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Towards a Platonic paradigm of performer training: Michael Chekhov and

Anatoly Vasiliev
Jonathan Pitches

To cite this Article Pitches, Jonathan(2007) 'Towards a Platonic paradigm of performer training: Michael Chekhov and
Anatoly Vasiliev', Contemporary Theatre Review, 17: 1, 28 — 40
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10486800601096006
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486800601096006

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 Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 17(1), 2007, 28 – 40

Towards a Platonic Paradigm

of Performer Training: Michael
Chekhov and Anatoly Vasiliev
Jonathan Pitches
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In an interview in 1992, Michael Haerdter, the founding director of the

Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, asked Anatoly Vasiliev to reflect on
the paradigm shift heralded by the new millennium. Vasiliev made the
following response:

To judge by what is happening in Russia [. . .] art will go to the aristocracy,

will become more philosophical; it will become estranged from the
people, will produce images which don’t aim at establishing contacts. In
other words, new ideas and thoughts will be formed and a new aesthetic
situation created. And I think that Russia will be the starting point of this
1. Anatoly Vasiliev, process because there is a strong renaissance of the past.1
‘Theatre as Monastic
Community: An
Interview with Anatolij Vasiliev’s comments are typically ambiguous. His predictions appear to
Vassiliev Conducted be negative – the theatre art of the twenty-first century will be élitist,
by Michael Haerdter’,
Theaterschrif, 1 he tells us, it will appeal to a minority of aristocrats and will produce
(1992), 46–78 (p. 72). work which is markedly removed from its audiences. Yet this osten-
sibly pessimistic vision reflects closely the development of his own
practice, a body of work and an approach to training which, over a
decade later, is only just beginning to have critical attention paid to it
beyond Russia.
2. Ibid., p. 46. As a self-declared ‘student of the student of Stanislavsky’,2 trained by
Maria Knebel and Andrei Popov at GITIS (the State Institute of Dramatic
Art) in the late 1960s, Vasiliev’s place in the Russian tradition of actor
training is significant, for whilst he predicts that the renaissance of the
Russian theatre lies in discovering the past, he is, along with Lev Dodin,

Contemporary Theatre Review ISSN 1048-6801 print/ISSN 1477-2264 online

Ó 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/10486800601096006
 29

consistently credited with holding the keys to the Russian theatre’s future,
not least for his establishment of a new, post-Stanislavskian system of actor
training – the ludo technique. For this, he is accorded a place in Mitter and
Shevtsova’s Fifty Key Directors (2005) and described by Birgit Beumers as
‘the founder of a new theatre which may be called verbal, conceptual,
3. ‘Anatoly Vasiliev’ in metaphysical or ritual’.3
Shomit Mitter and Of course, the Russian theatre has a long history of re-claiming the
Maria Shevtsova (eds),
Fifty Key Directors past in compiling a vision of the future, arguably more than most
(London: Routledge, theatrical traditions. Meyerhold was notable for doing this when he
2005), pp. 190–195
(p. 193). creatively combined popular theatre forms with contemporary theories of
industry in his system of biomechanics, and Stanislavsky’s own System
drew on Aristotle as much as it did on Ribot and the nascent, twentieth-
century science of psychology.
In his interview, Vasiliev’s reference to the past is to a philosophy
more ancient even than Aristotle’s, the clues to which lie in his prediction
of an elite band of aristocrats and philosophers surveying the theatrical
landscape – they might be called the governors of a Republic. He is
consciously provoking us, it seems, to examine an anti-Aristotelian
history of theatre, compelling us, through the starkness of his vision, to
assess instead the validity of a Platonic theatre as a ‘new’ paradigm in
performance.
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To examine this contention further, I want to juxtapose Vasiliev’s ludo

