An Actor Prepares

by Constantin Stanislavsky

  This gave life at once to the scene of the unhappy creature getting some joy out of the burning of the bank notes. Out of pity for him I did silly things to amuse him. I tapped the packets on the table, made comic gestures and faces as I threw the coloured wrappers off them into the fire. Vanya responded to these improvisations and reacted well to them. His sensitiveness instigated me to go on with more of the same type of inventions. A wholly new scene was created; it was lively, warm and gay. There was an instant response to it from the audience. This was encouraging and drove us on. Then came the moment to go into the next room. To whom? To my wife? Who is she? And there was another question to be solved. I could not go on until I knew all about this person to whom I am supposed to be married. My story about her was extremely sentimental. Nevertheless I really felt that if the circumstances had been what I imagined them to be, then this wife and child would have been infinitely dear to me.

  In all this new life imagined for an exercise our old methods of playing it seemed unworthy.

  How easy and pleasant it was for me to watch the baby in his bath! Now I did not need to be reminded about the lighted cigarette. I took great care to put it out before I left the living-room.

  My return to the table with the money is now both clear and necessary. This is work that I am doing for my wife, my child, and the unfortunate hunchback.

  The burning of the money acquired a totally different aspect. All I needed to say to myself was: what should I do if this really happened? I am horror-stricken at the prospect of my future; public opinion will brand me not only as a thief, but also as the murderer of my own brother-in-law. Moreover, I shall be looked upon as an infanticide! No one can restore me in the eyes of the public. Nor do I even know what my wife will think of me after my having killed her brother.

  All during these conjectures it was absolutely necessary for me to remain motionless, but my immobility was full of action.

  The next scene, the attempt to revive the dead boy, went off quite by itself. This was natural, in view of my new attitude towards him.

  Now the exercise, which had become rather a bore to me, aroused lively sensations. The method of creating both the physical and the spiritual life of a part seemed remarkable. I did feel, however, that the whole basis of the success of this method lay in the magic ifs and given circumstances. It was they that produced the inner impulse in me, not the creation of physical details. Why would it not be simpler to work straight from them, instead of putting so much time on physical objectives?

  I asked the Director about this, and he agreed.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘and that is what I proposed that you should do over a month ago when you first played this exercise.’

  ‘But then it was difficult for me to arouse my imagination and make it active,’ I remarked.

  ‘Yes, and now it is wide awake. You find it easy not only to invent fictions but to live them, to feel their reality. Why has that change taken place? Because at first you planted the seeds of your imagination in barren ground. External contortions, physical tenseness and incorrect physical life are bad soil in which to grow truth and feeling. Now you have a correct physical life. Your belief in it is based on the feelings of your own nature. You no longer do your imagining in the air or in space, or in general. It is no longer abstract. We gladly turn to real physical actions and our belief in them because they are within reach of our call.

  ‘We use the conscious technique of creating the physical body of a role and by its aid achieve the creation of the subconscious life of the spirit of a role.’

  8

  In continuing the description of his method the Director illustrated his remarks today by an analogy between acting and travelling.

  ‘Have you ever made a long journey?’ he began. ‘If so, you will recall the many successive changes that take place both in what you feel and what you see. It is just the same on the stage. By moving forward along physical lines we find ourselves constantly in new and different situations, moods, imaginative surroundings, and the externals of production. The actor comes into contact with new people and shares their life.

  ‘All the while his line of physical actions is leading him through the ins and outs of the play. His path is so well built that he cannot be led astray. Yet it is not the path itself that appeals to the artist in him. His interest lies in the inner circumstances and conditions of life to which the play has led him. He loves the beautiful and imaginative surroundings in his part, and the feelings which they arouse in him.

  ‘Actors, like travellers, find many different ways of going to their destination: there are those who really, physically, experience their part, those who reproduce its external form, those who deck themselves with stock tricks and do their acting as though it were a trade, some who make a literary, dry lecture of a part, and those who use the part to show themselves off to advantage before their admirers.

  ‘How can you prevent yourself from going in the wrong direction? At every junction you should have a well trained, attentive, disciplined signal man. He is your sense of truth which co-operates with your sense of faith in what you are doing, to keep you on the right track.

  ‘The next question is: what material do we use for building our track?

  ‘At first it would seem that we could not do better than to use real emotions. Yet things of the spirit are not sufficiently substantial. That is why we have recourse to physical action.

  ‘However, what is more important than the actions themselves is their truth and our belief in them. The reason is: Wherever you have truth and belief, you have feeling and experience. You can test this by executing even the smallest act in which you really believe and you will find that instantly, intuitively and naturally, an emotion will arise.

