My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  Stanislavsky’s own peroration in My Life in Art provides his own epitaph, comparing himself to a gold-seeker: ‘I cannot will to my heirs my labours, my quests, my losses, my joys and my disappointments, but only the few grains of gold that it has taken me all my life to find. May the Lord aid me in this task!’

  How could one not love such a man? And yet, and yet. I was unable to articulate my objection to his work until many years after I first encountered it, and when I did it was something of a revelation. The Drama Centre’s Stanislavsky training was in the hands of a remarkable, permanently gum-chewing American actress called Doreen Cannon, who was a pupil of the actress Uta Hagen, one of many American actor-teachers to have rebelled against Lee Strasberg’s limited conception of Stanislavsky’s work and tyrannical teaching methods. I reviewed Strasberg’s A Dream of Passion in 1988, for the Sunday Times.

  Lee Strasberg never committed his method to print during his lifetime. He wrote a brief introduction to Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting, and the 9,000-word entry on Acting in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and there exists a transcript of some of his classes, Strasberg at the Actors Studio in book form. A Dream of Passion was to be his summa, and its working title was What is Acting? From Stanislavsky to the Method. Alas, he died before completing it. The book that his editors have made from the existing material is an account of his personal development. It is pleasantly, plainly, written and contains a certain amount of anecdotal biographical information, an account of several exercises (some of them hovering on the edge of primal therapy) and a central section on Stanislavsky.

  Bringing a repertory of Chekhov and Gorky plays with them, the Moscow Art Theatre came to America in 1924 where they were seen by an enthusiastic audience – including the twenty-three-year-old Lee Strasberg. He immediately enrolled in the school founded by two MAT company members who had decided to stay behind. In due course, he and a couple of friends founded the Group Theatre, which, after a few glorious years, folded, whereupon Strasberg opened the Actors Studio, not a drama school in the usual sense, but a kind of forum in which his students would offer exercises to him to criticise. The Strasberg System was known as The Method.

  Essentially, it consisted of Stanislavsky’s formulations as found in his first book, An Actor Prepares. These formulations are all eminently sensible, and were obviously a useful antidote to the staginess of the contemporary Russian theatre. They are, however, the very least you can expect of an actor, a mere beginning, though admirable for drama students. Having got so far, Stanislavsky then continued to elaborate and in some cases radically alter his system, for the obvious reason that presenting a semblance of real life on the stage is not what all plays call for; in fact, very few plays fail to demand a very great deal more.

  These developments, however, were ignored by Strasberg. He had discovered the true faith, which was called Emotional Truth. That was the ultimate yardstick of any performance. And who decided what was emotionally true? Why, Strasberg, of course. Despite reports coming out of Russia about Stanislavsky’s revisions and his new insistence on physical action, Strasberg became, in Harold Clurman’s words, ‘a fanatic about emotion’. And of course, the results were often startling. A degree of emotional self-expression such as had never been seen before took the American theatre by storm, and the material was ready to hand. A number of extraordinary performers, Dean, Monroe, Brando, passed through Strasberg’s hands, some briefly, some becoming dependent on his steadying presence. Monroe could hardly act at all without either him or his wife Paula being in the vicinity. All this emotional discharge burnt up the screen, and electrified the world. Every young actor wanted to be like an American actor, wild, passionate, real and so very very NOW. Almost at a stroke, an entire tradition of American acting, articulate, witty, intelligently passionate – the tradition of Tracy and Hepburn and Cagney and Bogart – realistic but not ‘real’ was made to seem false, while people were expected to pay good money to watch actors working up to and away from their feelings.

  There is not a word in Strasberg’s book to suggest that he sees any purpose to the theatre other than watching people having emotions. The tone of the book is somewhat combative, because even at the time of his death (1982) the tide was turning. It is now fully turned. Emotion has ceased to be the ultimate goal of American actors, because it has failed to animate any but the tiniest range of plays. Strasberg’s failure as a director with the legendarily bad production of Three Sisters, which provoked the audience to chant in unison with the mannered stumblings of Sandy Dennis when the play appeared at the Aldwych Theatre, was an early indication of this, but most recently a new and brilliant generation of American playwrights appeared with other demands to make, verbal and linguistic demands. Strasberg’s book betrays what might be called logophobia: a deep distrust of words which must always result in a terrible sameness of acting; after all, there are a limited number of emotions to permutate – it is his words that make one playwright different from another. Not according to Strasberg. ‘The words prepare the actor to carry out the activities desired by the author.’ With the distrust of words comes an inevitable distrust of intelligence.

  All great acting – Olivier’s, Brando’s, Laughton’s, Maggie Smith’s – is great because of piercing contact made with the thought processes of the character: thinking what the character thinks, hearing what the character hears, seeing what the character sees. Not according to Strasberg. ‘It does not matter so much what the actor thinks,’ he writes, ‘but the fact that he is really thinking something that is real to him at that moment.’ This technique, known as ‘substitution’ is a deadly practice, killing off the actor’s mental responses. He describes ‘the primary characteristic of the stage’ as ‘the non-existent reality’. But the reality does exist: it is the words. The most baleful result of his influence is the present widespread unresponsiveness of actors to language. No matter how brilliant the visualisation of either the character or his world, it can only fully live in the words of the play, their texture, their rhythm, above all, in their meaning.

