Stanislavski Uncovered (Part One)

Another picture of me as Mary in 'The Birth of Jesus'.

Last Thursday I walked around Creakebottom village as I often do, taking in the grandeur of its bumpy hills and feeling it’s odour-soaked blasts of wind on my face. Due to the frequent manure spreading on the largely agricultural farms surrounding the village, it can sometimes feel like wading through an enormous fart, which never really tails off. If I happen to launch a gaseous deposit (a stinker) into my personal atmosphere, I can open a window to attack the offense, but what if you’re already outside?! What then? The Creakebottom tourist board have long grappled with this conundrum, considering various solutions from giant air-hoovers to fragrance-emitting lampposts. The one sensible solution of introducing a wind-farm was met with a revolution akin to the Arab spring, with at least a dozen villagers picketing the council offices for the best part of an hour. It was wishful thinking on the council’s behalf, they can’t even get a Tesco’s here, let alone a wind-farm.

Anyway, where was I? Yes, last Thursday, in Creakebottom, I passed a homeless man selling the Big Issue, a rare sight in our village.

This week I was thrilled with the juiciest of questions which landed on my inbox. I have grown impatient with my intro and I can’t wait to get straight into it.

Category: Theatre related

“Gus, I've often heard in amateur theatre circles about 'Stanislavski Technique' but no one seems to have a clue what it is or how to use it. Could you help?"

Gareth Spinks, Swindon

What a corker of a question, and correctly labelled too! Such is the magnitude of this topic I will cover it in two swoops, part one this week and part two will follow next week.

The Rise of Stanislavskism (part 1)

The great man himself

Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski was born in January 1863 according to Wikipedia, which you may feel makes him rather old. But his techniques and methods are still being used today, though his body is long decomposed. I recently saw a budding actor of the professional ilk who showed off a picture with Stan’s gravestone. I honestly haven’t the foggiest idea what that was in aid of. ‘Here’s a picture of me with a slab of stone with Stan’s name on, underwhich lies what remains of his decomposed body’. Bizarre, but as you’ll find out, Stan does tend to make actors go a bit cuckoo.

Stanislavski is the name on everyone’s lips, big or small, when it comes to actor training, giving actors the tools to go out every night and give an audience the most believable performance humanly possible by humans pretending to be other fictional humans in a completely fabricated environment. So successful were his thoughts and musings that now all over the world students and wannabe actors are mentioning his name, of their own accord or as they read aloud blogs just like this one, that mention his name.

If you’ve ever seen a film or a play and thought “well blow me sideways that was realistic weren’t it! I almost believed it was real!” you’ve probably been Stanified. You see Stan was all about things being real, seeming real to an audience even though they’re not. In this way he was a very effective liar, and we can all thank the Lord he wished to pursue lying onstage, else I fear he’d have stolen all of Russia and the choice pickings of Eastern Europe by pretending to be their King.

He’s Russian by the way, and stinking rich, as many rich Russians are, and thus without need to work or do anything worthwhile with his time, he began wasting away his glutton filled hours with highly innovative studies into creating world-class theatre.

Stan's Method in Practice

Identity obvious from text.

Stan developed a technique which he named Emotion Memory Recall, or EMR (if you translate the full title into an acronym). This psycho-tool alone has been sold to drama schools all over the world as the way forward in modern-technological acting. It works like this: let’s say you have been given a role as Grumpy the dwarf in ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, perhaps at an annual pantomime. Now you might think “Easy, I’ll just strap shoes onto my knees, and pull a grumpy face. Job’s a gooden” well that would most certainly put you into the Crap School of Acting, not to mention the Director putting you at the back of the stage (the place no actor wants to be). No, Stan would teach you that the way to authentically portray Grumpy, is to remember (or recall, you see where the title comes from) a time when you yourself were grumpy. Perhaps you’d stubbed your toe. Perhaps an earthworm had wiggled it’s way into your picnic and you’d only found out once it was too late. Perhaps your knees had fallen off. Think about that grumpiness you felt. Meditate on it. Let it overtake you again. Then walk around a bit being grumpy, accessing the grumpy moaner that lives inside of you. Next step, start to believe that you are Grumpy, go out and introduce yourself as Grumpy the dwarf to passers by, refuse to shake their hands and moan about the weather (best to avoid those with Dwarfism during this phase as you are very likely to offend). Now you are no longer ‘being Grumpy’ but in fact you ‘are Grumpy’ or at least you think you are, and if you think you are, so will the audience, so says Stan.

So far so good you may think, albeit a little schizophrenic.

Well now imagine you have been cast in the role of Hamlet, the suicidal Prince bent on murdering his Uncle who’s killed Hamlet’s dad and shacked up with his Mum. Now we face a bigger problem, in that we are portraying emotions we may not ourselves have felt. Time for level 2, let’s stay with Hamlet.

Now although I have stayed for many acting seasons in Woking, Surrey, I have never stayed long enough to suffer from the suicidal depression which most permanent residents battle with on a regular basis, owing to the catastrophic choice of architecture, particularly in the town centre across the course of the last 50 years. Woking is the place creativity comes to die. I speak of course of the pre-aspirational years, before Woking developed the dream of becoming a poor man’s Guildford, and lured Superdry to open a shop here – the Japanese may make great clothes but they are known for their gullible nature.

What to do? I’m in a toilet that won’t flush. I’ve gotta play Hamlet but am not personally suicidal, and I can’t afford the time to spend in Woking History Centre which might get me to that place of suffering. What to do? The answer is in degrees. I may not have experienced the desire to end my life, but I certainly have experienced the desire to hurt myself a bit. I remember a time when I had had had a particularly long stint in the Woking borough, and each day I would walk past the Maybury Road and have to cast my eyes on the brown, yes brown, high rise, with brown windows, like a giant poo-drenched tardis. I could feel the depression rising in me one day, and as I sat down at Esquires, (now extinct, but in its height the most disappointing Coffee shop in Woking yet the only who had invested in free WiFi) knowing my coffee was too hot, I braced myself and took a big healthy swig. As usual the coffee wasn’t as hot as it should have been owing to Esquires poor standards, and thus the self-harming impact wasn’t what it should have been, but nevertheless I had abused my own body out of despair. I had, in a sense, committed mouth suicide.

All I now need to do is recall this event, focus on the poo-tardis, recall the need to hurt my mouth and scale this up to something resembling full suicide. Then of course I must say the words of “to be or not to be” with all that at the forefront of my overworked imagination.

You can see how this technique is both highly effective and indeed slightly mental. Most actors that do it regularly go bonko – is it worth it? Daniel Day-Lewis, a happy-go-lucky extreme Method actor, was doing precisely what I have been describing, playing Hamlet and using EMR, when on the National Theatre stage he believed that he saw the Ghost of his dead Father, his, not Hamlet’s. His dad. Who was also dead, but not under precarious circumstances. None that I know of anyway. But he was fully dead, and yet doing his EMR, DDL was convinced that he saw him. It freaked him right out and he’s never acted on stage again. 

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Tune in next week for Part 2!

Yours Creatively

G. Blathermouth

GUS' QUESTION GUIDELINES: 

Any question MUST fall into one of the following FOUR categories:

a) Theatre related
b) AMADSC related
c) Love-life related
d) Jesus related (it may be that I refer you to Rev. Wesley Biggins if my theology muscles prove too weak for the weight of your questions)

I will answer no questions on the politics of UKIP or the progress of my long-term battle with genital warts. For questions regarding the former, please read the Daily Mail. For questions regarding the latter, please watch this space for info on my companion Blog 'Gus' Nuts' for all things wart-related.

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