theatre with the Michael Chekhov Technique. Beyond even Stanislavsky,
4. From an unpublished whose work, Vasiliev claims, he is actively ‘reconstructing’,4 Chekhov’s
transcript of Vasiliev’s ideas are central to an understanding of Vasiliev’s theatre – as Martin
International
Workshop Festival Dewhirst, Vasiliev’s interpreter in Britain, quipped: ‘V [. . .] really digs
Masterclass at the M. Chekhov’!5 Historically, this affinity is explained by the common
Royal Scottish
Academy of Music and figure of Maria Knebel (1898–1985), Vasiliev’s teacher. Knebel, of
Drama (RSAMD), course, was a student herself before she taught at GITIS, studying with
Glasgow, UK, 23–27
September 1996,
Stanislavsky and, earlier, with Michael Chekhov in the very first laboratory
translated by Martin that he led just after the Revolution in Moscow. Her teaching thus
Dewhirst. constitutes a vital conduit, linking Chekhov’s creativity with Vasiliev’s.
Philosophically, the two men’s connection is more complex and will
5. From an email
correspondence with need elucidating here; Chekhov never makes his debt to Plato explicit
Martin Dewhirst, 15 and his introduction to the ideas contained within the Socratic dia-
June 2001.
logues is oblique – through his mentor Rudolf Steiner. Nevertheless, by
comparing Vasiliev and Chekhov, it should become evident in this
article that both acting methodologies are rooted in a fundamen-
tally different philosophical tradition from Stanislavsky’s System, one
which reassembles the hierarchy of theatrical elements propounded by
Aristotle.

THE ACADEMY VERSUS THE LYCEUM

Imagine for a moment that the two famous seats of learning founded by
Plato (427–347 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC) – the Academy and the
Lyceum respectively – were the ancient equivalents of an acting
conservatoire today. What kind of actors would they have produced?
Of course, the reflex response, at least in Plato’s case, may well be ‘stupid
 30

question’! Plato is, after all, notorious for his condemnation of the
mimetic arts in the Republic and for his banishment of the dramatic
poet from his ideal state. ‘We can fairly take the poet and set him
beside the painter’, Plato argues in Book 10 of the Republic, the Theory
of Art:

He resembles him both because his works have a low degree of truth and
also because he deals with a low element in the mind. We are therefore
6. Plato, The Republic, quite right to refuse to admit him to a properly run state.6
trans. Desmond Lee
(London: Penguin,
1987), p. 435. But Plato’s outright rejection of the dramatic arts (‘low’ because
they stimulate the baser, emotional side of our character) should
not exclude us from asking, in principle, what an actor might learn
from Plato, particularly given the prominence for the next two millennia
of Aristotle’s Poetics (c.330 BC) – the first extant piece of dramatic
criticism.
To help stimulate our imaginations, let’s assume that each proto-
conservatoire was emblazoned with a metonymic image carved into the
stone of the building’s portico. For Plato, this might have been his model
7. See, for example, the of the soul or psyche:7 a charioteer controlling two contrasting steeds,
medallion-wearing described in Phaedrus.8 Here, the driver represents reason and the two
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bronze bust,
attributed to animals – one cooperative, the other straining at the leash – signify spirit
Donatello from 1440– and desire respectively. This model of the psyche is also reflected in the
50, depicting a winged
chariot rider and two philosophy of the Republic: it is the higher faculty of reason which
horses. controls the animal instinct of desire and which steers (not stirs) the
spirit.
8. Plato, The Collected In his introduction to the Poetics, Kenneth McLeish offers us an
Dialogues, Edith
Hamilton and equally rich image of Aristotelian thinking, one which might have
Huntington Cairns adorned the philosopher’s newly founded Lyceum:
(eds) (Princeton:
Princeton University
Press, 1961), p. 493. Universal order is like an embroidered cloth in which each stitch has its
place; if one stitch is dropped or the cloth is torn, the whole is damaged
9. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. and must be repaired.9
Kenneth McLeish
(London: Nick Hern
Books, 1999), p. xi. This dropping of the stitch or tearing of the cloth is the Aristotelian
notion of hamartia: a ‘falling short’ or ‘lapse from the ideal state
10. Ibid. of things’.10 By extension, tragic drama is underpinned by a fundamental
tension, between logic and order, on the one hand, and the collapse or
rupturing of that order, on the other. In the Poetics, Aristotle draws
on his teacher, Plato’s, love of rational thinking. But he is far less suspi-
cious of the results of this logic. In fact, he actively praises the results
of a well-organised muthos in one of the most cited passages from
Chapter 13:

The best kinds of muthos for tragedy are not simple but complex, and are
11. Ibid., p. 17. devised to represent incidents which arouse pity and terror.11

These heightened emotions are not, for Aristotle, a dangerous

manifestation of the ‘lowest’ kind of thinking, as Plato might claim,
but simply a measure of a well-made play.
 31

So, how might this translate into a contrasting model of classical actor
training? The following schema may be illustrative:

Plato Aristotle
Academy Lyceum
Forms Catharsis
Intelligence (nous) Plot and Action
Hidden and mystical truths Truth based on the senses
Dreamer Realist

As with all schematic representations of thought, much is lost here.

