General principles of active analysis

For the Stanislavski system, and particularly for its later discoveries

related to the new rehearsal method – active analysis of the play and the

role – to be accepted in theatre practice, we need to examine what led

Stanislavski to change the established format of rehearsals.

It is well known that the Moscow Art Theatre introduced the so-called

‘table’ period as the basis of the initial work on a play, that is, analysing

the play at the table before getting it up on its feet in rehearsal.

During this period the company, under the guidance of the director, would

undertake a scrupulous analysis of the play: the inner motives, the

subtext, the relationships, the characters’ personalities, the

throughaction, and the supertask, etc. This work allowed the actor to get

an in-depth understanding of the play, determining its ideas and artistic

tasks. Above all, the ‘table’ work compelled the actor to delve deep into
the character’s inner world, the very foundation of the process of creating

the show.

See below the chapter ‘The supertask’ (ed. note).

See below the chapter ‘Throughaction’ (ed. note).

As he perfected his creative method, developing and deepening the

system, Stanislavski became aware of a number of disadvantages to

‘table’ work.

One was the increasing passivity of the actors, who instead of actively

searching for a way to get closer to their roles from the very start, relied

on the director to show them the way.

And indeed, during a lengthy period ‘at the table’ it is the director who

tends to take on an active role: explaining, describing, firing the actors’

imagination, while they become accustomed to the director resolving the

play- and character-related problems for them all.

Performers are often quite happy for the director to act out all the roles at

the start of the ‘table’ rehearsals. Working this way, actors inevitably grow
passive and follow the director’s instructions, no questions asked.

This, naturally, disrupts a creative process where the actor is a conscious

creator.

There is a particular thread running throughout Stanislavski’s life: the

dream of a fully conscious actor, an actor-creator, capable of interpreting

the play independently and of taking eNective actions in the play’s given

circumstances. When he first started, Stanislavski was delighted to find

his actors malleable. But later he realised that this very ‘malleability’

reduced their initiative, that the actor’s inertia was a deadly evil in art.

Stanislavski declared war on the actor’s passivity, in whatever form it

took: in the individual’s work on a role, or in the work of the company as a

whole, in rehearsals, or in the actual performance. But whilst Stanislavski

placed high demands on the actors, the tasks he put to the director were

even more challenging.

It is quite natural that at the start of rehearsals the director is better

prepared than the actors. The director must not only have thought about
the content of the play, but must also have pictured the casting

possibilities for each role, and considered all the technical resources at

their disposal.

The director must visualise the entire production, organise the process of

rehearsals, and have a clear idea of the direction in which to steer the

company as they create the show. But being prepared does not mean that

directors should impose their creative will on performers. They must

inspire each individual actor as well as the company as a whole. By

setting up certain conditions, they must enable each actor to feel a

personal responsibility for their role, to be as active as possible.

Throughout his artistic life, Stanislavski warned directors against

imposing their will on the actor, even in the first read-through, since he

believed that even at that stage there could be a risk of imposing certain

inflections, adaptations and colours on the actors.

See Book Two, the chapter on ‘Adaptations’ (ed. note).

The more cultivated the director, the greater their life experience, the

deeper their knowledge, the easier it is for them to help the actor. But the

actor can only receive concrete help when the director has previously

studied all the inner workings of the play’s action, the nature of the

characters’ relationships, their interactions, their inner worlds and their

dispositions revealed as they strive to fulfil the supertask.

Unquestionably, the director must be ready for the first rehearsal, that is,

they must have a clear idea of what they want to bring to light in the play.

But it is also perfectly natural for the director’s ideas to be enriched by the

actors’ contributions during the course of rehearsals. Naturally, as they

work, the actors must familiarise themselves with the period in which the

action of the play is set, its iconography, literary and critical studies of the

play, and so on.

Stanislavski said that directors must avoid introducing this kind of

material to the actors in the first days of rehearsals, and do it only after

the actors have familiarised themselves, to some extent, with the

characters they are to embody. Then the actors will be able to relate the

information they receive to the characters being explored in rehearsals.

Sometimes, however, directors talk about the concept, the period and

the style of the piece at the very start of rehearsals. What they say may be

true, they believe they are helping the actors, but in fact their words fall

on barren soil and become dead weight.

Stanislavski warned directors against revealing their ideas too soon, in

too much detail. He believed that in the early stages the actor’s

imagination should not be overloaded, since this will, to some degree,

prevent the actor from actively seeking their own way into the role.

Nemirovich-Danchenko, a close colleague of Stanislavski’s, has come up

with well-defined teaching on the creative role of the director. He called

the director ‘a three-faced creature’ that combines the following qualities:

- the director as interpreter, actor, pedagogue, helping the actor

create a role;

- the director as mirror, reflecting the actor’s personal qualities;

 - the director as organiser of the entire production.

The audience is familiar only with the third ‘face’, since it is in plain sight,

revealed in every aspect of the production.

But the first two of the director’s functions are hidden from the audience.

They only see actors, who have fully absorbed the work so generously

invested in them by the director.

For the director to be an interpreter of the play and the role, their concept

and intention must have depth and integrity.

For the director to be an actor and a pedagogue, they must, in the first

instance, personally get a feel for every nuance of the inner and outer

workings of the role. They must be able to put themself in the performer’s

shoes, without losing sight of the actor’s individuality, cherishing and

developing their creative attributes.

For Nemirovich-Danchenkoi the tasks of the directing pedagogy were to

detect each person’s individuality; develop it; improve their taste; battle

against their bad habits and petty vanities; be able to request, insist and
demand; watch, with care and pleasure, for the tiniest little shoots of

anything living and genuine that would bring the actor nearer to the truth

of their onstage sense of self.

