‘It can’t be very easy to find such an irresistible super-objective,’ someone said.
‘It is impossible to do it without inner preparation. The usual practice, however, is quite different. The director sits in his study and goes over a play. At almost the first rehearsal he announces the main theme to the actors. They try to follow his direction. Some, by accident, may get hold of the inner essence of the play. Others will approach it in an external, formal way. They may use his theme at first, to give the right direction to their work but later they ignore it. They either follow the pattern of the production, the “business’, or they go after the plot and a mechanical rendering of the action and the lines.
‘Naturally, a super-objective that leads to such results has lost all its significance. An actor must find the main theme for himself. If, for any reason, one is given to him by someone else, he must filter it through his own being until his own emotions are affected by it.
‘To find the main theme, is it sufficient to employ our usual methods of psycho-technique for bringing about a proper inner creative state, and then add the extra touch which leads to the region of the subconscious?
‘In spite of the great value I lay on that preparatory work, I must confess that I do not think even the inner state it creates is capable of undertaking the search for the super-objective. You cannot feel around for it outside of the play itself. So you must, even in some small degree, feel the atmosphere of your make-believe existence in the play and then pour these feelings into your already prepared inner state. Just as yeast breeds fermentation, this sense of life in a play will bring your creative faculties to boiling point.’
‘How do we introduce yeast into our creative state?’ said I, puzzled. ‘How can we make ourselves feel the life of the play before we have even studied it?’
Grisha confirmed me. He said, ‘Of course, you must study the play and its main theme first.’
‘Without any preparation, à froid?’ the Director broke in. ‘I have already explained to you what that results in, and I have protested against that type of approach to a play or a part.
‘My main objection, however, is to putting an actor in an impossible position. He must not be forcibly fed on other people’s ideas, conceptions, emotion memories or feelings. Each person has to live through his own experiences. It is important that they be individual to him and analogous to those of the person he is to portray. An actor cannot be fattened like a capon. His own appetite must be tempted. When that is aroused he will demand the material he needs for simple actions; he will then absorb what is given him and make it his own. The director’s job is to get the actor to ask and look for the details that will put life into his part. He will not need these details for an intellectual analysis of his part. He will want them for the carrying out of actual objectives.
‘Besides, any information and material which he does not need immediately to pursue his aims only clutters up his mind and interferes with his work. He should be careful to avoid this, especially during the early period of creativeness.’
‘Then what can we do?’
‘Yes,’ Grisha said, echoing Vanya. ‘You tell us we may not study the play and yet we must know it!’
‘Again I must remind you that the work we are discussing is based on the creation of lines formed from small, accessible, physical objectives, small truths, belief in them, which are taken from the play itself and which give to it a living atmosphere.
‘Before you have made a detailed study of the play or your part, execute some one small action (I do not care how slight it is), which you do with sincerity and truthfulness.
‘Let us say that one of the persons in the play has to come into a room. Can you walk into a room?’ asked Tortsov.
‘I can,’ answered Vanya promptly.
‘All right then, walk in. But let me assure you that you cannot do it until you know who you are, where you came from, what room you are entering, who lives in the house, and a mass of other given circumstances that must influence your action. To fill all that in so that you can enter the room as you should, will oblige you to learn something about the life of the play.
‘Moreover, the actor has to work out these suppositions for himself and give them his own interpretation. If the director tries to force them on him the result is violence. In my way of doing, this cannot happen because the actor asks the director for what he needs as he needs it. This is an important condition for free, individual creativeness.
‘An artist must have full use of his own spiritual, human material because that is the only stuff from which he can fashion a living soul for his part. Even if his contribution is slight, it is the better because it is his own.
‘Suppose, as the plot unfolds, when you come into that room you meet a creditor and that you are far behind on the payment of your debt to him. What would you do?’
‘I don’t know,’ exclaimed Vanya.
‘You have to know, otherwise you cannot play the part. You will just say your lines mechanically and act with pretence instead of truth. You must put yourself into some position analogous to that of your character. If necessary, you will add new suppositions. Try to remember when you yourself were ever in a similar position and what you did. If you never were in one, create a situation in your imagination. Sometimes you can live more intensely, more keenly, in your imagination than in real life. If you make all your preparations for your work in a human, real way, not mechanically; if you are logical and coherent in your purposes and actions, and if you consider all the attending conditions of the life of your part, I do not doubt for a moment that you will know just how to act. Compare what you have decided on with the plot of the play and you will feel a certain kinship with it, to a great or small degree. You will come to feel that, given the circumstances, the opinions, the social position of the character you are playing, you would be bound to act as he did.
‘That closeness to your part we call perception of yourself in the part and of the part in you.
