The System from Moscow

In the summer of 1897 two men sat down for lunch at the Slavyansky Bazar, a restaurant in Moscow, and by both their accounts did not get up until the following morning. Konstantin Stanislavski was an amateur actor and director from a wealthy merchant family. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko was a playwright and teacher. Between them, over something like eighteen hours, they planned a new theatre. The length of the lunch comes from their own memoirs, and it has grown no shorter in the retelling, but the theatre was real. The Moscow Art Theatre opened in 1898.

What they were against is easier to describe than what they were for. Russian theatre of the time ran on stars, stock gestures and plays rehearsed in a few days. Actors declaimed to the audience rather than speaking to each other. Scenery was generic. The new company rehearsed for months, treated the ensemble as more important than any single performer, and wanted the life on stage to look like life.

Its first great success came that December with The Seagull, a play by Anton Chekhov that had failed badly in St Petersburg two years earlier. Played quietly, with pauses and half-finished sentences, it worked. The gull became the theatre's emblem, and Chekhov its house dramatist.

The productions were admired. Stanislavski was not satisfied. In My Life in Art he describes a moment, on holiday in Finland around 1906, when he realised that a part he had played many times had gone dead: he was reproducing the outward signs of a performance he no longer felt. This is his own account, written years later and shaped to introduce what followed, but the problem it names is one every working actor recognises. Inspiration comes and goes. The question was whether anything could be done to make it come more often.

His answer, worked out over the next three decades, was the system. The actor begins with the given circumstances: who I am, where I am, what has just happened, what the play tells me and what it leaves for me to decide. Then the magic "if": not "I am Hamlet" but "what would I do if my father had been murdered and my mother had married the killer?" Then the objective, what I want from the other person in this moment, ideally phrased as an active verb. Objectives link into a through-line that runs the length of the play, towards what he called the superobjective, the thing the character wants most.

None of that asks the actor to feel anything directly. Feeling, in the system, is the by-product of doing something with conviction under particular circumstances. But in his middle years Stanislavski also borrowed from the French psychologist Théodule Ribot the idea of affective or emotion memory: recall a real experience from your own life, through its sensory details, and the feeling attached to it can be revived and lent to the part.

It was this part of the system that travelled furthest, partly by accident. When the Moscow Art Theatre toured America in the 1920s, some of its actors stayed and began to teach. When the first book of the system appeared in English as An Actor Prepares in 1936, it covered mainly the inner work. The volumes on the body, the voice and physical action came out in English only in 1949 and 1961.

Meanwhile Stanislavski had moved on. In his last years he grew wary of emotion memory, which he found unreliable and sometimes harmful to the actors who dug for it. He worked instead on what came to be called the method of physical actions: build a precise score of things the character does, carry it out truthfully, and let the feeling arrive on its own. He died in 1938 still revising.

The irony is that he is remembered as the champion of emotional truth by people who learned only half of what he taught. He would probably not have minded the incompleteness. He called his work a system, not a gospel, and spent his life demonstrating that it was never finished.