My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Yat (Gert) Malmgren, who died on June 6th after a short illness, made a unique and extraordinary contribution to the training of actors in England. The school he founded in 1963 with Christopher Fettes and John Blatchley, the Drama Centre in Chalk Farm, remains one of the most influential and radical drama schools in the world, notable not only for the rigour of every aspect of its training, but also for the integration of all the varied elements involved. The pedagogic core which made this possible was provided by Malmgren’s own work, Character Analysis, which is a fully worked-out theory of acting that places transformation – vocal, physical and emotional – at the heart of the acting process. He devoted his life as a teacher to conveying his profound understanding of the laws governing transformation, the means whereby the chaos of an actor’s raw material is converted into the logic and focused, meaningful energy of character. His work stands with the great acting theories of the twentieth century, those of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Artaud, all of which Malmgren acknowledged and admired, but – being a technique based above all on sensations – it was one less easy to put into words.

  His theory was scientific and analytical, but the way he expounded it was all his own: a combination characteristic of the man, at once deeply sophisticated and apparently naïve, his creative use of the English language sometimes hilarious but more often poetic and suggestive, his approach both visionary and concrete. Above all, he was a living embodiment of his own work; his physical demonstrations were breathtaking. ‘I am a peasant,’ this strikingly handsome, elegant, aristocratic man would insist, ‘I demand that everything must be simple.’ By simple, he meant clear, and by clear, he meant specific. Generalisation was the disease, and Character Analysis was the antidote. Actors move in darkness, most of the time, hoping that intuition and inspiration will save the day; Malmgren offered a way of working which enabled the actor to understand and trust his own instrument.

  He himself had been an exceptional performer in his time. Born near Stockholm in 1916, he trained first as an actor, then as a dancer. His outstanding gift was for the creation of character through movement, and he swiftly developed a career as a solo artist, taking his inspiration from the Bible but also from the political world around him. He studied continuously in Berlin and in Paris with the greatest teachers of the day, and his performances were acclaimed wherever he went. In 1940, he was honoured by an invitation to join the Ballet Jooss in exile at Dartington Hall in Devon; with them he gave performances of the great pacifist ballet The Green Table all over England and in America, eventually ending up in Brazil, where he stayed for seven years, performing his solo programme and teaching at his own school. At the Copacabana Club in Rio de Janeiro he sometimes appeared on the same bill as Marlene Dietrich; he later became the club’s chief choreographer. He returned to Scandinavia in 1947 for more solo recitals, and in 1950, having retrained himself as a classical dancer, he joined International Ballet as a soloist, achieving particular distinction as the Baron in La Boutique Fantasque, under the direction of Massine himself.

  This second career was cut short by injury, and he turned increasingly to teaching (though he continued to work as a choreographer, on Peter Brook’s Tempest, for example). He was welcomed as a teacher at the English Stage Company at the Royal Court, but perhaps the most significant event in his subsequent development occurred when he was invited in the mid-Fifties to work with Rudolf Laban; shortly before his death, the great German movement theorist was evolving a system he called Movement Psychology which sought to combine the Jungian theories of William Carpenter with his own widely acclaimed approach to movement. It was this work that Laban entrusted to Malmgren, and it formed the basis of his teaching, first, at the influential Actor’s Studio in West Street, Covent Garden, which he founded in 1954 with his partner, Christopher Fettes – Sean Connery, Anthony Hopkins and Diane Cilento were among the students – and subsequently at RADA, the Central School of Speech and Drama and the Drama Centre.

  Malmgren never ceased evolving the work, refining and enriching it year after year. The directness of his contact with the students was crucial – he continued to take movement classes until his seventies – and his capacity to inspire them with the possibilities of the theatre and of their own talents changed the lives of all those who came into contact with him. He is survived by Christopher Fettes, another great teacher, who brought a dimension of historical and anthropological breadth to the school which complemented the depth of Malmgren’s work on the expressive capacities of the actors; the Drama Centre remains the living monument of their vision, a vision not only of training, but of the place of the theatre in the world, which they both conceived of as central to the health of society. Their many distinguished students – Frances de la Tour, Jack Shepherd, Penelope Wilton, Pierce Brosnan, Geraldine James, Tara Fitzgerald – all freely acknowledge their debt.