‘Suppose you go through the whole play, all of its scenes, bits, objectives, and that you find the right actions and accustom yourself to executing them from start to finish. You will then have established an external form of action which we call the “physical life of a part”. To whom do these actions belong, to you or to the part?’
‘To me, of course,’ said Vanya.
‘The physical aspect is yours and the actions too. But the objectives, their inner foundation and sequence, all the given circumstances are mutual. Where do you leave off and where does your part begin?’
‘That’s impossible to say,’ answered Vanya, perplexed.
‘All you must remember is that the actions you have worked out are not simply external. They are based on inner feelings; they are reinforced by your belief in them. Inside of you, parallel to the line of physical actions, you have an unbroken line of emotions verging on the subconscious. You cannot follow the line of external action sincerely and directly and not have the corresponding emotions.’
Vanya made a gesture of despair.
‘I see your head is swimming already. That is a good sign, because it shows that so much of your role has already become mixed into your own self that you cannot possibly tell where to draw the line between you and your part. Because of that state you will feel yourself closer than ever to your part.
‘If you go through a whole play that way you will have a real conception of its inner life. Even when that life is still in the embryonic stage, it is vital. Moreover, you can speak for your character in your own person. This is of utmost importance as you develop your work systematically and in detail. Everything that you add from an inner source will find its rightful place. Therefore, you should bring yourself to the point of taking hold of a new role concretely, as if it were your own life. When you sense that real kinship to your part, you will be able to pour feelings into your inner creative state, which borders on the subconscious, and boldly begin the study of the play and its main theme.
‘You will now realize what a long, arduous task it is to find a broad, deep, stirring super-objective and through line of action that will be capable of leading you to the threshold of the subconscious and carrying you off into its depths. Also you see now how important it is, during your search, to sense what the author of the play had in his mind and to find in yourself a responsive chord.
‘How many themes must be cut back so that others will grow! How many times must we aim and shoot before we hit the bull’s eye!
‘Every real artist should make it his object, while he is on the stage, to centre his entire creative concentration on just the super-objective and through line of action, in their broadest and deepest meaning. If they are right all the rest will be brought about subconsciously, miraculously, by nature. This will happen on condition that the actor recreates his work, each time he repeats his part, with sincerity, truth and directness. It is only on that condition that he will be able to free his art from mechanical and stereotyped acting, from “tricks” and all forms of artificiality. If he accomplishes this he will have real people and real life all around him on the stage, and living art which has been purified from all debasing elements.’
6
‘Let us go still farther!’ exclaimed the Director as he began the lesson. ‘Imagine some IDEAL ARTIST who has decided to devote himself to a single, large purpose in life: to elevate and entertain the public by a high form of art; to expound the hidden, spiritual beauties in the writings of poetic geniuses. He will give new renderings of already famous plays and parts, in ways calculated to bring out their more essential qualities. His whole life will be consecrated to this high cultural mission.
‘Another type of artist may use his personal success to convey his own ideas and feelings to the masses. Great people may have a variety of high purposes.
‘In their cases the super-objective of any one production will be merely a step in the fulfilment of an important life purpose, which we shall call a supreme objective and its execution a supreme through line of action.
‘To illustrate what I mean I shall tell you of an incident from my own life.
‘A long time ago, when our company was on tour in St. Petersburg, I was kept late in the theatre by an unsuccessful, badly prepared rehearsal. I was upset by the attitude of some of my colleagues. I was tired and angry as I left. Suddenly I found myself in a mass of people in the square before the theatre. Bonfires were blazing, people were sitting on campstools, on the snow half asleep, some were huddled in a kind of tent that protected them from the cold and wind. The extraordinary number of people—there were thousands of them—were waiting for morning and the box office to open.
‘I was deeply stirred. To appreciate what these people were doing I had to ask myself: “What event, what glorious prospect, what amazing phenomenon, what world-famous genius could induce me to shiver night after night out in the cold, especially when this sacrifice would not even give me the desired ticket, but only a coupon entitling me to stand in line on the chance of obtaining a seat in the theatre?”
‘I could not answer the question because I could not find any happening that could persuade me to risk my health, perhaps even my life, for its sake. Think what the theatre meant to those people! We should be deeply conscious of that. What an honour for us that we can bring such a high order of happiness to thousands of people. I was instantly seized with the desire to set a supreme goal for myself, the carrying out of which would constitute a supreme through line of action and in which all minor objectives would be absorbed.
‘The danger would lie in letting one’s attention centre for too long on some small, personal problem.’
‘Then what would happen?’
‘The same thing that happens to a child when he ties a weight on the end of a string and winds it up on a stick. The more it winds the shorter the string becomes and the smaller the circle it describes. Finally it strikes the stick. But suppose another child pushes his stick into the orbit of the weight. Its momentum will cause it to wind its string on the second stick and the first child’s game is ruined.
