Top Highlights

• While learning the special world of the play, the actor almost immediately puts himself into the living conditions of the character and looks for practical ways to achieve rapport with it.
• The essence of the character is revealed in his motives, and the range of his motives involves the entire range of the actor’s behaviour. Together with the question, ‘What am I doing here?’ another question should arise in the actor: ‘Why am I doing so?’ Only then will he manage to enter into the complex soul of the character and grasp the collecti...
• Beginning with study of the play according to its events, Stanislavsky, like Saltykov-Schedrin, considered them as ‘turning points’ in the life of a character. The actor should realize what part the given event, or a given
• fact, plays in this character’s life, what behaviour it pushes the character towards, and what thoughts and feelings it arouses in him.
• To evaluate one or another event in a play, Stanislavsky suggested mentally removing it, for example, by trying to imagine what would happen if a given character did not appear.