  In fairness to Strasberg, he has inherited this attitude from his Russian model. Stanislavsky was almost word-blind, and had the greatest difficulty in reading plays, preferring to work on a subtext of his own invention. (Strasberg’s attempt to deny Chekhov’s intense dislike of Stanislavsky’s productions of his plays is feeble and patently contradicted by the writer’s letters – being written in words, they are presumably not to be trusted.) A good deal of Stanislavsky’s system originated in his own personal problems, like his chronic stage fright. Strasberg repeats with approval the Russian’s well-known comment about the actor’s dread of ‘the black and remote hole of the proscenium arch’: in fact, it is a wonderfully friendly aperture for most of us, its very blackness relieving us of the self-consciousness which so bedevilled Stanislavsky and his fundamentalist American disciple. In the last page of the book, Strasberg crossly rejects a trend he has discerned which is anathema to his throbbing, palpating vision of theatrical art: ‘the problem of expression [is] a means of sharing one’s individual way of experiencing… all human beings are in even more need of this, if life is not to deteriorate into the “playing of games”, which many psychologists, and even more some theatre people, have discovered and proclaimed a way of life.’ Now that Strasberg’s influence has disappeared, we can drag the theatre off the psychiatrist’s couch, and out of the seance parlour, and hand it back to the players.

  When I arrived at the Drama Centre, though I didn’t realise it, I was in a state of emotional stasis, locked, armoured, rigid. I was an ideal candidate for the emotional-memory work that is such a valuable aspect of Stanislavsky’s teaching, but which Strasberg had elevated into the be-all and end-all of acting. My great emotional breakthrough came in the second year of the training; by the third year, thanks to it, I had access to an unprecedented (for me) physical and emotional freedom. But it never occurred to me for a moment that the plays of Feydeau, Caldéron, Pirandello, Ostrov
sky, Max Frisch which we performed in that final year could be reduced to a series of psycho-dramas. Unlike many of my colleagues, who had been inspired to become actors by movies – especially American movies – I was absolutely focused on the theatre. I had seen so many great actors, so many devastating productions, so many towering plays, which told me that the theatre was a thing of almost infinite variety, that it was obvious to me that though emotional freedom was essential to any performance, it was only a beginning.

  In order to survive financially at the Drama Centre, I had been working for the RSC (helping with the box office for their 1970 Roundhouse season) and at the Old Vic, now as an usher. I saw all the plays in what was an extremely mixed period for the National, during which the company spread across the West End, in seasons at the New and Cambridge Theatres, with a series of variably successful new productions. Olivier was seriously ill for some of this time, which sapped the company’s morale in a way that suggested that the organisation was dangerously dependent on his charisma to keep it going. Extraordinary things were happening, nonetheless, including Olivier’s triumphant appearance in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, whose heart-stopping first night I attended (thanks to my old box-office chums, of course). My enthusiasm for him was not shared by many of my fellow students, which puzzled me. I wrote this piece for a Festschrift celebrating his eightieth birthday; it was called Laurence Olivier and My Generation.

  When I was at drama school, the Laurence Olivier controversy raged. Was he the greatest actor who had ever lived? Or was he simply appalling, a ham, external, tricksy, unwatchable, and so on? At that time the cons seemed to be winning. It was, in fact, quite hard to find someone to say a word in his favour, among either my contemporaries or his. This being the case, I generally kept rather quiet. I was a raving fan, and frankly baffled by the inability of people to see what was as plain as the noses on their face (not to mention the nose on his face, rather larger of course, because generally made of putty): that he was the most exciting, the most daring, most interesting, the funniest, most moving person on the English stage by a mile. It’s fifteen years since he was on any stage and nothing has dimmed my memory of a single moment of any performance of his. If an artist’s job is to be memorable, Olivier is the supreme acting artist of my lifetime.

  The sensuous impact was shocking. Most great actors operate by stealth: one’s first glimpse of Ralph Richardson or John Gielgud or Alec Guinness was likely to be disappointing. Only slowly did they weave their spell, drawing you closer to them, luring you to the edge of your seat. It was quite different with Olivier. The initial image was always so clear, projected in bright sharp colours; a voice of symphonic splendour, simultaneously sumptuous and piercing; an aptness of invention; an audacity of timing, and no lack of feeling, contrary to report. In the area where he was supreme master – the tragicomic – he was desperately moving: Strindberg’s Edgar, Osborne’s Archie, Shylock, Richard III – all weasel men for whom at bay he found the authentic cry of pain.

