But true to his form, Constantin couldn’t go a decade without some sort of artistic meltdown. In the first decade of the 20th century, despite having little reason to doubt the advantages and success of his realist system, Stanislavski began to question its legitimacy.
The crisis began with MAT’s 1903 mounting of Julius Caesar. With Stanislavski appearing as Brutus and under Nemirovich’s direction, the production was widely hailed as a triumph of realism. The set, costumes, and lights were the result of dramaturgical perfection, so true-to-history that Russian school children were brought to MAT not to see the play but the be shown a glimpse of life in ancient Rome. While Stanislavski and the cast reportedly succeeded, in a final read-through before opening night, in finding the truth in their characters, once on stage, Stanislavski felt suffocated. The overwhelming technical perfection of the show, with its obsessive focus on accuracy, inhibited Stanislavski’s ability to “live” his role and he felt his performance become stifled and artificial. With this sense of limitation continuing throughout the show’s run, Stanislavski began to suspect that while his and Nemirovich’s realist impulses were correct, the dictatorial style of direction they had employed – coupled with their increasingly ambitious technical goals – had deprived their actors of the ability to be honest in their work.
However, it was not until 1906 during a vacation in Finland that this crisis hit its high point. Depressed and disenchanted with the limitations of MAT’s realism, Stanislavski set out to develop a system for performance that was focused on the actor as the foremost authority on their text, vigorously pursuing and expanding on his earlier method of “living the part”. With no precedent for such a formal system, Stanislavski turned outside the theatrical world for his research. Between 1906 and 1912, drawing on literary theory, the still-infantile world of psychology, and other sources, Stanislavski conceived the method that would be form the eventual basis of An Actor Prepares.
The Bolshevik Revolution & Continued Success