The Platonic notion of Forms, for example, hails from the middle period
of Plato’s writing and is questioned and problematised in later works, and
the polarising of Aristotle and Plato (or more accurately of Aristotelian-
ism and Platonism) clouds any common ground between student and
tutor. But the table above does give us a starting point from which to
construct a working idea of how a classical conservatoire might have
operated and prepares the ground for an assessment of Vasiliev and
Chekhov’s philosophical leanings, in contrast to Stanislavsky’s.
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THE ARISTOTELIAN ACTOR

Although Aristotle does make observations on performance skills (for

poets, actors and orators) in the Rhetoric, the key text for any would-be
Lyceum-trained actor must be the Poetics. Granted, it is not an actor
training manual and focuses instead on the origins and characteristics of
tragic drama, but this has not stopped it being applied to the craft of
acting, nor has it hindered the mainly formal analyses elucidated within
its pages being interpreted from a performer’s perspective.
Given Aristotle’s wider empiricist project, and his early scientific work
in classification, his training system for actors would be rooted in the
real world, a world based on observation and sense-perception. His
overarching application and celebration of logic – expressed in the Poetics
in his plot analyses – would be a central part of an actor’s work with (and
without) text. Aristotle’s hierarchical classification of Tragedy – Plot
(muthos), Character (ethos), Thought (dianoia), Diction (lexis), Song
(melos) and Spectacle (opsis) – places a clear emphasis on the organisation
of the dramatic material above all else. Coupled with his desire for order
and logic, it follows that his actors would be trained in detailed textual
analysis and given the tools to ‘make sense’ of the plot in logical terms, to
establish some kind of closure: a resolution of the conflict caused by the
protagonist’s hamartia or error. If there were improvisation-based
techniques taught at his conservatoire, they too would be seen in the
same context. As we have seen, Aristotle’s ideal theatre does not eschew
emotion – even if it is looking to balance pity and terror in a cathartic
reaction – and thus his actors, in realising the ideal muthos, must transfer
the emotional charge of the play to their audience. On this point,
Aristotle is clear: emotion should not arise from mere spectacle or
rhetorical virtuosity but from the terror-inducing incidents themselves.
 32

An actor’s task, then, working within such a form, would be to play through
the organised series of actions without embellishment or deviation.
In itself, there is nothing particularly surprising in this analysis but
fantasising about the Lyceum as a conservatoire does point up
spectacularly the affinity between Aristotelian thinking (as it is expressed
in the Poetics) and the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Realist
12. This is not to say that school, specifically the training System of Stanislavsky:12 causal plotting,
Stanislavsky was only mimesis based on the representation of reality, the primacy of action-
to be associated with
the Realist school. His based work derived from a close reading of text. Little wonder, then, that
work in opera, Stanislavsky acknowledges this link in An Actor’s Work on Himself.
symbolism,
melodrama and Sharon Carnicke explains:
seventeenth-century
comedy is clear
evidence of the scope
Stanislavsky believes that action distinguishes drama from all the other arts,
of his System. citing as proof Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as an ‘imitation of action’.
Stanislavsky also invokes the etymology of drama from the Greek root,
13. Sharon Carnicke, dran, ‘to do’.13
‘Stanislavsky’s System:
Pathways for the
Actor’, in Alison Although both Michael Chekhov and Anatoly Vasiliev publicly
Hodge (ed.), recognise their debt to Stanislavsky, it is not a philosophical affinity they
Twentieth Century
Actor Training are acknowledging. In very different ways, their acting systems take us
back to Plato’s Academy not Aristotle’s Lyceum.
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(London: Routledge,
2000), pp. 11–36
(p. 24).

