I am not qualified to pronounce on the form that tomorrow’s drama will take; that must be left to the voice of some genius to come. But I will allow myself to indicate the path I consider our theatre will follow.
First, the romantic drama must be abandoned. It would be disastrous for us to take over its outrageous acting, its rhetoric, its inherent thesis of action at the expense of character analysis. The finest models of the genre are, as has been said, mere operas with big effects. I believe, then, that we must go back to tragedy – not, heaven forbid, to borrow more of its rhetoric, its system of confidants, its declaiming, its endless speeches, but to return to its simplicity of action and its unique psychological and physiological study of the characters. Thus understood, the tragic framework is excellent; one deed unwinds in all its reality, and moves the characters to passions and feelings, the exact analysis of which constitutes the sole interest of the play – and in a contemporary environment, with the people who surround us.
My constant concern, my anxious vigil, has made me wonder which of us will have the strength to raise himself to the pitch of genius. If the naturalistic drama must come into being, only a genius can give birth to it. Corneille and Racine made tragedy. Victor Hugo made romantic drama. Where is the as-yet-unknown author who must make the naturalistic drama? In recent years experiments have not been wanting. But either because the public was not ready or because none of the beginners had the necessary staying-power, not one of these attempts has had decisive results.
[…]
The domain of the novel is crowded; the domain of the theatre is free. At this time in France an imperishable glory awaits the man of genius who takes up the work of Molière and finds in the reality of living comedy the full, true drama of modern society.
[…]
Costume, stage design, speech
Modern clothes make a poor spectacle. If we depart from bourgeois tragedy, shut in between its four walls, and wish to use the breadth of larger stages for crowd scenes we are embarrassed and constrained by the monotony and the uniformly funereal look of the extras. In this case, I think, we should take advantage of the variety of garb offered by the different classes and occupations. To elaborate: I can imagine an author setting one act in the main marketplace of les Halles in Paris. The setting would be superb, with its bustling life and bold possibilities. In this immense setting we could have a very picturesque ensemble by displaying the porters wearing their large hats, the saleswomen with their white aprons and vividly-coloured scarves, the customers dressed in silk or wool or cotton prints, from the ladies accompanied by their maids to the female beggars on the prowl for anything they can pick up off the street. For inspiration it would be enough to go to les Halles and look about. Nothing is gaudier or more interesting. All of Paris would enjoy seeing this set if it were realized with the necessary accuracy and amplitude.
And how many other settings for popular drama there are for the taking! Inside a factory, the interior of a mine, the gingerbread market, a railway station, flower stalls, a racetrack, and so on. All the activities of modern life can take place in them. It will be said that such sets have already been tried.
Unquestionably we have seen factories and railway stations in fantasy plays; but these were fantasy stations and factories. I mean, these sets were thrown together to create an illusion that was at best incomplete. What we need is detailed reproduction: costumes supplied by tradespeople, not sumptuous but adequate for the purposes of truth and for the interest of the scenes. Since everybody mourns the death of the drama our playwrights certainly ought to make a try at this type of popular, contemporary drama. At one stroke they could satisfy the public hunger for spectacle and the need for exact studies which grows more pressing every day. Let us hope, though, that the playwrights will show us real people and not those whining members of the working class who play such strange roles in boulevard melodrama.
As M. Adolphe Jullien* has said – and I will never be tired of repeating it – everything is interdependent in the theatre. Lifelike costumes look wrong if the sets, the diction, the plays themselves are not lifelike. They must all march in step along the naturalistic road. When costume becomes more accurate, so do sets; actors free themselves from bombastic declaiming; plays study reality more closely and their characters are more true to life. I could make the same observations about sets I have just made about costume. With them too, we may seem to have reached the highest possible degree of truth, but we still have long strides to take. Most of all we would need to intensify the illusion in reconstructing the environments, less for their picturesque quality than for dramatic utility. The environment must determine the character. When a set is planned so as to give the lively impression of a description by Balzac; when, as the curtain rises, one catches the first glimpse of the characters, their personalities and behaviour, if only to see the actual locale in which they move, the importance of exact reproduction in the decor will be appreciated. Obviously, that is the way we are going. Environment, the study of which has transformed science and literature, will have to take a large role in the theatre. And here I may mention again the question of metaphysical man, the abstraction who had to be satisfied with his three walls in tragedy – whereas the physiological man in our modern works is asking more and more compellingly to be determined by his setting, by the environment that produced him. We see then that the road to progress is still long, for sets as well as costume. We are coming upon the truth but we can hardly stammer it out.
Another very serious matter is diction. True, we have got away from the chanting, the plainsong, of the seventeenth century. But we now have a ‘theatre voice’, a false recitation that is very obtrusive and very annoying. Everything that is wrong with it comes from the fixed traditional code set up by the majority of critics.
