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Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski was a seminal Soviet Russian theatre practitioner. He was widely recognized as an outstanding character actor, and the many productions that he directed garnered him a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation. His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his "system" of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal technique.
The Seagull is a play by Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov, written in 1895 and first produced in 1896. The Seagull is generally considered to be the first of his four major plays. It dramatizes the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Treplev.
Stanislavski's system is a systematic approach to training actors that the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski developed in the first half of the twentieth century. His system cultivates what he calls the "art of experiencing". It mobilises the actor's conscious thought and will in order to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly. In rehearsal, the actor searches for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the character seeks to achieve at any given moment.
The Living Corpse is a Russian play by Leo Tolstoy. Although written around 1900, it was only published shortly after his death—Tolstoy had never considered the work finished. An immediate success, it is still performed. Arthur Hopkins produced its Broadway premiere in 1918 under the title Redemption, starring John Barrymore.
The Moscow Art Theatre (or MAT; Russian: Московский Художественный академический театр, Moskovskiy Hudojestvenny Akademicheskiy Teatr was a theatre company in Moscow. It was founded in 1898 by the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas that were Russia's dominant form of theatre at the time. The theatre, the first to regularly put on shows implementing Stanislavski's system, proved hugely influential in the acting world and in the development of modern American theatre and drama.
Realism in the theatre was a general movement that began in 19th-century theatre, around the 1870s, and remained present through much of the 20th century. It developed a set of dramatic and theatrical conventions with the aim of bringing a greater fidelity of real life to texts and performances. These conventions occur in the text, design, performance style, and narrative structure. They include recreating on stage a facsimile of real life except missing a fourth wall. Characters speak in naturalistic, authentic dialogue without verse or poetic stylings, and acting is meant to emulate human behaviour in real life. Narratives typically are psychologically driven, and include day-to-day, ordinary scenarios. Narrative action moves forward in time, and supernatural presences do not occur. Sound and music are diegetic only. Part of a broader artistic movement, it includes Naturalism and Socialist realism.
The Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet was a 1911–12 production of Hamlet, produced by Konstantin Stanislavski and Edward Gordon Craig. It is particularly important in the history of performances of Hamlet and of 20th-century theatre in general. Despite hostile reviews from the Russian press, the production attracted enthusiastic and unprecedented worldwide attention for the theatre, with reviews in Britain's The Times and in the French press that praised its unqualified success. The production placed the Moscow Art Theatre "on the cultural map for Western Europe", and it came to be regarded as a seminal event that influenced the subsequent history of production style in the theatre and revolutionised the staging of Shakespeare's plays in the 20th century. It became "one of the most famous and passionately discussed productions in the history of the modern stage."
A Month in the Country is a play in five acts by Ivan Turgenev, his only well-known work for the theatre. Originally titled The Student, it was written in France between 1848 and 1850 and first published in 1855 as Two Women. The play was not staged until 1872, when it was given as A Month in the Country at a benefit performance for the Moscow actress Ekaterina Vasilyeva (1829–1877), who was keen to play the leading role of Natalya Petrovna.
The Moscow Art Theatre production of The Seagull in 1898, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, was a crucial milestone for the fledgling theatre company that has been described as "one of the greatest events in the history of Russian theatre and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama." It was the first production in Moscow of Anton Chekhov's 1896 play The Seagull, though it had been performed with only moderate success in St. Petersburg two years earlier. Nemirovich, who was a friend of Chekhov's, overcame the writer's refusal to allow the play to appear in Moscow after its earlier lacklustre reception and convinced Stanislavski to direct the play for their innovative and newly founded Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). The production opened on 29 December [O.S. 17 December] 1898. The MAT's success was due to the fidelity of its delicate representation of everyday life, its intimate, ensemble playing, and the resonance of its mood of despondent uncertainty with the psychological disposition of the Russian intelligentsia of the time. To commemorate this historic production, which gave the MAT its sense of identity, the company to this day bears the seagull as its emblem.
Theatre or theater is a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present experiences of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, and dance. It is the oldest form of drama, though live theatre has now been joined by modern recorded forms. Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting are used to enhance the physicality, presence and immediacy of the experience. Places, normally buildings, where performances regularly take place are also called "theatres", as derived from the Ancient Greek θέατρον, itself from θεάομαι.
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Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich is a 1868 historical drama by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy. It is the second part of a trilogy that begins with The Death of Ivan the Terrible and concludes with Tsar Boris. All three plays were banned by the censor. Tsar Fyodor is written in blank verse and was influenced by the work of William Shakespeare, Casimir Delavigne, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. It dramatises the story of Feodor I of Russia, whom the play portrays as a good man who is a weak, ineffectual ruler. The trilogy formed the core of Tolstoy's reputation as a writer in the Russia of his day and as a dramatist to this day. It has been considered Tolstoy's masterpiece.
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The Mistress of the Inn, also translated as The Innkeeper Woman or Mirandolina, is a 1753 three-act comedy by the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni about a coquette. The play has been regarded as his masterpiece. Frederick Davies describes it as Goldoni's Much Ado About Nothing.
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Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man, sometimes published in English under the title Too Clever By Half, is a five-act comedy by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. The play offers a satirical treatment of bigotry and charts the rise of a double-dealer who manipulates other people's vanities. It is Ostrovsky's best-known comedy in the West.
Drayman Henschel, also known as Carter Henschel, is an 1898 five-act naturalistic play by the German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann. Unlike his 1892 play The Weavers, Hauptmann focuses on the story's psychological rather than social dimensions. As with his 1902 play Rose Bernd, the play charts the demise of an ordinary man who falls victim to circumstances beyond his control. As with many of Hauptmann's dramas, it ends with the main character's suicide.
Pavel Aleksandrovich Markov was a Soviet theatre critic, literary manager, and teacher. Between 1925 and 1949, he was head of the Literary Section of the Moscow Art Theatre. He was the chairman of the "lower committee" of the theatre's management. He has been described as "the most outstanding teacher and critic of his generation."
Alexander Akimovich Sanin was a Russian actor, director and acting teacher. He was a founder member of the Moscow Art Theatre and during his career directed plays, operas, and films.
References
- ↑ Hartnoll (1983, 377).
- ↑ Bédé and Edgerton (1980, 349), Brockett and Hildy (2003, 396), and Hartnoll (1983, 377).
- ↑ Bédé and Edgerton (1980, 349).
- ↑ Benedetti (1999, 385) and Worrall (1996, 30).
- ↑ Benedetti (1999, 65, 67) and Worrall (1996, 30).
- ↑ Benedetti (1999, 72) and Worrall (1996, 30).
- ↑ Benedetti (1999, 84) and Worrall (1996, 30, 56).
- ↑ Hartnoll (1893, 377), Hannele at the Internet Broadway Database, and The Assumption of Hannele at the Internet Broadway Database.
- ↑ Day (2007, 34), Hartnoll (1983, 377), and Morley (1981, 9–12).