THE PLATONIC ACTOR

Whilst Reason, Will and Feeling occupy an equal status as Inner Motive
Forces in Stanislavsky’s System – ‘our art recognises all three types and in
14. Constantin their creative work all three forces play leading parts’14 – in the Platonic
Stanislavsky, An Actor conservatoire Reason is the main driver, as the charioteer image tells us.
Prepares, trans.
Elizabeth Hapgood This is because of Plato’s deep-seated suspicion of emotion, fuelled in
(London: Methuen, part by the death of his mentor Socrates, and his belief that the material
1980), p. 251.
world is one of illusion and ignorance. He illustrates this belief in the
Republic with his strikingly theatrical Simile of the Cave (Book 7), which
constitutes an extension of his antipathetic opinion of Tragedy. Here,
three levels of understanding are exemplified: the lowest, characterised by
illusory imitations or shadows, the second level or the sensible realm,
where objects are perceived by measurement, and the third, the realm
of the Forms – where ‘real’ objects are perceived by only a few,
15. Viewed in conjunction philosophically enlightened individuals in abstraction.15 Plato uses a
with Plato’s Divided symbolic language to illustrate these levels with the lowest one (eikasia)
Line, there are in fact
four levels to this represented by chained cave dwellers, forced to observe a shadow-play on
taxonomy: A: the wall of the cave; the second level, (pistis) associated with direct
Knowledge, B: Reason,
C: Belief and D: Illusion perception, has one of the prisoners turn towards the fire and finally go
(Plato, Republic, outside into the blinding light, and the third (connected to intelligence
p. 461). Here, for
simplicity’s sake, and
or nous) is illustrated by the liberated prisoner gazing at the planets and
following Nicholas P. ultimately the sun – the symbol of Good as well as of philosophical
White, A Companion to enlightenment. Those able to do so, the elite thinkers of this utopia, are
Plato’s Republic
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, the ‘philosopher kings’ of Plato’s Republic. Importantly, they are charged
1979), p. 185, B þ C later with the responsibility of applying their knowledge and returning to
are conflated.
rule the ignorant cave population.
 33

Applying this complex nexus of ideas and images to the craft of acting
isn’t easy but just suppose Plato did not cast out the first cohort of actors
from his conservatoire, before, at least, he had a chance to influence them
in some way! The make up of his graduates would be significantly
different from those emerging from the Lyceum. Firstly, with Reason or
dianoia elevated to first place (from Aristotle’s third), the Platonic actor’s
position is radically changed. This may manifest itself in the actor taking a
demonstrably critical perspective on the text, its characters or him/
16. Tony Gash has herself, in a conventionally Brechtian sense,16 or it might lead to a clear
suggested that Brecht, shift in relationship to the audience: a dialogic rather than a cathartic
Craig and Artaud are
all working in the engagement. Second, Plato’s actors would develop a necessary suspicion
tradition of Plato, if in of illusory emotions, perhaps even of the material world itself, and be
very different ways.
See Tony Gash, looking for a higher level of abstraction in their models of acting – not
‘Plato’s Theatre of the the shadow-like, first level of sense perception but a mystical quest for the
Mind’, in Anthony
Frost (ed.), Theatre
underlying Form of things. Third (and given this Platonic demand for
Theories from Plato to abstraction), the kind of work created by his graduates may reflect a
Virtual Reality particular paring back of the conventions of the theatre: the creation,
(Norwich: Pen and
Inc, 2000), pp. 1–24 perhaps, of a richly metaphorical and minimalist stage picture, in keeping
(p. 3). with the stark theatricality of the Cave and with the idea that the
Platonist is more Dreamer than Realist.
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THE KNEBEL CONNECTION

Before extending this analysis to Vasiliev and Chekhov’s own con-

servatoires, or (more accurately) laboratories, it will be helpful to outline
in brief one of the most significant biographical connections linking the
two men.
During Maria Knebel’s remarkable career, she experienced first hand
some notable beginnings and some equally significant endings. Knebel
was one of the first students to work in Chekhov’s acting studio, where
the young Moscow Arts Theatre actor began to develop his pedagogy
from 1918–21. Here, Chekhov taught his pupils the System of
Stanislavsky, including an extended period of work on improvised études
and, later, a series of evening presentations to an invited public. At all
times, Stanislavsky’s teachings were filtered through Chekhov’s own
specific individuality. As he notes in The Path of the Actor:

