The Profession of the Stage-Director

A genuinely different book from most of what Progress sent abroad. Not an institute treatise assembled by a committee, but a working theatre director talking, at length and with evident pleasure, about his own trade.

Georgi Tovstonogov ran the Gorky Theatre in Leningrad - the house better known abroad as the Bolshoi Drama Theatre - and by 1972 he was among the two or three most important directors in the Soviet Union. The book is exactly what its title says. How to read a play, how to find its genre, how to rehearse, how to get a performance out of an actor, how to work with a designer and a composer, how to stage Chekhov and Gorky and Shakespeare so that an audience will sit still for three hours.

The core is the chapter on method - Stanislavsky's late method of physical actions, which Tovstonogov calls active analysis, and which he explains more clearly than most textbooks manage: that the most complex spiritual phenomenon is reached through a sequence of physical actions, and that an actor overloaded with intellectual preparation cannot carry his own head. He insists there is no scenic life without conflict, then usefully complicates his own rule. He opens by disowning any claim to authority, calling his account individual and subjective, and the modesty is not a pose.

The critical writing is equally undefensive. "Reflections on the Classics" is a worried essay about a real problem - that Shakespeare, Pushkin, Ostrovsky, Chekhov and Gorky had slipped out of the Soviet repertoire - and it refuses to blame audiences. Most striking of all, in "The Director and the Times", he defends the coexistence of rival styles and writes that unification and levelling are as intolerable in stage direction as in any other art. That is a defence of artistic pluralism, published in Moscow, and it is real.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.