The ‘sense of self’ (samochuvstviye in Russian): the phrase refers to one

of the fundamental concepts of the Stanislavski system. It is usually

translated as a ‘state’ or a ‘state of mind’. To avoid the passive

connotations of the word ‘state’ and to express the fact that

samochuvstviye is always in a kind of ‘flux’, it is translated literally as the

‘sense of self’. To an extent, the fundamentals of the Stanislavski system

are in particular concerned with producing conditions that would allow

for samochuvstviye (the ‘sense of self’) to be conducive to creativity as

such, as well as analysing and working with the elements that constitute

it (trans. note).

If directors develop these qualities in themselves, they can become

highly polished mirrors that reflect the subtlest shift in an actor’s psyche,

the smallest, barely perceptible internal mistake.

When Stanislavski introduced his new rehearsal method, he emphasised

the need for the director as pedagogue to be tactful and not to share their

knowledge of the play until such time when it was actually useful to the

actor and their work. He poses the question of finding a tactical device, a

kind of ‘teaching ploy’, which would ensure that the director’s view of the

role and the play did not ‘weigh the actor down’, but discreetly corrected

them, integrating their independent search into an artistic whole.

The initial prerequisite for changing the rehearsal practice was the actors’

passive attitudes which Stanislavski had decided to fight.

Another equally important reason was the realisation that the old method

of rehearsals maintained – against nature – an artificial gap between the

physical and mental aspects of the actor’s existence in the given

circumstances of the play.

Onstage it is important to be truthful in showing particular actions of

each character, and this can only happen when the person’s physical and

mental sense of self merge.

Human physical life is a concrete realisation of the psychophysical sense

of self. Actors, therefore, cannot confine themselves to abstract

psychological reasoning, since no physical action can ever be cut oN

from a mental action. Stanislavski says that there is an indissoluble link

between stage action and its cause, that ‘the life of the human body’ and

‘the life of the human spirit’ are one. For him this was the basis in his work

on psycho-technique.

In my notes, there is an example Konstantin Sergeievich used to clarify

his ideas regarding this unity, the indissolubility of the psychophysical

process.

[‘Sometimes a man says nothing’, he told us, ‘but from the way he sits,

stands or walks about we can understand his state of mind, his mood and

attitude to what’s going on around him. So, often, as we pass by people

on a park bench, we can tell, without hearing a single word, whether they

are doing business, having a row or speaking of love.

[‘And yet we cannot tell what goes on in someone’s life from their physical

behaviour alone’, Stanislavski continued. ‘We can tell that someone

coming towards us in the street is in a rush on a matter of some

importance, or that someone else is looking for somebody. But then the

person comes up to us and asks, “Have you seen a little boy in a grey

cap? He ran away when I went into a shop.”

[‘When he hears your answer, “No, I haven’t!”, he walks away from you,

calling out from time to time: “Vladimir!”

[‘Now that you have seen not only the man’s physical behaviour, not only

the way he walked and looked around, but have also heard what he said

to you, how he called out to the boy, you can grasp quite clearly what’s

happening to him, what’s on his mind.

[‘Imagine that this man, who is looking for his son, came up to you and

asked you the same question but in a sort of sing-song fashion,

melodramatically, stressing the wrong syllables. You would conclude that

he is either mentally ill, or simply making a fool out of you.

[‘But can anything genuine and true occur onstage if the physical

behaviour is inaccurate or fake? Imagine that this same man, looking for

his son in the street, came up to you, stopped you in your tracks, took out

a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, leaned against the wall of a house,

lit a cigarette and leisurely enquired about his son. Once again you’d think

there is something wrong, that he isn’t looking for his son at all but needs

you, for some reason.

[‘It is clear then that our inner state of mind, our thoughts, desires,

relationships must be expressed both in words and in a specific physical

behaviour.

[‘We have to be able to decide at any given moment how people are going

to behave physically, whether, for some particular reason, they are going

to walk, sit or stand, and also how they are going to walk, how they are

going to sit or stand.

[‘Let’s imagine that we have to act the man who is looking for his son.
[‘If we try and speak his lines at the table, we will find it hard to do so

properly. Our body, sitting down, at rest, will prevent us from finding a true

sense of self of the man who has lost his son. And without that our words

will sound hollow. We won’t be able to speak the lines as the person

would speak them in real life.

[‘But then I say to you’, continued Stanislavski: ‘You are looking for your

son who ran oN when you popped into a shop. Get up from the table,

imagine that this is the street and these are passers-by. You urgently need

to find out if they have seen your son. Now do it, and take not only verbal

but also physical action.’]

The gap between the sense of self of an actor sitting calmly at the table,

pencil in hand, and the actual experience of the psychophysical life of the

role, which actors should strive for from the outset of their work, obliged

Stanislavski to analyse the existing rehearsal practice in depth.

Stanislavski’s starting point was that deconstructing a play ‘at the table’

was, essentially, analysis of the psychological aspects of the character’s

life. ‘At the table’ the actor always viewed their character, from the

outside, as it were. So when it was time for the actor to get up and do

something, that physical doing always proved diNicult. There was an

artificial gap between the psychological and the physical aspects of the

character’s life in the given circumstances of the play.

By aNirming that the unbroken line of physical actions – that is, the line of

the life of the human body – has an important place in creating the

character and provokes internal action, i.e., experiencing, Stanislavski

urges actors to understand that the link between physical and mental life

is indivisible, and that consequently, we must not split apart the creative

process of analysing the character’s inner and outer behaviour.

‘Experiencing’, perezhivaniye in Russian, borrowed from everyday

speech, consists of the root ‘to live’ and the preposition that signifies a

transition, a transformation, going beyond the boundaries of the ‘self’.