I taught what I myself learned from working with Stanislavsky, what I

learnt from Sulerzhitsky and Vakhtangov . . . Everything was refracted
through my individual perception and was coloured by my personal
17. Michael Chekhov, The relationship to what I had perceived.17
Path of the Actor,
trans. Simon Blaxland-
Delange (London: Having tasted the beginnings of the Chekhov Technique, before it was
Routledge, 2005), formalised into a curriculum in exile in Europe, Knebel then worked with
p. 78.
Stanislavsky directly and became known as one of his key interpreters
in the last period of his life (1935–38). This was the period of Active
Analysis, where, in Elena Polyakova’s words, the work developed beyond
the ‘rather tedious ‘‘segment’’ approach’, and instead proposed: ‘a
synoptic study of the play’s plot and characters followed by études . . .
 34

18. Elena Polyakova, closely and concretely based on episodes in the play’.18 Unwittingly,
Stanislavsky, trans. Liv Knebel had witnessed Chekhov’s first and Stanislavsky’s last contribu-
Tudge (Moscow:
Progress), p. 353. tions to the history of modern actor training.
Thirty years later, in 1968, Knebel was witness to another beginning,
as she and her colleague, Alexei Popov, taught Vasiliev the same method
of Active Analysis, as part of the director’s programme at GITIS. She,
later, was instrumental in launching Vasiliev’s postgraduate career,
introducing him to Oleg Yefremov at the Moscow Arts Theatre (MAT)
and ensuring that his work was supported. Exactly fifty years, then,
separate Chekhov and Knebel’s playful experiments with the improvised
étude form, and Vasiliev’s first Active Analysis class with Chekhov’s pupil.

CHEKHOV AND VASILIEV

But it is not just the figure of Knebel that allies the contemporary
Muscovite director with Michael Chekhov. Both men ask profound
questions of Stanislavsky, driven, in part by a common desire to challenge
the linear determinism of his System, exemplified in the overarching
principle of the supertask (zverkhzadacha). Vasiliev encourages his actors
to reconstruct the supertask or superobjective of the play, re-directing it
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vertically (not horizontally) in order to establish a spiritual or ludo

reading of the text; Chekhov asks his actors physically to embody the
character’s main drive in archetypal form – what he calls the
Psychological Gesture (PG). Driven by a common suspicion of emotion
memory (one which Stanislavsky of course acquired too), Chekhov and
Vasiliev have developed very different performance strategies to establish
distance between the role and the actor and these will need examining in
the current context. Furthermore, whilst Chekhov and Vasiliev have very
different religious backgrounds (the former, an anthroposophist, the
latter, a Russian Orthodox Christian), their spirituality is manifest in a
desire to find another (higher) level of engagement with the text. For
Vasiliev this means inculcating the spirit of Platonic enquiry in his actors;
for Chekhov, it means the constant pursuit of the ‘ideal’ in theatre.

CHEKHOV AND PLATO

Once Chekhov had resigned as director of his acting laboratory in

October 1921 and following Vakhtangov’s untimely death, he went on
to take the lead role of Artistic Director at the Second Moscow Arts
Theatre in 1923. MAT2 emerged from the famous First Studio – the
ideas incubator for the System – where Chekhov, Boleslavsky,
Vakhtangov and Sulerzhitsky developed the System in practice. But
whilst Chekhov had spent many of his formative years with Boleslavsky
and his colleagues at the First Studio, his internalising of the System
brought about a sharply different set of principles. Much of this split –
between what I have called the mechanistic and the Romantic branches
of System-based training – is dealt with in detail in Science and the
Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting (2005). But here it is enough to note
 35

that the very different cultural and political context within which
Chekhov was operating, coupled with his own personal mental crisis and
his subsequent espousal of the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, led him to a
palpably different philosophy of actor training. For the sake of this article,
Chekhov’s alternative basis for training the actor is best illustrated with
reference to the following: the Higher Ego, Archetypes and the
Psychological Gesture (PG).

THE HIGHER EGO

In On the Technique of Acting (1991), Chekhov opens his chapter on the
Higher Ego with the following words:

