Method acting
Method acting, known as the Method, is a group of rehearsal techniques that seek to encourage sincere and expressive performances through identifying with, understanding, and experiencing a character's inner motivation and emotions. Theatre practitioners built these techniques on Stanislavski's system, developed by the Russian and Soviet actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski and captured in his books An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role.
The approach was developed and labeled “Method Acting” by Lee Strasberg. Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner rejected Strasberg’s technique and left the Group Theatre. Adler was the only member of the Group Theatre to study with Stanislavski.
History and development
"The Method" is an elaboration of the "system" of acting developed by the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski. In the first three decades of the 20th century, Stanislavski organized his training, preparation, and rehearsal techniques into a coherent methodology. The "method" brought together and built on the director-centred unified aesthetic and disciplined ensemble approach of the Meiningen company; the actor-centred realism of the Maly Theatre; and the naturalistic staging of André Antoine and the independent theatre movement.The "system" cultivates what Stanislavski calls the "art of experiencing", to which he contrasts the "art of representation". It mobilizes the actor's conscious thought and will to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes, such as emotional experience and subconscious behavior, sympathetically and indirectly. In rehearsal, the actor searches for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the character seeks to achieve at any given moment.
Stanislavski later elaborated the "system" with a more physically grounded rehearsal process, the "Method of Physical Action". Minimizing at-the-table discussions, he began to encourage an "active analysis", in which the sequence of dramatic situations are improvised. "The best analysis of a play", Stanislavski argued, "is to take action in the given circumstances."
Another important influence on the Method were the ideas and techniques of Yevgeny Vakhtongav, a Russian-Armenian student who died in 1922, aged 39. Vakhtangov's "object exercises" were developed by Uta Hagen to train actors and maintain their skills. Strasberg attributed to Vakhtangov the distinction between Stanislavski's process of "justifying" behavior with the inner motivational forces that prompt that behavior in the character and the "motivating" behavior with imagined or recalled experiences relating to the actor and substituted for those relating to the character. Following this distinction, actors ask themselves, "What would motivate me, the actor, to behave in the way the character does?" The contrast is the Stanislavskian question, "Given the particular circumstances of the play, how would I behave, what would I do, how would I feel, how would I react?"
United States
In the United States, the transmission of the earliest phase of Stanislavski's work via the students of the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre revolutionized acting in the West. When the MAT toured the US in the early 1920s, Richard Boleslawski, one of Stanislavski's students from the First Studio, presented a series of lectures on the "system" that were eventually published as Acting: The First Six Lessons. The interest generated led to a decision by Boleslawski and Maria Ouspenskaya to emigrate to the US and to establish the American Laboratory Theatre.However, the version of Stanislavski's practice these students took to the US with them was that developed in the 1910s, rather than the more fully elaborated version of the "system" detailed in Stanislavski's acting manuals from the 1930s, An Actor's Work and An Actor's Work on a Role. The first half of An Actor's Work, which treated the psychological elements of training, was published in a heavily abridged and misleadingly translated version in the US as An Actor Prepares in 1936. English-language readers often confused the first volume on psychological processes with the "system" as a whole. Many of the American practitioners who came to be identified with the Method were taught by Boleslawski and Ouspenskaya at the American Laboratory Theatre. The approaches to acting subsequently developed by their students—including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner—are often confused with Stanislavski's "system".
Stella Adler, an actress and acting teacher whose students included Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro, also broke with Strasberg after she studied with Stanislavski. Her version of the method is based on the idea that actors should stimulate emotional experience by imagining the scene's "given circumstances", rather than recalling experiences from their own lives. Adler's approach also seeks to stimulate the actor's imagination through the use of "as ifs", which substitute more personally affecting imagined situations for the circumstances experienced by the character.
Alfred Hitchcock described his work with Montgomery Clift in I Confess as difficult "because you know, he was a method actor". He recalled similar problems with Paul Newman in Torn Curtain. Lillian Gish quipped: "It's ridiculous. How would you portray death if you had to experience it first?" Charles Laughton, who worked closely for a time with Bertolt Brecht, argued that "Method actors give you a photograph", while "real actors give you an oil painting."
