With his insights into the processes of acting and directing, Konstantin Stanislavski forged a definitive position in the development of twentieth-century theatre, laying the groundwork for many innovators. With Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, he founded the Moscow Art Theatre in 1897, through which he developed and documented a system of acting as a way of creating believable roles on stage. This process depends on the concept of the actor seeming to transform into another being before the spectator. Like naturalism, these notions of believability were innovative at the time. They were a reaction to the star system and the Romantic drama that existed before Stanislavski, which highlighted individual actors and their melodramatic techniques while simultaneously marginalising the text and other cast members. The acting process of recreating a fictional character outlined by Stanislavski begins with the self. The actor has to search in his or her subconscious, through a technique called ‘emotion memory’ for a personal experience equivalent to that which the character must depict on stage. The actor uses the ‘magic if’ to suspend disbelief and to ask what he or she would do in such a situation. Beyond the self, Stanislavski’s meticulous attention to text gives the actor a method of dissecting and compartmentalising text into units and objectives. Stanislavski’s discoveries are partly significant for his later admission and redress of previous failings and limitations, exacerbated no doubt by his longevity and the radical changes in Russian society and culture during this time. Stanislavski’s ideas evolved to place more emphasis on the actor’s physical actions than on their emotional life, a system known as the Method of Physical Actions (MOPA), though he never completed research into this to his satisfaction. His assertion was that actions can be fixed, whereas emotions are temperamental and unreliable. The work of Jerzy Grotowski as well as a recent general growing interest in physical approaches to performing led by exponents such as Eugenio Barba, have all confirmed the significance of this shift in Stanislavski’s later years. His work provided a systematic base for students such as Evgeny Vakhtangov and Vsevolod Meyerhold to depart from, and for Lee Strasberg to develop (though many would say misconstrue) into the Method via students of Stanislavski such as Richard Boleslavsky, who went to work in the USA. From the RCTP

Image: Konstantin Stanislavski in 1938