The legend of the grand inquisitor; Stanislavski that Stanislavskians don’t want you to know about

Abstract

The high quality of Russian actors (and quantity thereof) is unarguable, if based on the evidence of Russian touring theatres and award-winning films. Nevertheless, I believe that the way in which these great artists were trained bears little resemblance to how actors training is described in Stanislavski’s books An Actor Prepares and Building a Character, which is not to say, paradoxically, that the aforementioned artists were not trained utilizing the Stanislavski System. Nevertheless, most books written in English about Russian acting technique continue revolving around these same Stanislavskian tomes which incidentally correspond to a very short period of activity within a very long career as actor, director and acting teacher. The meagre amount of English translations of seminal works on Russian acting technique written by direct pupils and collaborators of Stanislavski, is only partly to blame for this; considering that scholars can now travel to Russia freely and that most of these texts can be found on the Internet at the push of a button there is really no excuse for not correcting archaic or imprecise views. I believe that the true Stanislavski System utilized to train great Russian actors is in truth a bulk of knowledge which was and is still being passed down from teachers to students in the great acting schools of Russia and which can be found duly transcribed in the literary legacy of these selfsame teachers and students (and on some recorded media) but that, however, remains as yet unknown or unacknowledged by many English-speaking specialists. Things are shifting quickly in Russian acting as directors begin to explore post-dramatic performance and it is important that clarity is achieved in relation to Russian text-based acting before it moves on irretrievably in whatever direction it may, once again.