  Temperamentally, he was not a romantic actor, despite Heathcliff, nor a heroic one, despite Henry V. He was a Realist actor, always grounding his roles in a material, observed reality – thus diminishing them in the eyes of some of his contemporaries, who were used to acting in abstract nouns: nobility, majesty, pathos. Olivier was a very modern actor; for all his unprecedented command of the mechanics of acting, his point of reference was not the theatre, but the world. ‘Acting,’ he told Tynan, ‘is the art of persuasion. First you’ve got to persuade yourself, then you’ve got to persuade your audience.’ The all-important first half of that requirement was never forgotten, as he nagged away at making sense for himself of every moment, winkling out generalisation and banishing it. Sometimes the effect was reductive – but whatever you thought about his decision to play Othello black, instead of nobly moorish, the way in which he executed his interpretation commands absolute admiration: the observation was precise, detailed and brilliantly realised. He forged for that performance the greatest instrument any actor has ever had at his disposal. The physical, vocal and emotional flexibility of it set new standards for the rest of us to measure ourselves against. In fact, of course, none of us could begin to match those standards.

  In his short film, The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, Werner Herzog shows Steiner, a skiing champion, entering so completely into communion with his sport, and jumping so far and so high, that he made nonsense of all previous records, to the degree that he was eventually barred from competing: no one else stood a chance. Laurence Olivier has approached his art like a sportsman or an athlete, and he has won the pentathlon. It was his ambition, he told Tynan, ‘to fascinate the public with the art of acting in the same way that they might follow a boxer or a cricket player’. It was this that lay behind the ritual criticisms of him that I heard so often in my student years: ‘I can see the wheels going round’, ‘it’s all so calculated’, ‘he never moves me’, and, again and again, derogatorily ‘yes, it’s very clever – I suppose’.

  It was clever; it was meant to be. It was also, frankly, intended to annihilate the competition. It succeeded there, too. The victor ludorum, the glory-boy of the acting world, has, undisputedly, become the Greatest Actor Alive. But this acting that is about acting has proved sterile. It has had no issue. Othello was not the harbinger of a race of super-actors; it was an end in itself. The literalism of the interpretation remained; the giddying virtuosity of the performance flew off the edge of the globe. Nothing was left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.

  Every role he played has had to be reinvented by his successors, with only middling results so far. In fact it is acting itself that needs to be reinvented. The post-Olivier vacuum yawns ominously long and large. Many good performances have been seen in the last few years, but there has been no redefinition of the actor’s aim. Olivier accrued all the glory to himself; he won all the prizes. If acting is not about prizes, and not about glory, what then is it about?

  Long Day’s Journey was not the only success at the National during those seasons: there was, for example, Ingmar Bergman’s radical split-stage Hedda Gabler, with Maggie Smith supreme in the title role, and William Gaskill’s superb revisiting of Farquhar with The Beaux Stratagem. For me, though, those years were most memorable for the brief participation of Paul Scofield in the company, first in Pirandello’s Rules of the Game, in which he was enigmatic and compelling, and then The Captain of Köpenick, in which he gave a performance so extraordinary that it compelled me to rethink everything I thought I knew about acting, made me waver, indeed, in my loyalty to Olivier. They were bewilderingly different stage animals, Olivier all acting, Scofield all being. I watched him like a hawk, and was fascinated once to note the difference between a Saturday matinee and Saturday evening performance of Köpenick; I diligently wrote down what I noticed – it was the first writing I ever did about acting – and six years later when Scofield and I were acting together I shyly handed it to him. ‘Interesting,’ he said, in that dangerously veiled way of his. In it, I observed how totally in character he was, and yet how totally responsive to the audience. I’ve lost it now (or perhaps it just slunk away in embarrassment), but I think even at that early age, I had an inkling of the mystery of his art. He was hugely approved of by the Drama Centre as one of the few English actors who genuinely transformed. This aspect of acting interested me more than anything else, so I pondered on his work, seeing every performance in London he ever gave thereafter. Although he seemed utterly different in every role, the external changes were not signposts, as with Olivier; the change was internal, a shift of being, some ineffable realignment of his soul. When I played Pedro Crespo in The Mayor of Zalamea in our final-year public productions at the Drama Centre, I froze when I saw that the costume that they had borrowed for me had a label stitched to it which said ‘Paul Scofield – Thomas More’. I put it on as a priest puts on his vestment.

  I watched these great ones with new admiration: now I had acted, or tried to, I knew h
ow difficult the simplest character and the most straightforward line could be to play. But this was not daunting. Not in the least. All I felt was a sense of infinite possibility. I was filled with irrepressible excitement for the years ahead. The training had taken me deep into a new world which seemed to me to be limitless: it had instilled in me a sense of unending intellectual, emotional and physical challenge. All these stories, these characters, these visions created by our forerunners, waiting to be unleashed into the world – ‘images of destiny’, as Christopher Fettes so inspiringly described them. And I had felt in myself the stirrings of creativity, of power, of transcendence, which could only grow in the companies to which I felt confident I would belong for the rest of my career.