  ‘These moments, no matter how short they may be, are much to be appreciated. They are of greater significance on the stage, both in the quieter parts of a play and in places where you live through high tragedy and drama. You have not far to go to find an example of this: what were you occupied with when you were playing the second half of that exercise? You rushed to the fireplace and pulled out a packet of bank notes: you tried to revive the moron, you ran to save the drowning child. That is the framework of your simple physical actions, inside of which you naturally and logically constructed the physical life of your part.

  ‘Here is another example:

  ‘With what was Lady Macbeth occupied at the culminating point of her tragedy? The simple physical act of washing a spot of blood off her hand.’

  Here Grisha broke in because he was not willing to believe ‘that a great writer like Shakespeare would create a masterpiece in order to have his heroine wash her hands or perform some similar natural act’.

  ‘What a disillusion indeed,’ said the Director ironically. ‘Not to have thought about tragedy! How could he have passed up all of an actor’s tenseness, exertion, “pathos”, and “inspiration”! How hard to give up all the marvellous bag of tricks and limit oneself to little physical movements, small truths, and a sincere belief in their reality!

  ‘In time you will learn that such a concentration is necessary if you are to possess real feelings. You will come to know that in real life also many of the great moments of emotion are signalized by some ordinary, small, natural movement. Does that astonish you? Let me remind you of the sad moments attendant on the illness and approaching death of someone dear to you. With what is the close friend or wife of the dying man occupied? Preserving quiet in the room, carrying out the doctor’s orders, taking the temperature, applying compresses. All these small actions take on a critical importance in a struggle with death.

  ‘We artists must realize the truth that even small physical movements, when injected into “given circumstances”, acquire great significance through their influence on emotion. The actual wiping off of the blood had helped Lady Macbeth to execute her ambitious designs. It is not by chance that all through her monologue you find in her memory the spot of blood recal
led in connection with the murder of Duncan. A small, physical act acquires an enormous inner meaning; the great inner struggle seeks an outlet in such an external act.

  ‘Why is this mutual bond all-important to us in our artistic technique? Why do I lay such exceptional stress on this elementary method of affecting our feelings?

  ‘If you tell an actor that his role is full of psychological action, tragic depths, he will immediately begin to contort himself, exaggerate his passion, “tear it to tatters”, dig around in his soul and do violence to his feelings. But if you give him some simple physical problem to solve and wrap it up in interesting, affecting conditions, he will set about carrying it out without alarming himself or even thinking too deeply whether what he is doing will result in psychology, tragedy or drama.

  ‘By approaching emotion in this way you avoid all violence and your result is natural, intuitive, and complete. In the writings of great poets even the simplest acts are surrounded by important attendant conditions and in them lie hidden all manner of baits to excite our feelings.

  ‘There is another simple and practical reason for approaching delicate emotional experiences and strong tragic moments through the truth of physical actions. To reach the great tragic heights an actor must stretch his creative power to the utmost. That is difficult in the extreme. How can he reach the needed state if he lacks a natural summons to his will? This state is brought about only by creative fervour, and that you cannot easily force. If you use unnatural means you are apt to go off in some false direction, and indulge in theatrical instead of in genuine emotion. The easy way is familiar, habitual and mechanical. It is the line of least resistance.

  ‘To avoid that error you must have hold of something substantial, tangible. The significance of physical acts in highly tragic or dramatic moments is emphasized by the fact that the simpler they are, the easier it is to grasp them, the easier to allow them to lead you to your true objective, away from the temptation of mechanical acting.

  ‘Come to the tragic part of a role without any nervous twinges, without breathlessness and violence and above all, not suddenly. Arrive gradually, and logically, by carrying out correctly your sequence of external physical actions, and by believing in them. When you will have perfected this technique of approach to your feelings, your attitude towards the tragic moments will change entirely, and you will cease to be alarmed by them.

  ‘The approach to drama and tragedy, or to comedy and vaudeville, differs only in the given circumstances which surround the actions of the person you are portraying. In the circumstances lie the main power and meaning of these actions. Consequently, when you are called upon to experience a tragedy do not think about your emotions at all. Think about what you have to do.’

  When Tortsov had finished speaking there was silence for a few moments until Grisha, ready as always to argue, broke in:

  ‘But I think that artists do not ride around on the earth. In my opinion they fly around above the clouds.’

  ‘I like your comparison,’ said Tortsov with a slight smile. ‘We shall go into that a little later.’

  9

  At today’s lesson I was thoroughly convinced of the effectiveness of our method of psycho-technique. Moreover, I was deeply moved by seeing it in operation. One of our classmates, Dasha, played a scene from Brand, the one with the abandoned child. The gist of it is that a girl comes home to find that someone has left a child on her doorstep. At first she is upset, but in a moment or two she decides to adopt it. But the sickly little creature expires in her arms.