Going from ‘one’s self’ to ‘the other’. The word hovers in between a few

diNerent semantic fields, such as ‘to live through’, ‘to experience’, or to

have a ‘strong feeling’, ‘strong emotion’, ‘strong impression’, etc. As part of

the Stanislavski system, perezhivaniye refers to the process of undergoing

an experience as it occurs. Theatre as ‘the art of experiencing’ is the new

definition of theatre introduced by Stanislavski and the Russian school;

feelings, or life, experienced here and now as contrasted to the theatre of

representation or imitation. In the ‘theatre of experiencing’ you must live,

rather than appear to live. In English, the term is mostly translated as

‘experiencing’, but sometimes it is translated as ‘to sense’ or ‘to feel’, or

their derivatives ‘sensation/ sensations’, ‘feeling/ feelings’, ‘emotion/

emotions’. However, none of them ever imply the result the actor strives

for but always the source of action itself – that which literally sets things

in motion (trans. note).

The actors must know from the outset of working with the director that

they are going to analyse the play through action. Once they have

deconstructed the play logically, which Stanislavski called ‘mental

reconnaissance’, the director asks the actors to go to a rehearsal space

and perform their actions in the concrete setting. All the objects the

performers might need in the course of action, all the personal props,

every single thing that can help the actor believe in the truth of what is

happening must be set up in advance.

Does that mean that once they move on to the etude6 phase, in which

they look for the logic and sequence of their psychophysical behaviour,

the actors never go back to the table? Not at all. They go back after each

etude to make sense of what they have found, verify how precise they

have been in carrying out the playwright’s intentions, share with each

other the lived experience they have just acquired, get the director to

answer the questions that have come up so that they can grasp the

author’s text in even greater detail, and having discarded what they did

wrong, go back and seek again to merge with their role in action.

See below the chapter ‘Etude rehearsals’ (ed. note).

The third and, perhaps, most important reason that prompted

Stanislavski to talk of active analysis was the primary importance he

attributed to words onstage.

Verbal action was for him the principal action in performance, and he saw

words as the basic means of embodying the author’s ideas. He strived to

ensure that onstage, as in life, words were inseparably linked to the

character’s thoughts, tasks and actions.

The entire history of theatre is linked to the problem of how to speak

onstage.

See Book Two, the chapter ‘Technique and logic of speech’ (ed. note). The

notion of ‘stage speech’ covers a wide semantic field of voice and speech

(trans. note).

Ever since the plays of the Russian realist school began to take their

rightful place on the Russian stage, the best actors have given primacy to

‘words sung from the heart’,ii the expressive word that Gogol wrote about
as ‘… sounds of the heart and soul, conveyed in words, so much more

diverse than the sounds of music’.

Shchepkin, who considered the delivery of the author’s text onstage to be

subject to the character being created, believed that the prime

requirement for transforming into the character was a truthful delivery of

the lines. He made it a mandatory condition for the actors in the company

to have a clear understanding of the thoughts the text contained and

study their course and development.

Mikhail Shchepkin (1788–1863), a great Russian actor, known for his roles

in plays by Gogol. He kept notebooks on theatre (ed. notes).

Another major figure at the Maly Theatre, the actor Alexander Yuzhin,

believed that stage speech must be individually tailored for each

character. It is not possible to demand that all the text should be

delivered with the same simplicity and natural spontaneity. It all depends

on who is speaking. ‘Hamlet’s lifelike and natural speech is neither

lifelike, nor natural for Chatski’, he used to say.

Chatski is a leading character in a verse comedy Woe from Wit by

Alexander Griboyedov (1795–1829), Russian diplomat, playwright, poet

and composer (trans. note).

Of great interest are Gogol’s assertions on the way words are delivered

onstage. He said that achieving a natural and sincere delivery of lines

onstage depended on the rehearsal process. He wrote, ‘they [the actors]

must learn the lines together, and the role must enter their minds of its

own accord during rehearsals, so that each of them, immersed in the

immediate circumstances, involuntarily picks up the right tone of their

role. … But if the actors learn their lines at home, they can deliver nothing

but a studied pompous response that will be fixed in them for ever:

nothing will ever break through it … with the play as a whole turning for

them into something indistinct, remote’.

Having observed and analysed the experience of the great masters as

well as his own lifelong experience, Stanislavski considered the word to

be, in Nemirovich-Danchenko’s memorable phrase, both the crowning

glory and the starting point of the creative act. He came to the conclusion

that the greatest danger for an actor in search of natural behaviour

onstage was a linear approach to the author’s text.

And that was the third and decisive reason for changing the rehearsal

practice.

Stanislavski often said that the more talented the playwright, the more

vivid is the eNect of their play on you when you first read it. The way the

characters behave, their relationships, their feelings and thoughts seem

so clear, so close to your heart, that you automatically assume that all

you have to do is learn the lines and you will, without even noticing it,

master the character.

But as soon as the actor learns the lines, everything that was so alive in

their imagination withers and dies.

How can we avoid this danger?

Stanislavski came to the conclusion that the actors can only bring words

to life if they do the preparatory work that leads them to a place where the

author’s text becomes essential in expressing the character’s thoughts.

Mechanical line-learning inevitably leads, as Stanislavski put it, to the

words getting ‘lodged in the muscles of the tongue’, that is, turning into

dead clichés.

In the initial stages of their work, according to Stanislavski, actors should

crave the author’s words in order to discover the thoughts they contain,

not merely as lines to learn by rote.

Mastering all of the character’s inner motives, dictated to the actor by this

or that word, is an extremely complex process.

In An Actor’s Work on Himself Stanislavski wrote: To believe in someone

else’s fictional invention and genuinely live it – you call that a trifle? Don’t

you know that creating something based on someone else’s idea is

infinitely more diNicult than making up a story of your own? … we rework

dramatists’ creations. We discover what is hidden beneath their words.

We invest someone else’s text with our own subtext. We establish our

own relationship to people and the circumstances of their lives. We filter

all the material given to us by the author and the director through our own

personalities. We reshape it, give it life, fill it with our own imagination.

We become bound to it, we live in it psychologically and physically. We

produce the ‘truth of the passions’ in ourselves. The end result is

genuinely productive action, closely connected with the ideas hidden

within the play. We create living, typical images through the passions and

feelings of the characters we [Link] Stanislavski sought new ways to

generate the actor’s creative sense of self, in which genuinely creative

ideas arise and their embodiment takes place in the most organic way

possible.

