Who's play is it anyway?
John Mortimer
THE MOSCOW ART THEATRE LE'l'IERS edited by Jean Benedetti Methuen, £20, pp.377 This is a chronicle of the enthusiastic cooperation, the arguments, the rivalry and mutual hatred of the two founders of the Moscow Art Theatre, Stanislayski and Nemirovich-Danchenko. Stanislayski was puritanical, wealthy, upper-class and dictatorial; Nemirovich, shorter, fatter, fond of good living, women and gambling. They met and talked for 18 hours at the Slavyanski Bazar, decided they were soul- mates and founded the world's most famous theatre company. Their lives dramatised the great conflict which enlivens or kills so many theatrical ventures — who does the theatre belong to, the writer or the director?
For Nemirovich, as Mr Benedetti says in his introduction, the theatre was the 'hand- maiden of literature', it existed to serve the writer, and actors and scenery were there to illuminate the text. Stanislayski saw the theatre as an art form in its own right, where the writer became the 'handmaiden' of the actors and, above all, of the director. Stanislayski ended up a legend who had a profound influence, not always for the good, on world theatre and a God to many Americans. Nemirovich, who died during the last war, is largely forgotten. If I show any bias in his favour it is because I would rather have had a play of mine directed by Nemirovich than Stanislaysky.
It appears from this correspondence that Chekhov might have had the same preference. The two directors worked out a curious partnership. Nemirovich rehearsed the actors, did much of the casting, orches- trated the dialogue and the pauses and maintained reverence for the text. Stanislayski prepared what he called the `production plan', which seemed to have consisted of ideas for the set and larger theatrical effects. Some of these were not particularly helpful to the dramatist.
Allow us please [he wrote to Chekhov whilst preparing such a plan for the second act of The Cherry Orchard], during one of the paus- es to bring a train with little puffs of smoke. . . That would work splendidly.. . Towards the end of the act the concert of frogs and corncrakes.. On the left down- stage, a hayfield with a small stook. This is for the actors to help them live their roles.
Chekhov was less than delighted to have the audience entertained, during one of his carefully placed pauses, by little puffs of smoke from a passing train. 'Ikons. Serg wants to bring in a train in Act II,' he wrote to Olga Knipper, the actress he married, `but I think we must stop him doing it. He also wants frogs and corncrakes.' Writers are curious beings who think that actors can live their roles without the help of corn stooks. But Stanislayski was such a martyr to realism that, as they still tell you with awe in the Moscow Art Theatre, he thought it quite false to bring a gun on to the stage unless it was loaded.
Nemirovich was equally perturbed by Stanislayski's way of acting. When he played Astrov in Uncle Vanya he insisted on appearing with a handkerchief on his head 'to keep off the mosquitoes'. This was a realistic detail that his partner 'simply could not take'. Stanislaysky was also shaky on the text and Nemirovich insisted he wouldn't allow any actor to change the words around and he was determined to defend Chekhov's literary style. He was equally censorious of the actor's brutal way with props:
The less often you bang perfectly beautiful chairs (now all our actors do it) the more attractively and appealingly your real quali- ties will come through.
In short, Stanislaysky seems to have ignored Noel Coward's vital first principal of acting — he didn't know the lines and he bumped into the furniture.
As the correspondence continues, Stanislayski becomes less interested in passing trains and croaking frogs than in his 'system'. He concentrated on finding within his soul 'the living material from which the dramatist's character has been created', and he wrote in My Life in Art:
God knows how my soul and my art were dis- figured by bad theatrical habits and tricks.
When this system was applied to the pro- duction of A Month in the Country, Stanislayski insisted on private sessions in which the psychology of the characters was proved in so painstaking a manner that after 80 such rehearsals very little progress had been made, and Nemirovich was driven to despair. Worse still, Olga Knipper, who was a brilliant but instinctive actress, became totally confused by the system and its opaque scientific language and broke down in tears in the middle of the dress rehearsal.
It is fair to say that Nemirovich adopted some of these techniques, and no doubt the system produced some marvellous evenings in the theatre, as did Stanislayski's importa- tion of Gordon Craig to design sets far ahead of their time. But the method, perhaps in lesser hands, became a way of by-passing the writer and turning the director into a psychiatrist and guru who could in some way bring the actors into close personal contact with characters whose true reality was in the author's imag- ination. What these letters demonstrate best is the vitality that theatrical arguments brought to the enterprise that started with an 18-hour conversation. The dialogue still rumbles on in a world where the inheritors of Nemirovich's respect for writing and the children of the Stanislayski system still clash by night.
Perhaps the most precious piece of advice, valuable to actors, directors and authors alike, is contained in a letter Chekhov wrote to Olga Knipper:
You must stop worrying about success or failure, your business is to work step by step, from day to day, softly-softly, to be prepared for unavoidable mistakes and failures, in a word, follow your own line and leave compe- tition to others.
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