During the filming of Marathon Man, Laurence Olivier, who had lost patience with Method acting two decades earlier while filming The Prince and the Showgirl, was said to have quipped to Dustin Hoffman, after Hoffman stayed up all night to match his character's situation, that Hoffman should "try acting ... It's so much easier." In an interview on Inside the Actors Studio, Hoffman said that this story had been distorted: he had been up all night at a nightclub for personal rather than professional reasons and Olivier, who understood this, was joking.
Strasberg's students included many prominent American actors of the latter half of the 20th century, including Paul Newman, Al Pacino, George Peppard, Dustin Hoffman, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Fonda, Jack Nicholson, and Mickey Rourke.
India
In Indian cinema, a form of Method acting was developed independently from American cinema. Dilip Kumar, a Hindi cinema actor who debuted in the 1940s and eventually became one of the biggest Indian movie stars of the 1950s and 1960s, was a pioneer of this technique, predating Hollywood Method actors such as Marlon Brando. Kumar inspired many future Indian actors, including Amitabh Bachchan, Naseeruddin Shah, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Irrfan Khan and many more. Kumar, who pioneered his own form of method acting without any acting school experience, was described as "the ultimate method actor" by filmmaker Satyajit Ray.In the south, method acting was extensively practiced at first by Malayalam actor Sathyan and later by Tamil actor Sivaji Ganeshan and later by prominent actors like Mammootty, Mohanlal and Kamal Haasan.
Method acting is being discussed more in India with the rise of OTT streaming platforms that feature several popular web series exploring genres seldom featured in Indian cinema. The increasing viewership of these platforms has given space to the next generation of method actors in India, including Rajkumar Rao, Amit Sadh, Ali Fazal and Vicky Kaushal.
Henry Irving's dual consciousness system
The techniques used by the English actor Henry Irving, who died in 1905, are a precursor to the established ideas about method acting. These were described by Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, in two chapters of his book Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, published in 1907. Stoker had worked in close cooperation with Irving as the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.In the book, Stoker wrote in particular:
Irving and I were alone together one hot afternoon in August 1889, crossing in the steamer from Southsea to the Isle of Wight, and were talking of that phase of Stage Art which deals with the conception and development of character. In the course of our conversation, whilst he was explaining to me the absolute necessity of an actor's understanding the prime qualities of a character in order that he may make it throughout consistent, he said these words: "If you do not pass a character through your own mind it can never be sincere". I was much struck with the phrase... Lest I should forget the exact words I wrote them then and there in my pocket-book. I entered them later in my diary. p. 244It has been suggested that Bram Stoker used Irving's techniques to help him capture authenticity of tone while writing Dracula.
Quoting Irving: "It is most important that an actor should learn that he is a figure in a picture, and that the least exaggeration destroys the harmony of the composition. All the members of the company should work toward a common end, with the nicest subordination of their individuality to the general purpose." p.252
And quoting Irving again: "Has not the actor who can... make his feelings a part of his art an advantage over the actor who never feels, but makes his observations solely from the feelings of others? It is necessary to this art that the mind should have, as it were, a double consciousness, in which all the emotions proper to the occasion may have full swing, while the actor is all the time on the alert for every detail of his method... The actor who combines the electric force of a strong personality with a mastery of the resources of his art, must have a greater power over his audiences than the passionless actor who gives a most artistic simulation of the emotions he never experiences." p.256
"For the purely monkey arts of life there is no future they stand only in the crude glare of the present, and there is no softness for them, in the twilight of either hope or memory. With the true artist the internal force is the first requisite the external appearance being merely the medium through which this is made known to others." p.257.
"If an actor has to learn of others often primarily through his own emotions, it is surely necessary that he learn first to know himself. He need not take himself as a standard of perfection though poor human nature is apt to lean that way; but he can accept himself as something that he knows. If he cannot get that far he will never know anything. With himself then, and his self-knowledge as a foothold, he may begin to understand others." p.258