This primarily concerns that initial period of work, which ultimately plays

a decisive role in all subsequent work.

Stanislavski maintained that, if the work started with learning lines by

rote, the actor would at best just report them, more or less competently,
to the audience. This is only natural since, in life, we never speak unless

‘our verbal action is genuine, productive and to the purpose’. In life, we

express our thoughts by using a great variety of words. We can be

repeating one and the same idea over and over again, and every time,

depending on who we are speaking to, we will find new and appropriate

words to express it. In life, we know that our words can bring joy, hurt,

pacify, insult, and when addressing other people, we lend our words a

definite meaning. In life, our words express our thoughts, our feelings and

that is why they aNect others, producing a reaction in those around us.

Something very diNerent happens onstage. Without having fully made the

character’s thoughts and feelings our own, with no belief in the play’s

given circumstances, we are obliged to deliver lines that belong to the

character we portray, lines which are quite alien to us.

What do we need do to make the author’s text ‘our own’, an organic part of

us, the one and only text that we need? What do we have to do to make

the word an instrument of action?

Stanislavski suggested we closely study the course of a character’s

thoughts so as to be able to express them in our own words. When we

know exactly what we are talking about, we can, even before we have

learned our lines, express the author’s thoughts in our own words.

Stanislavski wrote: ‘There are thoughts and feelings you can express in

your own words. They are what matters, not the words. The line of the role

follows the subtext not the text itself. But the actors are too lazy to dig

deep into the subtext, so they prefer to skim the surface, the outward

form of the word which can be spoken mechanically without using up

energy to penetrate the essence.’ Stanislavski said the secret of his

approach was to forbid the actors learning their lines for a certain period

of time, which saved them from mindlessly learning the lines by rote, and

made them dig into the essence of the subtext and follow its internal line.

When learnt by rote, words lose their actual meaning and turn into

‘mechanical gymnastics’, with ‘the tongue gabbling oN sounds that have

been learnt’. But when actors have to make do without someone else’s
words for a time, they have nothing to hide behind and can’t help but

follow the line of the action. By using their own words, actors understand

that what is said is inseparable from their tasks and actions.

Regarding the stage of the etude rehearsals in which actors speak using

‘their own words’, Stanislavski writes: This protects you from forming a

mechanical habit of uttering empty words you have not experienced. I

have held on to the author’s splendid words for you to use them better,

not for the sake of gabbling, but for the sake of action and fulfilling the

basic task.

Knebel’s italics (trans. note). Once we are able to navigate our character’s

train of thought with ease and fluency, we are no longer slaves to the text,

and will go back to it when we feel the need to use it for expressing those

thoughts that we have already understood during the etude. We will fall in

love with the text since the author’s words will express better and more

precisely the thoughts we have come to know through the process of

active analysis.
Given circumstances

Alexander Pushkin wrote: ‘Truth of the passions, feelings that seem true in

the supposed circumstances, that is what our intellect requires of a

dramatist.’

Stanislavski made this renowned quote the basis for his system,

changing the word ‘supposed’ to ‘imposed’. For an actor in a play the

circumstances are not supposed but imposed: given.

Stanislavski makes a play on words which it is diNicult to translate.

‘Supposed’ means ‘hypothetical’. But for the actor these circumstances

are ‘proposed’ (prescribed) by the playwright. In her original translation

Elizabeth Hapgood, who worked closely with Stanislavski, used the term

‘given’, and this has now been generally adopted (trans. note).

So, what are these ‘given circumstances’? They are the plot, the facts, the

events, the period, the time and place of action, the living conditions,

how we as actors and directors understand the play, the contributions we

ourselves make, the mise-en-scène, the staging, the set and costume

designs, the props, the lighting, the sound eNects, etc., etc., everything

that is ‘given’ for the actors to take into account in their creative work.

Stanislavski covers here an unusually wide range of all the factors that

actors should give credence to.

What seems to me of primary importance in this chapter on the ‘given

circumstances’ is everything that relates to the study of a play.

Let’s take Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit as an example. What are the ‘given

circumstances’ of Griboyedov’s comedy? What is its historical context?

The play was written between 1822 and 1824, the time when all

progressive Russians realised that the people had been duped and their

hopes betrayed. Once more they found themselves at the mercy of

soulless bureaucrats and military blockheads. The finest representatives

of the intelligentsia among the nobility formed secret societies and

prepared for the uprising on 14 December 1825.

A reference to the Tsar’s failure to carry out the promise of liberal reforms

in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat by the Russian people in the Great

Patriotic War of 1812 (trans. note).

The acting ensemble need to know that in 1812 Griboyedov volunteered

for the Russian army and was also a member of a secret society: probably

the reason why in 1826 he was arrested and accused of having taken part

in the Decembrist Uprising. He was released only because of a lack of

evidence. We know, however, that he had been warned of his impending

arrest and managed to burn any compromising papers. Furthermore, at

their trial the Decembrists covered up for him just as they did for Pushkin.

To understand the period the characters live in is to discover one of the

key given circumstances.

By studying the period, we begin to study the characters’ environment.

The Famusov family, their relatives, friends and guests lived in a Moscow

we can hardly imagine today. This was a Moscow that was being rebuilt

after the fire of 1812. The newly built houses were spacious but quite
modest in scale (palaces were an exception) with an enfilade of

numerous rooms on the ground floor, and a more cramped upper floor

with a rather low ceiling. The house façade was inevitably embellished

with columns and a stuccoed pediment, and at the back there was a yard

with some out-houses and, often, a large garden. People moved slowly

around the Moscow of that time, either on horseback, or in large carriages

and small carts. So, if the actress playing old Khlestova pictures the long

exhausting journey she had to take to get to Famusov’s drawing-room, her

opening lines will convey Khlestova’s actual experience:

‘Enfilade’ is a suite of rooms with doorways in line with each other (trans.

note).

