bently, eric - on brecht and stanislavsky

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Are Stanislavski and Brecht Commensurable?Author(s): Eric BentleySource: The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Autumn, 1964), pp. 69-76Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1124779 .

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A r e Stanislavski a n d

B r e c h t Commensurable?

By ERIC BENTLEY

"How does Brecht's system differ from Stanislavski's?" I haveoften heard this question asked, sometimes in exactly these words,and probably we shall all live to see the question appear in much

this form on college examination papers. I recall, too, that as a

young admirer of Brecht's, nearly twenty years ago, I myself de-

scribed an actor in one of his plays as having gone "beyondStanislavski."Will the acting profession soon be divided between

Method actors and Brechtians?

Possibly it will, so far as nomenclature is concerned, and so faras the actors' declared allegiances are concerned. It is obviously

possible for some actors to love Stanislavski, others, Brecht. What

I would question is whether there are indeed two systems, two

ways of life, presenting the actor with an either-or choice.

At least some of the differences between what the two men said

stem from the fact that they addressed themselves to different

subjects; that they differed about the same subject remains to be

proven. Take Stanislavski's alleged preoccupation with subjec-tive elements and Brecht's alleged preoccupation with objectiveelements. Brecht speaks of what is done in a finished performance.As a director, he tells actors to do what is presumably to be done

"on the night." Some Method actors will protest that it is wrongof him to tell them this: he is "working in terms of results" instead

of stimulating their subconscious. Some Brechtian actors willretort that theatre is results, that drama is action, that the notion

of a subconscious is bourgeois and decadent.... And so the issueis joined.

But it is an imaginary issue. We can side-step it by remember-

ing that Brecht was a playwright, Stanislavski an actor. For

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Tulane Drama Review

Brecht, actors were the means toward the full realization of his

plays. Because he had the good luck to work in a highly pro-fessional environment and with actors of very great talent, he

could with reason take it that the actor's craft was simply there

to be used. At worst, it only needed adjusting to a new kind of

playwriting. At best, it could give the new playwright ideas on

playwriting. (Some of Brecht's "theories" are deductions from the

work of particular actors.) In short, Brecht, who regarded his

scripts as forever unfinished, forever transformable, and his dram-

aturgyas

youngand

developing,tended to

regardthe actor's craft

as given and as already there in finished form. Thus Brecht

assumed that the actor in one of his shows was an actor, and had

his training behind him, while he made a different assumptionabout playwriting: namely, that he was constantly giving himself

an education in it. Hence, Brecht's rehearsals, while they trained

the playwright, did not, in any such direct way, train the actor.

This is but another way of saying that, in a playwright's theatre,

the actor is there to do what the playwright says, and he betterknow how to do it pronto and not hold the playwright up: that's

what he's paid for. For Stanislavski, on the other hand, it was the

play which was a fait accompli. We do not read of his reworkinghis scripts either in the manner of Brecht or of the Broadwaydirectors. He was too busy reworking the actors. I suppose everydirector looks for clay to mold. For Stanislavski, the clay consisted

of actors; for Brecht, of his own collected writings.

I know that the antitheses I am using oversimplify. What an-titheses don't? In his last years, Brecht was beginning to mold

actors, beginning, in fact, to learn to mold actors, and beginningto talk of acting schools and the younger generation. And con-

versely, perhaps, examples could be given of Stanislavski's editingand adapting plays. Such factors, however, imply only slightmodifications of the point I have made. And by consequencewhat Brecht, in his theoretical pronouncements, is talking about

is what actors, finally, can and should do, while what Stanislavskiis talking about is the question of how they may be brought to

the point where they can do this or anything else. Brecht is talk-

ing about the end result; Stanislavski about education, about the

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ERIC BENTLEY

actor's training. To say this does not provide us with all the

answers. Rather, it opens up newquestions.For example, did Brecht assume that the present-day actor can

give him just the result he wants? Stanislavski, it is well known,

presupposes just the opposite. In his view, it is because the actors

cannot produce the right results that the Method is needed and

that the emphasis on education and training is justified. Hence,when the Brechtians protest that a director must not degenerateinto an acting coach, the Stanislavski-ites can retort: "Yes, he

must-at a time when the actors are not perfected professionalsbut still need coaching." And indeed that our "professional"actors attend acting schools and the like until middle age testifies

less to their modesty than to the fact that we do not have a

profession any more. Was this not true in Brecht's Germany?Another hard and ambiguous question. I would say it was on the

whole not true of the Germany of Brecht's youth and therefore

that his reliance upon a realized professionality was justified.

