The Path of the Actor

Abstract

Michael Chekhov (edited by Andrei Kirillov and Bella Martin), The Path of the Actor (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) Once, in my admittedly limited time as an actor, I experienced a fleeting moment of double consciousness. For perhaps a minute, and in a way utterly resistant to adequate description or metaphor, I was split, performing my role and at the same time standing apart, observing the audience, observing myself performing, and forming for myself a discursive commentary on what was going on. I remember the words that came to me: 'this is going well ...'. Except I wasn't 'standing apart' - a lazy metaphor redolent of faux-spiritual, popular-culture representations of near-death experiences and the like. I was still there, in and with my body, but carrying on parallel cognitive, critical, aesthetic and affective processes; I recall feeling quite pleased with myself. It was a great moment - although not sufficiently great to have convinced me of the merits of a life on the stage - and I have frequently thought about it since: was I 'really' just switching backwards and forwards between different intentions more rapidly than I could register? Or was something genuinely transcendental happening? I wish that, at the time, I had read Michael Chekhov's reflections on just such a moment in his own experiences, in which the theosophical writings of Steiner - which he had been reading since the early 1920s - crystallised in a revelatory performative moment. That I hadn't is partly to do with the unavailability of those reflections in translation. However, even if they had been available, given the (then ... and now?) reluctance of our training institutions to direct students towards any kind of reading, chances are I still wouldn't have read them. Routledge has now corrected that unavailability, adding Chekhov's autobiographical writings to the recently revised and expanded To The Actor (Routledge, 2002) and Franc Chamberlain's 2004 overview for the Performance Practitioner series. The texts published here for the first time in English are Chekhov's first autobiography The Path of the Actor (Put'aktera, 1928) and excerpts of the serialised autobiographical sketches published in the mid-1940s in Novi Zhurnal, a New York-based journal for emigre Russians, reproduced here as Life and Encounters. Chekhov's revelatory moment, as described in Life and Encounters, comes during the opening performance of Artisten (George Waiters and Arthur Hopkins' 1927 Broadway hit Burlesque), directed by Max Reinhardt in Vienna in November 1928. Self-exiled from Russia, where his experiments with theosophical principles in rehearsal had come to the attention of Lunacharsky's Narkompros (Ministry of Enlightenment), Chekhov had been referred to Reinhardt by a 'well-known impresario and art lover who was doing good business' with whom he had met, 'armed with a small volume of Hamlet in German'. The impresario appears to have summed up Chekhov's potential with some alacrity: 'Well ... we're going to do some good business with you ... can you dance?'... waiting a few seconds for a reply, he repeated his question, flapping his arms in the air for the sake of clarity ... 'We'll begin with cabaret. I'll turn you into another Crock [a famous Swiss clown, notes Chekhov]. Can you play an instrument? Sing? Even just a little bit?'. (137) Hamlet remained in Chekhov's pocket. Reinhardt cast Chekhov as a tragicomic clown named Skid. The rehearsals were disastrous. Reinhardt was not involved until the final week, leaving the show to his assistant, referred to by Chekhov only as 'Doctor S', who barks guttural instructions at his actor 'until he [Doctor S] finally went home with a migraine'. Drilled into acrobatic tricks, coached by the increasingly overwrought Doctor S's overwrought coaching and working in a foreign language paralyses Chekhov, who is unable to learn his lines. …