The 1812 Fire of Moscow started on 14 September 1812 after Russian

troops and most of its remaining residents abandoned the city just ahead

of Napoleon’s vanguard troops entering it after the Battle of Borodino. The

fire all but destroyed the city. (Wikipedia, ‘Fire of Moscow (1812)’, viewed

15 December 2020,
[Link]

At sixty-five ’tis no easy matter to drag myself

To see you, niece. Sheer torment!

An hour or more just from Pokrovka! I am drained;

It is not night. It’s doomsday! Of course, we cannot cover here the full

extent and variety of the given circumstances in the comedy Woe from

Wit.

We need to picture not only the period, the character’s everyday way of

life, and their relationships with one another, but, crucially, we must

understand that besides this present, the characters also have a past and

a future.

Stanislavski wrote: The present cannot exist without the past; nor can it

exist without the future. Some will say that we can neither know nor

predict our future. However, we not only can but we should desire one,

and have designs for it …

If in life there can be no present without a past or a future, then on the

stage which reflects life, it cannot be otherwise. How can we penetrate

Chatski’s past? Our imagination will be helped by studying the text of the

play.

Chatski has been away for three years. When he left Moscow, he was a

youth in love. He lived abroad. We don’t know exactly where, but we can

imagine both Italy and France. It was the beginning of the 19th century.

There was intellectual ferment everywhere. Famusov may not have been

very far from the truth when he exclaimed in response to one of Chatski’s

outbursts, ‘Ah, dear God, he is a Carbonaro!’

The Carbonari, or ‘charcoal burners’, were a secret revolutionary society.

The organisation involved itself in secret rituals rather like Freemasonry. It

attracted thousands of ex-Napoleonic oNicers and oNicials (trans. note).

Chatski spent some time in St Petersburg. We learn this from Molchalin:

Tatiana Yurievna once spoke,

On her return from Petersburg,

Of your connections in the Government

And then the break-up … Let the actor’s imagination suggest to them

what it was that prompted the break-up with the government ministers,

and who else Chatski might have been in contact with while in St

Petersburg. Perhaps, they were the very same people that Griboyedov

himself was associated with.

A reference to the secret societies and the Decembrists (trans. note).

Chatski is finally back in Moscow, where he had left behind his first love.

He has missed her, he has been impatient to get back to her – … for five

and forty hours, with no sleep at all,

I hastened across seven hundred miles – the wind, the storm … He

delights in Moscow and even more in seeing Sofya again – his love for her

having grown deeper and stronger while they were apart.

So, if the actor gets a feel for Chatski’s past, conjures it up, he will then

run onto the stage not out of a vacuum, but out of life itself, which will

continue to nourish his imagination.

Only then will his first words carry his passion and sincerity: It’s barely

light – but you are up! and I am at your feet. That is where Chatski’s

present begins, and we are to witness it for four acts. But for his present

to be vibrant, full-blooded and compelling, the actor must clearly see

where Chatski will disappear to after his final words: Away from Moscow!

Never to return.

No looking back. I’ll run away and search the world

For the smallest corner where my outraged heart can find shelter …

My carriage! get my carriage! What is Chatski’s future like? Here the actor

must ask himself a number of questions that will undoubtedly help him

with the present of the role. For example: maybe Chatski would come to

his senses, resign himself to the status quo, and as the years go by turn

into a well-meaning respectable member of the establishment, another

Famusov? Or maybe he will join the civil service and turn into a

functionary, like Molchalin, only a little more intelligent and noble-

minded? No, impossible! Perhaps then in his passionate protest against

the system, he will immerse himself in the activities of a secret society?

Maybe he is going to share the fate of the 120 who were sent to Siberia

after the events of 14 December 1825? Or maybe his fate will be that of

Griboyedov, who was sent a thousand kilometres from his homeland into

an honourable exile as an ambassador to Persia, and perished as a result

of political intrigues at the hands of the Persian insurgents?

14 December 1825 is the date of the Decembrist Uprising (trans. note).

Indeed, that might be a feasible future for Chatski. And the anticipation of

this kind of future does colour the twenty-four hours that Chatski spends

in Moscow, the twenty-four hours of his present, in as much as it carries

traces of his past.

Let us take another example.

The past, present and future of Sofya, a young lady from Moscow: she is a

spoilt young lady, the only daughter of a rich and high-ranking father, who

grew up without a mother. Famusov, her father, managed ‘to hire Madame

Rosier to be her second mother’. Madame Rosier, without applying either

her mind or her heart to the girl’s upbringing, let herself be ‘lured away by

someone else for five hundred roubles more a year’, having nevertheless

taught Sofya ‘to dance! and sing! and flirt! and sigh!’. Sofya, lonely and

longing for love, developed a close bond with Chatski, but, oNended by

his departure, made Molchalin her hero – and now Sofya’s present

unfolds in front of Chatski’s eyes.

It is easy to picture her future. She will either wilt away at her Auntie’s

house in ‘the ‘village, in the back of beyond, in Saratov’, or will be happy to

marry, if only to Skalozub, or will possibly forgive Molchalin one day … All

this stems from Sofya’s past and present so vividly described by

Griboyedov.

Having immersed our imagination in the past and the future of the

characters, having studied their relationships, their milieu and period, we

now understand the huge importance of the given circumstances in the

specific detailed reconstruction of the author’s intentions.

Events

As we stated earlier, Stanislavski categorically rejected learning the lines

mechanically and insisted on an in-depth analysis of the circumstances

that produce a given text.

Stanislavski shows us the way of truly getting to the core of a play. He

believes that the easiest way to do this is by analysing the facts, or the

events, that is, the plot.

That is why he suggested starting the systematic analysis of a play by

defining the events, or, as he put it, the operative facts, their sequence

and interaction.

While identifying events and actions, the actor involuntarily grasps wider

and wider strata of the given circumstances of the life of the play.

