My Life in Pieces

by Simon Callow

  In the early 1960s, some of the results of this exploratory work passed into the mainstream of the theatre; both Olivier, at the newly created National Theatre at the Old Vic, and Peter Hall at the Royal Shakespeare Company he had formed slightly earlier, absorbed the work of these directors and actors. Every so often these companies would present a piece of truly experimental acting – like, for instance, Robert Stephens’s electrifying performance of the sun-god Atahuallpa in Peter Shaffer’s TheRoyal Hunt of the Sun, or Ian Richardson’s Herald in the Marat/Sade – but the dust soon settled, and a consensus began to emerge, a sort of new realism: a kind of unvarnished, unsentimental manner in which real life could be credibly presented, in plays both modern and classical. Above all, this approach eschewed theatricality. Any sense that actors were unusual or exceptional human beings was rejected. The job of actors was now to be as like their audience, or their hoped-for audience, as possible: the man on the stage was now the man on the street.

  What the revolution had really achieved was the absolute dominance of the director. Experiment became centred on design and concept, both under the control of the director. The actor’s creative imagination – his fantasy, his instinct for gesture – was of no interest; all the creative imagining had already been done by the director and the designer. The best that an actor could do was to bring himself or herself to the stage and simply be. Actors, accepting the new rules, resigned themselves to serving the needs of the playwright as expressed by his representative on earth, the director. Of course they rebelled against this; they started to sneak amusing and charming and original elements into their work. But they had lost control of their own performances. And so they started to desert the theatre. The financial rewards could never compare with those of television or film; if there were to be no creative rewards, what was the point? It seemed like very hard work for very little return. Most of the celebrated actors of the recent revolutionary period disappeared into film. They came back again, from time to time, on a visit, but the theatre had ceased to be their natural habitat. It wasn’t just a question of fame or money: the stage had become unexciting to them. They were simply not getting the response from their audiences. They were not satisfied by an activity which now had neither the grandeur, the glamour nor the sense of heightened emotional power of the old school, which had engendered such intense energies in the auditorium, often taking the experience into the realm of the primal. Audiences felt this too. Despite the frequently challenging and inventive work of the dramatists, the designers and the directors, the contribution of the actors – what might be called the acting enterprise – was circumscribed. It was all very rational and objective and credible, but it was not markedly different from what was readily – and more cheaply – available in the cinema or on the television.

  The older actors – that fabled generation of Evans and Ashcroft, Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Redgrave, Guinness – never gave up, of course. They continued more or less unreformed, despite exposure – in the case of Olivier and Ashcroft – to the Royal Court during its fervent years; Gielgud and Richardson, in particular, became much loved as they ventured in extreme old age into plays by David Storey and Harold Pinter. But there was a clear shared sense that no one was going to replace these living national treasures: we were watching a gorgeous sunset without hope of a repeat. It was not the individuals that were dying, it was an entire view of acting and of actors. Above all what was disappearing was the idea that the actor was at the centre of the event; that his or her contribution was the core of the experience. Actors started to become embarrassed by their job; anyone who had the temerity to talk in public about the complex processes involved in acting, or to suggest that acting might be a great and important art, was remorselessly mocked. The phrase luvvie was invented by the British press to put actors in their place. Only those who claimed that there was no more to acting than learning the lines and avoiding the furniture were accorded any respect.

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  The roots of these developments are deep, and it is here that we need to mention the name of Konstantin Stanislavsky, a towering figure in the history of twentieth-century theatre, who – sometimes directly, sometimes more obliquely – has profoundly influenced attitudes towards acting. Deeply concerned to advance the art of acting itself, seeking to establish the conditions necessary for what he called creative acting, he studied the work of actors he admired and began to extrapolate theories from his observations. Little by little he formed a corpus of exercises and analysis which came to be known as the Stanislavsky System, the central tenets of which are brilliantly simple and convincing. In the Theory of Actions, he proposes that a play consists of a series of interlocking actions, or objectives, out of which the actor’s path through the play is constructed; in the Theory of Emotional Memory, he maintains that the actor finds the truth of the role by using his own experiences, thus achieving a lifelike as opposed to a merely theatrical performance. These two ideas, most potently expressed in question form – What do I want? and Who am I? – formed a powerful tool for combating what Stanislavsky defined as the actor’s worst pitfall: acting in general.

