‘I agree to that,’ I argued, ‘yet I still think that Dasha was not moved by any scheme of physical actions but by the suggestion that you made to her.’
‘I do not for a moment deny that,’ broke in the Director. ‘Everything depends on imaginative suggestion. But you must know just when to introduce it. Suppose you go to Dasha and ask her whether she would have been touched by my suggestion if I had made it sooner than I did, when she was playing the scene the second time, wrapping up the stick of wood without any display of feeling at all, before she felt the foundling’s little arms and legs, and kissed them, before the transformation had taken place in her own mind and the stick had been replaced by a lovely, living child. I am convinced that at that point the suggestion that that stick with a grimy rag around it was her little boy would only have wounded her sensibilities. To be sure she might have wept over the coincidence between my suggestion and the tragedy in her own life. But that weeping for one who is gone is not the weeping called for in this particular scene where sorrow for what is lost is replaced by joy in what is found.
‘Moreover, I believe that Dasha would have been repelled by the wooden stick and tried to get away from it. Her tears would have flowed freely, but quite away from the property baby, and they would have been prompted by her memories of her dead child, which is not what we needed nor what she gave us the first time she played the scene. It was only after she made the mental picture of the child that she could weep over it again as she had at first.
‘I was able to guess the right moment and throw in the suggestion that happened to coincide with her most touching memories. The result was deeply moving.’
There was, however, one more point I wanted to press, so I asked:
‘Wasn’t Dasha really in a state of hallucination while she was acting?’
‘Certainly not,’ said the Director emphatically. ‘What happened was not that she believed in the actual transformation of a wooden stick into a living child, but in the possibility of the occurrence of the play, which, if it happened to her in real life, would be her salvation. She believed in her own maternal actions, love, and all the circumstances surrounding her.
‘So you realize that this method of approach to emotions is valuable not only when you create a role but when you wish to relive a part already created. It gives you the means to recall sensations previously experienced. If it were not for them the inspired moments of an actor’s playing would flash before us once and then disappear for ever.’
10
Our lesson today was taken up by testing the sense of truth of various students. The first to be called on was Grisha. He was asked to play anything at all he liked. So he chose his usual partner, Sonya, and when they had finished the Director said: ‘What you have just done was correct and admirable from your own point of view, which is that of exceedingly clever technicians, interested only in the external perfection of a performance.
‘But my feelings could not go along with you, because what I look for in art is something natural, something organically creative, that can put human life into an inert role.
‘Your make-believe truth helps you to represent images and passions. My kind of truth helps to create the images themselves and to stir real passions. The difference between your art and mine is the same as between the two words seem and be. I must have real truth. You are satisfied with its appearance. I must have true belief. You are willing to be limited to the confidence your public has in you. As they look at you they are sure that you will execute all the established forms with perfection. They rely on your skill as they do on that of an expert acrobat. From your standpoint the spectator is merely an onlooker. For me he involuntarily becomes a witness of, and a party to, my creative work; he is drawn into the very thick of the life that he sees on the stage, and he believes in it.’
Instead of making any argument in reply, Grisha caustically quoted the poet Pushkin as having a different point of view about truth in art:
‘A host of lowly truths is dearer
Than fictions which lift us higher than ourselves.’
‘I agree with you and with Pushkin as well,’ said Tortsov, ‘because he is talking about fictions in which we can believe. It is our faith in them that lifts us. This is a strong confirmation of the point of view that on the stage everything must be real in the imaginary life of the actor. This I did not feel in your performance.’
Whereupon he began to go over the scene in detail and correct it just as he had done with me in the exercise of the burnt money. Then something happened which resulted in a long and most instructive harangue. Grisha suddenly stopped playing. His face was dark with anger, his lips and hands trembled. After wrestling with his emotions for some time, finally he blurted out:
‘For months we have been moving chairs around, shutting doors, lighting fires. That’s not art; the theatre is not a circus. There physical actions are in order. It is extremely important to be able to catch your trapeze or jump on a horse. Your life depends on your physical skill. But you cannot tell me that the great writers of the world produced their masterpieces so that their heroes would indulge in exercises of physical actions. Art is free! It needs space, and not your little physical truths. We must be free for great fights instead of crawling on the ground like beetles.’
When he had finished the Director said:
‘Your protest astonishes me. Up to now I have always considered you an actor distinguished for his external technique. Today we find suddenly, that your longings are all in the direction of the clouds. External conventions and lies—that is what clips your wings. What soars is: imagination, feeling, thought. Yet your feelings and imagination seem to be chained right down here in the auditorium.
‘Unless you are caught up in a cloud of inspiration and whirled upwards by it you, more than any other here, will feel the need of all the groundwork we have been doing. Yet you seem to fear that very thing and look upon exercises as degrading to an artist.
