Naturalism and Stanislavski’'s Method

Naturalism

Naturalism is a style of acting developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It focuses on moving and portraying scenarios that are true to real life, with set design, costuming and the dialogue all being things that could be seen or heard in day to day life. It also introduced more focus on class, with more bourgeois and working-class characters as well as the aristocratic proleriats of Classical drama.

It contrasts greatly to styles like total theatre, made popular by practitioners such as Steven Berkoff, where everything is exaggerated, grotesque and melodramatic.

Stanislavksi

Born in 1863 in Moscow, Russia, theatre inspired Stanislavski from an early age. His maternal grandmother was an actress and his grandfather built a stage on their estate. In June 1897, he and playwright/director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko opened the Moscow Art Theatre, which went on to gain an outstanding reputation both within Russia and worldwide.

Stanislavski’’s Method

Konstantin Stanislavski was a 19th century Russian playwright and director.

His method was to help people to build believable and realistic characters. He believed that every action should have a purpose – so that you could think about the reaction in realistic terms and not overact it.

His method requires you to think:

• Who am I?
• Where am I?
• When is it?
• What do I want?
• Why do I want It?
• How will I get It?
• What do I need to overcome?

The more details and thoughts you have about what it is you’re acting, the easier it is to believe and create a reasonable reaction.

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His work against melodrama

Stanislavski believed that before his system, actors only cared about themselves in a performance, and not performance as an art. Actors were so obsessed with being ‘the star’ of a performance rather than working as an ensemble that they would make their characters overdramatic and exaggerated. Stanislavski sought to change this by introducing methods such as connecting with emotional memory, thinking about the given circumstances of the character and their objectives. This would allow characters to give depth to their character and provide a more compelling performance by providing links to real, human emotion.

Given Circumstances

The given circumstances of a character are total set of environmental and situational conditions that can influence and change a character’s reactions to what is happening. For example, for a play set in 11th century like Macbeth, the fact that women were treated poorly and like they had no right to power means Lady Macbeth must be sly and secretive about her quest for ruling and control Macbeth into being a pawn.

In ‘Bassett’, the play we are performing for our assessment, the given circumstances for my character ‘Deanna’, are that she desperately needs the toilet. When moving around, I need to move around as though I am desperate to use to toilet, to make the character more believable. This means lots of crouching, hands between my thighs etc. When delivering lines such as ‘it’s not funny’ and ‘if she’s not coming back in the next 10 minutes then we’re going to have to think of something’, I had to add hints of desperation and genuine worry that she might not make it out of the classroom in time.

The Magic If

The magic if makes the actor ask, ‘what would I do if this were me?’, in order to provoke a more authentic and naturalistic response. This helps the audience to believe in the character, as by taking a response from a real person, they will be more likely to empathise with the character

Asking “what if” helped enormously to up the stakes in the tension and urgency of everyone’s actions throughout the play. The biggest stimuli we had was asking ourselves, “What if we can’t get out of this locked room?”. Regarding my character personally, this question was important as she really needed the toilet, and it helped me to remember to look like I needed the toilet throughout the play. There were also more ‘what if’ questions at the pivotal scenes in the play. For example, when the character Leo gets out his baseball bat, we asked “what if he does smash the window in?”, because obviously this would get our characters into an enormous amount of trouble. This encouraged us all to get up and run to stop him, a much sincerer reaction instead of just staying in our seats.

Circles of Concentration

There are three circles of concentration. The first is concentrating on yourself only. Beyond this, the second is acknowledgement of the character you are addressing, and the third is an awareness of the whole production. This method allows the actor to block out the audience and focus solely on their performance without thinking about judgement or critique from the people watching.

Our warmups throughout the term were to get us thinking within that first circle at the beginning of every session. This allowed us to settle and hone our energy into our acting and focusing on our own actions. This helped us to be somewhat more productive in our rehearsal time as we were all in the right headspace for acting and had been given the opportunity to ground ourselves and relax before we began working with each other.

Improvisations

Stanislavski believed that improvisation was important for stopping actors getting so far into their inner circle that a production would lose cohesion. Improvisation was important for everybody to have to work together and consider each character’s emotions, so that everything made sense together.

Improvisation was important to our assessment piece as it had a large improvisation at the beginning when the audience were entering and settling. If one person was trying to converse with somebody but the other person was too busy focusing on themselves, it would not have worked. This forced us all to be alert and focus on what was happening around the room, to make sure we could really nail the scenario of a rowdy classroom. The best example of us working together during the improvisation was when we were having a fight with throwing screwed up paper and post it notes at each other.

Units & Objectives

These are perhaps the most crucial part of Stanislavski’s system as they are the reason your character makes every action that they do throughout the performance. The super-objective is the overall goal for your character throughout the piece. This objective may align with the objectives of other characters in the play. The other objectives are the steps to reaching that overall goal, and the actions you take along the way. Units refer to a part of the scene that contains an objective. This means units are a way to break down scenes further into goals for your character.

In “Bassett”, the super-objective for most of the characters is to get out of the locked classroom. Each student may have different reasons for this however. For example, Leo wants to get out of the room to see the repatriation, Deanna is more focused on getting out of the room so she can go the toilet, and Zainab wants to get out so that she can go and do her noon prayer. Other things happen within the play that change the objectives of the characters. For me, once my character realises that getting out of the classroom may not be an option for a while, her objectives turn from trying to force open the door, to distractions. These included helping Grace with setting up the laptop, stopping Leo from climbing out the window and having a gossip with Kelly and Rachel about how video games are stupid. These objectives made sure that my character always had something to be doing or achieving, so that I wasn’t just sitting there letting my focus slip.

Imagination & Belief

Imagination is key to a good performance. If you don’t believe what you are performing, then the audience won’t either as it will show in your acting if you are tentative or in obvious disbelief.

We worked on our imagination skills in rehearsal by doing the bird exercise, where we had to pretend a scrunched-up piece of paper was an injured bird and treat it as such when we were holding it. For much of rehearsals, we didn’t have important props such as a desk with drawers, keys or a spray can. In a way this was good, as it meant we had to use our imagination and continue with our acting as though we did have the props.