ABSTRACT
Emotion in theatre and in life is the same thing, although the means for conveying this emotion are different. A partridge is exactly the same whether it is cooked in a restaurant or at home. But in a restaurant it is cooked and served so that there is a theatrical flair about it, while at home it is something ordinary and domestic, not theatrical. Stanislavsky served up truth by means of truth, water by means of water, and a partridge was simply a partridge, while Meyerhold did away with truth altogether, that is, he retained the dish and the way of cooking it, but he served up paper, not a partridge. And the feeling was cardboard, too. Meyerhold was a master and knew how to serve things up in a masterful way, as in a restaurant, but you couldn’t eat it. However, by breaking down theatrical vulgarity through stylised theatrical means, Meyerhold arrived at genuine theatricality, summed up in the following formula: the audience should not forget that they are in the theatre for a single instant. Through this approach, Stanislavsky arrived at the formula: the audience should forget they are in the theatre.
