Interested in Acting? Don’t Bother with Stanislavski!
He is the father of modern acting. His contribution to acting theory and practice is without question an important one. But if you’re discovering acting for the first time, you’d be better off avoiding his books entirely. His books are very poorly written and I should know. My earliest contact with any acting theory was when I received An Actor Prepares, Building a Character and Creating a Role as a boy for my birthday. I’ve read and re-read them many many times over the years, and although occasionally I find (or refind) a little nugget of goodness, these books are no use to you as someone learning to act.
On top of that, I own and have read every English language book by or about Stanislavsky and his ‘system’.
The 3 main books are old-fashioned, they were written in response to a style of acting that is long dead. They are overly flowery, and often do not explain much at all. His section on Emotion Memory, that which became the cornerstone of The Method, is less than a few pages in length.
These books are a waste of time, historically interesting but they can’t help you learn to act. They will leave you confused, you may actually feel enlightened but try to translate that light into something you can use.
Stanislavski was obsessed with the minutiae of character. It sent him down the wrong road. Creating interesting characters isn’t about building characters from scratch, filling them up with bits and pieces of character history. It forces actors to focus on ideas that whilst fun, have little or nothing to do with acting the script at hand. It forces the actor away from the dealing with task at hand and into a sort of parallel creative act. This can be great fun, and feel like real work, but it isn’t. It’s diversion from the real task of the actor which is to understand the script and translate what’s on the page into action on stage or camera.
I will give you the most important lessons from Stanislavski right here. He gave us the idea of INTENTION and ACTION. Work out what the character wants. Do something like that in the scene for real, don’t pretend. INTENTION and ACTION. All the rest is candy-floss. All the rest is dressing. All the rest is keeping acting teachers in a job.
If you want to learn about acting, there are better books. I would start with the Practical Handbook for the Actor, a brief little book by a number of authors. It offers you all the goodies of Stanislavski, but in straight forwards and common sense language. It’s a slim volume too, great for reading on public transport.
Seriously, if you want to learn about acting, leave the big man on the bookshelf.