Stanislavsky on Home Ground

Fifty years after his death, the seminal Russian theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky is still an object of controversy in his native land.

America and the West probably remember Stanislavsky and his innovative "method" system of acting because of the late Lee Strasberg and his celebrated Actors Studio, which helped form the likes of Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, and Marilyn Monroe. Oleg Efremov, current artistic director of the Moscow Art Theater, the company formed by Stanislavsky, recently organized an International Stanislavsky Symposium in Moscow, which brought together five hundred delegates to discuss what the late, great director means to the modern world.

Realism, on stage or off, is never an easy commodity to handle, particularly in Moscow, at a time when glasnost, particularly in the theater, was quite astonishing. As discussions at the symposium progressed and members saw more examples of what currently passes for "truth-telling" in Moscow's theaters, the idea that a common definition of stage realism could be achieved became increasingly remote.

Variations on Chekhov

Members were presented with several different ways of directing Chekhov. The most apparently authentic is still to be found at the Moscow Art Theater, where realism is taken to mean a close imitation of life's surfaces, together with a passionate expression of the characters' inner emotions. It is a style that, with its lack of irony, might be mistaken in the West for overly broad acting. Efremov's version of Uncle Vanya, which I had first seen four years ago, was described as a "meteorological" production, because one could tell from the lighting effects what the weather was, even the exact time of day. Through the windows could be seen the Russian countryside and there, in the distance, charcoal fires smoldering on a hill.

The setting was spectacularly exact, a perfect replica of a provincial estate of some eighty years past; but Chekhov himself often complained that Stanislavsky wasted time on inessentials. What do charcoal fires have to do with Uncle Vanya? A more selective directorial approach was found with Peter Brook, whose celebrated international company from the Bouffes du Nord in Paris took on the challenging task of playing The Cherry Orchard in English before Moscow audiences.

There were no elaborate sets in Brook's The Cherry Orchard, just some carefully selected rugs, a few chairs, a screen, and a bookcase. In the final scene, as the family leaves the country mansion that has been its ancestral home. The back walls of the stage at the Taganka Theatre were exposed to reveal a desolation of brick and plaster. What was more startling than this visual austerity, however, was the restraint in the acting. Brook, though Russian by birth, had brought with him the full British rhetorical repertoire of understatement and excessive politeness. No Slavic excesses were allowed.

For the first twenty minutes, Muscovites watched in silence; and then, as the cool, conversational delivery took hold, they began to respond with increasing excitement. "It was as if," my Russian companion said to me, "I had hear the words for the first time and knew what they meant." There was one memorable moment when Tom Wilkinson's Lopakhin said, "God has given us vast forests, immense fields, wide horizons. We who live here ought to be giants, living in such a country as this"--and all the frustrations of modern Russia could be felt through the applause.

This stylistic contrast between Efremov and Brook became a point of discussion at the symposium. Which director was closer to Stanislavsky's intentions? Clearly, Efremov was obeying the letter of the law, but what about the spirit? Stanislavsky had been a rebel in his day, seeking a new theatrical truthfulness in the face of the artificialities of nineteenth-century melodrama. Was it possible that the social realism of the Moscow Art Theater had now become as artificial today? If so, then Brook, by being less hidebound, had stayed closer to Stanislavsky's original inspiration.

Lack of Adventure

For some Soviet critics, however, Brook laws not adventurous enough. For the past twenty years in Moscow, there has been a trend toward what might be termed "expressionistic" Chekhov, pioneered by two avant-garde directors, Anatoly Efros (1925-1987) and Yuri Lyubimov (b. 1917). Both had stormy encounters with the pre-Gorbachev authorities, although Efros, who replaced the charismatic Lyubimov at the Taganka Theatre in 1985, was regarded as the more timid of the two.

Nonetheless, Efros, for "ideological deficiencies," had been discharged as artistic director of the Lenin Komsomol Theatre in 1967, after having held the post with distinction for four years. It was Efros who in 1967 first presented a Chekhov play, The Three Sisters, as an indirect attack on the Soviet system. Colonel Vershinin's vision of a noble, prosperous Russia became a savagely ironic comment on all utopian dreams, including those of socialism.