  The reason why Dasha is so drawn to scenes of this sort, with children, is that not long ago she lost a child, born out of wedlock. This was told to me in confidence, as a rumour. But after seeing her play the scene today no doubt remains in my mind about the truth of the story. All during her acting the tears were coursing down her cheeks and her tenderness completely transformed for us the stick of wood she was holding into a living baby. We could feel it inside the cloth that swaddled it. When we reached the moment of the infant’s death the Director called a halt for fear of the consequences to Dasha’s too deeply stirred emotions.

  We all had tears in our eyes.

  Why go into an examination of lives, objectives, and physical actions when we could see life itself in her face?

  ‘There you see what inspiration can create,’ said Tortsov with delight. ‘It needs no technique; it operates strictly according to the laws of our art because they were laid down by Nature herself. But you cannot count on such a phenomenon every day. On some other occasion they might not work and then . . .’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed they would,’ said Dasha.

  Whereupon, as though she were afraid that her inspiration would wane she began to repeat the scene she had just played. At first Tortsov was inclined to protect her young nervous system by stopping her, but it was not long before she stopped herself, as she was quite unable to do anything.

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ asked Tortsov. ‘You know that the manager who engages you for his company is going to insist that you play not only the first but all the succeeding performances equally well. Otherwise the play will have a successful opening and then fail.’

  ‘No. All I have to do is to feel and then I can play well,’ said Dasha.

  ‘I can understand that you want to get straight to your emotions. Of course that’s fine. It would be wonderful if we could achieve a permanent method of repeating successful emotional experiences. But feelings cannot be fixed. They run through your fingers like water. That is why, whether you like it or not, it is necessary to find more substantial means of affecting and establishing your emotions.’

  But our Ibsen enthusiast brushed aside any suggestion that she used physical means in creative work. She went over all the possible approaches: small units, inner objectives, imaginative inventions. None of them was sufficiently attractive to her. No matter where she turned, or how hard she tried to avoid it, in the end she was driven to accept the physical basis and Tortsov helped to direct her. He did not try to find new physical actions for her. His efforts were to lead her back to her own actions, which she had used intuitively and brilliantly.

  This time she played well, and there was both truth and belief in her acting. Yet it could not be compared to her first performance.

  The Director then said to her:

  ‘You played beautifully, but not the same scene. You changed your objective. I asked you to play the scene with a real live baby, and you have given me one with an inert stick of wood wrapped in a tablecloth. All of your actions were adjusted to that. You handled the stick of wood skilfully, but a living child would necessitate a wealth of detailed movements which you quite omitted this time. The first time, before you swaddled the make-believe baby, you spread out its little arms and legs, you really felt them, you kissed them lovingly, you murmured tender words to it, you smiled at it through your tears. It was truly touching. But just now you left out all these important details. Naturally, because a stick of wood has neither arms nor legs.

  ‘The other time, when you wrapped the cloth around its head you were very careful not to let it press on the baby’s cheeks. After he was all bundled up you watched over him, with pride and joy.

  ‘Now try to correct your mistake. Repeat the scene with a baby, not a stick.’

  After a great deal of effort Dasha was finally able to recall consciously what she had felt unconsciously the first time she played the scene. Once she believed in the child her tears came freely. When she had finished playing the Director praised her work as an effective example of what he had just been teaching. But I was still disillusioned and insisted that Dasha had not succeeded in moving us after that first burst of feeling.

  ‘Never mind,’ said he, ‘once the ground is prepared and an actor’s feelings begin to rise he will stir his audience as soon as he finds an appropriate outlet for them in some imaginative suggestion.

  ‘I do not want to wound Dasha’s young nerves but sup
pose that she had had a lovely baby of her own. She was passionately devoted to him, and suddenly, when only a few months old, he died. Nothing in the world can give her any solace, until suddenly fate takes pity on her and she finds, on her doorstep, a baby even more lovely than her own.’

  The shot went home. He had barely finished speaking when Dasha began to sob over the stick of wood with twice as much feeling as even the very first time.

  I hurried to Tortsov to explain to him that he had accidentally hit upon her own tragic story. He was horrified, and started towards the stage to stop the scene, but he was spellbound by her playing and could not bring himself to interrupt her.

  Afterwards I went over to speak to him. ‘Isn’t it true’, I said, ‘that this time Dasha was experiencing her own actual personal tragedy? In that case you cannot ascribe her success to any technique, or creative art. It was just an accidental coincidence.’

  ‘Now you tell me whether what she did the first time was art?’ countered Tortsov.

  ‘Of course it was,’ I admitted.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she intuitively recalled her personal tragedy and was moved by it,’ I explained.

  ‘Then the trouble seems to lie in the fact that I suggested a new if to her instead of her finding it herself? I cannot see any real difference’, he went on, ‘between an actor’s reviving his own memories by himself and his doing it with the aid of another person. What is important is that the memory should retain these feelings, and, given a certain stimulus, bring them back! Then you cannot help believing in them with your whole body and soul.’