The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit

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BM: I did my degree at Birmingham University, then I did a year at Guildford School of Acting and after three and a half years in the industry I kept feeling as though there was this seam of creativity that I just wasn’t tapping. She is Professor of Acting and Directing in the department of Theatre, Film and Digital Production at the University of California, Riverside. M., (2017), iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, New York: Atria.

So: ‘Being on an empty stage,’ says Kaiser, ‘and having to imagine an entire world around you [uses] exactly the same muscles as standing in front of the green screen and imagining everything that’s going to be provided for you digitally in postproduction’.So the thoughts might be related to Hamlet and Gertrude; or they might be related to the actor himself and his relationship with his own mother; to some residue of an image seen on the news that morning of an immigrant child reunited with his mother; to a memory of himself as a three-year-old child with his mother; to a fleeting thought of what it will be like at his mother’s funeral; to a imagined glimpse of what it was like at Gertrude’s wedding to his uncle; to a sudden quizzical possibility that the actress sitting in front of him playing Gertrude might actually be his mother. As an actor-in-training this has been a great introduction to the techniques that Stanislavsky used, filtered through Merlin's perfectly clear prose. The main points to remember are (a) no one can get anything wrong: the droppers-in are simply free-associating, and the actors are simply harvesting ripe fruits for future rehearsals; (b) the final interpretation of the scene might bear no overt signs of any of the discoveries made during the dropping-in session, yet the residue of them will be in the DNA of the scene somewhere (be it in the relationships, the shared moments, and the often highly-charged emotional journeys); and (c) words hold lots of unexpected information and possibilities, so no one particular interpretation need be fixed like a butterfly on a board.

Indeed, Stanislavsky himself crossed literary genres, though – as I mentioned – he didn’t cross media: he didn’t work in film. Jean Benedetti and Katya Kamotskaia (who was one of my teachers and a language adviser for this translation) sidestep the references that are in An Actor Prepares to spirit. He was born into the Renaissance of medicine and philosophy, as humanity transitioned out of the Dark Ages. The physical set-up for ‘dropping in’ involves the two actors sitting ‘eyeball-to-eyeball’ (as Packer describes it), knees interlocking, hands lightly resting on their thighs, their bottoms snug into the back of their chairs and their feet on the ground so that their spines are long and their bodies supported. This aspect of his work is often played down, particularly in the latest translation of An Actor’s Work.As Stanislavsky put it: ‘the separation of the mental life from the physical life does not give the actor the possibility to sense the life of the character’s body, and therefore he impoverishes himself. Increasingly, I believe this is my role: to provide a safe space for my students to dare to put themselves in experientially different situations, as they explore their potential as psychophysical beings.