‘A ballerina puffs, blows, and sweats, as she goes through her necessary daily exercises before she can make her graceful flights in the evening’s performance. A singer has to spend his mornings bellowing, intoning through his nose, holding notes, developing his diaphragm and searching for new resonance in his head tones if, in the evening, he is to pour out his soul in song. No artists are above keeping their physical apparatus in order by means of necessary technical exercises.
‘Why do you set yourself up as an exception? While we are trying to form the closest kind of direct bond between our physical and spiritual natures, why do you try to get rid of the physical side altogether? But nature has refused to give you the very thing you long for: exalted feelings and experiences. Instead she has endowed you with the physical technique to show off your gifts.
‘The people who talk most about exalted things are the very ones, for the most part, who have no attributes to raise them to high levels. They talk about art and creation with false emotions, in an indistinct and involved way. True artists, on the contrary, speak in simple and comprehensible terms. Think about this and also about the fact that, in certain roles, you could become a fine actor and a useful contributor to art.’
After Grisha, Sonya was tested. I was surprised to see that she did all the simple exercises extremely well. The Director praised her and then he handed her a paper-cutter and suggested that she stab herself with it. As soon as she smelled tragedy in the air she got up on her stilts and at the climax she brought out such a tremendous amount of noise that we laughed.
The Director said to her:
‘In the comedy part you wove a delightful pattern and I believed in you. But in the strong, dramatic places you struck a false note. Evidently your sense of truth is one-sided. It is sensitive to comedy and unformed on the dramatic side. Both you and Grisha should find your real place in the theatre. It is extremely important, in our art, for each actor to find his particular type.’
11
Today it was Vanya’s turn to be t
ested. He played the exercise of the burnt money with Maria and me. I felt that he had never done the first half as well as this time. He amazed me by his sense of proportion and convinced me again of his very real talent.
The Director praised him, but he went on:
‘Why’, said he, ‘do you exaggerate truth to such an undesirable degree in the death scene? You have cramps, nausea, groans, horrible grimaces and gradual paralysis. You seem, at this point, to be indulging in naturalism for its own sake. You were more interested in external, visual memories of the dissolution of a human body.
‘Now in Hauptmann’s play of Hannele, naturalism has its place. It is used for the purpose of throwing the fundamental spiritual theme of the play into high relief. As a means to an end, we can accept that. Otherwise there is no need of dragging things out of real life on to the stage which had much better be discarded.
‘From this we can conclude that not every type of truth can be transferred to the stage. What we use there is truth transformed into a poetical equivalent by creative imagination.’
‘Exactly how do you define this?’ asked Grisha, somewhat bitterly.
‘I shall not undertake to formulate a definition for it,’ said the Director. ‘I’ll leave that to scholars. All I can do is to help you feel what it is. Even to do that requires great patience, for I shall devote our whole course to it. Or, to be more exact, it will appear by itself after you have studied our whole system of acting and after you yourselves have made the experiment of initiating, clarifying, transforming simple everyday human realities into crystals of artistic truth. This does not happen all in a minute. You absorb what is essential and discard whatever is superfluous. You find a beautiful form and expression, appropriate to the theatre. By doing this with the aid of your intuition, talent, and taste you will achieve a simple, comprehensible result.’
The next student to be tested was Maria. She played the scene that Dasha did with the baby. She did it both beautifully and quite differently.
At first she showed an extraordinary amount of sincerity in her joy at finding the child. It was like having a real live doll to play with. She danced around with it, wrapped it up, unwrapped it, kissed it, caressed it, forgetting entirely that all she held was a stick of wood. Then suddenly the baby ceased to respond. At first she looked at him, fixedly, for a long time, trying to understand the reason for it. The expression on her face changed. As surprise was gradually replaced by terror, she became more concentrated, and moved farther and farther away from the child. When she had gone a certain distance she turned to stone, a figure of tragic suspense. That was all. Yet how much there was in it of faith, youth, womanliness, true drama! How delicately sensitive was her first encounter with death!
‘Every bit of that was artistically true,’ exclaimed the Director with feeling. ‘You could believe in it all because it was based on carefully selected elements taken from real life. She took nothing wholesale. She took just what was necessary. No more, no less. Maria knows how to see what is fine and she has a sense of proportion. Both of these are important qualities.’
When we asked him how it was that a young, inexperienced actress could give such a perfect performance his reply was:
‘It comes mostly from natural talent but especially from an exceptionally keen sense of truth.’
At the end of the lesson he summed up:
‘I have told you all that I can, at present, about the sense of truth, falseness and faith on the stage. Now we come to the question of how to develop and regulate this important gift of nature.
‘There will be many opportunities, because it will accompany us at every step and phase of our work whether it be at home, on the stage, at rehearsal, or in public. This sense must penetrate and check everything that the actor does and that the spectator sees. Every little exercise, whether internal or external, must be done under its supervision and approval.
‘Our only concern is that all we do should be in the direction of developing and strengthening this sense. It is a difficult task, because it is so much easier to lie when you are on the stage than to speak and act the truth. You will need a great deal of attention and concentration to aid the proper growth of your sense of truth and to fortify it.