  Stanislavsky had a naturally restless intellect and these simple formulations only satisfied him for a short time; striving to clarify, expand, diversify and enrich his system to accommodate his developing insights, he doggedly continued his quest for the key to acting until his dying day. Meanwhile, some of his earliest pupils, like Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, had left him at this formative stage, spreading the word in its most elementary form, particularly in America, where a technique rooted in emotional experience and deterministic action was eagerly received. The British theatre, too, though less susceptible, in its pragmatic way, to grand theories, quietly acknowledged that here was a way to reform the outmoded gestures and vocal mannerisms of the late Victorians and Edwardians, but also to counter the reliance on mere personality. The drama schools began to teach Stanislavskyan precepts in simplified form, and this began to filter through to the theatre in general. From the 1920s, the Moscow Art Theatre toured the West and astonished audiences with the detailed realism and emotional depth of its productions. The influence of Stanislavsky’s ideas grew and grew. Like Freud’s psychological theories, they swiftly established themselves as the common wisdom, passing into general currency among the population as much as among the profession, and they have since held sway in more or less diluted form in the theatre practice of the English-speaking world. All actors now aspire to give emotionally truthful, many-layered performances based on observation, utilising the raw material of their own lives; they aim above all for credibility. Whether they approach their roles from the inside out, or from the outside in, to use a familiar distinction, the desired end result is always the same: the recognisable truth. What else is there?

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  In Russia, the progress of Stanislavsky’s ideas had taken a somewhat different path. Initially, his colleagues in the Moscow Art Theatre resisted the idea of the System, but bit by bit he wooed them – bribed them, in some cases, with the promise of this role or that – into accepting it. The System never became popular with the established actors, nor with the ever-sceptical Nemirovich-Danchenko, who finally sidelined his partner into running the Studio Theatre and School. Out of this institution emerged an extraordinary group of young actor-theorists who swallowed Stanislavsky’s ideas whole and then spat them out again in radically different form. Meyerhold and Vakhtangov rapidly evolved into radical directors, as different from each other as they were from Stanislavsky, while Mikhail Chekhov, who had come to the Moscow Art Theatre when he was already a well-known actor at the Maly Theatre in St Petersburg, gave a series of performances for the Studio of startling originality. Stanislavsky unreservedly acknowledged him as the most gifted actor with whom he had ever worked, although at a certain point he dismissed him from his classes on account of his ‘overheated imagination’. Together they achieved an enormous success with Stanislavsky’s production of The
Government Inspector, in which Chekhov endowed the central character with mystical and bizarre elements, underlined by a design of grotesque menace. But despite this happy collaboration, it was clear that they had radically different views about acting. In a sense, Chekhov – intuitive, audacious, infinitely flexible, apparently able to transform himself into any shape he desired – was the actor the careful, cautious Stanislavsky had always dreamed of being. He was also terrifyingly volatile in his private life, alcoholic, paranoiac, wholly unpredictable. But he too was on a quest of his own quite as urgent as Stanislavsky’s, first of all to discover meaning for himself in his own life, then to understand the source of his art.

  Groping towards this meaning and that understanding, Chekhov immersed himself first in the study of yoga, then in the anthroposophical works of Rudolf Steiner. He started to teach and to direct; in time he became the director of the Second Moscow Art Theatre School. His formulations were fundamentally different to Stanislavsky’s. Their ‘idealistic’ and ‘mystical’ dimension caused violent opposition from some of his actors and from the state authorities; by now the first fine frenzy of the Russian Revolution, which had initially encouraged experiment and radicalism of every kind, had evolved into a controlling party bureaucracy which defined art in strictly political terms. Eventually, denounced as a ‘sick artist’, Chekhov was driven from Russia and commenced a lifelong odyssey during the course of which he sometimes seemed to be pursued, Orestes-like, by unrelenting Fates. From Riga to Berlin, from Paris to Dartington, from Connecticut to New York he moved. Time and again war, civil and global, forced him and his successive schools and companies into ever more distant hiding places, until he finally ended up in Hollywood, where he continued to teach, giving, before his early death, half a dozen charming cameo performances in various movies, among them Spellbound, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.

