'Try to avoid straining after the result. Act with truth, fullness and integrity of purpose. You can develop this type of action by choosing lively objectives...
'We find innumerable objectives on the stage and not all of them are either necessary or good; in fact, many are harmful. An actor must learn to recognise quality, to avoid the useless, and to choose essentially right objectives.'
'How can we know them?' 1 asked.
'I should define right objectives as follows,' said he:
'(1) They must be on our side of the footlights. They must be directed towards the other actors, and not toward the spectators.
'(2) They should be personal yet analogous to those of the character you are portraying.
'(3) They must be creative and artistic because their function should be to fulfil the main purpose of our art: to create the life of a human soul and render it in artistic form.
'(4) They should be real, live, and human,'not dead, conventional or theatrical.
'(5) They should be truthful so that you yourself, the actors playing with you, and your audience can believe in them.
'(6) They should have the quality of attracting and moving you.
'(7) They must be clear cut and typical of the role you are playing. They must tolerate no vagueness. They must be distinctly woven into the fabric of your part.
'(8) They should have value and content, to correspond to the inner body of your part. They must not be shallow, or skim along the surface.
'(9) They should be active, to push your role ahead and not let it stagnate.
'Let me warn against a dangerous form of objective, purely motor, which is prevalent in the theatre and leads to mechanical performance.
'We admit three types of objectives: the external or physical, the inner or psychological, and the rudimentary psychological type.'
Vanya expressed dismay at these big words and the Director explained his meaning by an example.
'Suppose you come into the room,' he began, 'and greet me, nod your head, shake my hand. That is an ordinary mechanical objective. It has nothing to do with psychology.'
'Is that wrong?' broke in Vanya.
The Director hastened to disabuse him.
'Of course you may say how do you do, but you may not love, suffer, hate or carry out any living, human objective in a purely mechanical way, without experiencing any feeling.
'A different case,' he continued, 'is holding out your hand and trying to express sentiments of love, respect, gratitude through your grasp and the look in your eye. That is how we execute an ordinary objective and yet there is a psychological element in it, so we, in our jargon, define it as a rudimentary type.
'Now here is a third way. Yesterday you and I had a quarrel. I insulted you publicly. Today, when we meet, I want to go up to you and offer my hand, indicating by this gesture that I wish to apologise, admit that I was wrong and beg you to forgive the incident. To stretch out my hand to my enemy of yesterday is not a simple problem. I will have to think it over carefully, go through and overcome many emotions before 1 can do it. That is what we call a psychological objective.
'Another important point about an objective is that besides being believable, it should have attraction for the actor, make him wish to carry it out...
'Objectives which contain these necessary qualities we call creative. It is difficult to cull them out. Rehearsals are taken up, in the main, with the task of finding the right objectives, getting control of them and living with them...
… you should not try to express the meaning of your objective in terms of a noun... the objective must always be a verb...
'This is because a noun calls forth an intellectual concept of a state of mind, a form, a phenomenon, but can only define what is presented by an image without indicating motion or action. Every objective must carry in itself the germ of action...'
The inner monologue is the third imaginational technique developed by Stanislavski. This is an important procedure in consciously creating the subconscious thoughts that are stimuli behind the physical actions. The inner monologue must exist as inner visions in an actors head in order to produce a series of emotions and states of being ‘by natural organic processes ‘i.e. the actor must create the thoughts that lie behind the dialogue.
Stanislavski said a play can be broken down into chunks, or units, by an actor or director in order to make the text more manageable. These units are controlled by the objectives in them; each unit has its own objective, which should be fulfilled by the end of the unit. In an actor prepares Stanislavski uses the metaphor of a turkey to describe objectives and units.
The technique can be described as a channel crossing; the units can be likened to buoys in a channel, which provide guides for the actor in her voyage.
The objectives contained within the units are active; they must drive the text forward onto the next unit. As they are active, Stanislavski would describe each objective as a verb. If something is introduced as more defining active, “it will push you to some fruitful activity to carry out that purpose”. If an objective is too general then it cannot be achieved; something more realistic will be easier to carry out. Providing an objective for a unit makes the unit essential; the super objective therefore makes the whole play essential.
The super objective can be described as the underlying aim of the play; the one overall theme that is being worked towards throughout each unit. However each character also processes his or her objective own super objective; that which they attempt to personally achieve during the play.
