Method Acting

This weeks A-Z of Practitioners is still at A with Stella Adler and as she is a method acting practitioner I have written an article discussing the evolution of the Strasberg and Adler 'Method'

Christian Bale is a great actor sure but when pictures of him turn up looking like a holocaust victim because he is working under ‘The Method’ it really makes me question what he is thinking. The same really goes for Daniel Day Lewis in many ways as he spends all day as his characters according to reports on his work. The truth is what are these men thinking? What makes this method so desirable? I have to say that its probably its proven ability to shake up the movie industry and that classic and legendary performances in the past 50 years have 90% been performed by Method actors. However the most interesting thing about the legendary method is that its definition as the method for acting was referred to as such by, the father of modern acting, Konstantin Stanislavski who created it and then eventually abandoned the belief. That is right, the man who created the method ultimately said that it didn’t work and that it was false, that the methods search for truth was ultimately just another lie. So what happened?

In the 1925 the Russian actor Richard Boleslavsky, who had trained under Stanislavski, opened the American Laboratory Theatre with several students including a young man named Lee Strasberg. Whilst Strasberg was learning at the American Lab about Stanislavski’s ‘system’ a young actress named Stella Adler, who had watched the Moscow Art Theatre’s successful 1922-1923 US tour was working towards joining the American Lab too. Adler would eventually meet Strasberg and together with several other students they broke away to form their own ‘Group Theatre’. The Group Theatre would during the 1930s collaboratively work on their ideas of the perfect most realistic acting technique based on the Stanislavski System. In 1934 Adler left the Group Theatre to study in Paris for five weeks with Stanislavski and it is here that she learned that he had turned his back on his previous beliefs that emotional memory was vital for effective truth on the stage. It was here that the split in the camps of method started and soon it became a battle of beliefs and this muddied the waters on what the method really was.

Strasbergs Method
Lee Strasberg took the Stanislavski system and manipulated it and changed it into what he believed was the Method of acting. Strasberg took the writings of Stanislavski and studied them intensively and experimented with them frequently trying to recreate emotion and artistic truth on the stage. This proved to be very hard and Strasberg found that using emotional memory didn’t come across as real, just remembering how you felt at the time didn’t help as the emotion seemed faded. However when Strasberg expanded the idea so that the performer would focus on the surroundings of the emotion, for example how did the room smell, how warm was it? What could you taste? This would make the emotion more real as the actor takes a very real situation they have experienced and using it creates a realistic emotion. This is what is known now most commonly as the Method ie Emotional Recall.

Adlers Method
Adler followed the same beliefs as Strasberg for years before being tutored by Stanislavski personally whereupon she changed gears. Listening to Stanislavski turn his back on emotional recall and instead turn to imagination as the key source and objective fulfilment as the secondary source Adler changed her ways. Adler used Stanislavskian methods such as the super objective mixed with intensive study of the text to help the actor immerse themselves in the world of the piece. Adlers belief was that if you lost yourself within the imaginary world you had created you could create real emotion that the intended emotions written by the playwright would come through.

Of course these both get mixed up and in all honesty nobody can really define ‘The Method’ anymore. When Strasberg and Adler passed away they both took the definitive ideas of their ‘Method’ with them. So you get people like Christian Bale losing weight drastically in an attempt to experience the feeling of being a drug addict and Daniel Day Lewis not wanting to break the illusion and therefore spend his days at work staying in character on set. Perhaps though this shows that more and more performers today are adapting what they understand the method to be for their own benefit and creating a new acting style.