Such ridicule of political optimism has since become commonplace in Soviet theater. In a later Lyubimov version, The Three Sisters began with the frightening tramp of boots, and then the metal sidewall of the Taganka Theatre rolled up to reveal an army platoon, ready to shoot any subversives in the audience. As an army officer in a police state, Vershinin could afford to be optimistic. Anyone else had to run for cover.

I asked Efros in 1985 whether his approach was not some kind of violation of Chekhov's plays' changing their meanings and destroying their innate naturalism. He flatly disagreed. "Chekhov and Stanislavsky were both facing up to the problems of their day. I am trying to do the same thing with ours. Stanislavsky never put naturalism on a pedestal. Otherwise, he would never have invited Edward Gordon Craig to direct an expressionist Hamlet at his theater. He was always looking for fresh ways to treat the contemporary human dilemma realistically. Naturalism was just one of his solutions."

Bur Efros was not radical enough for some Soviet intellectuals. "He always let the government and the bureaucrats off the hook," one critic complained to me. "He denounced them and apologized for them in the same breath." Efros also suffered in comparison with his older and more daring contemporary, Yuri Lyubimov, whose twenty-year reign at the Taganka Theatre from 1964 to 1984 was marked both by his astonishing courage and by the government's remarkable tolerance. His productions were repeatedly censored or banned. Still, "What others whispered," it was said in Moscow, "Lyubimov shouted."

Lyubimov on Tour

Lyubimov left the Soviet Union in 1985 and became an Israeli citizen. Since then, he has toured the world as a guest director for many leading companies, including the Burg theater in Vienna and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London. One of the most newsworthy features of the Stanislavsky symposium was the director's brief return to the Taganka to direct a revival of his adaptation of Boris Mozhayev's The Man Alive, banned for twenty-one years, and a new production of a Pushkin short story, A Feast in the Time of the Plague. He had a hero's welcome.

I watched him at rehearsal, surrounded by his old friends and actors from the Taganka Company, who seemed awestruck that they were once more in the presence of the master. There are national styles in directing, as in writing and acting. Most British directors, for example, suggest ideas quietly to their actors, instead of briskly telling them what to do. German directors, on the other hand, can often be bullies. Lyubimov is a showman, who acts out all the parts, interrupts himself, digresses to a discussion of a serious political point, cracks a joke, and improvises naughty rhymes in Russian.

It was all immensely entertaining, but I couldn't help thinking how different this Lyubimov rehearsal was from a Western one, particularly if conducted by a director trained in what we call the Stanislavsky method. There was no ponderous analysis of motive, no "affective memory," no compilation of case histories. And yet Lyubimov had been trained in the Moscow Art Theater School before World War II. He had either directly known or been closely influenced by all the great personalities of Russian theater from the late 1920s onward. Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Stanislavsky--all are names cited reverentially in the West.

Partly under Lyubimov's influence, but more, I suspect, from the needs of the situation, stage realism has come to mean something quite different from Stanislavsky's naturalism. Instead, it implies facing up to the social devastation caused by seventy-one years of communist rule. On this visit, I saw seven productions in different Moscow theaters, and each one was in its own way an attack on the system.

There were two grotesque antisocialist satires, based on short stories by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940), The Heart of a Dog and Zoya's Flat, which could not be published three years ago, let alone staged. At the Satiricon Theatre there was a nightclub version of Jean Genet's The Maids, a celebration of Western "decadence," as the old apparatchiks of the Ministry of Culture would have seen it. Even Pushkin's Boris Godunov was not spared, but turned into an expressionist parable about communist political corruption.

Memorable Fringe

In one fringe theater there was a memorable production of a Chekhov short story, Room, improvised by the actors under the inspired leadership of Yuri Yeryomin, a young Soviet director of whom I had not previously heard. We were herded by white-coated attendants into a hall, where there was a wooden cage. We had to watch the play's action through slats. The story was of a provincial mental asylum in which dissidents as well as lunatics were placed, under the eye of a disillusioned, half drunk doctor. But the doctor came to believe that at least some of the madmen were more sane that their captors, at which points he was placed in the cage as well.

