A Doll's House - Ibsen and Stanislavski

We all know the mantra, "acting is doing"-attributed to Stanislavski, although I'm not sure he was the first to say this, and I was considering this phrase today. Something we discussed in class on Wednesday really struck me about this approach to acting. We were talking about the specificity of the stage directions in "A Doll's House," and as I thought about "The Method" and its connection to Realism, several interesting questions popped to mind.

Stanislavski is often a bit distorted in our modern context, and many have argued that this distortion produced a generation of actors who mumbled and staggered through performances, because they became obsessed with the "Truth in Acting" aspect of Stan's work, and didn't take to heart much of the technical aspects of The Method. It is, however, not an understatement to say that he has revolutionised an actor's approach to acting worldwide. We evaluate every stage performance we see now with the test of reality, and Stan is directly responsible for that.

What I find so striking is that Stanislavski was developing his method of acting in an era in which the playwrights were very nearly prescribing every minute detail that happened onstage. We noted in class that Ibsen even told us exactly how Nora was feeling at many moments during the play. No other possible interpretations should be considered, or at least we should infer that from the dictatorial demands placed upon the actor by Ibsen. How, then, did Stanislavski develop a unique and personal acting style in the midst of this prescribed emotion?

Perhaps the rise of Realism was the only movement that could have enlisted a Stanislavskian response. Perhaps by prescribing emotion and intention as well as movement onstage, Stan felt the necessity to make these prescribed reactions seem even remotely believable in front of an audience. I am sure that a number of factors contributed to the Method's development, such as the intimacy of theatres of the time period, but I think that perhaps those absolutely specific stage directions really prompted our good friend Stan to begin his quest for onstage truth. Stanislavski saw the connections between the old-fashioned stage directions (exit SL, e.g.) and the new ("is shocked"). He realized that both of these directions required "doing," and his Method springs out of that connection.