You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Konstantin Sergeevich Alexeev (1863-1938): Born in Moscow, the son of a rich mill owner, the grandson of a French actress. Trained at the Paris Conservatory in 1887, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. At the time of the Russian Revolution when the Moscow Art Theatre was taken over by the government, Alexeev was kept on as Director. Comrade Director Alexeev is better known to the theatrical world by his stage name, Stanislavsky. We here are concerned with the second American edition of his Stanislavsky on the Art of the Stage.
The following five quotations give its particular language and the flavor of its formulations. The second and third quotations are from the introduction by the translator, David Magarshack. Numbers at the end of the quotations refer to pages in the book.
The theatre is the art of reflecting life. (92)
An actor must not “play” passions and characters: he must act under the influence of the passions and in character. (33)
Stanislavsky's theory of acting is quite properly mainly concerned with elucidating the problems which bear directly on the ways in which an actor can enter into the feelings of his part. (58)
What needs to be done is to introduce the living heart of the living actor into the chain of inward and outward actions which in life always run parallel with each other; what needs to be done is to help the actor by a whole series of devices to free his body and his inward world of every sort of tension so as to enable him to reflect the life of the play in which he is appearing. (98)
The heroic act of an artist consists in his disclosure of the secrets of creative life. (110)
The charm and colloquialism of these passages should not deflect us from the perception that they are unusually good statements about the theatre and the fruits of the thought of one of its very sensitive and experienced practitioners. Stanislavsky goes on to say of his “system”:
My system is divided into two main parts: (1) the inner and outer work of the actor