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Introduction

In the beginning there was chaos

All of my lessons are based on a love of order. I would go so far as to say a passion for order. That is how I was made, how I was raised. But nonetheless I adore chaos. I have to start from chaos to feel the wonders of order. For there to be nothing that makes sense in the beginning, then for one instant everything becomes clear and lucid, as if you have opened your eyes. Then everything fades away again and you can’t see anything any more. Like a child’s game.

Analysis is also a game, not a boring job as actors often think and therefore dislike. I know this for a fact. Maybe they think of it as too hard, and only intellectual directors are up to the task. But in actual fact the rules are simple – in the midst of utter chaos you have to find Beauty. That and nothing more.

They say chaos is for brilliant people, with normal people you have to bring order and show them so that they see; fools have to be shown and have it explained; and idiots have to be shown and have it explained and then repeated. All of this is just playful chitchat. In actual fact, it is not so easy to separate one from the other, brilliance from stupidity, order from chaos. It all exists together and not only is it hard to separate them, in a way they complement one another. It seems to me that that is how analysing a role should be approached – you can’t take it all apart and put it back together and sometimes you don’t have to. You just have to play with it. You have to ask questions.

Many actors believe that analysing a role means explaining for themselves the behaviour of the personnage* in a given situation, discovering the motives behind their actions, understanding the logic of people’s relationships, finding the organic chemistry of their feelings and the like. In brief, such an analysis results in a study of the principles of life and nothing more. It is clearly insufficient. I would even go so far as to say it is dangerous. Dangerous because the psychological analysis of a role is becoming a rabid disease amongst actors all over the world. Today, even in Greek tragedies, actors try to play out the psychological sufferings of the heroes. As if they see nothing in the role other than the psychology of humankind. I remember August Strindberg’s Dreamplay being performed by a company of actors from Mozambique under a Swedish director in the style of psychological theatre. I have never seen anything funnier, and they thought that they were employing the Stanislavsky system. Poor Konstantin Sergeyevich, if only he had seen it! It was he who warned in his final lessons that the use of just one psychological analysis severely reduces an actor’s ability to cognise the role. But, towards the end of his life, who listened to him? The bacteria of “psychologism” had already begun to spread in theatres. And soon it took on epidemic proportions. That is why I say it is dangerous. It seems to me that it is very important to dwell on this problem in some detail before coming to the proposed questions for conducting an analysis.

(*) What is generally referred to as “character” is divided by Jurij Alschitz into persona and personnage. Persona is to be understood as a real individual, with a biography, and comprises his/her personal history with facts, and emotions, with a beginning and an end. The personnage is a legend, a myth, a dynamic substance beyond the confines of time and space. Compare Jurij Alschitz, The Vertical of the Role, Berlin 2003, p. 32. (Editor’s note)

Throughout history the development of theatre has generally taken two directions. The first involved researching the spiritual world and the second the material world, where the practical side of life comes under scrutiny. It was this form of Theatre that gradually became predominant. By developing in this direction it perfected its ability to depict a person’s behaviour in different circumstances. But the situations, albeit in a thousand different guises, repeated themselves and ultimately came down, as they say, to twenty main plots. There were repetitions, remakes of age-old subjects and certain situational frameworks emerged. At that time, with the onslaught of the naturalism of the 19th century, people’s inner psychology was Theatre’s focal point. Motivated by the fact that each person’s behaviour in the same situation will be different and that each of us has different feelings and emotions, Theatre started studying human psychology, the various motives for a person’s behaviour and the richness of the human persona.

Actors’ consciousnesses have long played host to the idea of human individuality, inspiring them to create on stage numerous personas and the relationships they share. Theatre had made a distinct step in its development and it was accompanied by significant success. Truth be told, the suspicion sometimes arose that by and large people are different from one another in mere trifles. But in accepting this disparaging conclusion it was necessary also to accept that on stage we are engaged in a study of these very trifles. Not wishing to concur with this we continued, as we thought, to immerse ourselves deeper and deeper in the mysteries of human psychology, while in fact we were creating more and yet more acting clichés. It was as if actors had forgotten the theatre of Euripides or Shakespeare, as if they had forgotten that there is something higher than human nature, something which maps out the destinies of individuals and their spiritual aspirations, things that bear no relation to their character but rather to the mission allotted to them in life or which they themselves have chosen.

The truth of individuals’ psychology, as well as of their interrelations, became the sole criterion in theatre art. Everybody sought out one thing – “the truth of life”. But in hiding behind this “truth” theatre only created the illusion of truth, nothing more. Enthralled, actors would show audiences “… people in the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking and wearing their coats; when they attempt to extract a moral from jaded scenes and their insipid talk, when playwrights try to create a moral, a small one, comprehensive and useful for the everyday and give us under a thousand different guises the same, same, same old stuff…”** These words of Konstantin Treplev first voiced fears of theatre’s principles of “usefulness”, its intelligibility, its mimicking of life so dominant on stage, and thus ultimately its dependence on everyday life. The study of the inner psychology of life was substituted for its outer shell, and it was done with a fair amount of “vitality”. Over one hundred years ago the author of The Seagull was struck with concern that Theatre, with its unilateral thought processes, was gradually losing its ability to move upwards. It repeats itself, stands still or at best turns on the spot. The young and still untainted actress Nina Zarechnaya refuses to act without a psychological foundation for her character and demands a “living character”. Using Dorn’s words from the same play, Anton Chekhov proposed another way – “express only deep and eternal truths”; art should aim for the kingdom of dreams and higher ideals. There, in the realm of the spirit, people and human relations are truly ordered. But few have adhered to this advice.