That he began to get interested in training young people afterWorld War II represents not a change of heart on his part but a

change of situation in his country. It was not to a land of well-

trained Weigels, Homolkas, and Granachs that he returned, and

so in his latter days Brecht acquired an interest in what had been

Stanislavski's lifelong concern: the development of young peopleinto actors.

If the generalization still stands-that by and large Brecht is

concerned with getting the play produced, Stanislavski withtraining the actor to be in it-would it necessarily follow that anactor trained by Stanislavski would be a bad actor for Brecht's

plays? Were Stanislavski alive today, one can be reasonably sure

he would answer this question in the negative, for it was his aimto create an instrument which could be used for any honorabletheatrical purpose. And it is clear that he regarded this aim asattainable.

The Brechtians have their doubts-or should, if they wish totread in the Marxian steps of the Meister. Stanislavski's notionof a universally valid training and a possibly omnicompetent kindof acting they will (or should) describe as bourgeois. And they

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Tulane Drama Review

will call for a more historical view of things, according to which

Stanislavskibelongs

to one class and oneepoch,

the Brechtian

theatre to another class and another epoch.Nonetheless the record indicates that while Brecht's efforts

show a single direction, Stanislavski, like Reinhardt, produced all

kinds of plays, and could train actors to excel in each of them.

In my view, this is only to repeat that he was a director (a di-

rector has to work with the whole repertoire) while Brecht was a

writer concerned with writing (chiefly his own). It has been the

tendency of the Berlin Ensemble to impose Brechtianism uponplays by other authors; but the results are unfortunate exceptwhen the other authors are quite Brechtian. Stanislavski on the

other hand was by no means the servant, let alone the prisoner, of

one style or school. It is true that he created stage Naturalism in

Russia. But equally he might be said to have created stage Sym-bolism there, by his productions of Maeterlinck and Andreyev.Given a few more years of life, would he have created a Brechtian

theatre? The dangers of historical "If's" are notorious. And whowould wish to overlook the obvious: that Stanislavski and Brecht

were such utterly different men-different personally, as well as

in nationality? And though they both came of the upper bour-

geois class-which is amusing-their relation to that class is dif-

ferent in quite an ironic way. Stanislavski-prize exhibit of

Stalin's Russia as he lived to be-remained genteel to the end.

Acquiescent in the New Society, all that he was he brought from

the old. He did not like the new Communist plays, and his theatrebecame a museum for the best in "bourgeois" drama. While

Stanislavski was not even a rebel against his own family back-

ground, Brecht was nothing if not just that; and his love of "the

people" is pale indeed beside his rage against his own class.

Hence, while it is ironic enough that Stanislavski should be the

darling of a terrorist regime, it is doubly ironic that supportersof that regime should champion him against an artist who had

gone out of his way to praise Stalinist terrorism.That part of the story would be irrelevant to my present

argument except that the Communists, for their own reasons,

have so handsomely contributed to the confusion that reigns con-

cerning this Stanislavski-Brecht relationship. In 1953, a spokes-

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ERIC BENTLEY

man for the German Communist Party declared Brecht's theories

to be "undeniably in opposition to everything the name Stanis-

lavski stands for. The two leaders of the Ensemble must surelybe the last people to hide their heads in the sand when faced

with these facts." 1 At that time the "two leaders" of the Berlin

Ensemble were Brecht himself and his wife, Helene Weigel. Frau

Weigel attended the Stanislavski Conference of 1953 with the

laudable aim of showing that Brecht and Stanislavski were not as

incompatible as all that. But if, as I gather, all she had to offer

was a rehash of the Nine Points her husband had printed the

year before in Theaterarbeit, she could only have made the con-

fusion worse. For like the Party leaders, the Brechts identified

the word "Stanislavski" with the word "Soviet." And one notes

that the New Society is as given as any American orator on Com-

mencement Day to orotund platitude. Stanislavski believed in

Man, Brecht believed in Man; Stanislavski regarded Truthful-

ness as a duty, Brecht regarded Truthfulness as a duty; Stanis-

lavski had a sense ofresponsibility

tosociety,

Brecht.... Since

only seeing is believing, I will reproduce Brecht's Nine Points at

the foot of this article.

When Brecht was not busy blotting himself out (like his Young

Comrade) in order to be Stalin's organization man, he was apt to

express hostility to Stanislavski, as in two passages which Mr.

Willett rightly cites in Brecht on Theatre along with the Nine

Points. In the first of these passages, the target is Naturalism:

What he [Stanislavski]aredabout was naturalness,and as a resulteverythingn his theatreseemedfar too naturalfor anyoneto pauseand go into it thoroughly.You don't normallyexamineyour ownhomeoryourownfeedinghabits,do you?

