A Potted Biography of Constantin Stanislavski
Life of Originator of Western Actor Training Tradition
Sep 22, 2009
Constantin Sergeievich Alekseiev, later Constantin Stanislavski, was born on 5 January 1863, the second of ten children, to one of the richest families in Russia. He was brought up in a fashionable district of Moscow and he and his brothers and sisters were taken to the theatre and to concerts from an early age.
Stanislavski’s cousin spent a lot of money on staging theatre and opera and many of Russia’s top actors, dancers, writers and musicians were friends of his family. The children re-enacted scenes from performances they had seen either playing the parts themselves or using puppets.
Stanislavski's Home Theatre
In 1877, Stanislavski’s father converted outbuildings into a fully-equipped theatre. Stanislavski began a habit of making detailed notes about his performances that he kept up for the rest of his life.
After he left school and joined the family business, his father created a second, 300-seat theatre. Here Stanislavski developed techniques for getting his actors to perform with increased realism. He received favourable reviews for his amateur performances, but also began to appear in less respectable plays and venues. He adopted the name Stanislavski, after a fellow amateur who, like him, admired the ballerina Stanislavskaia, to hide his double life from his parents. The secret was revealed when he walked on stage to see his mother and father in the audience.
Society of Art and Literature
In 1888, against the advice of his family and friends, he spent a large amount of money on setting up the Society of Art and Literature. While performing for the Society under the direction of Aleksandr Fedotov, who had acted at the Mali with Mikhaïl Shchepkin, Stanislavski began creating characters from his own personality rather than copying gestures from other actors. In 1889 he married Lilina – the acting pseudonym of Maria Petrovna Perevostchikova – with whom he had acted.
In 1893, after the deaths of his father and brother, Stanislavski became head of the family business. He was a very successful businessman and a popular employer but only wanted to create theatre.
Moscow Art Theatre
On 22 June 1897, Stanislavski and the playwright Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko had an eighteen-hour meeting and agreed to set up an Art Theatre with an ensemble of actors and affordable ticket prices. Nemirovich controlled the repertoire, Stanislavski the staging.
The Open Art Theatre – later the Moscow Art Theatre – opened on 14 October 1898 with Tolstoy’s Tsar Fiodor Ioannovich, which was a great success, but the next few plays were disastrous failures. The theatre’s fortunes were saved by the spectacular success of Chekhov’s The Seagull.
The company built a repertoire of productions of new and old plays, each based on a detailed ‘mis-en-scène’ worked out by Stanislavski in advance, specifying every move, gesture, pause, tone of voice and sound effect.
Fomulating the 'System'
In 1902, Stanislavski began writing down ideas about a ‘grammar’ of acting. In 1905, he wrote of his doubts about the Art Theatre’s system of giving actors a detailed plan at the first rehearsal. He set up the experimental Theatre-Studio with the actor Vsevolod Meyerhold, which failed and was closed. The political situation in Russia was deteriorating, so the company went on its first foreign tour, spreading the company’s reputation throughout Europe.
Stanislavski experimented with putting the actor, rather than the director, at the centre of the rehearsal process. Some company members, including Nemirovich, regarded Stanislavski’s new methods as ridiculous and disruptive. Actors used to performing moves and gestures given to them by the director found it difficult to adapt. In 1909 and 1910, he experimented during rehearsals for A Month in the Country and Hamlet (co-directed and designed by Edward Gordon Craig). He now considered that real theatre could only be created by an ensemble of artists working together, not a company dominated by an author or star actor.
In 1912, Stanislavski founded the First Studio with young professional actors including Richard Boleslavski, Evgeni Vakhtangov and Michael Chekhov.
After the Revolution
In February 1917, Tsar Nicholas II was removed from power. Stanislavski broadly supported the revolution, but his factory was put into state ownership and he lost his private fortune.
He continued to teach his techniques in the Studios, and in 1918 set up an Opera Studio with young singers from the Bolshoi and Moscow Conservatoire, partly to show that his system could be employed beyond naturalistic plays. When he was evicted from his home in 1921, Lenin found him a property near the Art Theatre with living accommodation and space for his Opera Studio. He lived there for the rest of his life.
Stanislavski staged Tchaikovsky’s Evgeni Onegin with the Opera Studio, and the Art Theatre toured Europe and America. Boleslavski, with Stanislavski’s permission, gave lectures in America on the ‘system’ which were later published. Whilst in America, Stanislavski began to write his biography My Life In Art to pay for his son Igor’s treatment for tuberculosis. This was finally published in 1924.
Stanislavski's Last Acting Performance
In 1928, Stanislavski suffered a massive heart attack whilst playing Vershinin in an excerpt of Three Sisters at a gala for the Art Theatre’s jubilee. He finished the scene and took two curtain calls before going off, but this signalled the end of his acting career.
He continued to work on production plans for plays and operas and to put together his notes on his ‘system’ for publication. The ‘Method of Physical Actions’ was developed and An Actor’s Work On Himself – translated into English as An Actor Prepares – became the first of his works to explain his ‘system’.
Frustrated by divisions in the Arts Theatre, Stanislavski set up the Opera-Dramatic Studio to pass on his techniques in 1935. By 1938, he had revised An Actor’s Work On Himself: Part One for Russian publication, but he died on 2 August.
An Actor’s Work On Himself: Part Two and An Actor’s Work On A Role were unfinished, and his notes were not compiled into published works (in English Building A Character and Creating A Role) for many years.
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