Brecht And Stanislavski Essay

Brecht obviously had developed his own theatre practice not only independently of but actually, as we have seen, defining himself against (what he thought of as) Stanislavski’s work. Whilst he would have recognised these areas of overlap with his own practice, he also clearly laid different emphases upon different aspects of the work than Stanislavski would have. So, for example, Brecht took Stanislavski’s concept of the super-objective, which for Stanislavski represents the Ruling Idea of the play – what the play is essentially about, which then unites and guides the actors, helping them to work together in the service of a coherent and focused production – but then emphasised the distancing aspects of this process for the actors much more than Stanislavski himself would have done. Mumford notes that Brecht ‘By the ‘fifties... had become more aware of Stanislavski’s use of the
concept of the ‘superobjective’, which he interpreted as involving the subordination of everything to the central idea. For the actors to fulfil the superobjective they would have to maintain in rehearsal and performance a certain degree of critical distance from their characters. The implication is that perhaps Stanislavskian acting demanded not only an empathetic but also a critical and objective approach.’ (Ibid: 244).
In the final analysis and with the benefit of hindsight we can see that there were some undoubted affinities between the practices of these very different men. As with Meyerhold, however, one must be wary of overstating the degree to which Brecht’s practice dovetailed with that of Stanislavski. Whilst he did come to appreciate significant aspects of the System, Brecht’s radical views with regard to the actor / audience relationship, and the kind of provocation which art should offer – the conscious problematizing of the artistic experience which in many ways prefigured the postmodernist critiques of the following generation – meant that, for Brecht, Stanislavski’s System alone was not an adequate means to create the kind of politicised theatre he desired.
For all their criticisms, then, Meyerhold, Vakhtangov and Michael Chekhov, along with Brecht in his later years, had no hesitation in acknowledging Stanislavski as a towering figure on the theatrical scene throughout the Modernist era. I will now begin to consider Stanislavski in a Postmodern, some would say Postdramatic context.
Throughout the turbulent changes of the twentieth century and into our own time, through the modernist and postmodernist eras, the Stanislavski System has remained a potentially useful approach to acting for any performer wishing to apply it.
After his time with Stanislavski Meyerhold chose to take a very different path from his old teacher, but over the course of their working lifetimes each continued to stimulate and influence the other so that in the end Stanislavski could refer to the younger man as his only real heir in the theatre. Vakhtangov and Michael Chekhov were able to use the System as a foundation for their own practice, building upon and challenging some of its central tenets. Brecht had very different aims and concerns much of the time from Stanislavski, but nevertheless came to appreciate and use aspects of the System in his final years. Auslander’s analysis of Stanislavski, through the prism of Derridian deconstructive theory, was both useful and provocative, and Lehmann, Dafoe and Zarilli have proved to be challenging critics and artist / performers in a postmodern
context.