MEYERHOLD AND ACTING THEORY

The new plays – epic or miniature, abstract or satirical – demanded new attention to acting practices. By employing circus professionals, Radlov and Meyerhold had made a start, but in reality this only postponed the problem. The question was how to modify the circus artist's performance to fit the somewhat different demands of the theatre, how to theatricalise the circus, or circusise the theatre.

Meyerhold knew better than anyone that a dynamic performance which could stimulate an urgent and emotional response in the spectator was one which relied on technique. In 1913 he opened his Doctor Dapertutto's Studio in St Petersburg in order to explore and develop what was to become known in the Soviet era as ‘Biomechanics’, though it was then called by the perhaps more appropriate name of ‘Scenic Movement’. At base, this was rooted in one side of the ongoing debate about acting which can be traced to Denis Diderot and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It was Diderot who first asked: ‘If the actor were full, really full, of feeling, how could he play the same part twice running with the same spirit and success? Full of fire at the first performance, he would be worn out and cold as marble at the third.’ He pointed out that ‘at the very moment when he [the actor] touches your heart he is listening to his own voice; his talent depends not, as you think, upon feeling, but upon rendering so exactly the outward signs of feeling, that you fall into the trap’, and he concluded: ‘Actors impress the public not when they are furious, but when they play fury well.’ And the English actor David Garrick, whom Diderot greatly admired, remarked that he could speak to a post with the same feelings as to the loveliest Juliet under heaven.

Yet the Romantic theatre rejected this cool rationality and insisted on the actor infusing his performance with genuine feeling. This approach reached its apogee in the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Meyerhold's teacher. In Stanislavsky's fictionalised account of learning the process of acting, An Actor's Work, the first compliment the gauche young actor receives is for a moment in his performance of Othello when ‘like us the audience, [he] surrendered totally to what was happening.