‘We actors have a tendency to become sidetracked in the same way, and to put our energy into problems aside from our main purpose. That, of course, is dangerous and has a deteriorating influence on our work.’
7
All during these recent lessons I had been rather dismayed at hearing so much reasoning about the subconscious. The subconscious is inspiration. How can you reason about it? I was even more shocked by being obliged to piece the subconscious together out of small bits and crumbs. So I went to the Director and spoke my mind.
‘What makes you think’, said he, ‘that the subconscious belongs altogether to inspiration? Without stopping to think, instantly, give me the name of some noun!’
Here he turned abruptly to Vanya, who said, ‘A shaft.’
‘Why a shaft, why not a table, which is standing in front of you, or a chandelier, hanging overhead?’
‘I don’t know,’answered Vanya.
‘Neither do I,’ said Tortsov. ‘Moreover, I know that no one knows. Only your subconscious can tell why that particular object came into the foreground of your mind.’
Here he put another question to Vanya: ‘What are you thinking about, and what do you feel?’
‘I?’ Vanya hesitated, then he ran his fingers through his hair, stood up abruptly and then sat down, rubbed his wrists on his knees, picked up a scrap of paper from the floor and folded it up, all this in preparation of his reply.
Tortsov laughed heartily.
‘Let me see you repeat consciously every little movement you just made before you were ready to answer my question. Only your subconscious could solve the puzzle of why you went through all those motions.’
Thereupon he turned back to me and said, ‘Did you notice how everything Vanya did was lacking in inspiration yet contained a great deal of subconsciousness? So, too, you will find it to some degree in the simplest act, desire, problem, feeling, thought, communication or adjustment. We live very close to it ordinarily. We find it in every step we take. Unfortunately we cannot adapt all of these moments of subconsciousness to our uses, and also there are fewer of them where we need them most, when we are on the stage. Just try to find any in a well-polished, ingrained, hackneyed production. There will be nothing in it but hard and fast, established habits, conscious and mechanical.’
‘But mechanical habits are partly subconscious,’ insisted Grisha.
‘Yes, but not the kind of subconsciousness we are discussing,’ replied Tortsov. ‘We need a creative, human, subconscious and the place to look for it above all is in a stirring objective and its through line of action. Their consciousness and subconsciousness are subtly and marvellously blended. When an actor is completely absorbed by some profoundly moving objective, so that he throws his whole being passionately into its execution, he reaches a state that we call inspiration. In it almost everything he does is subconscious and he has no conscious realization of how he accomplishes his purpose.
‘So you see, these periods of subconsciousness are scattered all through our lives. Our problem is to remove whatever interferes with them and to strengthen any elements that facilitate their functioning.’
Our lesson was short today as the Director was appearing in a performance in the evening.
8
‘Now let us have a check up,’ proposed the Director as he came into class today, for our last lesson.
‘After nearly a year’s work, each of you must have formed a definite conception of the dramatic, creative process. Let us try to compare that conception with the one you had when you came here.
‘Maria, do you remember searching for a brooch in the folds of the curtain here because the continuance of your work in our school depended on your finding it? Can you recall how hard you tried, how you ran around and pretended to play despair, and how you enjoyed it? Would that kind of acting satisfy you now?’
Maria thought for
a moment and then an amused smile broke over her face. Finally she shook her head, evidently entertained by the memory of her former naïve ways.
‘You see, you laugh. And why? Because you used to play “in general”, trying to reach your goal by a direct onslaught. It is not surprising that all you accomplished was to give an external and wrong picture of the feelings of the person you were portraying.
‘Now remember what you experienced when you played the scene with the foundling infant, and you found yourself rocking a dead baby. Then tell me, when you contrast your inner mood in that scene with your former exaggeration, whether you are satisfied with what you have learned here during this course.’
Maria was thoughtful. Her expression was first serious and then sombre; there was a look of terror in her eyes for an instant, then she nodded her head affirmatively.
‘Now you are no longer laughing,’ said Tortsov. ‘Indeed, the very memory of that scene has almost brought you to tears. Why? Because in creating that scene you followed an entirely different path. You did not make a direct assault on the feelings of your spectators. You planted the seeds and let them come to fruition. You followed the laws of creative nature.
‘But you have to know how to induce that dramatic state. Technique alone cannot create an image that you can believe in and to which both you and your spectators can give yourselves up completely. So now you realize that creativeness is not a technical trick. It is not an external portrayal of images and passions as you used to think.
‘Our type of creativeness is the conception and birth of a new being—the person in the part. It is a natural act similar to the birth of a human being.
‘If you follow each thing that happens in an actor’s soul during the period in which he is living into his part, you will admit that my comparison is right. Each dramatic and artistic image, created on the stage, is unique and cannot be repeated, just as in nature.
An Actor Prepares Page 30