Chekhov’s plays were written with the aim of portraying difficult issues within a realistic setting, with believable characters and the slow pace of everyday reality. The meandering pace of the play, along with the aimlessness of the main characters could on the surface prove difficult when attempting to establish the character’s aims and objectives in a scene. In order to apply the system to this play, an actor must constantly consider exactly what their character is attempting to achieve scene by scene. For example, in Act Two, Lyubov Andreyevna and Lopahkin have completely contrasting aims in the scene where Lopahkin is trying to convince Lyubov Andreyevna to sell the cherry orchard, although their super-objectives for the act correspond – they both want to ensure the financial security of the family. This exercise is instrumental in this case in making sure that the actor can interact with the others on stage and if an actor is following Stanislavski’s system to the letter, then they must think about the aims and objectives of their character at all times when rehearsing a scene.
In order to enhance the various contrasting aims, a director could use tempo-rhythm as a means of emphasising each character’s purpose in a scene. This practise should not merely be used to provide the scene with the obvious contrasting pace between characters, but also to experiment with alternating tempo-rhythms to add another dimension to the characters. Lopahkin’s status could be dramatically altered by whether he is hysterically attempting to reason with family or keeping his head and speaking calmly and rationally. These two techniques work particularly well when used in conjunction with each other during rehearsals for plays such as ‘The Cherry Orchard’. However, Stanislavski’s sweeping statement that his system is “a way of life” cannot be applied to a technique alone, as an actor or director could easily do these exercises in rehearsal and forget about them until the next time that they go into character. When combined with the other techniques in Stanislavski’s system, though, a procedure is constructed that cannot be left at the theatre and must be taken home by all the actors so that they can fully step inside the character and live as them.
Emotion-memory is one of these techniques that must be included in the system and is particularly valid when acting in ‘The Cherry Orchard’. Personal loss is one of the main themes of this play and so an actor who has experienced loss in their past will be able to draw on the feelings that they felt at that time and use them constructively to play a part, especially in the case of an actor playing the part of Lyubov Andreyevna, who is the character hit most dramatically by the death of her son. Obviously, experiencing these emotions afresh would be a drain on any actor, and so the performer finds them self consumed by the emotions and experiences of the character, unable to escape their circumstances in the play. Together, the above assignments are the first steps towards an actor truly becoming the character.
Chekhov’s stage directions were fairly explicit, but when it comes to dialogue, an actor must look for the sub-text before engaging in a conversation in character. Each scene is laden with subtleties and when a character says “I’m aiming for the middle pocket” in the middle of a conversation about the past, it takes someone who is looking for subtext to acknowledge that Gayev is not merely talking rubbish but is actually looking for an escape from the embarrassment that he has caused himself by speaking from the heart moments before. These supposedly hidden meanings could be lost to an audience without an actor dedicating himself to the study of the text with the aim of discovering what a character is feeling when he says his specific lines. By looking for subtext, or by experimenting with off text improvisation an actor can delve deeper into the mind of the character and the mood of the scene, so that the circumstances are more realistic to the audience, and therefore the cast have created a fully believable situation.
Although all of these exercises are especially relevant to ‘The Cherry Orchard’, the rest of Stanislavski’s system is just as useful in helping the actors to prepare for their role in the play and completely pushing them into living their character as “a way of life”. The given circumstances of a character can be instrumental in providing an actor with the final aspect of the character that they playing. By placing a character in various fantastical situations, having established their given circumstances, the actor is forced to think about how their character would react to certain situations and therefore discovering more about not just the character’s personality but the actor could also discover reactions within the character that they would not necessarily have thought to look for. The exercises of given circumstances and the magic if are consequently used to explore a character further. However, the extent to which these ‘games’ take over an actor’s life depends heavily on the dedication of said performer. They can be left as warm-ups or taken to the extreme of an actor going through their daily routine in character, considering what, say, Lopahkin would do if he was given a parking ticket. Likewise, the aims and objectives exercise can be expanded by exploring characters’ circles of attention and considering who or what they are focusing their attention on.
The system must be taken all together to provide “the foundation stones of our art” as Stanislavski proclaimed. He spent twenty years polishing his system and although he was often accused of being a perfectionist, Stanislavski is undoubtedly the founder of naturalistic rehearsal techniques. He provided modern actors with the basis of method acting, whereby an actor lives their lives throughout the rehearsal period in character, a technique popularised by such film stars as Daniel Day-Lewis. To say that an actor must live by the system is perhaps too extreme, as it depends on how dedicated the performer is to their art but it is undoubtedly true that the system, when followed exactly, consumes the actor; through his system, Stanislavski has deservedly earned the reputation of one of the great modern day theatre practitioners responsible for revolutionising acting techniques.