[…]
Alas, yes, there is a ‘theatre language’. It is the clichés, the resounding platitudes, the hollow words that roll about like empty barrels, all that intolerable rhetoric of our vaudevilles and dramas, which is beginning to make us smile. It would be very interesting to study the style of such talented authors as MM. Augier, Dumas and Sardou. I could find much to criticize, especially in the last two with their conventional language, a language of their own that they put into the mouths of all their characters, men, women, children, old folk, both sexes and all ages. This irritates me, for each character has his own language, and to create living people you must give them to the public not merely in accurate dress and in the environments that have made them what they are, but with their individual ways of thinking and expressing themselves. I repeat that that is the obvious aim of our theatre.
3.2.2 André Antoine, Commentary on la mise en scene
Translated by Joseph M. Bernstein
La Revue de Paris, April 1903
Modern directing must perform the same function in the theatre as descriptions in a novel. Directing should – as, in fact, is generally the case today – not only fit the action in its proper framework but also determine its true character and create its atmosphere.
This is an important task and one that is completely new – for which our classical French theatre has done litde to prepare us. The result is that, despite the wealth of effort expended these past twenty years, we have not yet formulated any principles, laid down any foundations, established any teaching methods, trained any personnel […]
The first time I had to direct a play, I saw quite clearly that the work was divided into two distinct parts: one was quite tangible, that is, finding the right decor for the action and the proper way of grouping the characters; the other was impalpable, that is, the interpretation and flow of the dialogue.
First of all, therefore, I found it useful, in fact indispensable, carefully to create the setting and the environment, without worrying at all about the events that were to occur on the stage. For it is the environment that determines the movements of the characters, not the movements of the characters that determine the environmen
t.
This simple sentence does not seem to express anything very new; yet that is the whole secret of the impression of newness which came from the initial efforts of the Théâtre Libre […]
For a stage set to be original, striking and authentic, it should first of all be built in accordance with something seen – whether a landscape or an interior. If it is an interior, it should be built with its four sides, its four walls, without worrying about the fourth wall, which will later disappear so as to enable the audience to see what is going on.
Next, the logical exits should be taken care of, with due regard for architectural accuracy; and, outside the set proper, the halls and rooms connecting with these exits should be plainly indicated and sketched. Those rooms that will only be pardy seen, when a door opens slighdy, should be furnished on paper. In short the whole house – and not just the part in which the action takes place – should be sketched […]
In our interior sets, we must not be afraid of an abundance of little objects, of a wide variety of small props. Nothing makes an interior look more lived in. These are the imponderables which give a sense of intimacy and lend authentic character to the environment the director seeks to recreate.
Among so many objects, and with the complicated furnishings of our modern interiors, the performers’ acting becomes, without their realizing it and almost in spite of themselves, more human, more intense, and more alive in attitude and gestures.
And now the lights!
[…] Light alone, intelligendy handled, gives atmosphere and colour to a set, depth and perspective. Light acts physically on the audience: its magic accentuates, underlines, and marvellously accompanies the inner meaning of a dramatic work. To get excellent results from light, you must not be afraid to use and spread it unevenly
The audience, though it is thrilled by a beautiful stage set skillfully lighted, is not yet at the point where it can forgo discerning clearly the face and slightest gestures of a favorite actor. We know your aversion for those carefully prepared effects in half darkness; yet far from spoiling your impression, these effects really safeguard it, without your suspecting it. So we directors must stand our ground and make no concessions in that respect. One day we shall be right: the broad public will finally realize or feel that, to create a stage picture, values and harmonies are needed which we cannot obtain without sacrificing certain parts. The audience will realize that it gains thereby a deeper and more artistic impression […]
3 ANTON CHEKHOV AND KONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKY
Even if the founding of Antoine’s Théâtre Libre predates the Moscow Art Theatre by a whole decade, it was Konstantin Stanislavsky who developed a specific theory of naturalistic acting. More than any other major naturalistic playwright, Anton Chekhov had the advantage of working with a theatre dedicated to his plays. Shaw only effectively achieved this in the 1904–07 Court Theatre seasons, Strindberg still more briefly for the single season of 1889 at his Scandinavian Experimental Theatre (modeled on the Théâtre Libre). Ibsen had already moved out of theatrical production and was in exile before he began writing his naturalistic plays. By contrast the MAT was associated from the beginning with Chekhov (The Seagull having marked its first season and provided the logo for its curtain). All his major plays were written specifically for Stanislavsky, and he was an active presence in rehearsals.
Chekhov wrote significantly less about his work than any of the other naturalists, and where extended comments occur in his letters these are generally concerned with fiction. However, a letter to Maria Kiselyova (written shordy after he had completed The Seagull) illuminates the naturalistic principles at the core of his drama. In particular his claim of a moral value for realism, objectivity, and the immediate connection between a writer and his/her time offers a clear statement of qualities central to all the naturalistic playwrights.