Stanislavski insisted that actors should learn to break the play down

according to its major events. He advised them to test each situation in

the play against an instance drawn from their own life. His suggestion was
that every time an actor sought to define the main event at a certain point

in their own lives, they should take note of smaller events that occurred at

the very same time but did not aNect their life for more than a day, or just

a few hours, until a new event distracted them, overshadowing the one

before.

So Stanislavski advised that during the initial analysis of the play the

actor should not get bogged down in details, in tiny bits or chunks, but

should keep looking for what was the most important, and through that,

comprehend the particulars: [Think what happened in the Famusov

household on Chatski’s unexpected arrival?] [What are the

consequences of the news that the Government Inspector is on his way?]

These kinds of questions make us realise the logic and sequence of

actions and events. But they are by no means enough to understand what

happens in the play. This is understanding in the abstract. The most

important and complex process comes next: putting oneself into the

character’s place.
Both the director and the actor must be able to think in images, and

possess a dynamic creative imagination.

In getting a grasp of the play, of the author’s intentions, his thoughts and

motives, an actor must get to the heart of the play’s events and given

circumstances. He must live amid imaginary objects, in the thick of a

fictional, imaginary life.

Without the assistance of his creative imagination the actor will never

gain access to this fictional life. What kind of imagination is this?

Stanislavski used to say that everything our imagination comes up with

must be well grounded. Questions such as who, when, where, why, what

for and how stimulate the actor’s imagination, producing a vivid picture of

a fictional or imagined life.

He said that there are times when this artificial life is created intuitively,

with no conscious, intellectual input. However, with an active imagination

we can always stir up our feelings and create the imaginary life we need.
Still, the subject matter of our make-believe must be specific and clear.

There is no such thing as daydreaming ‘in general’.

For the imagination to arouse in the ‘human being/actor’ a life that is true

to nature, he must, says Stanislavski, ‘surrender to the role not only

psychologically but physically’.

The actor must make the character’s actions their own, only then can

they achieve truth and sincerity. They have to put themselves into the

character’s place in the circumstances given by the author.

For that to happen, they must start by performing basic psychophysical

actions linked to specific events.

The actor must, above all, have ‘a real sense of the life of a role, not only

psychologically but physically’. Just as yeast causes fermentation, so the

sense of the life of a role produces an inner heat, a rising to the boil

necessary for the process of creative exploration. We can only speak of

approaching the play and the role once the actor has reached this

creative state. A method of work in which the actor explores only the
psychological life of the character gives rise to considerable errors, since

the split between the psychological life and the physical life does not

allow the actor to get a sense of the life of the character’s body, leaving

them impoverished.

A person’s inner state of mind, their wishes, thoughts, feelings must be

expressed both in words and in specific physical activity.

From the very start the actor must analyse the play in action.

Here is Stanislavski’s definition of his method: … the new secret, the new

aspect of my technique for creating the life of the human body of a role

consists in the fact that the simplest physical actions, while being

actually embodied on the stage, oblige the actor to create, in accord with

his own motives, imaginative ideas, given circumstances, and magic ‘ifs’.

If one simple physical action requires such a huge eNort on the part of the

imagination, the whole line of the life of the human body needs a whole,

unbroken series of ideas and given circumstances throughout the play.

It is only possible to grasp and to extract them through detailed analysis

carried out by all our creative forces. My technique stimulates that

analysis naturally, spontaneously.

In the early stages of his work Stanislavski often asked the actors, ‘What

do you want in this episode?’, then later he formulated his question

diNerently: ‘What would you do if this or that happened?’

If the first question makes actors reflective and quite passive, the second

makes them active. They start to ask themselves, ‘What would I do today,

here, now, in these given circumstances?’ They become aware of the

reasons that compel them to take action; they start to performs actions

mentally, and in doing this, if only in their mind, they discover the way to

their feelings and their subconscious.

By discovering their character’s actions, the actor discovers the storyline,

and through it, the essence of their role. Grasping how the conflict

develops forces the actor to actively work out the action and the counter-

action and brings them nearer the concrete supertask of the role.
Using events as the starting point draws the actor into the world of the

play by the shortest possible route.

See below the chapter ‘The supertask’ (ed. note).

It might seem that this only concerns plays with a vividly expressed

external action, with an external plot. Not so. Even when everything in a

play is subject to hidden inner development, the living link between its

events lays bare the characters’ behaviour.

So, if we do not study the play through its events, or from the point of view

of the continuity of events that nourish it, we disregard the basic law of

drama – the law of action, since in a play the events are of primary

importance. In one of his rehearsals Konstantin Sergeievich said to us:

[Go back to some period in your life, recall the most important event at

the time, then you will immediately understand how it aNected your

behaviour, your actions, your thoughts and feelings, your relationships

with other people.] The events, or, as Stanislavski called them, the
operative facts, constitute the foundation on which the playwright

constructs the play’s action.

The actor must study the chain of all the operative facts in-depth.

But this alone is not enough. The action cannot exist without a motive

behind it. We cannot imagine asking a question, ‘What am I doing?’

without a complementary question coming up, ‘Why am I doing it?’, in

other words, for every action there is a motive.

While studying the play’s events, the logic and sequence of the

character’s actions and behaviour, the actor gradually starts to assess

them, developing an awareness of the character’s underlying motives.

In any play some characters want one thing, some another. Some have

one goal, some another. This leads to conflict and to struggle.

To define the reasons for these conflicts, to understand the goals and

motives of characters on either side is the primary task in the initial

period of rehearsals. To understand the basic events, without getting

distracted by smaller details that can lead you astray, to understand what
makes the action and the counter-action, is to define the dramatic

conflict on the basis of active analysis.

