Unit 6

                         Chekov & Stanislavski

Konstantin Sergeievich Stanislavski 
(17 January 1863 – 7 August 1938) 

Stanislavski was a seminal Russian theatre practitioner. He was widely recognised as an outstanding character actor and the many productions that he directed earned him a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation. Stanislavski fame and influence, however, rests entirely on his 'system' of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal techniques.

The system

The Stanislavski System is a highly influential method of dramatic theatrical training developed by the famous practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski. The system was developed to find a greater style of acting more innovated and improved to the greater style of Realism. However Stanislavski never intended to develop a new style of acting in which came outs as Naturalism.

The Stanislavsky system requires that an actor utilize, among other things, his emotional memory (i.e., his recall of past experiences and emotions). The actor’s entrance onto the stage is considered to be not a beginning of the action or of his life as the character but a continuation of the set of preceding circumstances. The actor has trained his concentration and his senses so that he may respond freely to the total stage environment. Through empathic observation of people in many different situations, he attempts to develop a wide emotional range so that his onstage actions and reactions appear as if they were a part of the real world rather than a make-believe one.

How is this aiding me in my work ?

This aids me in my work in my pursuit to become a better performer by having a direct relationship between actor to audience. I feel like Stanislavskis system guides me to become an amazing performer. The research conducted gives me insight in what I have to do.

 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

(29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904)

 Chekov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer in which he is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics.Furthermore Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre among Brecht and Stanislavski . Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor  throughout most of his playwright career in which he once said "Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress."

Chekov at first only was only writing stories for financial gain. This was until his artistic ambition grew and he started to have major influence on the evolution of the modern short story.

Chekhov renounced the theatre after the reception of The Seagull in 1896, but in 1898  Konstantin Stanislavski's  revived the play to acclaim at the Moscow Art Theatre in  which he also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. 

Three Sisters

Three sisters is a play by Anton Chekhov who is a famous, and very influential, playwright. This unit we are learning and practicing some of Stanislavsky's theories and ideologies. It is important to do a Chekhov play as an actor  particularly in a Stanislavsky unit, because Stanislavsky worked on a lot of Chekhov  plays and many of his methods were like The System was implemented into them.

Three Sisters takes place in Russia. It follows the life of three sisters Olga, Masha, And Irina who live in a  big  house in a small town.Their father died before the events of the play occur, leaving the sisters with  good wealth from inheritance. Despite all this the sisters  are bored  with their life away from the city and want to go back to Moscow where they were born. They also have an older brother called Andre and have close  family friends to their father, Tuzenbach, Solony, and Chebutykin  all with impossible pronunciations. 

Yodor Ilyich Kulygin

My character in Three Sisters is Kulygin who is a latin teacher  at a high school and Masha’s Husband.

The character I play, Kulygin is a jovial, kindly man, who truly loves his wife, and her sisters, although he is very much aware of her infidelity. In the first act he seems almost foolish, giving Irina a gift he has already given her, and joking around with the doctor to make fun of Natasha, but begins to grow more and more sympathetic as Masha's affair progresses. During the fire in Act 3, he confesses to Olga that he might have married her – the fact that the two would probably be very happy together is hinted at many times throughout the show. Throughout the show, often at the most serious moments, he often tries to make the other characters laugh in order to relieve tension, and while that doesn't always work, he is able to give his wife comfort through humor in her darkest hour at the show's climax. At the end of the play, although knowing what Masha had been doing, he takes her back and accepts her failings.

Prior to this monologue, Kulygin's wife, Masha, fell in love with one of the soldiers. Here, Kulygin speaks to Irina and Chebutykin of how fond he is of his wife and how the soldiers are leaving today so that everything may go back to as it was before. Kulygin states that happiness does not come from success and cleverness alone.

The York Realist

The York realist is a play written by Peter gill which takes place near York in the 1960's. It follows the current circumstances and life of the main protagonist, George who is a homosexual man living with his mother on a farm . The play covers past issues of oppression on homosexuals that would be presented as a problem for a character like George as homosexuality was illegal at the time. Social pressures would have forced him to keep his sexuality hidden from everyone including his family  forcing him to  suppress his true nature entirely.

The play consists of Georges family, Doreen whose a close family friend(Georges admirer), and John (Georges love interest). 

John is the most important of these characters and the play mainly focuses on their relationship and sexual tension through different acts. There are time differences between acts in which the relationship between the two is in a different situation. 

 These make up most of the themes in the play: Family, forbidden love, social pressures , oppression and freedom.