  Yat, it seemed to me, knew more about acting than any man alive. He read it with X-ray eyes; he penetrated it to the root and core. This was an intuitive gift; his life’s work was to find the rationale for these astonishing aperçus of his. The Drama Centre was intensely theoretical in its approach, systematically seeking to integrate all the elements of the training – Laban, Jung, Classical Ballet, Stanislavsky. Yat was particularly enthusiastic about Stanislavsky’s work because he valued logic so strongly, and he co-opted Stanislavsky’s theory of actions – the idea that everything said or done in a play has a specific objective which governs the characters – as the underpinning of his own work on physical expression. Though deeply respectful of his seriousness and passion, my enthusiasm for Stanislavsky’s work was not unqualified, even as a student. There was something self-flagellatory about the man that I resisted. Yet the more I read about him, the more touching I found him. His autobiography, My Life in Art, is especially moving. Thirty-five years after my first encounter with it, I wrote an introduction to the Folio Society’s new edition.

  My Life in Art was commissioned by Little, Brown & Co. in May of 1923 when the Moscow Art Theatre were on tour in America. Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavsky, the theatre’s co-founder, co-director and leading actor, was a very hot property, the focus of every artistic eye, not only because of his evident gifts as actor and director, but because of the famous System he had devised, said to be behind the exceptionally fine work that Americans were now experiencing for the first time. When the book appeared, in 1924, it was hugely popular from the start, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean; Ellen Terry proclaimed it her constant companion. The English-speaking world wanted to know what made Stanislavsky and his actors tick.

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  Stanislavsky (1863–1938) is occasionally described as acting’s Freud, its Darwin, its Marx and even – a little hysterically, perhaps – its Einstein (Lee Strasberg, in his introduction to Masks and Faces). The comparison with Freud is the most enlightening. Both men embarked on a lifelong study in search of the laws that govern their respective disciplines. Their findings, presented as scientific discoveries, have been immensely influential; to a large extent they have passed into the general consciousness. Both have had their disciples, who have sometimes bordered on the fanatical in their insistence that they alone have access to the truth. Both have been vulgarised, simplified and misrepresented by their own followers; the work of both has been hotly contested, both as science and as observation. In the case of Stanislavsky, there was initial dismissal (even from his own colleagues), followed by gradual acceptance and finally a more relaxed attitude from both admirers and detractors; like the Freudian revolution, the Stanislavskyan revolution has occurred, whether we like it or not. There are occasional outbursts against him: the dramatist-director David Mamet, in a recent tract, True or False, ringingly declares that ‘the Stanislavsky “Method”, and the technique of the schools derived from it, is nonsense. It is not a technique out of the practice of which one develops a skill – it is a cult’; but there are few present practitioners of the art of acting or directing who do not acknowledge that
Stanislavsky’s work is a source of enlightenment and inspiration, particularly, perhaps, as part of a training.

  What is incontestable is that no one in the history of acting has devoted so much time and practical research to the questions which concern all actors. The theory of acting in the Western world was first adumbrated by Aristotle, in his Poetics, as part of his general theory of the drama; there have been very many manuals of acting, from the Elizabethans through to the present day; there have been philosophical investigations, primarily and centrally Diderot’s great dialogue, The Paradox of Acting, which broached the eternal question of whether or not the actor actually feels the emotions that he portrays; and almost every great actor of any account has left behind a book of either memoirs or theory in which their particular approach to acting has been delineated: Irving, Coquelin, Ellen Terry, Pierre Brasseur, Sarah Bernhardt, Sessue Hayakawa (whose autobiography rejoices in the title Zen Showed Me the Way). But there is nothing in any of this to compare with the close record of his own work by one of the most distinguished actors and directors of this or any other century that Stanislavsky left us in My Life in Art, nor anything like his attempt, in a subsequent series starting with An Actor Prepares, to forge a set of exercises which, if diligently practised, would lead the actor to the Olympian heights of his profession. What made him do it? Why him?

