ABSTRACT
An international symposium-Stanislavsky in a Changing World-was held in Moscow in 1989 at the height of the glasnost period. Those who addressed the conference included Peter Brook, Yuriy Lyubimov, leading Soviet Stanislavsky scholars, and other authorities from around the world.1 Among the most interesting contributions were those given, seemingly impromptu and without notes, by Soviet theatre experts who, in the spirit of the times, dared to say what others had only been bold enough to think or state privately hitherto-namely, that Stanislavsky’s reputation needed to be subjected to a form of perestroika. This ‘reconstruction’ needed to confront the possibility that Stanislavsky’s work as a whole might be seen to be complicit with the ethos and ideology of the Stalinist period. Other, more considered, assessments were critical of his methods and stressed their limitations-none more so than that of the British scholar Peter Holland, who delivered a telling critique of the intellectual assumptions at the heart of the 1930 production score of Othello. The conference also contained more conventional evaluations of Stanislavsky, albeit less fulsome and hagiographic than audiences in the Soviet Union had come to expect.
