Konstantin Stanislavski 1863–1938

Stanislavski was born Konstantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev into a wealthy textile

family. He spent much of his youth making theatre: creating puppet shows,
circus acts and music. He briefly attended the Imperial Dramatic School
and considered opera as a career, but finally committed to drama.
Embarking on his career as an actor, he adopted the stage name,
Stanislavski, and collaborated on establishing the Society of Art and
Literature in 1888, playing his first major role at twenty-five. His early
acting attempts were based on external imitation of actor role models and
personal vanity. Much of the acting of the time was stereotypical,
poorly rehearsed and within a star-based theatre focused on vaudeville and
melodramas. His lessons in the need for ease, control and sense of truth
were hard-learned, but he set out ‘to destroy the ancient hokum of the
theatre’ (My Life in Art:306) and revolutionise both the nature of theatre and of acting.
In 1898, he and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, a prominent writer, critic
and teacher, set up the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavski was to be actor
and overall director, and the plays were to have serious and psychological
content: Chekhov’s The Seagull was in the opening season and was groundbreaking in its
rounded characters, subtlety, and inner life. Stanislavski
explored the psychology of the writing, not through an organic rehearsal
process, but through a production plan with naturalistic visual detail and a
soundscape. Since the actors had no psycho-physical technique, he told
them what to do autocratically, and this persisted through other Chekhov
productions. Theatre production was changing but acting technique clearly
wasn’t.
After Stanislavski endured the despotic treatment himself, playing
Brutus in Nemirovich-Danchenko’s production of Julius Caesar in 1903, he
turned his focus on how the actors themselves could make creative
contributions, and began the process of detailed company study of each
play. He also set up the Theatrical Studio in 1905 to explore psychology
and physicality and new theatre techniques. Under Vsevelod Meyerhold it
concentrated on the physical but there were financial problems and the
first Revolution forced it to close.
In 1906, depressed over the state of his theatre and the inadequacies of
his own acting, he set about examining all his past observation and
experience to arrive at the new approach to acting required by his search for
theatrical truth. He looked at all the natural processes that create
spontaneity and life onstage and concluded that the way to a creative mood and inspiration lay
in freedom and ease, concentration, imagination, and belief in the action. He proposed work
on the inner and outer self, and work on the role and play through the round-the-table analysis
he’d already
initiated. By 1910, he’d identified some key elements of a process: given
circumstances, units and objectives, emotion memory, inner motive forces,
radiation and communion. 1911 saw the legendary productions of The
Brothers Karamazov and Hamlet. Outstanding experimentation took place in
the First Studio of 1912, involving the teacher and friend, Leopold Sulerzhitski, who
introduced Hatha yoga into training; Michael Chekhov, later to become a teacher and
director; and Yevgeny Vakhtangov.
In 1923-4, the MAT toured the US where people were eager for knowledge
of Stanislavski’s approach, and two company members, Richard Boleslavski
and Maria Ouspenskaya, remained behind to establish the American Laboratory Theatre and
training in the Stanislavski process, which inspired the creation of the Group Theatre in 1931.
By this time, Stanislavski was emphasising given circumstances and the right actions as a
route to the inner life.
His production of Dead Souls in 1928 led him to question long periods
of analytical discussion. He moved towards his final stage of development
with its emphasis on ‘analysis through action’, improvisation of a text, and
uncovering the physical and psychological actions to fulfil objectives. This ‘method of
physical action’ was now the means of creating ‘the life of the human spirit’ and feeling in
acting.
He experimented with this at the Opera-Dramatic Studio with a selected group of actors
between 1935–38, and it was during this innovative work that he died of a heart attack in
August 1938.