ABSTRACT
The invention of the photograph produced an enormous shock in the thinking of nineteenth-century intellectuals and artists. From the development of the camera in 1839 to the end of that century, it was becoming clearer that there was another way of viewing the world. “Reality” could be captured on a chemically treated pane of glass or sheet of paper. In painting and literature, a new and more objective treatment of human behavior soon became the vogue for Europe’s middle-class patrons. In addition, the failed social revolutions of the industrial giants France and Germany further diluted the artistic balms of Romanticism and the melodrama. By the 1870s, scientific methodology and political unrest were leading the arts into a “photographic,” or Naturalist phase. In the performing arts, as always, external transformations occurred
more slowly. Although Émile Zola, the leader of the literary Naturalists, declared in 1874 that the French theatre would become Naturalist or cease to exist, few directors or dramatists paid the radical novelist and journalist much heed. After all, it was widely assumed that the very function of ballet, opera, and theatre was to provide fantasy solutions – within accepted entertainment formats – for the average spectator living in a formless and disordered universe. But growing social expectations among the intelligentsia and the subliminal popularity of the photograph changed that. Already in 1861, Georg II, the German Duke of Saxe-Meiningen,
attempted to create an ensemble of serf-actors, who were made to wear
actual or extremely realistic replicas of historical dress. Artifacts from previous epochs, like twenty-pound swords and shields, replaced lightweight hand props. Piles of dirt, tree trunks, stuffed carcasses of animals, and other natural obstacles on the stage floor made normal scenic negotiation difficult for the terrified performers but fascinating to watch. Saxe-Meiningen’s amateur actors moved and often sounded like soldiers and noblemen from antiquity and other eras. Like a photograph, little had to be faked or imagined by the performers or spectators. The play became an excuse to view human behavior of the past. Georg II had created theatre’s first time-machine. And within fifteen years, the Meiningen Players became the talk of Central and Western Europe. In Paris, André Antoine, a twenty-nine-year-old clerk with thoughts
of a professional acting career, founded the Naturalist Théâtre Libre fourteen years after Zola issued his manifesto. As young playwrights began to produce Naturalist texts for the 373-seat theatre, so too did Antoine’s trademarked innovations began to appear. Live chickens, hanging slabs of beef (which invariably attracted real flies), stained sofas, and functioning bistros within the proscenium arch startled audiences accustomed to two-dimensional representations. More novel still were Antoine’s ideas on mise en scène. Performers were instructed to stand and speak anywhere on stage as if the audience ceased to exist. (A contemporary circus parody of the Théâtre Libre revealed a clown-Antoine standing with his back to the house. Suddenly the clown-Antoine turned to confront the spectators only to show another hairy, faceless image. The back of Antoine’s head was painted on both sides of the clown’s papier-mâché head mask.) While Antoine’s initial success and later notoriety helped launch
similar-minded chamber theatres throughout Europe in the late 1880s and 1890s, a less offensive, stylistic offspring of Naturalism, realism, reigned in Scandinavia and the English-speaking world. In Great Britain and North America, mechanical improvements, especially in electric lighting, allowed audience members at huge playhouses to see detailed bodily expression in their leading actors as well as view the most minuscule objects in the super-realistic decor. Program notes often testified to the historical authenticity of the sets and furniture. Suddenly, the fact that the performer playing Marie Antoinette was actually wearing a corset from the eighteen-century queen’s boudoir took on a special theatrical interest. The entire stage now radiated with fascinating detail. The incandescent, carbon-filament lamp, perfected by Thomas Edison, made realism possible in the legitimate theatre. Technically more important, perhaps, was a perceptual (and unconscious)
shift that was brought about through a competing medium – that of
2 Stanislavsky in America
the early cinema. When motion pictures became commercially viable in 1895 and 1896, theatregoers quickly learned to watch the enlarged facial images of the performers with greater care. Working without recorded sound in bright, natural lighting and necessarily separated from their intended audiences, film actors had to be judged according to a new means: facial expressiveness and the corporal ability to communicate emotional states.
