The Stanislavsky System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance (review)

Reviewed by: The Stanislavsky System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance Jonathan Pitches Rose Whyman. The Stanislavsky System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xviii + 297, illustrated. $99.00 (Hb). The seventieth anniversary of Stanislavsky’s death was sure to stimulate renewed interest in the Russian practitioner’s work and legacy, and thankfully, with this book and with the long-awaited translations of his magnum opus, An Actor’s Work, there are significant new materials to substantiate that interest and, perhaps, to show the merits of a reassessment of his contribution. Whyman’s impeccably researched book resists the shorthand of the new Jean Benedetti translations, consistently using the full titles of Stanislavsky’s three major books: The Actor’s Work on Him/Herself in the Creative Process of Experiencing (AWHE), The Actor’s Work on Him/Herself in the Creative Process of Incarnation (AWHI), The Actor’s Work on a Role (AWR). While Routledge may be forgiven for eschewing these rather convoluted titles, Whyman’s adherence to them sets the tone for a very detailed and scholarly examination of the subtleties of the System. All the primary source translations of Stanislavsky’s writings are the author’s, and for the non-Russian reader, this opens up a wealth of hitherto unknown materials relating to the development of his ideas and to their complex appropriation by critics. This is also true of the three other practitioner–trainers who, collectively, constitute the Stanislavsky “legacy” alluded to in the book’s title: Yevgeny Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, and Vsevolod Meyerhold. Focusing on “Experiencing” and then on “Incarnation” in chapters two and three, the book’s first half echoes the now-famous diagram of Stanislavsky’s system: two nerve-encrusted lungs bisected by a spinal arrow leading to the super-task (40). But where other publications have simply included a key to the main terms of this diagram, Whyman assiduously takes us through all the terminological complexities of Stanislavsky’s summative statement in detail, making the fascinating observation that it was originally titled “The Plan of Experiencing,” not “The Plan of the System.” Ostensibly a minor point, this remark complements Whyman’s overall thesis: Tolstoy and Théodule Ribot are the thinkers most influential for the System, not Pavlov or Ivan Sechenov. This correction helps rebalance attention on Stanislavsky’s fascination with the internal processes of acting, developed early on in his career and maintained throughout his life. This theme is picked up again in the concluding chapter, “Theory and Practice of the System,” in a quite extended critical analysis of Soviet sources from the 1960s (specifically Grigory Kristi and Pavel Simonov) [End Page 382] dealt with in parallel to briefer citations of Joseph Roach and Phillip Zarrilli. Here, the western critics are positioned intriguingly as “following the Soviet line” (248) of materialist analysis, specifically in their prioritizing of the Method of Physical Actions (which was simply one of many rehearsal methods, according to Whyman) and, in Roach’s case, in his equating of affective memory with Pavlov’s conditioned reflex (249). Inevitably, the chapters on Vakhtangov and Chekhov (dealt with as a pair) and on Meyerhold are less detailed than the extensive Stanislavskian analysis, and there is a greater sense of distance from the subject matter when Whyman turns to these three director–teachers, all of whom worked with Stanislavsky at some stage. But there are real discoveries here too. Vakhtangov remains one of the most under-discussed contributors to the Moscow Art First Studio, after Anton Chekhov and Richard Boleslavsky (and arguably just before Leopold Sulerzhitsky), and here he is revealed as both a more effective interpreter of the system than Stanislavsky himself and as a conduit to the imagination-based Technique of Michael Chekhov: “Vakhtangov stepped over Stanislavsky’s theatre of experiencing and real life to assert the life of the image and art – the imaginative creation of the director, actor and writer” (165). Chekhov is analysed with similar competence and sensitivity, although, for this reader, the emphasis on anthroposophy and on Chekhov’s belief in “other worlds” (190), while well placed, misses the importance of Rudolf Steiner’s mentor, Goethe, and...

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