How did you first come upon My Life in Art?

I first came upon it through my curiosity about Chekhov, the Moscow Art Theatre and the whole beginnings of the ensemble idea. And this book has become a kind of bible for theatre people, because while it sets out the difficult origins of the Moscow Art Theatre at the end of the 19th century, it also sets out Stanislavski’s philosophy of acting and theatre. I think the best way to show what I mean is just to talk about one or two paragraphs that sum up his philosophy, particularly about acting.

‘Creativeness begins from that moment when in the soul and imagination of the actor there appears the magical, creative if…that is, the imagined truth which the actor can believe as sincerely and with greater enthusiasm than he believes practical truth.’

In a nutshell, that is Stanislavski’s approach to acting – that the actor has to enter into some imaginative contract with the world of the play, the creative if. Now since Stanislavski wrote this, other acting methods have appeared. Midway through the 20th century the Brechtian method appeared, in which the actor is not expected to enter into the world of illusion but is expected to assess reality and present the character to the audience. What Stanislavski was after was a kind of immersion of the actor in the situation and the character. But this book is such an important keystone of 20th-century acting that you have to read it. And of course out of it, in America, came the Method, which often perverted Stanislavski. But the whole American tradition of James Dean, Marlon Brando and everything that follows from that is very important.  

Two questions. How much of a break with the past were Stanislavski's theories? And how did he come to arrive at these theories?

How he came by it is one of those strange accidents. He was a relatively well-to-do figure. He met various like-minded people in Moscow towards the end of the 19th century and they were dissatisfied with the existing state of theatre and so put their resources into creating a new sort of theatre.

I think it was a decisive break with the past. The impression one gets with Stanislavski was that before he comes to codify the principles of acting, there was a much more hit-and-miss attitude, a kind of divine amateurism. What Stanislavski does is to say you can apply to acting a system and a method – it’s not just a case of relying on occasional flashes of inspiration, it’s all about discipline, method and system.

I’d like to emphasise this word, discipline. He says, ‘Why may the dramatic artist do nothing, spend his day in coffee houses and hope for the gift of Apollo in the evening? Enough. Is this an art when its priests speak like amateurs?’

So what he’s attacking is the lazy habits of Russian actors at the time, and the assumption that you can turn up in the evening and ‘turn on’ a performance, as it were. That seems to me the core thing that Stanislavski is writing about.

The other thing the book does is to establish the role of the director. Stanislavski was directing most of these early Moscow Art Theatre productions, at a time when the concept of ‘the director’ was pretty alien to most theatres – certainly in Britain, where the stage manager got the play on to the stage. What Stanislavski shows is that plays don’t just happen. So this work became a crucial bible, again in Britain, in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, when the idea of the director was beginning to take root, and the idea that plays had to be a symphony of sound, music, light and everything else, was becoming established. So I don’t think anyone who cares about theatre and the way it has developed can avoid reading this book. I should also say that the book is not a dry articulation of a code. It’s a very humane and enlightening book, and a very ironic book.

Let's talk about your next book, The Empty Space by Peter Brook. This is another seminal text that all drama students and directors have to read. Tell me about it why it's such a classic.

It was published in 1968 and it’s almost never been out of print since. It’s a very slim book – my well-thumbed edition runs to 157 pages. What Peter Brook does is apply his very cool, analytical judgment to theatre as it is. He breaks theatre down into four different categories – and these terms have now become standard.

The ‘deadly theatre’, first of all. The theatre of mechanical repetition, mainly in commercial theatre, where productions can run for ten or 20 years. This is the theatre that happens because it’s scheduled to happen, and there’s no particular inspiration behind it.

Then he comes to the ‘holy theatre’, by which he’s referring to a rather cultish, specialised, refined, avant-garde theatre created by dedicated individuals, that has an aura of sacrament about it, but is slightly removed from the daily world. So this might include Polish theatre companies like Grotowski’s, who worked in isolation in a secluded Polish forest, leading quite a monastic existence away from daily life.

Then there is the ‘rough theatre’, which embraces vaudeville, music hall, comedy, popular entertainment – and has all the rough vitality we associate with that.

But what he’s looking for is a synthesis of the holy and the rough, in what he calls the ‘immediate theatre’. This is theatre where idealism and spirituality is combined with an ability to reach out to an audience. Brook finds that Shakespeare is the best example of ‘immediate theatre’, because any Shakespeare play combines these ingredients in the most extraordinary way.

And I think the book is a reflection of Peter Brook himself.