Stanislavski wrote: What does it actually mean to assess the facts and

events of a play? It means finding their hidden inner meaning, their

spiritual essence, and the degree of their significance and influence. It

means digging underneath the external facts and events, and discovering

deep under them some other well-concealed events that often are the

cause of those external facts. It means following the course of the

psychological events, getting a sense of the extent and nature of their

impact, following the lines of aspiration of every single character,

observing the lines clash, criss-cross, intertwine, separate. In a word,

grasping the inner pattern that determines people’s relationships.

Assessing the facts means to find the key to the many secrets of ‘the life

of the human spirit’ of a role, hidden underneath the facts of the play.
Assessing the facts

The Russian term has been variously translated as ‘appraising the facts’

or ‘evaluating the facts’. Jean Benedetti also proposes ‘weighing up the

facts’ to capture the subjective nature of the process for the actor. After

some consideration, I have decided on ‘assessing the facts’ (trans. note).

Stanislavski demanded that actors learn to get to the very essence of the

facts selected by the playwright.

But establishing the facts is not enough. The actor must be able to put

themself in the character’s shoes, and then consider the facts and events

as themself, from their own point of view. In order to assess the facts

through their own feelings rooted in their personal, direct relationship

with the facts, the actor must internally question themself: ‘Which of my

own personal human intentions, wishes, aspirations, characteristics,

good qualities or character defects could make me, “the human

being/actor”, relate to the people and events in the play in the same way

as the character I portray?’

Let us try and follow the process of ‘assessing the facts’ in an example.

Let us take an episode from the role of Sofya from Griboyedov’s Woe from

Wit.

An assessment of the event that starts the play will be decisive for Sofya’s

inner characterisation.

The event is: her secret tryst with Molchalin.

How could Sofya have fallen in love with Molchalin? How could she prefer

him to Chatski, her childhood playmate?

From the very first moment of being onstage the actress must know what

it is that she intends to reveal in Sofya and Sofya’s thinking about the

facts and events, otherwise she will not be able to ‘be’, ‘exist’, ‘behave’ in

the given circumstances. Once she has understood Sofya as a person

and has looked at everything that is happening in the play through her

eyes, the actress discovers traits in herself that bring her nearer to the
character. In seeking a psychological approach, her imagination targets –

as it were – the author’s given circumstances.

We know of a number of diNerent interpretations of the role of Sofya as

performed by our leading actresses.

In the Moscow Art Theatre production Angelina Stepanova, with her

characteristic social astuteness, created in the role of Sofya a typical

figure of ‘Famusov’s’ Moscow. With wit and malice, she exposed those

who ‘cannot plainly speak the simplest word’.

Angelina Stepanova (1905–2000), a Moscow Art Theatre actress, who was

trained at Vakhtangov’s Third Studio. She first appeared as Sofya at MAT

in the 1924/1925 season (ed. note).

Imperious and cold, her Sofya mostly craved admiration; she needed ‘a

boy-husband, a servant-husband, a wife’s page-boy’.

With cunning and determination she implements her plan to wed

Molchalin.
She is not bothered by his poverty. She believes in his ability to make

himself indispensable to Famusov, Khlestova and others in her circle.

Chatski irritates her with his unwelcome love, he is in her way, so with her

every word she does her best to insult and humiliate him. She does not

want to remember the past that binds her to him, and she is clever

enough to understand that Chatski is someone hostile to her social

world. She fights against him in every way she can. She deliberately

spreads the rumour that he is mad: Ah, Chatski! You love to make the

others look like fools

See if you’d like to wear a fool’s cap yourself? She revels in the eNect her

words produce, watching as the rumour snowballs into an avalanche that

buries Chatski.

We are also familiar with another interpretation of Sofya’s character: Vera

Michurina-Samoilova played the role very diNerently.

Vera Michurina-Samoilova (1866–1948), an actress at the Aleksandrinski

Theatre in St Petersburg (ed. note).

Her Sofya’s nature was fervent, passionate. She had loved Chatski once,

loved him as ardently and sincerely as he loved her. But Chatski had gone

away. And he stayed away for a very long time. Abandoned by him, alone,

she is trying to stifle her feelings. Having suNered separation from the

man she loved, with no news from him, she does all she can to forget

him. She invents her love for Molchalin, it pleases her to think that there is

someone at her side for whom she is the most precious thing in the

world. This brings her the possibility of solace and peace of mind.

But her feelings for Chatski are not dead. They are alive, they disturb and

torment her, urging her to find another romantic interest and, finally, to rid

her heart of the man who had left her of his own free will.

In her scene in Act 1 Michurina-Samoilova abruptly interrupted her

servant Lisa, when Chatski’s name came up, and her interjection – Ah! If

someone loves somebody

Why go far away in search of answers? – burst out with all the pain of a

woman scorned. It seemed like all the years of separation had done
nothing to alleviate it. And when Sofya spoke of Molchalin – The man I

love is of another sort.

Molchalin always thinks of others, not himself … – it seemed she was

speaking not to Lisa but to Chatski, justifying to him, in her mind, her love

for another man who was both better and more deserving of her than him.

The meeting with Chatski shook her to the core, she could scarcely find

the strength to hold a civil conversation with him.

The line, ‘Why did God bring this Chatski back again!’, was tragic on her

lips. And in Act 3 when Chatski pressed Sofya to acknowledge, ‘Who is it,

after all, that she holds dear?’, Michurina-Samoilova stubbornly battled

with both Chatski and herself, hiding her true feelings with biting

sarcastic remarks. Having blurted out, ‘He’s lost his wits’, she saw,

bewildered, how the words she had spoken in nothing more than a fit of

pique were quickly picked up by others and gained a powerful

momentum.
‘… Sofya’s attraction to Molchalin is, essentially, merely the prism through

which the genuine deep love the girl feels for Chatski is refracted’, writes

Michurina-Samoilova, ‘[…] My Sofya loved only Chatski’.i

‘In Woe from Wit’, wrote Wilhelm Küchelbecker, ‘the plot hinges precisely

on Chatski’s opposition to other characters … There is Chatski. Then

there are other characters. They are brought together, and we are shown

the inevitable outcome of the meeting between the two opposite poles …’

W.K. Küchelbecker (1797–1846), a writer and poet, a friend of Pushkin and

Griboyedov; took an active part in the Decembrist Uprising in 1825 and

died in exile in Siberia (ed. note).