Our artistic nature has two aspects: one that is merely sufficient for our
ordinary existence and another of a higher order that marshals the creative
powers in us. By accepting the objective world of the imagination . . . [w]e
19. Michael Chekhov, On confront the Higher Ego.19
the Technique of
Acting (London:
Harper Perennial, Here, Chekhov is drawing directly on Rudolf Steiner’s teachings (from
1991), p. 15. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, specifically) and
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applying the notion of a divided personality to the actor’s work. He

highlights four advantages of harnessing the Higher Ego: i) creative
individuality, ii) separating Good from Evil, iii) recognising contempor-
20. Ibid., pp. 15–25. ary life, and iv) finding humour through objectivity.20 However, his
embracing of the Higher Ego is first and foremost motivated by a
personal need. Steiner offered him a way out of his own desperation,
recorded so poignantly in The Path of the Actor, by encouraging him to
develop an objective perspective on his personal predicament – his
alcoholism, his fits of uncontrolled hilarity and the profound sense of
malaise he felt as a result of dissatisfaction with the theatre.
But although Chekhov’s primary source is Steiner, these ideas also
chime, obliquely at least, with our imaginary Academy run by Plato.
Chekhov’s distinction between the material world and the higher order,
the sense that the objectivity of this perspective can help steer our
potentially riotous creative powers, echo in some way Plato’s charioteer.
Given the weight Steiner placed on Plato as a leading Mystic, and his
clearly articulated belief that the philosopher, ‘had penetrated the
21. Rudolf Steiner, supersensible world’21 with his theories, this is perhaps not too surprising.
Foundations of Importantly, though, Chekhov’s second-hand reading of Plato, through
Human Experience
(New York: Steiner, does not lead to a dispassionate application of Reason to the event
Anthroposophic Press, but an unleashing of the ‘imagination’, Chekhov’s defining term.
1996), p. 66.

ARCHETYPES AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL

GESTURE

Such a reading of Chekhov is given greater weight when his notion of the
PG is taken into account. Chekhov unconsciously borrows on a number
of sources in assembling his definition of the PG: in part, it is an
 36

adaptation of Steiner’s eurythmic mantra of ‘bringing the gesture into

the word’, in part it owes a debt to Goethe’s Romantic Science and his
22. See my recent article: theory of Urphenomena, as I have argued elsewhere,22 and in the main, of
‘Is it all Going soft? course, it derives from his endless work with students in acting schools
The Turning Point in
Russian Actor across Europe and the States. But Goethe and Steiner’s influence on the
Training’, New development of the PG indicates Chekhov’s ultimate philosophical
Theatre Quarterly,
21:2 (May 2005), parentage, for both men are indebted to Plato’s theory of Forms, and to
108–117. the Classical philosopher’s view that at a higher level of abstraction there
are universal archetypes which are the source of all material things.
Chekhov first expresses this idea of the archetype in unpublished class
23. Interestingly, earlier notes from the Dartington Trust archive.23 Working with an actress
than this, in 1925, playing Alina in Slowacki’s Balladina in October 1937, he makes the
Chekhov himself is
referred to by Andrei following point:
Bely as lending an
archetypal quality to
the character of the If you have [the] archetype, you will find in it all possible original means of
Senator in St expression. As long as we are in connection with the archetype, we are able
Petersburg: as he sat,
‘aside everything
to find original means of expression because the archetype always suggests
somewhere in the the original and never clichés.24
realm of the archetype,
like some cosmic
figure’. See Chekhov, Later, in 1941, when Chekhov had moved to the States, he expanded
on this idea in a class he was leading on the PG, this time appealing to an
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Path, p. 215.
abstract form to make his point:
24. Dartington Trust
Archive, 29 October
1937, Catalogue Ref Let us take the example of the triangle. How many kinds of triangle are
No. MC/S4/10/C there in the world? But when we speak of a triangle, we understand that it
is not a square. We have the archetype of the triangle in our mind. One
exercise is to try to imagine all kinds of triangle at once – all the
25. Michael Chekhov, geometrical things at once. You will have become a triangle inside.25
Lessons to the
Professional Actor
(New York: Chekhov then extends his analysis to look at the archetype of the King
Performing Arts and of the Father, stating that the archetype, rather like the PG, ‘does not
Journal Publications,
1985), p. 112. take part visibly in my action – it is my own secret’.26
Chekhov’s PG operates in a similar way, as a mental morphology of the
26. Ibid., p. 113. character one is playing – either for the whole of the play or for specific
moments. It is an image, or a Form in the Platonic sense, developed
through physical improvisation work in the studio and then internalised
and stored in the body memory of the performer. Once internalised, it
can be drawn on and individualised constantly through the power of
imagination, by working on Qualities of Action or Atmospheres, for
example. But as such, the PG itself is operating at a higher level of
abstraction than the individualised interpretations we see on stage – not
quite the triangle of all triangles but the Treplev of all Treplevs
internalised by the actor.

