‘Let’s sum up what you have done,’ said the Director. ‘I shall begin with you,’ he said, indicating me. ‘And at the same time with you and you,’ he went on, pointing to Maria and Paul. ‘Sit right here, on these chairs, where I can see you better, and begin; you are to be jealous, you to suffer, you to grieve, just producing those moods for their own sakes.’
We sat down, and immediately we felt the absurdity of our situation. As long as I was walking about, writhing like a savage, it was possible to imagine that there was some sense in what I was doing, but when I was put on a chair, with no external movements, the absurdity of my performance was clear.
‘Well, what do you think?’ asked the Director. ‘Can one sit on a chair, and for no reason at all be jealous? Or all stirred up? Or sad? Of course it is impossible. Fix this for all time in your memories: On the stage there cannot be, under any circumstances, action which is directed immediately at the arousing of a feeling for its own sake. To ignore this rule results only in the most disgusting artificiality. When you are choosing some bit of action leave feeling and spiritual content alone. Never seek to be jealous, or to make love, or to suffer, for its own sake. All such feelings are the result of something that has gone before. Of the thing that goes before you should think as hard as you can. As for the result, it will produce itself. The false acting of passions, or of types, or the mere use of conventional gestures,—these are all frequent faults in our profession. But you must keep away from these unrealities. You must not copy passions or copy types. You must live in the passions and in the types. Your acting of them must grow out of your living in them.’
Vanya then suggested that we could act better if the stage was not so bare; if there were some properties about, furniture, fireplace, ash trays.
‘Very well,’ agreed the Director, and ended the lesson at this point.
3
Our work for today was again scheduled for the School Stage, but when we arrived we found the entrance to the auditorium closed. However, another door was open that led directly on to the stage. As we entered we were astonished to find ourselves in a vestibule. Next to that was a cosy little living-room, in which were two doors, one opening into a dining-room and thence into a small bedroom, the other into a long corridor, on one side of which was a ballroom, brilliantly lighted. This whole apartment was partitioned off by scenery taken from productions in the repertory. The main curtain was down and barricaded with furniture.
Not feeling that we were on the boards we behaved as if we were at home. We began by examining the rooms, and then we settled down in groups and began to chat. It did not occur to any of us that the lesson had already begun. At last the Director reminded us that we had come together for work.
‘What shall we do?’ someone asked.
‘The same thing as yesterday,’ was the reply.
But we continued to stand around.
‘What is the matter?’ he asked.
It was Paul who answered. ‘I don’t know, really. Suddenly, for no reason at all, to act . . .’ he stopped, as if at a loss.
‘If it is uncomfortable to act for no reason at all, why then, find a reason,’ said Tortsov. ‘I am not putting any restrictions on you. Only do not continue to stand there like sticks of wood.’
‘But,’ somebody ventured, ‘wouldn’t that be acting for the sake of acting?’
‘No,’ retorted the Director. ‘From now on there is to be acting only for some purpose. Now you have the surroundings you asked for yesterday; can’t you suggest some inner motives that will result in simple physical acts? For instance, if I ask you, Vanya, to go and close that door, would you not do it?’
‘Close the door? Of course.’ And Vanya went over, slammed it and returned before we had a chance to look at him.
‘That is not what is meant by closing a door,’ said the Director. ‘By the word “close” I imply a wish that the door shall be shut, so that it will stay shut, to stop the draught, or so that persons in the next room shall not hear what we are saying. You merely banged the door, with no reason in your mind, and in a way that might well make it swing open again, as in fact it has done.’
‘It won’t stay shut. Honestly, it won’t,’ said Vanya.
‘If it is difficult, then it will require more time and care to carry out my request,’ said the Director.
This time Vanya shut the door properly.
‘Tell me something to do,’ I begged.
‘Is it impossible for you to think of anything? There is a fireplace and some wood. Go build a fire.’
I did as I was told, laid the wood in the fireplace, but found no matches, either in my pocket or on the mantelpiece. So I came back and told Tortsov of my difficulty.
‘What in the world do you want matches for?’ asked he.
‘To light the fire.’
‘The fireplace is made of paper. Did you intend to burn down the theatre?’
‘I was just going to pretend,’ I explained.
He held out an empty hand.
‘To pretend to light a fire, pretended matches are sufficient. As if the point were to strike a match!
‘When you reach the point of playing Hamlet, threading a way through his intricate psychology to the moment when he kills the King, will it be important to you to have a life-size sword in your hand? If you lack one, will you be unable to finish the performance? You can kill the King without a sword, and you can light the fire without a match. What needs to burn is your imagination.’
I went on pretending to light my fire. To lengthen the action I arranged that the make-believe matches should go out a number of times, although I tried hard to protect them with my hands. Also I tried to see the fire, to feel the heat, but failed, and soon began to be bored, so that I was compelled to think of something else to do. I began to move the furniture, then to count the objects in the room, but having no purpose behind these acts they were all mechanical.
