An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary (review)

An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary has excellent potential to correct the record in English-language theatre studies regarding what Stanislavski actually taught. Into one edition Jean Benedetti has translated, edited, and restored Stanislavski’s English works, An Actor Prepares and Building a Character, their Russian counterpart, An Actor’s Work on Himself, and other texts thought to be partial drafts for what Stanislavski conceived of as a final book. Benedetti’s book has two parts: “Year One: Experiencing” and “Year Two: Embodiment.” He believes this work follows the author’s original intentions. Admittedly, authorial intention is a literary cul-desac, but Benedetti’s work bears the earmarks more of historical restoration than critical analysis, thus Stanislavski’s intention is a legitimate concern.

Although some will surely find fault with the book, and a great many untranslated and unpublished texts remain in the Stanislavski opus, Benedetti’s work is far superior to the excised and rushed work of the American translator and editor, Elizabeth Hapgood, which has dominated non-Russian theatre classrooms for the last seventy years. Of equal importance are Benedetti’s efforts to de- Stalinize Stanislavski’s Russian versions, reviving terminology and concepts that Soviet censorship would not permit. Benedetti claims to have restored the unity of the Stanislavski system’s psychological, analytical, and physical components, which were separated and muted by virtue of different manuscripts presented in the United States and Soviet Union, by state and self-censorship, and by American and Soviet editorial policies (xvi). The conditions surrounding all previous publications of Stanislavski’s work were so thoroughly complex that readers of this significantly improved restoration may be tempted to hold his original editors, Hapgood (in the United States) and Lyubov Gurievich (Soviet Union), in contempt. But, as Benedetti explains, the conditions were assuredly not their fault.

For some readers of Hapgood, An Actor’s Work may be tantamount to experiencing Stanislavski for the first time. Midway through chapter 4, “Imagination,” material on the inner eye differs so drastically from the earlier US version that readers may regard An Actor’s Work as a totally unfamiliar book, full of ideas they always knew though now organized differently and explained effectively. An Actor’s Work shows where many famous Stanislavski maxims originated; for example, the well-known phrase, which never appears in Hapgood: “There are no small roles, only small actors” (573). Many Stanislavski-isms may have been originally transmitted (and some mutilated) via the classroom circuit and Russian editions. Benedetti’s work corrects editorial idiosyncrasies and myths sprung from the practical and political complexities affecting Hapgood’s transformation of Stanislavski’s original manuscripts between 1924 and 1938, her and others’ posthumous English and Russian editions from 1938 to 1990, and what émigré actors taught after the Revolution.

The three final chapters in Hapgood’s An Actor Prepares differ radically from the corresponding chapters in the Russian version, An Actor’s Work on Himself, because of what Benedetti calls the battle with “pseudo-Marxist” behaviorists (xvii). Quite decisively, Benedetti opts for the more comprehensive Russian chapters in his “Year One: Experiencing.” Eventually a chapter-by-chapter comparison of Hapgood’s and Benedetti’s texts becomes futile, mainly because of Benedetti’s adherence to Stanislavski’s diary format and many extended examples. As a result, An Actor’s Work is striking in its power to clarify Stanislavski’s system.

Chapter titles convey this power. Hapgood’s second chapter, “The Stage as Art,” becomes in Benedetti “The Stage as Art and Stock in Trade.” Hapgood’s omission of “stock in trade” in both her title and subsequent references denotes a divergence from the spirit of Stanislavski’s teachings that Benedetti recaptures. Without explicitly distinguishing art from stock and trade, Stanislavski’s vehemence, ethics, and reverent attitude towards theatre cannot truly be grasped.

An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary is not a compilation of Stanislavski’s complete writings; he wrote more than what is...