VASILIEV AND PLATO

Vasiliev’s debt to Plato is far more explicit than Michael Chekhov’s.

Across the range of his practice, in his teaching, his laboratory work and
his directing, Plato is a consistent reference point. He has staged Platonic
 37

dialogues, including The Republic, drawn on Plato in his reformulation of

the System, the ludo technique and, most importantly, integrated
Platonic philosophy directly into the training of his actors. His School of
Dramatic Art, founded in Moscow in 1987, is in a very real way, the
twenty-first century manifestation of the Academy conservatoire.
Describing his approach at a Masterclass in Glasgow in 1996, Vasiliev
explained his motivation:

27. Vasiliev, workshop
transcript.
In order for actors to act on a different level they have to go through a long
schooling in philosophical texts. On Plato. And after a year or two they
formulate their consciousness in a new way. They teach themselves to exist
on a new plane of feelings, on a new plane of experiences.27

Part of Vasiliev’s mission when his (generally more mature) actors

begin to work with him, is to break down their received opinions about
training and slowly to reconstruct their understanding of Stanislavsky.
Vasiliev is adamant that the new recruits to his School of Dramatic Art
must already be fully trained in the System but this foundation is
consciously broken up, using Plato as the tool of demolition.
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THE MENO AS A TRAINING TOOL

One of Vasiliev’s key sources for his work with actors is Plato’s Meno,
dating from the same middle period as the Republic. In the Meno, Plato
casts his beloved Socrates in a dialogue with a wealthy young aristocrat
(Meno), pursuing amongst other things the question of whether know-
ledge is acquired or a recollection from a previous incarnation. As a
consequence, the immortality of the soul is debated and Socrates ‘proves’
the pre-existence of knowledge by questioning one of Meno’s slaves on
the subject of geometry. It is this famous exchange between Socrates,
Meno and the Slave which Vasiliev asks his actors to study in detail, in
order to ‘formulate their consciousness in a new way’, as he puts it.
The Meno is ideal for this, as one of its central themes is the challenging
of blunt acceptance (or ignorance) and the inculcation in the Slave of a
belief in the pursuit of individual understanding. Socrates does this by
28. Plato, Protagoras and ‘perplexing him and numbing him like the sting-ray’28 before continuing
Meno, trans. W. K. C. his questioning in such a way as to encourage the slave to grasp the
Guthrie (London:
Penguin, 1956), abstract proof himself.
p. 135. Vasiliev clearly sees himself as a modern day Socrates, developing his
students’ capacity to see things at higher level of abstraction. In his
masterclasses on text (almost always on Dostoyevskian text), this is
evident in his highly theorised explication of what he calls the ludo
system – his riposte to Stanislavsky. During a week-long workshop I
attended on Dostoyevsky’s The Meek One (Krotkaya), Vasiliev explained
how he distinguished between the two systems, effortlessly conflating the
director’s and the audience’s perspective in the process:

Let’s take The Seagull. If you choose the psychological system as a member
of the audience I will experience the story of these people. If I direct The
 38

Seagull and I use the ludo system I will observe the story but I will
experience a story about these ideas – I will be an observer; I will
29. Vasiliev, workshop experience the story of the life of these ideas.29
transcript.

Clearly, Vasiliev’s reading of Chekhov’s play is director-oriented but it

does position Stanislavsky’s ‘psychological’ System as essentially empathic
and character-centred. Vasiliev’s ludic approach, by contrast, is idea-
centred: we are asked to engage with the ‘bigger’ questions (the function
and role of art in society, for example) rather than with the domestic
narrative of Treplev’s love-induced suicide.
Image 1 details one page from Tony Graham’s working notebook
of the masterclass and includes diagrams copied from Vasiliev’s
flipchart which illustrate further the distinction between the psycho-
logical and the ludo systems. As we can see from the top of the page,
the ludo approach displaces the centre of the actor and re-sites the
focus outside of the body – in the ‘universe’ of ideas not the psyche.
Here, the parallel with Chekhov is very clear and indeed Vasiliev
acknowledges it in Graham’s notes. There are similarities with
Chekhov’s idea of the Imaginary Centre – which may, through the
imagination of the actor, be moved all around the body and, indeed,
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Image 1 Notes from a working notebook of Anatoly Vasiliev’s 1996 Masterclass: the
psychological system versus the ludo system. I am indebted to Tony Graham for his
permission to reproduce this extract from his notebook here
 39

outside, for a cerebral, airy character. More important, though, is the

connection between Vasiliev’s ludo technique and Chekhov’s notion of
the Higher Ego, already discussed above: both practitioners are
looking for a mechanism to distance the actor from the personal, the
material and the emotional.