‘There is nothing surprising in that,’ explained the Director. ‘If an action has no inner foundation, it cannot hold your attention. It takes no time to push a few chairs about, but if you were compelled to arrange some chairs of different sorts for a particular purpose, as for guests at a dinner who must be seated according to rank, age, and personal harmony, you could spend a long time over them.’
But my imagination had run dry.
As soon as he saw that the others had also run down, he gathered us together in the living-room. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? If I brought a dozen children in here and told them this is their new home, you would see their imagination sparkle; their games would be real games. Can’t you be like them?’
‘It is easy to say that,’ Paul complained. ‘But we aren’t children. They naturally desire to play, and with us it must be forced.’
‘Of course,’ the Director answered, ‘if you either will not or cannot light a spark within yourselves, I have no more to say. Every person who is really an artist desires to create inside of himself another, deeper, more interesting life than the one that actually surrounds him.’
Grisha broke in: ‘If the curtain were up, and the audience there, the desire would come.’
‘No,’ replied the Director with decision. ‘If you are really artists you will feel the desire without those accessories. Now, be frank. Actually what was it that prevented your acting anything?’
I explained that I could light a fire, move furniture, open and shut doors, but these acts are not extended enough to hold my attention. I light the fire, or close the door, and that is the end of it. If one act led to another, and gave rise to a third, natural momentum and tension would be created.
‘In short,’ he summed up, ‘what you think you need is not short, external, semi-mechanical acts, but some that have a broader perspective, are deeper, and more complicated?’
‘No,’ I answered, ‘but give us something that, although simple, is interesting.’
‘Do you mean to say,’ said he, perplexed, ‘that all that d
epends on me? Surely the explanation must be sought in the inner motives, in the circumstances amid which, and for the sake of which, you are doing the act. Take that opening or shutting of a door. Nothing can be simpler, you might say, of less interest, or more mechanical.
‘But suppose that in this apartment of Maria’s, there used to live a man who became violently insane. They took him away to a psychopathic ward. If he escaped from there, and were behind that door, what would you do?’
Once the question was put in that form our whole inner aim, as the Director described it, was altered. We no longer thought about how to extend our activity, or worried about its external form. Our minds were centred on estimating the value or purpose of this or that act in view of the problem presented. Our eyes began to measure the distance to the door, and to look for safe approaches to it. They examined the surroundings for directions of escape, in case the madman should break through the door. Our instinct of self-preservation sensed danger, and suggested ways of dealing with it.
Either accidentally or on purpose, Vanya, who had been pressing against the door after it was shut, suddenly jumped away, and we all rushed after him, the girls screaming and running off into another room. In the end I found myself under a table, with a heavy bronze ash-receiver in my hand.
The job was not ended. The door was now closed, but not locked. There was no key. Therefore the safest thing we could do was to barricade it with sofas, tables and chairs, then call up the hospital and arrange to have them take the necessary steps to regain the custody of the madman.
The success of this improvisation put me in high spirits. I went over to the Director and begged him to give me another chance at lighting the fire.
Without a moment’s hesitation he told me Maria had just inherited a fortune! That she has taken this apartment, and is celebrating her good luck by a housewarming, to which she has invited all her fellow-students. One of them, who is well acquainted with Kachalov, Moskvin and Leonidov, has promised to bring them to the party. But the apartment is very chilly, the central heating has not yet been turned on, although it is very cold outside. Can some wood for an open fire be found?
Some sticks might be borrowed from a neighbour. A little fire is started, but it smokes badly, and must be put out. Meanwhile it has grown late. Another fire is started, but the wood is green, and will not burn. In another minute the guests will be here.
‘Now,’ he continued, ‘let me see what you would do if my supposed facts were true.’
When it was all over, the Director said: ‘Today I can say that you acted with a motive. You have learned that all action in the theatre must have an inner justification, be logical, coherent and real. Second: if acts as a lever to lift us out of the world of actuality into the realm of imagination.’
4
Today the Director proceeded to enumerate the various functions of if.
‘This word has a peculiar quality, a kind of power which you sensed, and which produced in you an instantaneous, inner stimulus.
‘Note too how easily and simply it came. That door, which was the starting point in our exercise, became a means of defence, and your basic aim, the object of your concentrated attention, was desire for self-preservation.
‘The supposition of danger is always exciting. It is a kind of yeast that will ferment at any time. As for the door and the fireplace, inanimate objects, they excite us only when they are bound up with something else, of more importance to us.
‘Take into consideration also that this inner stimulus was brought about without force, and without deception. I did not tell you that there was a madman behind the door. On the contrary, by using the word if I frankly recognized the fact that I was offering you only a supposition. All I wanted to accomplish was to make you say what you would have done if the supposition about the madman were a real fact, leaving you to feel what anybody in the given circumstances must feel. You in turn did not force yourselves, or make yourselves accept the supposition as reality, but only as a supposition.
