Acknowledgements

The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit owes much to many. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and obtain permissions, and thanks go to A&C Black for permission to quote from Stanislavsky’s An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, Creating a Role and My Life in Art, as well as extracts from David Mamet’s American Buffalo and Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. To Faber and Faber for permission to quote from Harold Pinter’s The Lover, David Hare’s The Permanent Way, and Stanislavsky’s On the Art of the Stage. To Farrar, Straus and Giroux for US permission to quote from the On the Art of the Stage. To Nick Hern Books for permission to quote from Helen Edmundson’s Anna Karenina and Stephen Mulrine’s translations of Chekhov’s The Seagull, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. To Mike Pushkin for his terrific translation of Maria Knebel’s On the Active Analysis of Plays and Roles, along with Professor Maggie Gale and the University of Birmingham who helped towards the commissioning of the translation.

Without the brilliant contributions of various actors, directors, writers and teachers including Max Stafford-Clark, David Hare, Vladimir Ananyev, Albert Filozov, Katya Kamotskaya, Alex Delamere, Flaminia Cinque, Matthew Dunster, Richard Cottrell, Edward Baker-Duly, Joe Anderson, Terry Johnson, John Lyons, the late Fritha Goodey with whom I thrashed out many an idea over a Starbucks Americana, Matthew Lloyd at the Actors Centre London and numerous workshop participants there, along with Professors Phillip Zarrilli and Chris McCullough and the gifted students of the University of Exeter, there simply would have been no book. The ongoing research of scholars and practitioners including Sharon M. Carnicke, Jean Benedetti, Robert Leach, Robert Ellerman, Jonathan Pitches and Rose Whyman, among many others in the research community, is a continual and vital resource and provocation: my thanks to them, whether they’ve been directly quoted or indirectly turned to. And special thanks to my agent, Natasha Stevenson, for her perpetual patience, to Linda di Lieto for her generosity and brave story, to Jane Wilson for a blessed haven in which to write, and my parents Margaret and Michael for their unflinching support.

Last but very far from least, mighty gratitude is owed to the ever-incisive and supportive Nick Hern, and his meticulous colleagues Claire Grady, Caroline Downing, Nick de Somogyi and Simon Trussler. And above all to Miles Anderson, who not only furnished me with countless wisdoms and witticisms, but also passionately and indomitably slashed through various drafts with me late into the night with a carving knife and a Chianti. God bless.