A History of Stanislavski in Translation

Abstract

Stanislavski has become a minor industry, both in theatre training and in publishing, with courses and related books endorsing, elaborating, or questioning his ‘System’. But how much of the System is really accessible to an English-speaking readership, and how full a view of Stanislavski's fully-formed ideas does it represent? Even the order and timing of the appearance of his works in English has, argues Jean Benedetti, determined our reception of his thought, and left us ignorant, sometimes wilfully, of the real development of his thinking: and in the following article, he traces the complicated and often fraught history of the translation of Stanislavski's works into English, revealing how (sometimes from the best of intentions) a slanted and incomplete view of the System still dominates our perceptions. Following a career in the theatre, film, and television. Jean Benedetti was Principal of the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama from 1970 to 1987, and since 1979 has been chairman of the Theatre Education Committee of the International Theatre Institute. In 1982 he published Stanislavski: an Introduction, and his biography of Stanislavski, the first in the West in forty years, was published in the autumn of 1988, and in paperback earlier this year. He is currently working on a documentary history of the Moscow Art Theatre.