods and creating a continuous current of truth.

  ‘Test it by playing the whole exercise from beginning to end, several times, using just the physical actions.’

  We followed his instructions and really did feel that the detailed bits dovetailed into one continuing whole. This sequence was strengthened by each repetition and the action had the feeling of pushing forward, with increasing momentum.

  As we repeated the exercise I kept making one mistake which I feel I ought to describe in detail. Each time I left the scene and went off stage I ceased to play. The consequence was that the logical line of my physical action was interrupted. And it should not have been interrupted. Neither on the stage or even in the wings should an actor admit such breaks in the continuity of the life of his part. It causes blanks. These in turn become filled with thoughts and feelings which are extraneous to the role.

  ‘If you are unaccustomed to playing for yourself while off stage,’ said the Director, ‘at least confine your thoughts to what the person you are portraying would be doing if he were placed in analogous circumstances. This will help to keep you in the part.’

  After making certain corrections, and after we had gone over the exercise several more times, he asked me: ‘Do you realize that you have succee
ded in establishing, in a solid and permanent manner, the long sequence of individual moments of the true physical action of this exercise?

  ‘This continuous sequence we call, in our theatre jargon, “the life of a human body”. It is made up, as you have seen, of living physical actions, motivated by an inner sense of truth, and a belief in what the actor is doing. This life of the human body in a role is no small matter. It is one half of the image to be created, although not the more important half.’

  7

  After we had gone over the same exercise once more the Director said:

  ‘Now that you have created the body of the role we can begin to think about the next, even more important, step, which is the creation of the human soul in the part.

  ‘Actually this has already happened inside of you, without your knowing it. The proof is that when you executed all the physical actions in the scene just now you did not do it in a dry, formal way, but with inner conviction.’

  ‘How was this change brought about?’

  ‘In a natural way: because the bond between body and soul is indivisible. The life of the one gives life to the other. Every physical act, except simply mechanical ones, has an inner source of feeling. Consequently we have both an inner and outer plane in every role, inter-laced. A common objective makes them akin to one another and strengthens their bonds.’

  The Director had me go over the scene with the money. As I was counting it I happened to look at Vanya, my wife’s hunchback brother, and for the first time I asked myself: why is he for ever hanging around me? At this point I felt I could not go on until I had clarified my relations with this brother-in-law of mine.

  This is what I, with the Director’s help, concocted as a basis for the relationship: the beauty and health of my wife had been bought at the price of the deformity of this, her twin brother. At their birth an emergency operation had to be performed and the boy’s life was jeopardized to save the mother and her baby girl. They all survived, but the boy became a half-wit and hunchback. This shadow has always lain on the family and made itself felt. This invention quite changed my attitude towards the unfortunate moron. I was filled with a sincere feeling of tenderness for him and even some remorse for the past.