(**) Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, Act I. All original quotes translated by Michael Smith.

A century has since passed. Konstantin shot himself. Chekhov is gone. What has changed in our views of theatre? As before, most actors create a role on the basis of the personnage’s psychological state, purely on the basis of psychological conflict and the plot. I don’t want to say this is wrong but it is insufficient both for the role of the Actor and that of Theatre. What we take on board and sort out as our own personal baggage in life is perfect only for life itself and not at all for Theatre.

This unilateral way of analysing the role brings the actor to a low, base way of thinking, to a stage study, to put it bluntly, of coarseness. It limits his artistic potential, narrows the artistic scope, makes a cliché of the acting and results in inadequate proficiency. Let me explain why…

By taking such a one-sided view of the role, actors and directors basically draw on psychological material gained from their own experiences in life. But however great this experience may be it would be difficult to call it knowledge of human psychology. Psychology is a most complicated component to our lives, and it only seems accessible to all. And everyone considers himself an expert. In fact, this is gratifying self-deception. The deepest processes in our psychological lives are only to a tiny degree subject to our logic and the decisions we make freely. There are more questions than there are answers. Difficult psychological decisions are taken intuitively by the subconscious. So we have a paradox – actors use these psychological processes as if it were the most natural thing on stage while scientists state that the science of psychology is only just in the initial phase of research. Thus actors only use the uppermost layer of the very simplest psychological motivation, taken from life, on stage. They draw on its energy to create a role. But for the stage, for theatre and for art this is not enough. Due to its inconstancy, the everyday lacks sufficient energy for the simple reason that it needs energy itself.

The analysis of the role is often based on how observant an actor is in life and of his ability to render a believable imitation of a commonplace, everyday situation and human nature on stage. Everyday life gradually came to be the basic material of an actor’s art. The lifelike images that most actors strive to attain so selflessly merely serve to force their feelings and thoughts onto a lower level. This diminishes the energy of the acting and means they will never achieve the level of genuine “creativeness”. Because the creative spirit feeds first and foremost on ideas and images. By feeding on a diet of the everyday, nothing greater can ever be created. Surely the role of Theatre is more than rifling through explanations about who loves whom and who doesn’t? We find out who are friends and who are foes, and then what? In any case, as Oscar Wilde said – sooner or later one comes to that dreadful universal thing called human nature. There is yet something else, something even more important, that truly steers life itself, alters it, something which defines our role in life and our attitudes. Surely this is a more worthy object when analysing a role? A study of the purely psychological relations between individuals is clearly insufficient to get a full picture of the world those people inhabit. Are the plays of Sophocles, Chekhov, Shakespeare or Becket built merely on “psychology”? Nonetheless, the vast majority of actors and directors continue to cut the philosophical worlds of the great playwrights to shreds with the scissors of psychological theatre.

Today an actor does not have the right to be satisfied with his work on a role by simply analysing the psychological being of the personnage. Contemporary theatre demands the analysis take different directions – “vertical”, “horizontal”, from different positions, based on different sciences and religions. Only by fulfilling this condition can the acting become truly rich in nuances and as varied as a great novel where, while everything exists in isolation, it seethes and boils together and is thus unified. Everything has to be acted out together and at the same moment – psychology and philosophy, physiology and aesthetics, biology, physics, religion, ethics and so on. The more views an actor takes in analysing a role, the more polyphonic the role will sound on stage. By immersing himself thus he is not faced with the question of where to get the energy to act from. If one line of analysis doesn’t work then another will. The actor doesn’t move about clutching to one single solitary thread of the role which, if he loses, will thrust him into a gaping chasm – rather he holds onto an entire network of various analyses that ensure his ability to structure his acting on stage. The rules proposed below differ widely, they offer you various studies that can support or contradict each other, bringing you to results, which are the opposite of your intention. That’s fine. Don’t be afraid of that – it is a game. I will even go so far as to say that if you are an actor then you should know what the joys of victory and defeat in acting are. If you know this then you will probably love to analyse.

I love to play with balls; hence the order of the questions bears no relation to the degree of their importance. Each question or rule is a distinct point on the surface of the ball. It suits me better that way. In a game all the rules are important, though the most important is what you need at a given moment. I think that sooner or later you will find them all useful. The main thing is to play with the ball, spin it around. The number of these rules increases with each year of my experiments in theatre and teaching. This pleases me rather than otherwise. I think that you too can add to and continue the list. It all started with one of my teachers, who once gave us twelve or fourteen rules of analysis, called them “axioms”, explained nothing in detail and then left. He was a good teacher, he believed in the aptitude of his students and trusted us with his knowledge. His name was Mikhail Mikhailovich Butkevich. He is no longer with us. It is with gratitude that I continue what he started.

I named these rules of analysis Questions of the Role. If you have a Question then you will have the energy to investigate. If a Question arises then that means somewhere an Answer awaits. Maybe you will never find it. But the important thing is to look – because that is what analysis is all about.