In the piece we are creating to perform there was a selection of  themes for the play to choose in order to  create short unique stories out of them, differentiating our piece  from the actual play. For example we may choose to devise a short piece of theater surrounding  one of our personal experiences of these particular themes. Our objective is to combine our unique stories with clear transitions in order to tell a story using the themes of the York realist, but with our own personal perspectives of those themes so its different to the actual play. 

Donmar Theatre

For Unit 6 we are working very closely with the Donmar theatre to deliver a performance based on the York realist. We are working with Toby Peach  an actor/theatre director who I coincidentally  met a week prior outside of college at the Young Actors Theatre. He gave me feedback on a self written monologue I performed.

Toby’s workshops have been very helpful  enabling us to extract the themes of the York Realist and use them with our personal experiences and ideas to create them into stories .

At the Donmar Theatre we did a range of activities to help work as an ensemble. The activities helped in a way that we were all contributing  in creating a narrative and having our own personal objectives. 

The ensemble activities made us aware of the group itself. Some of the activities used include grandmas footsteps but without a grandma. This was interesting for multiple reasons because we had to imagine the grandma being there. This meant that we all had to freeze and move in unison without a Grandma  telling us when to move. 

We also had to ensure that the game went on and was also enjoyable for an audience to watch and follow the unique objectives and stories of each individual playing the game. We would have to eliminate ourselves and restart so the game wouldn't end in order to keep the game entertaining and interesting. Some objectives included  trying to win, purposely trying to loose, cheating and sabotaging the game for fellow competitors.This was important for us as it teaches that we need to be aware of our actions and that we need to ensure they benefit the performance for both the audience and the other actors on stage.

Another workshop  was learning about the context of when The York Realist is set, which was set in the 60's when homosexuality was illegal. This is  very important to know when reading the play because it gives an insight into life at the time , the oppression and what problems  characters were facing.

 The threat of a severe punishment awaiting them if caught. 

 We also found out that homosexuals at the time would have spoken a secret language called polari  which was a language mixed with other languages and slang. Homosexuals would speak  polari to discover other homosexuals  and hide  themselves from the law.

Development of the Donmar Piece

Toby introduced us to an energy ball which we our going to use for the piece . The energy is stored in our hands and is transferred through a clap directed at someone else with eye contact and that  person claps back to show they’ve  receive the energy ball. 

We have really been playing around with this idea , literally  by playing games with the energy ball like piggy in the middle. 

We all stated to have our own unique objectives with the energy ball like being selfish and hording it or giving it to someone who hasn't had it and has been struggling to get it. We started realising that there are many stories that start to come out of the game and we wanted it to be incorporated into our production.

The objective is to start with a very short game to establish what the energy is and how it functions before setting off with our  individual narratives. After the game finishes,  the person who last has the energy will tell their short story, and by the time they're finished telling the story they will clap the energy to someone else who will tell their story and so on. 

This makes the piece have smooth transitions, giving the piece structure.Furthermore it  helps to link the themes and stories together into one overall message , which we initially got from the themes of the York Realist.

We also started adding production elements like sound and lighting to the piece. Primarily with music and sound , where some stories don't have music, while others, like one based on a video game has a track from Minecraft to make it sound geeky.  The music helps breathe life into some of the stories, particularly ones with no dialogue.  Sound effects like train carriages for a scene on a train are being implemented giving the scene more life.

 Once we are at the Donmar theatre itself we did a tech run-through with the music kicking in on the right ques; we also used lighting elements with professional lights for subtle colour changes during transitions into different  stories. Multicolored disco type lighting  blend  was used for a rave like party scene.         

Final Performances

We performed both the Donmar piece and Three Sisters  in the same week.

The Donmar performance went with 100% energy and effort from everyone involved  making our piece go smoothly with no mistakes. We were all very fortunate to have performed it at the Donmar professional theatre in front of other schools who were also on board with the project as well as some of the actors  from the York Realist, Peter Gill the author himself and my mum who was very impressed by our performance.This experience was very beneficial for all of us as upcoming actors to have attained more stage experience on the famous Donmar stage.

Three Sisters came together well on the night despite everyone's (including me ) preparation during rehearsals weeks before towards the final performance. Our preparation was unprofessionalI  as I  feel that not enough work was put in when it came to rehearsing  the piece in comparison the Donmar piece. Lines weren't fully learned until late into the project which was a serious problem. Despite all these issues, I feel like our performance felt way more alive than we'd ever practiced especially taking into consideration of  the feedback received from the audience, in particular my performance as Kulygin in which I was told that my scene was very entertaining to watch.

D . H Lawrence  Research 


We got into groups and conducted research on D. H Lawrence in which we would present to the class.

Note: I can't find my research but all the research conducted was said in the presentation above.