While Stanislavky’s theatre also flirted with Symbolism, its significance was as an experimental proving-ground for his development of naturalistic staging and performance. In addition to Chekhov, whose plays remained in the repertoire for over half a century, up until the Russian Revolution, the MAT concentrated on plays by Maxim Gorki as well as standard works of Naturalism, which had also appeared on Antoine’s programme (Ibsen, Hauptmann, Lev Tolstoi’s The Power of Darkness). Stanislavsky’s productions were reported in the press outside Russia, and seen in Europe on tours by the MAT in the 1920s. But it was his writings (first translated into English in the 1930s) that had the greatest impact. In addition to the concept of acting “truly”, the practical correlative to Chekhov’s aim of depicting life “as it really is”, this extract oudines one of the most important keys to Stanislavsky’s system: establishing objectives, which in terms of acting is the equivalent to the naturalists’ focus on motivation. Dramatizing his theories in the form of workshop rehearsals, Stanislavsky projects his own voice into an imaginary alter-ego, the teacher Tortsov.
The most influential reports from Moscow followed this line in describing the rehearsal practices of the MAT. Severed from its roots in Chekhov and the spiritual aspect of Stanislavsky’s acting, corresponding to the lyrical symbolic aspect of Chekhov and other naturalistic dramatists, his training rapidly became “the Method”. This reduction to a series of acting exercises – which was one of the major factors that led to the widespread adoption of Stanislavsky in the American theatre – is well illustrated by a report by Norris Houghton, who listed the principles of the Moscow Art Theatre company as: (1) Physical development; (2) work with the actor’s personal psychology involving self-control of the nervous system; (3) development of imagination and fantasy; (4) “offered circumstances” – learning to communicate the specific situations presented by an author; (5) naiveté – the actor “must believe in what he does and says”; (6) contact between the actors; (7) memorizing emotions; (8) rhythm; (9) developing the internal qualities of a character as well as its external form; (10) defining aim, or motivation. “The exercises based on this system of Stanislavsky’s are practiced constantly” [Moscow Rehearsals, 1937].
3.3.1 Anton Chekhov, letter to Maria Kiselyova, January 1887
Translated by Michael Heim
“Letters of Anton Chekhov,” Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought, Simon Karlinsky (ed.), Northwestern University Press. Originally published by Harperand Row, 1973
First of all, I have no more love for literature of the school we have been discussing [muck-raking realism] than you do. As a reader and man in the street I try to stay clear of it. But if you ask me my sincere and honest opinion about it, I must say that the issue of whether it has a right to exist or not is still open and unresolved by anyone, even though Olga Andreyevna thinks she has settled it. Neither you nor I nor all the critics in the world have any hard evidence in favor of denying this literature a right to exist. I don’t know who is right: Homer, Shakespeare, Lope de Vega and the ancients as a group, who, while not afraid of digging around in the “manure pile,” were morally much more stable than we are, or our contemporary writers, prudish on paper, but cold and cynical down deep and in life. I don’t know who is in bad taste: the Greeks, who were not ashamed to celebrate love as it actually exists in all its natural beauty, or the readers of Gaboriau, Marlitt and Pierre Bobo [popular writers of pulp fiction]. Just like the problems of nonresistance to evil, free will and so on, this problem can only be settled in the future. All we can do is bring it up; any attempt at resolving it would involve us in spheres outside the realm of our competence. Your reference to the fact that Turgenev and Tolstoi avoid the “manure pile” throws no light on the matter. Their squeamishness proves nothing; after all, the generation of writers that came before them condemned the description of peasants and civil servants beneath the rank of titular councilor as filth, to say nothing of your “villains and villainesses.” And anyway, one period, no matter how glorious it is, does not give us the right to draw conclusions in favor of one or another school. Your reference to the corrupting influence of the school under discus
sion does not solve the problem either. Everything in this world is relative and approximate. There are people who can be corrupted even by children’s literature, who take special pleasure in reading all the little piquant passages in the Psalter and the Book of Proverbs. And there are people, who become purer and purer the more they come into contact with the filth of life. Journalists, lawyers and doctors, who are initiated into all the mysteries of human sin, are not known to be particularly immoral, and realist writers are more often than not of a higher moral caliber than Orthodox churchmen. And anyway no literature can outdo real life when it comes to cynicism. You’re not going to get a person drunk with a jigger when he’s just polished off a barrel.
2. Your statement that the world is “teeming with villains and villain- esses” is true. Human nature is imperfect, so it would be odd to perceive none but the righteous. Requiring literature to dig up a “pearl” from the pack of villains is tantamount to negating literature altogether. Literature is accepted as an art because it depicts life as it actually is. Its aim is the truth, unconditional and honest. Limiting its functions to as narrow a field as extracting “pearls” would be as deadly for art as requiring Levitan to draw a tree without any dirty bark or yellowed leaves. A “pearl” is a fine thing, I agree. But the writer is not a pastry chef, he is not a cosmetician and not an entertainer. He is a man bound by contract to his sense of duty and to his conscience. Once he undertakes this task, it is too late for excuses, and no matter how horrified, he must do batde with his squeamishness and sully his imagination with the grime of life. He is just like any ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper reporter as a result of squeamishness or a desire to please his readers were to limit his descriptions to honest city fathers, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railroadmen?
A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre Page 8