All this was in startling contrast to my first visit to the Soviet Union in 1984, when Chernenko was still alive and Gorbachev was just one of several possible successors. In those days the state propaganda of the Brezhnev era was still in full flow and the unreadable newspaper contained triumphant statistics about work targets fulfilled and the better life just around the corner. Then, if you wanted to know what it was really like to live in the Soviet Union, you had to take a quiet walk with a friend in a park, apparently casual and not too long, where in urgent whispers he would tell you horrific anecdotes of corruption, suppression, and unendurable hardships.

I asked Lyubimov about glasnost. Wasn't it good that The Man Alive could at last be performed, and hadn't he left the Soviet Union at the wrong time? He replied, "No, nothing has really changed. Throughout the country, the same people are in power, the same suffering exists." "But at any rate," I replied, "You can talk openly about the problems." "Even so…" he said. "Even so…"

In another sense, too, this rush of speaking frankly can be unnerving. I went to a meeting of Russian regional directors from such places as Omsk, Vladivostok, and Leningrad, which was in an uproar for much of the time. "How can we accept the idea," said one person tearfully, "that our glorious Revolution, on which we have wasted so much time and blood, was wrong? How can we believe that our enemies were right? It is impossible." "For seventy-one years," another stated, "we have been told what to think. Now nobody tells us what is right or wrong. If I'm allowed to stage everything, then I can stage nothing, for I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing." "We've lived in a make-believe world," summed up a director from Omsk. "We're still living in make-believe."

Exception to the Rule

But I can remember one occasion when all of Stanislavsky's theories worked exactly according to plan. Perhaps it was the exception that proved the rule. It happened in Leningrad, during a performance of the Mali Theatre's dramatized version of Abramov's novel Brothers and Sisters, which concerns the life of a village in the north of Russia during the war, under Stalinist oppression, and the years of stagnation that followed. The director war Lev Dodin.

A pre-Gorbachev production, it was premiered on the night Chernenko died. Dodin had fought hard for the right to stage this controversial work and had received support, surprisingly, from a local communist official who had argued his cause, at some personal risk, at the Ministry of Culture in Moscow. As a result, every detail of the production had to be authentic and backed up by hard evidence. No polemical exaggerations were allowed.

Nonetheless, the portrait that emerged to this village's life, its endless hardships and sufferings, was stunningly effective, more convincing perhaps because of the necessary restraint. The communist system was not spared from blame, and indeed the chief oppressor was shown to be the local party apparatchik. Propaganda films of rosy-cheeked peasants were shown--and laughed at--as were leading articles from Pravda.

But, as in the great nineteenth-century Russian novels, the focus was upon human endurance and moral dilemmas, particularly on how private and public loyalties may come into conflict. There was one extraordinary scene, which cannot be adequately described in words. During the war, all the men from the village had gone off to fight, leaving the collective farm to be run be women and children; afterward, only one soldier returned, apologizing for having stayed alive when all his comrades had been killed.

Months later, however, Anfisa, the woman who had been running the collective farm, heard a rumor that someone else had come back; and when she saw that it was her husband, she simply could not believe her good fortune. The actress playing Anfisa, Shestakova, held one of the longest pauses I have ever witnessed; and the audience began to weep. Wave after wave of sobbing filled the theater, tears of grief, tears of relief.

Cathartic Act

If Modernists tell you that there is no such things as Aristotelian catharsis, do not believe them. There was Mother Russia mourning for her slaughtered sons; there were the orphaned children crying out for parents lost forever in the unmarked graves and ditches of history. And the event that triggered off this display of collective emption was the unmistakably authentic, Stanislavsky-inspired acting of Shestakova.

The real lesson that Stanislavsky taught does not lie in any of the theories and training methods that bear his name. He knew there were no shortcuts to truthfulness. After the actor has assembled all the external facts about a character and used his imagination to feel what it is like to live within those boundaries, there still remains the difficult task of using these insights to better understand the human condition. The rules are irrelevant. The process is all.

Stanislavsky bore witness to the fact that the theater need not be trivial or just an urban diversion. It was, and is, a way through which life itself can be examined; and within all the confusions of the symposium, which reflected the feats and doubts of Soviet society today, Stanislavsky's calm and disciplined voice could still be heard. "Take nothing for granted. Think of your own experiences and use them truthfully."