In the second, the target is not only the strictly Naturalistic

theatre but any theatre that depends too heavily on empathy.Brecht finds in the hypnotic kind of theatre a soporific intention

based on fear of the audience's intelligence: "The audience's

sharp eye frightens him [Stanislavski]. He shuts it." Such pas-sages remind us that Brecht knew very little about Stanislavski

and, like the rest of the world, thought of him as the lackey of

1MartinEsslin,Brecht:The Man and His Work(NewYork:Double-day, 1961), pp. 179-80.

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Tulane Drama Review

one style of theatre. If the word "Soviet" does not define Stanis-

lavski's general outlook, neither do words like "naturalistic" and

"empathic" define his theatre as a whole.

To revert to the question of whether Stanislavski, had his

health been better and had h,e lived on, would have proceededto create a Brechtian theatre, or at least to have achieved some

authentically Brechtian productions, one would probably be wise

to answer: No, he belonged too unalterably to the pre-1914 world.

He would not have been any more at home with Brecht than he

had been with the Russian Communistplaywrights-or

with

his own rebellious sons, such as Meyerhold. The difference be-

tween generations is a difference of spirit and temper. But this

is not to say that Stanislavski's approach to acting will have to

be discarded if Brecht's plays are to be well performed. First a

man can become an actor-with the help of the Method. Then

he can learn to adapt himself to different kinds of plays-in-

cluding Brecht's. Is the difference between Brecht and all other

playwrights greater after all than other differences which actorshave already learned to confront-say, between Shaw and Shake-

speare, Wilde and Arthur Miller? Brecht's assault upon the idea

of Empathy and his defense of Alienation sound more threaten-

ing in their abstract theoretic grandeur than in practice theyturn out to be. The "Alienation Effect" is not alien to the

tradition of comic acting as Stanislavski and everyone else

know it-what Brecht is attacking is the tragic tradition in its

attenuated form of domestic, psychological drama of pathos andsuspense. But the Charlie Chaplins and Zero Mostels practiceAlienation as Monsieur Jourdain composed prose. Perhaps it takes

a German intellectual to make such heavy weather of the thing.

Incidentally, Brecht never considered that "epic" acting had

really been achieved either by the Berlin Ensemble or anyoneelse. So there is his own authority for saying: there are no

Brechtian actors. Evidently what he had was a vision of what

acting might become, given not only changes on stage, but alsoin the auditorium. Should that vision ever be realized, it is con-

ceivable that Stanislavski may prove to have been one of the

contributors to it.

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ERIC BENTLEY

SOME OF THE THINGS THAT CAN BE LEARNT FROM

STANISLAVSKI2

1. The feeling for a play's poetry.Even when S.'s theatre had to put on naturalistic plays to

satisfy the taste of the time, the production endowed them with

poetic features; it never descended to mere reportage. Whereas

here in Germany even classical plays acquire no kind of splendor.

2. The sense of responsibility to society.S. showed the actors the social meaning of their craft. Art was

not an end in itself to him, but he knew that no end is attainedin the theatre except through art.

3. The star's ensemble playing.S.'s theatre consisted only of stars, great and small. He proved

that individual playing only reaches full effectiveness by means

of ensemble playing.

4. Importance of the broad conception and of details.

In the Moscow Art Theatre every play acquired a carefullythought-out shape and a wealth of subtly elaborated detail. The

one is useless without the other.

5. Truthfulness as a duty.S. taught that the actor must have exact knowledge of himself

and of the men he sets out to portray. Nothing that is not takenfrom the actor's observation, or confirmed by observation, is fitto be observed

bythe audience.

6. Unity of naturalness and style.In S.'s theatre a splendid naturalness went arm-in-arm with

deep significance. As a realist he never hesitated to portrayugliness, but he did so gracefully.

7. Representation of reality as full of contradictions.

S. grasped the diversity and complexity of social life and knewhow to represent it without getting entangled. All his productions

make sense.2 FromTheaterarbeitDresden,1952),p. 413.TranslatedbyJohn Wil-

lett, Brecht on Theatre(New York: Hill and Wang, 1964),pp. 236-37.Reprinted by permissionof the publishers.

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76 Tulane Drama Review

8. The importance of man.

S. was a convinced humanist, and as such conducted his theatrealong the road to socialism.

9. The significance of art's further development.The Moscow Art Theatre never rested on its laurels. S. invented

new artistic methods for every production. From his theatre came

such important artistsas Vakhtangov, who in turn developed their

teacher'sart further in complete freedom.

bently, eric - on brecht and stanislavsky

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