  Konstantin Stanislavsky (né Alexeyev) was a complex man, with a complex attitude to both life and art. My Life in Art records his unceasing struggle with, on the one hand, the dismal, corrupt Russian theatre of his youth and early manhood, and, on the other, his own unyielding self. Though his work as an actor was hugely praised, he was often deeply uncomfortable on stage. He was both blessed and cursed with a clear perception of how unsatisfactory his own performances were – of how poorly his body responded to his impulses – and how confused those impulses were. This sort of self-awareness can be quite paralysing for an actor, and there are many instances of just such paralysis in the present volume. It is a measure of Stanislavsky’s doggedness, his unswerving devotion to the cause of High Art, that he persisted in his quest through appalling bouts of self-consciousness, challenging himself at every turn, never letting himself get away with a thing, until he finally achieved his goal. As Jean Benedetti remarks at the beginning of his invaluable short summary of the System, Stanislavsky: An Introduction, ‘Had Stanislavsky been a “natural”, an actor of instinctive genius, there would be no System.’

  Stanislavsky’s starting point was two-fold: he had been vouchsafed moments in certain of his own performances where inspiration had descended, moments which, like Shelley’s Spirit of Delight, came ‘rarely, rarely’; he sought to reproduce these and increase them in frequency. He had also been lucky enough to see performances by a number of great actors; he studied their work closely, striving to discover their secrets. Where had his own fitful and their great inspirations come from? There were no easy answers to his question.

  His acting life had begun in 1877, when he was a mere fourteen years old. He founded a group of amateur players, the Alexeyev Circle, which performed in the front room of his wealthy parents’ spacious house; the work later continued at the Moscow Society of Art and Literature. He was intelligent and tasteful, and managed, single-handed, to raise the whole level of theatrical presentation in Moscow to undreamed-of heights; both the group and he, as its leading actor, became famous. In time he met the distinguished writer and administrator Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and together, in 1898, they founded the Moscow Art and Popular Theatre, which rose to even greater heights than had the amateur circle. All this while, Stanislavsky’s extraordinary gifts as a metteur en scène were developing apace (heavily influenced by the complex ensemble stagings of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s company which he had seen in Germany), and together he and Nemirovich created standards of discipline and sensitivity that were unexampled in Russian theatrical life, culminating in the production of the four mature masterpieces of Chekhov with which the theatre’s name became identified.

  So far, so triumphant. But at the height of his success, Stanislavsky (as he had now become known in order to protect his family name from the sullying associations of the stage) was deeply dissatisfied. He felt no closer to his goal; despite all his hard work on himself and his actors, inspiration remained intermittent. He seemed not to be able to build on his work, and depended for his effects largely on the physical production of which he was now such a virtuoso: using lighting, scenery and sound in constantly innovative ways to create unforgettable theatrical effects. All of this was meaningless to him, however, because the central element, the acting, remained earthbound, imitative, a mere theatrical stencil, in his evocative phrase, dimly copied from something else. It lacked, in a word, truth. This word loomed very large for Stanislavsky. He believed in the existence of an ideal truth, quite separate from mere theatrical truth, and he determined to track it down.

