Theatre
Backstage in Moscow
By JOAN LITTLEWOOD THE building itself stands in a busy side-street off one of Mos- cow's main boulevards. It is pale green, the colour typical of the older, more gracious Moscow. Opposite there is a stall where you can buy hot sausages and cold lemonade and a few yards farther along the street 'The Artist's Café,' dimly lit, Victorian. Here, the waiter tells you, the great names took their coffee. For a stranger from the West it is difficult to find the theatre. There are no posters, photographs or neon lights. If you wander round to the back by mistake you may find yourself in a quiet yard, half garden, half wood-pile; you can no longer hear the traffic; but this is during the day. In the evening the pavement is crowded with theatre- goers. You can follow them in, up the broad flight of stairs to the semicircular foyer where you promenade past restaurants and exhibitions of designs and photographs.
In the auditorium the chairs are of dark, polished wood; there is plenty of space for your feet but no other concession to comfort. All the other Moscow theatres are plushy, ornate and luxurious. By contrast, it seems austere here. As you catch sight of the blue seagull on the front curtain, you feel that nothing has been altered in this building, and that is so. The theatre seats about 1,200 people; it appears smaller. By the centre aisle, ten rows back, two seats, side by side, bear brass nameplates. Even if you cannot decipher that Russian alphabet, you know by now those revered names—Constantin Stanislavsky, Nemirovitch Danchenko, the founders of the theatre, the men who shaped and directed its artistic outlook and style.
Of course, many of the artists and workpeople in the theatre remember Stanislavsky well. They describe his manner at rehearsal. 'He never raised his voice.' He had such respect for the stage itself.' 'He would never allow a gun to be fired in this theatre,' and, of course, the inevitable 'He was a saint.' To this day no real guns of any type are allowed on the stage, no blank cartridges are fired. All war-like effects must be created by artistic means. This was Stanislavsky's express wish. This feeling for 'the artistic and harmonious' proved to be very strong in the craftsmen in this theatre. A replica of the set I used in London for Macbeth had been built in the Moscow Arts workshops to avoid the hazards of transport. It should have been an austere setting, battle-scarred, gaunt. It came out beautiful, tasteful, softly coloured. It was painful to them that a theatrical setting should bear the marks of war. Gentleness and courtesy pervaded the old theatre. The stage doorkeeper, the stage-hands, the hairdresser, they all bow as you pass, hand on heart with a graciousness that one had believed to be lost for ever. The dressing-rooms and sitting- rooms backstage are thickly carpeted, comfortably furnished, decorated with large bowls of flowers artistically arranged, and photographs of the famous men and women who first used them. Again the colours are quiet and austere. It is almost impossible to gain admittance to those cloistered rooms. The most famous and distin- guished visitors must be received in a parlour Which is actually front of house. Stanislavsky's belief in the need for a quiet, undisturbed atmosphere in which to prepare for acting is thus still upheld. Stanislavsky's own dressing-room is not used, it remains as he left it.
The stage is vast. It is run by a laughing giant called Leonid and a team of men and women who not only work full time at the theatre but consider it a privilege to do so. The backstage equipment is not as modern as at the best Berlin theatres, but I have never been in a theatre anywhere where there was so much real efficiency with so little authoritarianism on the stage. The workshops are as big as a moderate-sized British engineering factory and are as well equipped; the property room runs almost the whole length of the stage; there is no orchestra pit but the stage is so deep that our twenty-four-piece orchestra played be- hind the back curtain without noticeably inter- fering with the effective stage space. The most impressive feature, though, was during rehearsals When, after working through two acts of Macbeth and starting work on Act III, we realised we could get a better lighting effect in Act I than we had achieved. Whilst I was discussing it with John Bury, our designer, the stagehands had stripped Act III and set up Act I without even being asked, although it meant resetting Act III only a few minutes later.
The lighting man, unlike in England, is expected to be an artist in his own right and there is no place for a cue-sheet in the lighting control room. The switchboard operator is placed where he can see the stage and suit his lighting changes to the rhythm of the play. Everything in this theatre is designed to emphasise and facilitate the creative aspects of every theatrical activity. Rehearsals are Sacrosanct. No financial worries ever cloud the theatre's horizons and the actors are accorded a respect that nobody but star footballers or Cabinet Ministers can be sure of in Britain.
Theatrical innovators in Germany and Russia have often attacked the academies for their con- servatism, but their existence has ensured that every actor can use the full potential of his voice and body as can only those people of exceptional talent in Britain or America. Creative producers and directors are therefore able to start off at a high level, and Stanislavsky, who, in his efforts to master the art of acting for himself, evolved the only system that exists for consciously stimulat- ing the unconscious mind, had actors to work With who could make real use of his theories. His System is simply an attempt to give actors who already have control of their voices and bodies a means of developing and controlling their imaginative and intellectual inspiration as part of a creative ensemble.
Stanislavsky insisted that acting is an art and that a play cannot be produced without the com- pany understanding its inner meaning and content as well as its external form; without a knowledge by the company of the function of every character appearing on the stage. Of course this can only be achieved by a permanent company working to- gether as artists, a fact which is forgotten by the critics who say that every good actor has used the principles of Stanislavsky. In such a theatre an actor in the smallest part makes his conscious contribution towards the ultimate effect of the production and is not there just to show his own individual ability. It is a well-known fact that in Stanislavsky's theatre an actor might play King Lear tonight and a small, part in The Cherry Orchard tomorrow night. It was Stanislavsky's ability to put his beliefs into practice, to hold together and inspire a gifted company with these ideas, which gave the Moscow Arts Theatre its unique place in the world.
Before the war my own company and the 'Group' in New York were the only two English- speaking companies training to use Stanislavsky's approach to acting. It was only in 1946 that his work was translated into German, and by that time his influence on the French theatre had already waned. His teachings are still spreading : they have now reached London via America, bowdlerised and relabelled 'the Method.' How- ever, in both America and England the fact that Russian actors had a splendidly developed vocal and physical technique before they started work on any artistic theory has been totally ignored and now `Stanislavsky's Method' is associated with inarticulate mumblings, grunts, stutters, studied casualness, lack of precision in movement and complete lack of style.
Stanislavsky's work has been decried without being understood, and applied with even less understanding. Perhaps the most attractive thing about the art of theatre is that its achievements and theories cannot be perpetuated but must constantly be renewed. Nothing is more dangerous to a young artist than the artists who immediately precede him : he must replenish himself from the sources of his language and the immediacy of the life around him if his work is to have signifi- cance. We shall see now for ourselves whether the present Moscow Arts Theatre Company has be- come a contemporary theatre or remained an attractive museum piece.
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