Are Stanislavski and Brecht Commensurable?

Author(s): Eric Bentley

Source: The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Autumn, 1964), pp. 69-76
Published by: The MIT Press
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Are

Brecht

Stanislavski

and

Commensurable?

By ERIC BENTLEY
"How does Brecht's system differ from Stanislavski's?" I have
often 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 described an actor in one of his plays as having gone "beyond
Stanislavski." Will the acting profession soon be divided between
Method actors and Brechtians?
Possibly it will, so far as nomenclature is concerned, and so far
as 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 subjective elements and Brecht's alleged preoccupation with objective
elements. 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 wrong
of him to tell them this: he is "working in terms of results" instead
of stimulating their subconscious. Some Brechtian actors will
retort that theatre is results, that drama is action, that the notion
of a subconscious is bourgeois and decadent.... And so the issue
is joined.
But it is an imaginary issue. We can side-step it by remembering that Brecht was a playwright, Stanislavski an actor. For
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Brecht, actors were the means toward the full realization of his
plays. Because he had the good luck to work in a highly professional 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 dramaturgy as young and developing, tended to regard the 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 assumption
about 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 better
know 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 reworking
his scripts either in the manner of Brecht or of the Broadway
directors. He was too busy reworking the actors. I suppose every
director 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 antitheses don't? In his last years, Brecht was beginning to mold
actors, beginning, in fact, to learn to mold actors, and beginning
to talk of acting schools and the younger generation. And conversely, perhaps, examples could be given of Stanislavski's editing
and adapting plays. Such factors, however, imply only slight
modifications of the point I have made. And by consequence
what Brecht, in his theoretical pronouncements, is talking about
is what actors, finally, can and should do, while what Stanislavski
is talking about is the question of how they may be brought to
the point where they can do this or anything else. Brecht is talking about the end result; Stanislavski about education, about the

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71

actor's training. To say this does not provide us with all the
answers. Rather, it opens up new questions.
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 degenerate
into an acting coach, the Stanislavski-ites can retort: "Yes, he
must-at a time when the actors are not perfected professionals
but 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 after
World 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 welltrained 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 people
into actors.
If the generalization still stands-that by and large Brecht is
concerned with getting the play produced, Stanislavski with
training the actor to be in it-would it necessarily follow that an
actor 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 aim
to create an instrument which could be used for any honorable
theatrical purpose. And it is clear that he regarded this aim as
attainable.
The Brechtians have their doubts-or should, if they wish to
tread in the Marxian steps of the Meister. Stanislavski's notion
of a universally valid training and a possibly omnicompetent kind
of acting they will (or should) describe as bourgeois. And they

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

Stanislavski belongs to one class and one epoch, 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 director 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 upon
plays by other authors; but the results are unfortunate except
when 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 Symbolism 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 who
would 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 bourgeois class-which is amusing-their relation to that class is different 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 theatre
became a museum for the best in "bourgeois" drama. While
Stanislavski was not even a rebel against his own family background, 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 supporters
of 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 concerning this Stanislavski-Brecht relationship. In 1953, a spokes-

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73

man for the German Communist Party declared Brecht's theories

to be "undeniably in opposition to everything the name Stanislavski stands for. The two leaders of the Ensemble must surely
be 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 confusion 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 Commencement Day to orotund platitude. Stanislavski believed in
Man, Brecht believed in Man; Stanislavski regarded Truthfulness as a duty, Brecht regarded Truthfulness as a duty; Stanislavski had a sense of responsibility to society, 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]cared about was naturalness,and as a result
everythingin his theatreseemedfar too naturalfor anyone to pause
and go into it thoroughly.You don't normallyexamine your own
home or your own feedinghabits,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 passages 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(New York:Doubleday, 1961),pp. 179-80.

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Tulane Drama Review

one style of theatre. If the word "Soviet" does not define Stanislavski'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 proceeded
to 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 Communist playwrights-or with
his own rebellious sons, such as Meyerhold. The difference between 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-including Brecht's. Is the difference between Brecht and all other
playwrights greater after all than other differences which actors
have already learned to confront-say, between Shaw and Shakespeare, Wilde and Arthur Miller? Brecht's assault upon the idea
of Empathy and his defense of Alienation sound more threatening in their abstract theoretic grandeur than in practice they
turn 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 and
suspense. But the Charlie Chaplins and Zero Mostels practice
Alienation 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 anyone
else. 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 also
in the auditorium. Should that vision ever be realized, it is conceivable that Stanislavski may prove to have been one of the
contributors to it.

ERIC BENTLEY

75

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 attained
in 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 carefully
thought-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 taken
from the actor's observation, or confirmed by observation, is fit
to be observed by the 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 portray
ugliness, but he did so gracefully.
7. Representation of reality as full of contradictions.
S. grasped the diversity and complexity of social life and knew
how to represent it without getting entangled. All his productions
make sense.
2
FromTheaterarbeit(Dresden,1952),p. 413. Translatedby John Willett, Brecht on Theatre (New York:Hill and Wang, 1964),pp. 236-37.
Reprinted by permissionof the publishers.

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Drama

Review

8. The importance of man.

S. was a convinced humanist, and as such conducted his theatre
along 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 artists as Vakhtangov, who in turn developed their
teacher's art further in complete freedom.