My response to Konstantin Stanislavsky by Bella Merlin

After reading this book I understand that Stanislavsky’s system was made up of many different elements, which all come together through rehearsal to create an effective and skilled performance. He came up with his system because he felt that theatre in Russia was getting worse, becoming meaningless and had to be improved. In the late 19th century, theatre was dominated by the ‘star system’ where the audience expected to see the most famous actors on stage. It took Stanislavsky a long time to finish his system, not before he made many mistakes and had done endless rehearsals and performances. He got things wrong first, like when he went through his ‘director dictator’ phase, in which he believed the actors shouldn’t contribute anything and it was all down to the director to tell the actors what to do.

Stanislavsky used the given circumstances in the script to begin to shape the play and the characters. To find the given circumstances you have to ask questions about the character’s past, their situation in the play and their relationship to the other characters. You can find the answers to the questions by searching the script for any clues. Once you’ve found the given circumstances of your character, you can begin to build around them.

Stanislavsky uses the idea of the fourth wall (the invisible wall between the audience and the stage). Stanislavsky felt the actor’s attention should be on the stage and not in the audience, as Stanislavsky was trying to get away from the ‘star system’. I think having this invisible wall makes the action on stage more truthful. However, Stanislavsky still felt that the audience had a vital part to play in live performances. He developed the idea of the fourth wall by using exercises that would improve the actor’s concentration. One of these exercises was abut shifting circles of attention.

Units and objectives are a vital part of Stanislavsky’s system. A play has to be broken down into units, so the actors can more easily understand the play and begin to colour the units with imagination. Once broken down into units, the actors can then find their objectives, which can be found by asking the question ‘what do I want?’ These objectives have to be physical, but should also contain a psychological component. The objective has to be something the actor can believe in, but still needs to be relevant to the character. When Stanislavsky’s actors practiced their objectives, it was an active and emotive process, to avoid it becoming a dry, intellectual process.

The super objective is the overall outcome of the play. It is the actor’s main goal, which all their objectives should fit into. It must unite the actors, the director and the playwright. The  super-objective must encompass the play’s main theme and excite the actor’s inner motive forces. The super-objective is important because if the actors know where they are heading, they can respond more easily if something goes wrong on stage, for example another actor forgets their line. Once the super objective has been carefully identified and all the preparation has been done, that preparation can fall away so that the actors can play ‘in the moment’, the whole time keeping the super objective in mind. Directors often tell their actors to ‘cut 90%’.

One of the components to Stanislavsky’s system is emotional memory. This is where the actor takes an experience from their own life, where they felt the same emotion which is needed from them by their character. The actor shouldn’t try to recreate the emotion, but use colours or some sort of stimulus, to provoke the emotion during the scene. Using emotional memory brings the performances to life and adds depth to the character.

Stanislavsky always used ‘if’ as a tool to make the actors think ‘what would I do if I was in this situation?’ Stanislavsky used ‘if’ to stimulate believable actions from the actors. This technique helps the actor to put themselves in the characters shoes and understand the character’s actions. To practice asking the ‘if’ question, Stanislavsky got his actors to do lots of different improvisations, asking what they would do in different situations.

Stanislavsky uses the idea of ‘grasp’ to engage and entertain the audience.  Stanislavsky said that in order to get the audience in your grasp, the actor has to have a great sense of inner activity. Actors have to be careful not to mistake ‘grasp’ for muscular tension, so by doing exercises in rehearsals, actors can practice their ‘grasp’ on other members of the cast. Actors practice this by communicating with one another by receiving and emitting rays, and paying attention to the physical sensations that arise. By doing this exercise the actors can begin to realise the different feelings between real ‘grasp’ and muscular tension.

I think that Stanislavsky’s method of actor training is very effective. It is complex because it involves so many different components and each one has to be considered and worked on during a rehearsal process. For his system to be truly effective, I think that every component has to be included and nothing can be forgotten. His exercises help focus and relax actors, improve their concentration and work on physicality and imagination. Without Stanislavsky’s system, theatre would be very different to what it is today, because so many actors structure their work around his methods.