Michael Billington

Home

UK TV

US TV

Film

Theatre

Articles

On Acting

Memorials

Welcome to Michael’s ‘Intimate With Strangers’ Page 9

SELF REGARD

I do not mind being greeted with “Hello, Stanislavsky,” or “Hi-ya Konstatin,” or receiving
anxious enquiries as to the state of my “super objective” or whether “my units” are in
order. Only my friends dare do this and in any case it is not unflattering. What is not so
satisfactory is when people suppose that I would mean my own work to be an example of
the Stanislavsky method, or assume that I would condemn any style of work which is not
based on this method.

For of course no single actor could possibly, on his own, give any effective demonstration
of the method. This can only be done by a group, and would take years to perfect. As far
as I know, the only English-speaking group which has attempted to absorb and put the
method into practice has been the Group Theatre of New York, who were seen here only
in Golden Boy. (Alas the Group Theatre is also now disbanded, and the better known
members of it are known here only through the screen: Luther Adler, Morris Carnovsky,
Clifford Odets, John Garfield.) But I have derived great stimulus from the book, and
constant reference to the high standards it demands can help check, to some extent,
the varying quality of one’s work.

When I have directed plays I have tried to apply its first principles; that is to say I have
tried to dissuade actors from flying at their parts “like French falconers,” hoping to give
a performance at the first rehearsal, but instead to encourage them to find their way
into a part by degrees, and to try to make sure that they supply themselves with a good
imaginative foundation to the part.

For again and again we see actors who start off well but who can never give a full
expression of the character because they have not imagined it fully and actively and
laid its foundations well; or others who have given a good performance on the opening
night, while their imaginative powers were still at work, but who gradually lose life and
conviction as the run proceeds, repeating maybe each move and inflection with expert
precision but finding that they need the stimulus of a “good house” or “someone in front,”
or a particular scene in which they know they are especially effective to help them give
their best. They are aware that something has gone out of their performance but do not
know it is. They know that certain scenes become increasingly difficult to play and they
do not know why. At worst, they begin to indulge in private jokes which even the
audience can see are not part of the play.

Even the actor will have recognized some if not all these symptoms in his own or other
actors’ work. Nor are these flaws primarily caused by long runs. They are caused, quite
simply, by the actors losing sooner or later (some lose quite early) the “offered
circumstances,” of which their part, not to mention the plot, depend. Every actor knows
how the impact of a first night audience adjusts his sense of the play as a whole. Some
less thorough actors are never so good as on opening nights. The audience reactions
supply such actors with the impulses which should have come earlier. But although
audiences vary, they do not vary to the extent of supplying a fresh stimulus every night,
and then such actors become morbidly dependent on their audiences and cannot give
their best except on rare, and unpredictable occasions. Such actors need to go back to
the beginning and start again, trying to revive that imaginative faculty of believing in what
they are doing. For that is part of what Stanislavsky taught: belief. No half-belief. Not
make-believe. Belief that does not begin and end by an intellectual process, but which is
so deep-rooted that it fires each movement, echoes in each silence, and penetrates
beyond “the threshold of the subconscious,” where it becomes creative...

On Acting

1

Home

UK TV

2

3

4

5

6

7

US TV

Film

Theatre

Articles

8

9

On Acting

10

11

Memorials