The playwright’s dramatic intention was embodied both in Stepanova’s

and in Michurina-Samoilova’s interpretations. Stepanova’s approach is

more direct. Michurina-Samoilova, by making Sofya more human, in the

end may have made her Sofya more frightening since she was capable of

greater feelings! Naturally, in the process of searching for the personal

traits that would bring them nearer to the character, the two actresses
developed diNerent psychophysical qualities and used diNerent parallels

to evoke the feelings they needed that corresponded to their ideas.

It must be stressed that ‘assessing the facts’ is a creative process that

enables the actor to grasp the essence of a play, requiring from them the

ability to feed their personal experiences into the understanding of the

play’s every detail.

‘Assessing the facts’ requires the actor to have both a broad overview of

the piece and an ability to examine individual moments in it from the

point of view of the whole: … although real drama manifests itself as a

known event, the latter only provides a cause for bringing to an end all the

contradictions that have been feeding the drama long before the actual

event takes place. These contradictions, concealed in life itself, have

been gradually and indirectly paving the way for the event itself. From the

point of view of the event, the drama is the final word, or, at least, the

decisive turning point of all human existence.

The Supertask

We cannot ignore here one of the most important principles of

Stanislavski’s aesthetic.

The terms ‘supertask’ and ‘throughaction’ are widely used by us all.

While we cannot claim to examine fully the whole of the Stanislavski

system here, we have to stress yet again that to understand clearly the

method of active analysis of the play and the role we must study every

single one of its elements. Therefore, it seems advisable to remind

ourselves what Stanislavski meant when he talked of the supertask and

the throughaction.

First, let us quote Stanislavski himself: The Supertask and the

Throughaction are the living essence, the arteries, the nerves, the heart-

beat of the play. … The Supertask (wish), the Throughaction (intention)

and its fulfilment (action) establish the creative process of experiencing.

How can we decipher this?

‘Let us agree that in the future’, writes Stanislavski, ‘we will call this

fundamental, principal, all-encompassing goal, which draws together

each and every Task, and stimulates the creative eNorts of the inner

drives and the Elements that comprise the sense of self of the actor-role:

the Supertask of the writer’s work.’ The supertask must be ‘conscious’,

generated in the mind by the actor’s creative thought. It must be

emotional, stimulating the whole of his human nature. And finally, it must

be volitional, arising from their ‘spiritual and physical being’. The

supertask must awaken the actor’s creative imagination, arouse their

faith, stir up their mental and emotional life. A properly defined

supertask, one and the same, and compulsory, for all the performers, will

elicit a personal response, a unique emotional resonance in each of

them. Without the subjective experiences of a creative artist, it [the

Supertask] is arid, dead. It is essential to find a response in the actor’s

heart and mind if the Supertask and the role are to become living, vibrant,

resplendent with all the colours of genuine, human [Link] When we are

looking for the supertask it is essential to define it exactly, to name it

precisely, to express it in words that will spur us into action because an

incorrectly defined supertask often sends actors in the wrong direction.

Stanislavski gives an example from his own acting practice. He tells a

story of how he once played Argan in Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire.

Initially, he defined the supertask as: ‘I want to be ill.’ Despite all his

eNorts Stanislavski got further and further away from the essence of the

play. Molière’s joyous comedy turned into a tragedy. All because

Stanislavski set oN with an incorrectly defined supertask. Finally, he

realised his mistake and searched for an alternative, eventually coming

up with: ‘I want people to think that I am ill.’ Then everything fell into

place. He instantly struck up the correct relationship with the quack

doctors in the play, and Molière’s sarcastic, comedic talent resounded

loud and clear. Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid) by Molière,

written in 1673. Stanislavski appeared in it as Argan at the Moscow Art

Theatre in 1913.
Throughaction

Let us take another example from Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit.

If Chatski’s supertask is defined as ‘I want to strive for liberty’, then the

whole of the character’s inner life and all of his actions must be directed

at achieving it. This gives rise to his merciless condemnation of everything

and everyone who stands in the way of his striving for liberty, his striving

to unmask and battle the likes of Famusov, Molchalin, Skalozub.

This unified action, directed towards the supertask, is what Stanislavski

called the ‘throughaction’.

Stanislavski says that ‘… the Throughaction brings everything together,

strings all the elements together, like a thread through unconnected

beads, and points them towards the common Supertask’.i

Unless the actor pins all their actions to the pivotal core of the

throughaction, the performance of that role can never be considered a

serious artistic success.

More often than not, when the actor replaces the throughaction with

minor, less essential actions, artistic failure awaits them.

Imagine the actor playing Chatski saying to himself, ‘I aspire to many

things: to find rest in my native land after my travels, to mock a host of

buNoons, to marry Sofya, to free an old friend from his wife’s influence,

etc.’.

What would happen then? The role would be fractured into separate tiny

actions, and however well they were performed, nothing would remain of

the author’s supertask.

In combating this phenomenon, rather frequent in the theatre,

Stanislavski wrote: That is why the individual bits of your role, beautiful as

they were, made no impression and were not satisfying as a whole. You

are breaking a statue of Apollo into bits and showing each of them

separately. Fragments will hardly capture an [Link] In a work of

fiction, for every throughaction there is its counter-throughaction that

reinforces the throughaction.

See Appendix A (ed. note).

Famusov, Skalozub, Molchalin, Famusov’s other guests and the mythical

Princess Marya Alexeievna represent the counteraction to Chatski’s

throughaction and thereby strengthen it.

Stanislavski says: ‘If there were no counter-Throughaction in the play and

everything just worked out, there would be nothing for the cast and the

characters to do, and the play itself would be actionless and therefore

ineNective on the stage.’