‘What would have happened if, instead of this frank confession, I had sworn to you that there was, really and truly, a madman behind the door?’
‘I should not have believed such an obvious deception,’ was my reaction.
‘With this special quality of if,’ explained the Director, ‘nobody obliges you to believe or not believe anything. Everything is clear, honest and above-board. You are given a question, and you are expected to answer it sincerely and definitely.
‘Consequently, the secret of the effect of if lies first of all in the fact that it does not use fear or force, or make the artist do anything. On the contrary, it reassures him through its honesty, and encourages him to have confidence in a supposed situation. That is why, in your exercise, the stimulus was produced so naturally.
‘This brings me to another quality. It arouses an inner and real activity, and does this by natural means. Because you are actors you did not give a simple answer to the question. You felt you must answer the challenge to action.
‘This important characteristic of if brings it close to one of the fundamentals of our school of acting—activity in creativeness and art.’
5
‘Some of you are eager to put what I have been telling you into immediate practice,’ said the Director today. ‘That is quite right and I am glad to fall in with your wishes. Let us apply the use of if to a role.
‘Suppose you were to play a dramatization of Chekhov’s tale about an innocent farmer who unscrewed a nut off a railroad track to use as a sinker for his fishing line. For this he was tried and severely punished. This imaginary happening will sink into the consciousness of some, but for most people it will remain a “funny story”. They will never even glimpse the tragedy of the legal and social conditions hidden behind the laughter. But the artist who is to act one of the parts in this scene cannot laugh. He must think through for himself and, most important, he must live through whatever it was that caused the author to write the story. How would you go about it?’ The Director paused.
The students were silent and thoughtful for a time.
‘In moments of doubt, when your thoughts, feelings, and imagination are silent, remember if. The author also began his work that way. He said to himself:
‘ “What would happen if a simple farmer, off on a fishing expedition, were to take a nut from a rail?” Now give yourselves the same problem and add: “What would I do if the case came up to me to judge?” ’
‘I would convict the criminal,’ I answered, without hesitation.
‘What of? On account of the sinker for his fishing line?’
‘For the theft of a nut.’
‘Of course, one shouldn’t steal,’ agreed Tortsov. ‘But can you punish a man severely for a crime of which he is entirely unconscious?’
‘He must he made to realize that he might be the cause of wrecking a whole train, killing hundreds of people,’ I retorted.
‘On account of one small nut? You will never get him to believe that,’ argued the Director.
‘The man is only making believe. He understands the nature of his act,’ said I.
‘If the man who plays the farmer has talent, he will prove to you by his acting that he is unconscious of any guilt,’ said the Director.
As the discussion went on he used every possible argument to justify the defendant, and in the end he succeeded in making me weaken a little. As soon as he noticed that, he said:
‘You felt that very same inner push which the judge himself probably experienced. If you played that part, analogous feelings would draw you close to the character.
‘To achieve this kinship between the actor and the person he is portraying add some concrete detail which will fill out the play, giving it point and absorbing action. The circumstances which are predicted on if are taken from sources near to your own feelings, and they have a powerful influence on the inner life of an actor. Once you have established this contact between your life and your part, you will
find that inner push or stimulus. Add a whole series of contingencies based on your own experience in life, and you will see how easy it will be for you sincerely to believe in the possibility of what you are called upon to do on the stage.
‘Work out an entire role in this fashion, and you will create a whole new life.
‘The feelings aroused will express themselves in the acts of this imaginary person had he been placed in the circumstances made by the play.’
‘Are they conscious or unconscious?’ I asked.
‘Make the test yourself. Go over every detail in the process and decide what is conscious, what unconscious, in its origin. You will never unravel the puzzle, because you will not even remember some of the most important moments in it. These will arise, in whole or in part, of their own accord, and will pass by unnoticed, all in the realm of the subconscious.
‘To convince yourself, ask an actor, after some great performance, how he felt while on the stage, and what he did there. He will not be able to answer because he was not aware of what he lived through, and does not remember many of the more significant moments. All you will get from him is that he felt comfortable on the stage, that he was in easy relationship to the other actors. Beyond that, he will be able to tell you nothing.
‘You will astonish him by your description of his acting. He will gradually come to realize things about his performance of which he had been entirely unconscious.
‘We may conclude from this that if is also a stimulus to the creative subconscious. Besides, it helps us to carry out another fundamental principle of our art: “unconscious creativeness through conscious technique.”
‘Up to this point I have explained the uses of if in connection with two of the main principles in our type of action. It is even more strongly bound up with a third. Our great poet Pushkin wrote about it in his unfinished article on the drama.
An Actor Prepares Page 5