DOI: 10.4324/9781315059792-12
You are preparing to participate in a collective undertaking. What does that mean? It means that you must be welded into one collective whole and learn as a group to care for your common work. And to learn how to do this means that you will be re-educated both as a person and as an actor.
The painters or the poets sit at home, or in their studios, they are not dependent on anyone and they can work whenever they choose. In your work you are bound up with a whole group, and you are obliged to do your work before an audience of thousands, and not at a time you choose, but at the exact hour announced on the billboards…. Do you comprehend the entire responsibility you are shouldering, and the necessity of training yourselves under a special creative discipline? That is what we are preparing you for and why we are graduating you from our school, not as individuals (which I consider has no purpose) but in whole groups.
The success of an actor does not depend only on himself, but also on his partner who may do a good or bad job of holding up his end during creative moments. And an opera singer is, in addition, dependent on the conductor. Also the backstage atmosphere exercises considerable influence on your work. An actor is dependent on his dresser, on the electrician. This is the special character of collective creativeness to which you must accustom yourselves and which you must come to understand. You depend on your fellow students as they depend on you. Collective art can be created only in an atmosphere of friendliness and mutual help. Interest in your relationships with your fellow students is interest in your common work. An actor works under conditions of nervous intensity. He is peculiarly over-anxious and ambitious. You must learn to hold yourselves in check, to be patient and friendly with your associates; these are the conditions of working in a joint enterprise.
I know many theatres which have ceased to be joint enterprises, and have turned into collections of mutually hostile people. They used to be an amiable collective, but with the years they have lost their cohesion and broken up.
The problem of collective enterprise is important and complex. You must not only recognize it but feel it very deeply. Each one of you must weigh your conduct from the point of view of the good of the whole. You must speak only of what will do no harm to the theatre.
If you are unable to grasp the peculiar conditions of collective creativeness and cannot allow yourselves to be absorbed in it, your group will lose its common goal and will become nothing more than a hatching ground for all sorts of horrid things.
We must be assured that all your energy will be directed towards keeping our common cause intact, and your instructors for their part will be thinking of how to set up a programme of instructions calculated to train you for collective creativeness.
Learn how to love art in yourselves, not yourselves in art. If you undertake to exploit art it will betray you: art is very vindictive. I repeat: love art in yourselves, not yourselves in art—that should be your guiding thread. The theatre does not exist for you, you exist for the theatre.
There is no higher satisfaction than working in the field of art, but it requires sacrifice.
You will have to acquire an iron—and I am not afraid to say—a soldier’s discipline. An actor who, when he enters the theatre, does not feel a slight tremor pass through him at the thought that here, nearby, is the stage, will never be a true actor. If you have this deep inner discipline, which stems from respect for your work, the atmosphere backstage will be peculiarly helpful to creativeness. And that atmosphere is always transmitted in some strange manner to the auditorium. The public always senses what is going on backstage, and is affected by it. How this happens I do not know. It is a secret. If I make the remark that you make too much noise with your chairs when you sit down, note that this too has a bearing on the artistic discipline I am trying to instill in you.
Stand up, but don’t make any noise.
Move the chairs so that no noise will be heard….
For every sound there will be—a penalty!
Now learn this elementary discipline from the word go, and begin by moving those chairs without a sound.
Once the widow of Richard Wagner took me backstage (during a performance of The Flying Dutchman). In the space of one minute the ship had to be removed, and in its place were put the women with their spinning wheels—and all without a single sound.
On another occasion a table laden with crystalware had to be removed instantly from the stage. What happened was that each actor took his share and carried it off. This was done in absolute silence, there was not a clink of glass to be heard.
Discipline is not only necessary for the maintenance of order, without which collective creative work is impossible, but also for artistic purposes. It provides the needed atmosphere.
You must study systematically to gain control of your art. That control is what, as a rule, an actor lacks. An opera singer must always care for his instrument, his voice, or he cannot sing. But the actor reasons thus: “I know how to walk, I know how to talk,” so he goes on the stage. Yet as a matter of fact an actor needs perhaps even more training than an opera singer. An opera singer cornes to this school with his art of singing already in his possession, it is only the acting he needs to learn.
Now a violinist has to care every single day for his instrument. When I was in America I went to an evening party where the famous violinist Jascha Heifetz was present. At the very high point of the evening, when we were sitting down to dinner Heifetz suddenly disappeared. Later on he appeared again. It seemed that he had a concert scheduled for the next day. He had driven home to move his violin into a cabinet with a certain temperature and degree of humidity. No one but he would do a thing like this.
I remember when Sarah Bernhardt came to play here. One of her legs had been amputated, but she continued to act L’Aiglon in the Rostand play; it was an amazing piece of technical perfection. But what did it cost her? Every day she sang, exercised her voice in diction, fenced with trainers she took along on her journeys. She was in the midst of these exercises when I went in to see her.
You have an instrument of expression. You must perfect it and care for it. One cannot play Beethoven off key, or on an instrument which is out of tune. Your instrument must be well tuned so that you can render on it all the shadings of your emotions.
Even though you feel perfectly well, if your body does not correspond to your emotions, if your voice does not carry or your hands are cramped, people will only laugh at your feelings.
Think of a man who is deaf and dumb. He wants to make a declaration of love and all he can do is make incoherent sounds. Can you understand him? Imagine his anguish.