‘Avoid falseness, avoid everything that is beyond your powers as yet and especially avoid everything that runs counter to nature, logic, and common sense! That engenders deformity, violence, exaggeration and lies. The more often they get an innings, the more demoralizing it is for your sense of truth. Therefore avoid the habit of falsifying. Do not let the reeds choke the tender flow of truth. Be merciless in rooting out of yourself all tendency to exaggerated, mechanical acting: dispense with throes.
‘A constant elimination of these superfluities will establish a special process which is what I shall mean when you hear me cry: Cut ninety per cent.!’
CHAPTER NINE
EMOTION MEMORY
1
Our work began today by going over the exercise with the madman. We were delighted because we had not been doing exercises of this sort.
We played it with increased vitality, which was not surprising because each one of us had learned what to do and how to do it. We were so sure of ourselves we even swaggered a bit. When Vanya frightened us we threw ourselves in the opposite direction, as before. The difference here, however, lay in the fact that we were prepared for the sudden alarm. For that reason, our general rush was much more clearly defined, and its effect was much stronger.
I repeated exactly what I used to do. I found myself under the table, only I was clutching a large book instead of an ash tray. The others did about the same. Sonya, for instance, ran into Dasha the first time we ever did this scene and accidentally dropped a pillow. This time she did not collide with her but let the pillow fall anyway, in order to have to pick it up.
Imagine our amazement when both Tortsov and Rakhmanov told us that, whereas our playing of this exercise used to be direct, sincere, fresh and true, today it was false, insincere and affected. We were dismayed at such an unexpected criticism. We insisted that we really felt what we were doing.
‘Of course you were feeling something,’ said the Director. ‘If you were not you would be dead. The point is what were you feeling? Let us try to disentangle things and to compare your former with your present acting of this exercise.
‘There can be no question but that you preserved the whole staging, the movements, external actions, the sequence and every little detail of grouping, to an amazingly accurate degree. One could easily be led to think that you had photographed the set. Therefore you have proved that you have remarkably keen memories for the external, factual side of a play.
‘Yet, was the way you stood around and grouped yourselves of such great importance? To me, as a spectator, what was going on inside of you was of much greater interest. Those feelings, drawn from our actual experience, and transferred to our part, are what give life to the play. You did not give those feelings. All external production is formal, cold, and pointless if it is not motivated from within. Therein lies the difference between your two performances. In the beginning, when I made the suggestion about the madman, all of you, without exception, became concentrated each on your own problem of personal safety, and only after that did you begin to act. That was the right and logical process,—the inner experience came first and was then embodied in an external form. Today, on the contrary, you were so pleased with your acting that you never thought about anything except going over and copying all the externals of the exercise. The first time there was a deathly silence—today, it was all jollity and excitement. You were all busy getting things ready: Sonya with her pillow, Vanya with his lampshade, and Kostya with a book instead of an ash tray.’
‘The property man forgot the ash tray,’ I said.
‘Did you have it prepared in advance the first time you played the exercise? Did you know that Vanya was going to yell and frighten you?’ asked the Director, with a certain amount of irony. ‘I
t’s very queer! How did you foresee today that you were going to need that book? It ought to have come into your hand accidentally. It’s a pity that that accidental quality could not be repeated today. Another detail: originally, you never relaxed your gaze on the door, behind which the madman was supposed to be. Today you were instantly taken up with our presence. You were interested to see what impression your acting was making on us. Instead of hiding from the crazy man you were showing off to us. The first time you were impelled to act by your inner feelings and your intuition, your human experience. But just now you went through those motions almost mechanically. You repeated a successful rehearsal instead of recreating a new, living scene. Instead of drawing from your memory of life you took your material from the theatrical archives of your mind. What happened inside of you in the beginning naturally resulted in action. Today that action was inflated and exaggerated in order to make an effect.
‘The same thing happened to you as to the young man who came to ask V. V. Samoilov whether or not he should go on the stage.
‘ “Go out,” said he to the young man. “Then come back and say over again what you have just told me.”
‘The young man came and repeated what he had said the first time, but he was incapable of reliving the same feelings.
‘However, neither my comparison to the young man nor your lack of success today should upset you. It is all in the day’s work, and I shall explain to you why. The unexpected is often a most effective lever in creative work. During your first performance of the exercise that quality was obvious. You were genuinely excited by the injection of the idea of a possible lunatic. In this recent repetition the unexpectedness had worn off, because you knew ahead all about it, everything was familiar and clear, even the external form through which you pour your activity. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem worth while, did it, to reconsider the whole scene afresh, to let yourselves be guided by your emotions? A ready-made external form is a terrible temptation to an actor. It is not surprising that novices like you should have felt it and at the same time that you should have proved that you have a good memory for external action. As for emotion memory: there was no sign of it today.’
An Actor Prepares Page 16