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  Chekhov encapsulated his teaching in various publications over the years, culminating in the appearance of the present volume, To the Actor, which contains the essence of his working method. Another, more elaborate version of the same book has recently appeared under the title of On the Technique of Acting. The complex relationship of the two books to one another is described in Deirdre Hurst du Prey’s introduction to the latter; both are indispensable handbooks, providing a detailed and practical guide to Chekhov’s work. They were not, however, his first books. While he was still in Russia, he had described his early life and the development of his ideas in two remarkable volumes, The Path of the Actor and Life and Encounters. These earlier works of spiritual and artistic autobiography convey the pressure out of which his ideas grew, vividly portraying Chekhov’s frustration with what he perceived to be the unnecessary limitations and inhibitions which cramp and ultimately destroy actors’ creativity. Many of these limitations and inhibitions seemed to Chekhov to stem directly from Stanislavsky’s System.

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  Chekhov revered Stanislavsky, as anyone who cares about acting must, both as a man, and for his deeply sincere lifelong quest to discover the laws of acting. But Chekhov’s conception of acting was as different from the older man’s as were their personalities. Stanislavsky’s deep seriousness, his doggedness, his sense of personal guilt, his essentially patriarchal nature, his need for control, his suspicion of instinct, all found their expression in his System. At core, Stanislavsky did not trust actors or their impulses, believing that unless they were carefully monitored by themselves and by their teachers and directors, they would lapse into grotesque overacting or mere mechanical repetition. Chekhov believed, on the contrary, that the more actors trusted themselves and were trusted, the more extraordinary the work they would produce. For him, the child playing in front of his nanny, improvising wildly, generating emotions with easy spontaneity, changing shape according to the impulses of his fantasy, was the paradigm of the actor. Stanislavsky was unable look back on his own childish efforts without embarrassment. Stanislavsky believed that the only acceptable truth in acting was to be found within the actor’s own experience, whereas Chekhov was profoundly convinced that the imagination was the key to all art. Acting, he said, should never be autobiographical; constant recourse to one’s own experience would lead, he said, to ‘degeneration of talent’. The imagination, once engaged, never lost its freshness and power, but the limited pool of individual experience quickly stagnated. The actor’s work on himself should focus on encouraging and liberating his imagination, by consciously inventing and fantasising, rather than by dredging the subconscious. For Chekhov, fairy tales were the ideal material for his teaching: all plays, in his view, aspired to the condition of fairy tales.

  As far as the text was concerned, Chekhov had an almost mystical relationship to language, crystallised by his exposure to Steiner’s Eurhythmy. He insisted on the vital importance of sound, of the vibrations which were released within the actor and within the audience by the consonants and vowels themselves. Stanislavsky had a very different approach. Interestingly, he was what we would now describe as severely dyslexic, and always sought the subtext, the emotional life behind the words, rather than engaging with the words themselves, which he was notoriously given to paraphrasing. As for character, Stanislavsky believed it had to be constructed painstakingly, detail by detail. This was anathema to Chekhov. ‘They call this work,’ he wrote in The Path of the Actor. ‘It is indeed work, it is tormenting and difficult – but unnecessary. The actor’s work is to a significant extent a matter of waiting and being silent “without working”.’ To him the all-important prerequisite for acting was ‘a sense of the whole’. In a parallel characteristically drawn from the natural world, he believed that character was like a seed which contained the whole future life of the plant within it; if you grasped one phrase, one gesture, of the character you had access to all the rest; everything would fall harmoniously into place. Here was the origin of his famous ‘psychological gesture’, the embodied essence of the character, a transforming and liberating principle of being which awakes the character into instant and complete life, and which then proliferates into a thousand details which spontaneously and harmoniously evolve. Stanislavsky believed that the actor must be wholly immersed in his character, who becomes a second ‘I’. Chekhov, rather, believed that in a successful performance, the actor was always watching his character, moved by him, but never ‘violating his personal emotions’. This standing apart, he said, ‘enabled me to approach that state whereby the artist purifies and ennobles the character he is playing, keeping him free from irrelevant aspects of his own personality.’