PASSIVE ANALYSIS

What is also evident from Graham’s notes is that Vasiliev still maintains a
line of analysis inspired by his teacher, Maria Knebel. Knebel, we recall,
was credited with taking Stanislavsky’s last thoughts on Active Analysis
and developing them with generations of actors and directors at GITIS.
In essence, Active Analysis proposes a simple method: identifying two key
moments in the dramatic text – the Initial or Inciting Event or IE
(iskhodnoe sobytie) and the Main or Climactic Event or ME (osnovnoe
sobytie). The IE is the action in the play that initiates the rest of the plot –
the overall cause, if you will, of the play’s events. The ME is the
culminating event, ‘one which resolves the through action’, as Carnicke,
30. Carnicke, quoting Knebel, puts it.30 This Active Analysis leads to an identification
‘Stanislavsky’s of the conflicting anatomy of the play, its points and counter-points, and
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System’, p. 28.
through the use of improvised études, allows the actors to flesh out the
play both corporeally and imaginatively.
31. For an illustration of But in his reconstruction of the System, Vasiliev subverts this structure
this idea, taken from in his efforts to break up what he considers to be its linear determinism.
Vasiliev’s workshop,
see my Science and the His reading of Dostoyevsky’s Meek One, in the 1996 masterclass, posited
Stanislavsky Tradition a reversal of the ME and IE, such that the actors involved would play the
(London: Routledge,
2005), p. 183. text with a conscious prospective awareness of the ME.31
Suspicious of the emotional stimulus Active Analysis can have on a
performer – the ignition of the ‘emotion’s logic’, as Bella Merlin
32. Bella Merlin, observes32 – Vasiliev proposes what might be called a Passive Analysis, in
Konstantin his pursuit of distanced abstraction. Such an approach takes us back to his
Stanislavsky (London:
Routledge, 2003), interview with Haerdter in 1992, made before his programme for a ludo
p. 143. theatre was formed. For it is precisely this kind of philosophical enquiry
into Drama, drawing on Platonic ideals, which Vasiliev is now committed
to, pursuing ‘a new aesthetic’ in Russian theatre, and, perhaps
consciously, estranging those audiences, who are content to remain in
33. Vasiliev, ‘Theatre as the darkened cave of ignorance.33
Monastic
Community’, p. 72.

CONCLUSION
Chekhov recorded his own vision of the future of theatre some sixty years
earlier in The Path of the Actor, and it has much in common with
Vasiliev’s. The ubiquitous style of Naturalism, he argued, is on a one-way
course towards ever-gratuitous and sensational imagery. ‘A naturalism-
dominated future in the theatre is a dismal prospect’, he argues:

[It] will be compelled to seek out ever more fiery combinations of facts,
combinations that are capable of having a greater effect on the nerves of an
 40

audience . . . It will reach a point where it has to give a series of powerful

sensations capable of arousing shock [. . .]. Scenes will appear on the stage
of terrible forms of death, physical torments, bloody murders, soul
shattering catastrophes, pathological and psychological disorders [. . .].
The legacy that Naturalism will leave behind will be a coarsened and
nervously disordered audience that has lost its artistic taste and much time
34. Chekhov, Path, will be needed to restore it to health.34
pp. 42–43.

This nightmare vision, so easily identifiable in much of our

contemporary media, is one which Vasiliev wants to avoid through his
search for a Platonic theatre and the dignified abstraction of the philo-
sopher’s Theory of Forms. Fittingly, Plato’s term (Form, from the Greek:
paradeigma) is the root of the word ‘paradigm’, the term often used to
capture a new zeitgeist or way of seeing the world. But if postmodernism
tells us anything, it is that nothing is new and that we must constantly re-
contextualise and revitalise sometimes ancient ideas in response to the
threat of increasing desensitisation. That, I believe, is the subtext of
Vasiliev’s 1992 prophecy. We need to review what we mean by ‘contact’
in the twenty-first century, and continue to strive for the most exacting
and challenging theatrical responses.
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