  It must be stressed that at this time, his acting was universally acclaimed, admired by all, to a degree that his natural modesty, bordering on self-abnegation, prevents him from acknowledging in My Life in Art. In fact, there was never to be a time throughout his career when he felt entirely satisfied with his work as an actor. In 1906, at the end of the first brilliant cycle of work at the Moscow Art Theatre, he took a sabbatical in Finland to ponder these problems. He spent much of the time assessing the work of actors like the great Italians Tommaso Salvini (1829–1915) and Eleanora Duse (1858–1924), trying to fathom the source of their inspiration. He observed that they seemed to believe completely in what they were doing, and that it was this belief that gave them the capacity to be true to their inner emotion despite the public nature of the stage. Moreover, it created great relaxation: they seemed not to suffer at all from tension. At this point, Stanislavsky turned his eyes upon himself. Was he relaxed? Hardly ever. Did he believe in what he was doing? Almost never. When had he been relaxed? When had he been good? He remembered certain passages of certain performances. Why had they been remarkable? Generally, he discovered, because they were specific, rooted in either personal experience or memories of behaviour which had impressed itself on him. What if an entire role were to be constructed in this way? One would believe in every minute and relaxation would ensue, not an externally achieved relaxation, which he knew from trying made little or no difference to the performance, but a natural, spontaneous freedom. It also seemed to him that what differentiated these great actors from – well, from him, for example – was that they knew what they were doing: their characters, that is, seemed to do everything for a reason; they always seemed to want something, and every action they took was towards the achievement of this want. So there was another principle.

  Armed with his discoveries, he announced them to the convened actors of the Moscow Art Theatre group. ‘I have discovered the principles of Art!’ he cried. ‘No you haven’t,’ they replied, ‘acting’s not like that at all.’ From then on Stanislavsky was something of a stranger in his own house. He eventually created a studio theatre in which to test and establish his ideas; over the remaining twenty-five years of his life he became more and more a teacher, modifying, adapting his principles, but never finally doubting the truth of those first discoveries. The founder members of the company never quite came round to them, though, and when he worked with those actors, he had to bargain with them, offering them bigger and better roles, in order to persuade them to think in terms of the strange neologised words in which he described his discoveries, some of them derived from the psychological texts he had read (by Ribot, for example), some by analogy with other sciences. The core of his approach is the idea of action: that every moment that an actor stands on stage, he or she wants something. The play consists of the actions the actor performs in order to get what he or she wants. He further elaborated this notion by proposing an overarching action (the super-objective) which is what the character wants in life, of which all the other actions are component parts. The actor must first identify
his wants, then the obstacles that he faces in order to fulfil them. Of equal importance is the question of character: who is it that does the wanting? Here he devised another series of exercises which were dedicated to discovering the character within the actor, rather than imposing an external image. But before this work comes the necessary preliminary work whereby the actor learns how to access the emotions required by the part; and this, Stanislavsky determined, could only come from within oneself: the actor’s own memories, both emotional and sensual. Only if the actor is in easy communication with his inner life and particularly with his sensual and emotional past will he have anything to bring to the role. Only if he knows what he wants in the play and what he does to get it will he know why he is on the stage. If he knows why he is on stage, the actor can never be self-conscious; and self-consciousness is the supreme evil, to be eliminated at all costs. Stanislavsky was tormented by what he called ‘the terrifying black hole of the auditorium’.

  The above is a simplified rendition of the first phase of Stanislavsky’s work; Benedetti’s book (op. cit.) gives a much more thorough, rather more technical account. There are a number of objections to the theory: firstly, it can well be objected that not all actors are afflicted by self-consciousness. There are many actors, perhaps the majority, for whom the stage is the most natural place on earth; indeed, it is almost a definition of an actor that he is someone who feels more at home on a stage in front of a thousand people than he does in his own front room. A second objection to Stanislavsky’s theory is that though the actor has no point of personal contact with the character, he may be perfectly well able, from intelligence, observation and imagination, to create the character as written. Finally, it can be objected that plays are simply not written in this way; authors do not necessarily write their characters with objectives in the way that Stanislavsky describes. It is this last objection that has proved the most enduring: the Stanislavsky System can sometimes seem to be imposing something on the play that doesn’t exist within it, that the truth that Stanislavsky so avidly sought was one of his own imagining.