  Finally, and most significantly, Chekhov increasingly believed that the core of the theatrical event was to be found in the actor’s relationship with his audience. For Stanislavsky, the audience was both intimidating and corrupting; he feared what he called ‘the black hole of the auditorium,’ but even worse he feared his own desire to pander to the audience. To solve this problem he erected the notorious imaginary Fourth Wall. Chekhov saw it quite differently. It was vital, he said, to engage with what he called ‘the will of the auditorium’, to reach out to each member of the audience and share the creative act with him or her. ‘I understood that members of the audience have the right to influence the actor during a performance and that the actor should not prevent this.’ He spoke, mystically, of the actor sacrificing himself to the audience.

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  Stanislavsky’s noble work has served its purpose; but it is Chekhov, it seems to me, who speaks to the crisis in our theatres. Audiences feel neglected. They are offered more or less naturalistic work which engages neither their imagination nor that of the actors. Prophetically, Chekhov wrote of naturalism: ‘The legacy that naturalism will leave behind it will be a coarsened and nervously disordered audience that has lost its artistic taste; and much time will be needed to restore it to health.’ He says that it breeds the necessity ‘of giving its audiences a series of “powerful sensations” capable of arousing shock through a chain of pathologica
l effects’. Since actors no longer think of themselves as creative artists they have lost their self-respect. To be mere interpreters of the written word is not enough for them, or for their public, though it may be enough for some writers and directors. This is why the public increasingly turns to what is called ‘performance art’, as if the theatre was not by absolute definition a performance art – as if the work of performance artists was expressive and imaginative, but that Marlowe, Ibsen, O’Casey, David Hare, required mere photographic realism. It is particularly absurd to attempt to perform the classics with a naturalistic technique, the very idea of which would have been inconceivable to a writer of the Elizabethan period: in the admirable epigram of the Shakespeare scholar Graham Holderness, ‘An actor playing naturalistically in an inn yard is likely to be confused with a waiter.’

  Michael Chekhov was a highly individual artist, and it would be wholly inappropriate to hope for a generation of Michael Chekhovs. On the contrary, the central purpose of his teaching is to encourage the actor’s respect for his or her own imagination and the freedom to create from it. It opens up the possibility of a full and reciprocal relationship with the audience, who can once again be introduced to the idea that actors provide them not with photographic facsimiles of life, but with works of art in which the actors’ voices, their bodies and their souls are the medium for the production of unforgettable, heightened creations. In the past, when ballet dancers originated roles, they would speak of them as ‘creations’. ‘Great acting is like painting,’ Charles Laughton, an actor much after Michael Chekhov’s own heart, said. ‘In the great masters of fine art one can see and recognise the small gesture of a finger, the turn of a head, the vitriolic stare, the glazed eye, the pompous mouth, the back bending under a fearful load. In every swerve and stroke of a painter’s brush, there is an abundance of life. Great artists reveal the god in man; and every character an actor plays must be this sort of creation. Not imitation – that is merely caricature – and any fool can be a mimic! But creation is a secret. The better – the truer – the creation, the more it will resemble a great painter’s immortal work.’ The possibilities are limitless, far beyond the demands of naturalism. Why should the art of the theatre be more restricted in genre than any other? In my first book, Being an Actor, I called for Cubist acting, Impressionistic acting, Secessionist acting (I said we perhaps had already had enough of Mannerist acting). Just as each of these painterly genres enriches truth’s vocabulary, so might these different modes of acting.