Why nobody agrees what the system is
Konstantin Alekseyev, who took the stage name Stanislavski in 1884, spent roughly thirty years working this out. The problem is not that he was vague. It is that the books were edited twice, in opposite directions.
He wrote in Russian. The first book to appear anywhere was an American translation, and the American publisher required cuts before it would take the manuscript.
The Russian original of that same volume runs to about 575 pages. The English came out at 295, in larger type. Roughly half of it is gone.
- 1909First written draft of the system. The emotion-memory period runs through the First Studio from 1912.
- 1934–38The late work, developed in enforced seclusion. Active Analysis belongs here, and he published almost nothing about it.
- 1938Dies on 7 August. Part one appears in Moscow posthumously, and his widow receives the first copy about three weeks later.
- 1948, 1957Part two, then the work on a role. The Soviet collected edition follows, edited to fit the official line.
- 1924My Life in Art, in Boston. He wrote it for America. The Russian edition of 1926 is the longer one.
- 1936An Actor Prepares. The inner half, cut roughly in half again, two years before the Russian.
- 1949Building a Character. The physical half, thirteen years later. Most of American acting had already been built.
- 2008Jean Benedetti reunites both halves as An Actor's Work, the first English attempt at the whole thing.
There was a second reason he published in America, and it is not the one usually given. Money mattered, but the scholar who has done most on these texts records that he also hoped to get his ideas out from under a censorship that was pushing the system into Marxist shapes.
The words you were taught, and the words he used
This is the most useful section on the page, because the vocabulary most drama schools use is one translator's choice, and it makes plain workmanlike instructions sound like psychology.
Two words carry most of the trouble. A kusok is a bit or a slice, the word you would use about bread. A zadacha is a task or a problem, the word a Russian child uses for a sum in an arithmetic book.
None of this makes “objective” wrong. It is a real attempt at a real Russian word, and thinking in objectives has helped a great many actors. The point is narrower: if the vocabulary has ever felt more abstract than the job it describes, that is not you failing to understand it.
Did he abandon emotion memory?
This is the oldest argument in the subject and it has a clean answer that almost nobody gives, because it requires opening one book.
The case for saying yes is a famous instruction: do not drag feelings out of yourself, but think how to perform all the physical actions within the given circumstances, throughout the play. That is in the modern translation at page 166.
The case for saying no is that Emotion Memory is chapter nine of the same book, running from page 195, a full chapter that endorses the technique and tells the actor to keep feeding it with reading, observation and travel.
Early on, emotion memory is a way in. Late on, it is still there, but he insists you reach feeling indirectly — through the other elements, through the staging, through props and light, and above all through doing the action in the circumstances. What he withdrew is the idea that you can go at a feeling head-on and get it.
That is the same instruction as page 166, said the other way round. Stop hunting the feeling. Do the thing. The feeling arrives as a consequence.
There is a second reason the argument has been so confused. The passage at page 166 sits inside the volume about inner work, not the physical one, because he folded his 1930s thinking about action back into the earlier book while revising it.
Which means the tidy split between an early inner Stanislavski and a late physical one is not really there. The late man is inside the early book, revising it until he died.
What the Soviet state did to it
The second edit is less discussed in acting classes and it explains more. From 1934 the system was not merely popular in the Soviet Union. It was official.
When Britain actually got it
Here is a fact that surprised us and that we have not seen anywhere else. British actor training did not take up the system between the wars. It took it up in 1960.
Theodore Komisarjevsky taught at RADA before the war, and Michel Saint-Denis ran London schools from 1936, but he brought a French improvisation tradition rather than Stanislavskian psychology. Michael Chekhov was at Dartington from 1936 with what was in any case a divergent line.
The first systematic Stanislavskian programme in a mainstream British conservatoire was Harold Lang's at the Central School of Speech and Drama, from 1960 to 1963. He worked from Stanislavski's own writings and deliberately avoided the American Method.