The deeper your feelings, the more complicated the pattern of your emotions, the greater should be the expressive capacity of your body. Let your teachers find out which muscles you need to develop, find out what your particular weaknesses are. Work on these exercises and keep them up for years. Develop your hands and fingers. The fingers are the eyes of the body, you can express anything with them.
Train yourselves so that your muscles believe in the rightness of your movements, let them seek the way to perform. Keep at this for years.
What does one mean by control of the body? It is not enough to know how to place your feet when you walk, etc. You must train yourselves to live, walk, talk while an inner supervisor controls all your movements. This supervisor works without regard for your will, and he sees to it that your external conduct is right.
Through training that will continue over many years you should be able to reach the point where you will be incapable of walking on to the stage with cramped muscles. But you must also have a very strong desire to accomplish this.
You cannot imagine what a joy it is for a person who has used his voice and his body badly all his life, suddenly to feel that he is doing it well. Fortunately it is possible to attain control of one’s body and speech, to perfect one’s physical apparatus and inner capacities. But to do this requires tremendous discipline and system in your work.
When, however, it is accomplished, you will step on to the stage and will not have to make any effort to act. You will only have to move your eyes, and the eyes of two thousand people in the audience will follow you. You will be pensive—and they will be pensive with you.
To have the right to go on to the stage, not do anything and yet be living in such a way that the entire audience does this in unison with you—that is a great joy! But in order to experience it you must know what your purpose was in going on the stage. The actor who comes on the stage has it in his power to make people think, suffer, be joyful along with him. What is it that confers this power on an actor and gives him the right to carry the spectators with him?
I once wrote about being on my way home one night from an unsuccessful rehearsal in Leningrad, and how I found people sitting around a fire on Michael Place, It was winter and cold. I entered into conversation with them. It transpired that since early evening they had been taking turns to stand in line for tickets to our play. It made me think: “What would make me stay out in the freezing weather all evening in the street? For the sake of what blessings would I do it?” So you see what responsibility lies on us actors with regard to the public that tomorrow will fill the theatre? What gives us the right to come out on the stage?
In four years, when you will have finished your course, I shall ask you to give me an answer to the question: Why did you enter the theatre? We wanted to act, you will reply. That is a natural and comprehensible wish. But is it enough to make a genuine artist out of you? Of course the footlights, the costumes, the audiences, all that is exciting and flattering. But also it spoils you. Constant show of yourselves, compliments—you get so accustomed to them you can scarcely live without them. If after the performance some old professor wanders into your dressing room to tell you that you acted badly in this or that place, and that you need something different for your part—that will be of greater value to you than the screams of your psychopathic admirers who appear to make the reputation of an actor. When Tamagno sang in Moscow, a thunderous voice came from the audience at one of his performances. It was that of an admirer yelling: “Tamagno, bravo! bravo!” I recognized the voice because I had heard it at other performances by other artists. This person ran from theatre to theatre screaming “bravo” and going mad with excitement. There are many like that.
Some actors think that such screaming is an advertisement for them. No. An actor grows as long as he works. If he is going to be greedy for the applause of his admirers his stature will be lessened. I know one actor who exchanged the society of cultivated and challenging friends for that of ecstatic admirers. As an actor he became negligible.
Oscar Wilde is quoted as having once said: “An actor is either a showman or a creator, a priest or a fool.” Don’t be actors who are fools. Don’t try to cater to the taste of the public, but listen to the opinion of those who know.
So you will have to decide: Why did I go on the stage? You may say stupid things. If you do, the others will answer back, but you must think and talk about this subject constantly. That “why” will be your main motivation and guide. We shall call it your super-objective. Keep your mind constantly on the super-objective of your life.
You have a group newspaper; write in it and decide why you came into the theatre. Your joint work and the reason for your going on the stage are your fundamental problems. You must think, write, talk about them, not only in school but all during your creative life.
Unless you set these two problems squarely before yourselves and keep strengthening the super-objective of your life, your first success will turn your head, and the second will put you off it entirely. Incidentally a little head-turning does not constitute a real danger, if you are able to take yourselves in hand in time.
You are lucky. You have a studio into which you can bring the very best that is in you. When you enter, along with your rubbers, leave all that is petty and mean outside, bring inside only your very best feelings and share them with your friends. Here you will be able to commune with such great geniuses as Shakespeare, Pushkin, Gogol, Ostrovski. In this building you will become cultivated people, and you will create an atmosphere which will keep it always clean.
Nevertheless there are always those who enjoy collecting all sorts of filth and bringing it here to dump within the walls of our theatre. It will be your job to chase right out of this place the person who comes to spit, no matter how talented he may be. The talented person who brings filth into our place of work is poisonous because he uses his talent to spread contamination. He may be very much needed here, but he must be gotten rid of without delay. You must not tolerate anyone sitting beside you who will poison the air in our theatre. You must also see to it that if any of you, for any reason, have difficulties at home, you must at least be made to feel at ease here.
Every actor should feel that it is on the stage that art is created; otherwise he is no actor.
Remember always that your strength lies in your unity, and that you came here to perform a great and fine piece of work.
This is my testament to you, wrought out of my experience of fifty-six years of work in this seething caldron which is the theatre.
(1935)