DOI: 10.4324/9781315059792-3
Before we begin to study we must reach an agreement about what you wish to learn, otherwise we may run into a misunderstanding.
In the old-time theatres there were elements of the same fine and high-minded things that we too strive for, therefore we shall study the old carefully, conscientiously, so that we may learn to have a better perception of the new.
Let us not say that the theatre is a place of learning. No, the theatre stands for entertainment. We must not lose sight of this important factor. People should always come to the theatre to be entertained but once there, with the doors closed behind them, the lights lowered, we can pour into them anything we wish. For there is entertainment and entertainment.
Here you are, seated in the theatre. In front of you is fine scenery, sometimes a bit garish perhaps, sometimes something in more pleasing tones, depending on the action. Then there are splendid actors with arresting and fluent gestures, brilliant lights that rather dazzle you and leave you stunned, music too—all this is highly exciting, you are wrought up, your nerves are screwed to an ever increasing pitch. At the end you applaud, you cry “bravo!”, dash onto the stage, embracing someone or other, plant a kiss here or there, get jostled about, etc. When you leave the theatre you are so agitated you cannot think of sleep, you must go to a restaurant with all your friends. At supper you review the spectacle and you remark on how good such and such an actress was….
But the next day: what impression remains with you? Almost none, and a few days later you can really not be sure where it was that you applauded so warmly and the actors came out to take a bow….
As for me I adore spectacles. I dote on vaudeville and farce when they are not off-colour.
But there is also another kind of theatre. You have come in and taken your seat as an onlooker, but the director of the play changes you into a participant in the life that is unfolding on the stage. Something has happened to you. You are carried away from your position as a mere onlooker. As soon as the curtain is drawn you say to yourself:
“I know this room, and there’s Ivan Ivanovich, and there’s my friend, Maria Petrovna…. Yes, I recognize all this. Now what happens next?” You are all ears. You look at the stage and you say:
“I believe it all, every bit of it…. That is my mother there…. I can tell…”
When the performance ends you are stirred, but in a different way now. You have no desire to applaud.
“How can I applaud my own mother? It feels rather strange.”
The components of your excitement are such that they force you to concentrate, to turn your eyes inward. When you leave the theatre you do not wish to go to a restaurant. You are more drawn to some home or other, where you sit around the samovar and talk intimately about the problems of life, one’s philosophic outlook, social problems.
And when your impressions have been with you overnight you find that vastly different things have remained in your mind. That other time you thought back and asked yourself with some concern: “Why did I dash onto the stage and kiss the tenor? To be sure he did sing well, but why did I have to kiss him? How silly….”
But in the second instance your overnight impression has sunk much deeper into you: serious questions have been raised, they call for answers, you feel you did not take in all you should have, you must return to the theatre…. The people you saw on the stage there, their lives, sufferings and joys wind themselves around your heart, they become part of you, these characters become your real friends.
“Let’s go see the Prozorovs,” or, “Let’s go see Uncle Vanya.” You are not going to see the Three Sisters or Uncle Vanya as plays, you are really going to call on old friends.
Older actors used to maintain that such close relationships were impossible between a regular stage and the audience, that it can be achieved only in a small compass. The Moscow Art Theatre rediscovered the means of establishing that relationship. It may well be that it does remain impossible in the Bolshoi (Opera) Theatre—there are limits in all things—yet I remember that when we were abroad we played in a Wiesbaden theatre which was really only slightly smaller than the Bolshoi, and that only goes to prove that our kind of art can be conveyed also to a very large crowd of people.
So we have first a theatre which is a spectacle, an entertainment for eye and ear, and that is its ultimate aim.
In the second kind of theatre the effect on your eyes and ears is only a means to penetrate the soul of the audience.
The first theatre is under the necessity of cajoling the eye or else dazzling it and in any case emotions must be torn to tatters. The actor knows this and as a result there are no lengths to which he will not go. If his temperament is insufficient he will scream, he will suddenly race his lines, he will underscore every syllable, he will intone.
Just think what the power is of this institution that we call the theatre! You can raise a crowd to a state of ecstasy, and you can agitate them, wind them around, you can mix them all up together, or on the contrary you can make them sit motionless and accept anything you choose to inculcate, you can appeal to the herd instinct in them, etc.
Painting, music and the other arts which individually exercise an immediate appeal to the human soul, are united in one whole in the theatre and that is what so reinforces its power.
I well remember what Leo Tolstoy, whom I met for the first time at Nikolai Davydov’s (the great actor), said on this subject: “The theatre is the most powerful pulpit of our times.” It is more powerful than school or church. Before you go to school you must have the desire to go instilled in you. Everyone goes voluntarily to the theatre because everyone wishes to be entertained. In school you must learn how to remember what is taught you, but in the theatre what is poured into you remains with you of its own accord.
The theatre is the most powerful weapon of all, but like all weapons it has a double potential: it can bring great good and it may cause great harm.
Now if we ask ourselves: What are our theatres doing for people, what will the reply be? I am speaking now of all theatres, beginning with that of Duse, Chaliapine and other great artists and ending with that of Saburov, the Hermitage Variety Theatre and anything else that goes under the name of theatre.
The evil that a bad book can do is not to be compared with that which the theatre can inflict, neither as to the power of the infection nor as to the ease with which the evil spreads among the masses. And yet the theatre as an institution contains elements of popular education, primarily aesthetic education, for the masses.
This then is the dread power which you contemplate taking into your hands, this is the responsibility which will be laid upon you to handle this power in the right way.
—Speech to students, assistants and actors of the Moscow Art Theatre Second Company (“Filial”) (March 1911)