John Schlesinger filmed the class for the BBC in 1961, which did a great deal to legitimise it. The resistance beforehand was real and recorded: eclecticism was treated as a virtue, systematic method as hostile to intuition. Vanessa Redgrave described real hostility to any method in particular.
So a British actor's inheritance is genuinely different from an American one. It arrived a quarter of a century later, through a different door, and without the Method attached.
Does any of it work?
Nobody knows, and the small amount of research that exists is more interesting than the usual claims made for it.
Grading what gets quoted
Twenty-three research briefs in, the pattern is dependable. Here is where the famous lines come from.
Using it, stripped of the vocabulary
Everything above is history and translation. The working method underneath is small, old and has not changed since 1909.
Who, where, when, what has just happened, what everyone wants. The facts of the scene before any interpretation of it. Most confusion in rehearsal is a circumstance nobody established.
If these were my circumstances, what would I do? Not how would I feel, because the question is about behaviour, and it produces something playable rather than something to try to summon.
Small pieces, one plain job each, expressed as something you are doing to the other person; if it needs a paragraph to state, it is not a task yet.
The supertask, running under all the small ones, and the line of action that connects them. This is what stops a performance being a series of good moments that add up to nothing.
Communication is the element, and it is the one that survives everything else going wrong. What you are doing only exists in what it does to them.
This is the late correction and it is the most useful sentence he wrote. Perform the action in the circumstances, and let whatever arrives arrive. Chasing an emotion is the reliable way to lose it.
The circumstances, the task and the line of action all transfer to a tape without modification, and they are what make eight takes match. That much is uncontroversial.
What people often say is that tempo-rhythm and physical characterisation do not survive a chest-up frame. We are less sure than we were. There is a scholarly collection published this year, co-edited by the leading Stanislavski scholar, arguing that exactly those elements do adapt to screen work. There is no evidence either way, so treat what you read about this — including ours — as craft opinion.
Where the sources disagree
Every page on this course ends here. On this one, most of the disagreements dissolve once you know which edition somebody read.
Did he reject emotion memory?
Commonly saidYes, decisively, in his late work.
What we foundNo. It is chapter nine of the book he was still correcting when he died. He subordinated it to action; he never removed it.
Is it “units and objectives”?
Commonly saidThe standard terms of the system.
What we foundOne translator's choices from 1936. He wrote bits and tasks, using deliberately ordinary words. And “beat” is neither.
Which book should you read?
Commonly saidAn Actor Prepares, the classic.
What we foundIt is half a book, cut roughly in half again. The 2008 single-volume translation is the first English attempt at the whole thing.
Was the system Soviet-approved or Soviet-suppressed?
Commonly saidOne or the other, depending who is telling it.
What we foundBoth. The system was enthroned from 1934; the late method he actually ended on was politically unsafe and its main carrier was dismissed in 1949.
Is it the foundation of all Western acting?
Commonly saidUniversally, and often in the first line.
What we foundIt is the dominant inheritance of English-language actor training. “Universal” writes out Meyerhold, Brecht, Grotowski, Lecoq and everything non-Western.
When did British training adopt it?
Commonly saidBetween the wars, with the émigrés.
What we found1960, at one London school, from the books, and deliberately without the American Method attached.
Is there evidence it works?
Commonly saidA brain-imaging study and a body of memory research.
What we foundFifteen students in a scanner, unreplicated; memory researchers who never mention him; and one randomised trial, about falling over.
A last word
It is worth holding on to how ordinary the actual instruction is. Work out what is true in the scene, decide what you want and what you are doing about it, and aim it at the other person. Stop trying to feel things on purpose.
Everything difficult about this subject is downstream of a publisher's cuts, a translator's word choices and a state's preferences. None of it is downstream of the method, which is small enough to write on a postcard and has survived every edition intact.
Read the scene for what is true. Decide what you want. Then do something about it.