Jurij Alschitz - 40 Questions of One Role

When an actor feels that he is engendering questions the job immediately becomes easy and interesting. The most important thing in asking questions is to feel movement forwards. To a great extent this is achieved because of the freestyle montage of the questions. It should be noted that as soon as an actor begins to feel that the energy of the question is diminishing he has to ask the next and not stick to one and the same thing. Each new meeting point of questions draws forth a flash of the truth. And it is especially because of the order in which the questions are posed that the inner, hidden essence of the role can emerge. The montage of questions can differ – sharp, contrasting, gentle, continuing the previous question or engendering the next. Try and you will see how engaging and creative it is.

40 questions are not enough. There can, in fact, be an unlimited amount. I have tried to show just the basic principle of analysis. All the questions in this methodology serve as examples. They should steer the actor towards his own questions. Of course, not any old questions but those that are “eternal”, “of the world” and “unresolved” will help him discover something new inside himself – the explorer, a belief in himself and his own wisdom. That is important. Remember that Socrates was proclaimed by the Oracle of Delphi to be “the wisest of men” (Plato writes of this in Socrates’ Apologia). But he himself was convinced that “he knew nothing”, and to justify the honourable title he began to ask questions of others who were considered wise. Thus Socrates came to the conclusion that this conviction of his own lack of knowledge made him wise in as much as other people were unaware of it. Try for yourself! Take a risk and I am sure that you will discover the wonderful world of the role, full of diverse secrets and riddles. You will also discover your own world, boiling with thousands of questions, and there are always thousands of answers. Sometimes they come to you at once and sometimes years later.

Introduction

In the beginning there was chaos

All of my lessons are based on a love of order. I would go so far as to say a passion for order. That is how I was made, how I was raised. But nonetheless I adore chaos. I have to start from chaos to feel the wonders of order. For there to be nothing that makes sense in the beginning, then for one instant everything becomes clear and lucid, as if you have opened your eyes. Then everything fades away again and you can’t see anything any more. Like a child’s game.

Analysis is also a game, not a boring job as actors often think and therefore dislike. I know this for a fact. Maybe they think of it as too hard, and only intellectual directors are up to the task. But in actual fact the rules are simple – in the midst of utter chaos you have to find Beauty. That and nothing more.

They say chaos is for brilliant people, with normal people you have to bring order and show them so that they see; fools have to be shown and have it explained; and idiots have to be shown and have it explained and then repeated. All of this is just playful chitchat. In actual fact, it is not so easy to separate one from the other, brilliance from stupidity, order from chaos. It all exists together and not only is it hard to separate them, in a way they complement one another. It seems to me that that is how analysing a role should be approached – you can’t take it all apart and put it back together and sometimes you don’t have to. You just have to play with it. You have to ask questions.

Many actors believe that analysing a role means explaining for themselves the behaviour of the personnage *in a given situation, discovering the motives behind their actions, understanding the logic of people’s relationships, finding the organic chemistry of their feelings and the like. In brief, such an analysis results in a study of the principles of life and nothing more. It is clearly insufficient. I would even go so far as to say it is dangerous. Dangerous because the psychological analysis of a role is becoming a rabid disease amongst actors all over the world. Today, even in Greek tragedies, actors try to play out the psychological sufferings of the heroes. As if they see nothing in the role other than the psychology of humankind. I remember August Strindberg’s Dreamplay being performed by a company of actors from Mozambique under a Swedish director in the style of psychological theatre. I have never seen anything funnier, and they thought that they were employing the Stanislavsky system. Poor Konstantin Sergeyevich, if only he had seen it! It was he who warned in his final lessons that the use of just one psychological analysis severely reduces an actor’s ability to cognise the role. But, towards the end of his life, who listened to him? The bacteria of “psychologism” had already begun to spread in theatres. And soon it took on epidemic proportions. That is why I say it is dangerous. It seems to me that it is very important to dwell on this problem in some detail before coming to the proposed questions for conducting an analysis.

(*)What is generally referred to as “character” is divided by Jurij Alschitz into persona and personnage. Persona is to be understood as a real individual, with a biography, and comprises his/her personal history with facts, and emotions, with a beginning and an end. The personnage is a legend, a myth, a dynamic substance beyond the confines of time and space. Compare Jurij Alschitz, The Vertical of the Role, Berlin 2003, p. 32. (Editor’s note)

Throughout history the development of theatre has generally taken two directions. The first involved researching the spiritual world and the second the material world, where the practical side of life comes under scrutiny. It was this form of Theatre that gradually became predominant. By developing in this direction it perfected its ability to depict a person’s behaviour in different circumstances. But the situations, albeit in a thousand different guises, repeated themselves and ultimately came down, as they say, to twenty main plots. There were repetitions, remakes of age-old subjects and certain situational frameworks emerged. At that time, with the onslaught of the naturalism of the 19th century, people’s inner psychology was Theatre’s focal point. Motivated by the fact that each person’s behaviour in the same situation will be different and that each of us has different feelings and emotions, Theatre started studying human psychology, the various motives for a person’s behaviour and the richness of the human persona.

Actors’ consciousnesses have long played host to the idea of human individuality, inspiring them to create on stage numerous personas and the relationships they share. Theatre had made a distinct step in its development and it was accompanied by significant success. Truth be told, the suspicion sometimes arose that by and large people are different from one another in mere trifles. But in accepting this disparaging conclusion it was necessary also to accept that on stage we are engaged in a study of these very trifles. Not wishing to concur with this we continued, as we thought, to immerse ourselves deeper and deeper in the mysteries of human psychology, while in fact we were creating more and yet more acting clichés. It was as if actors had forgotten the theatre of Euripides or Shakespeare, as if they had forgotten that there is something higher than human nature, something which maps out the destinies of individuals and their spiritual aspirations, things that bear no relation to their character but rather to the mission allotted to them in life or which they themselves have chosen.

The truth of individuals’ psychology, as well as of their interrelations, became the sole criterion in theatre art. Everybody sought out one thing – “the truth of life”. But in hiding behind this “truth” theatre only created the illusion of truth, nothing more. Enthralled, actors would show audiences “… people in the act of eating, drinking, loving, walking and wearing their coats; when they attempt to extract a moral from jaded scenes and their insipid talk, when playwrights try to create a moral, a small one, comprehensive and useful for the everyday and give us under a thousand different guises the same, same, same old stuff…” **These words of Konstantin Treplev first voiced fears of theatre’s principles of “usefulness”, its intelligibility, its mimicking of life so dominant on stage, and thus ultimately its dependence on everyday life. The study of the inner psychology of life was substituted for its outer shell, and it was done with a fair amount of “vitality”. Over one hundred years ago the author of The Seagull was struck with concern that Theatre, with its unilateral thought processes, was gradually losing its ability to move upwards. It repeats itself, stands still or at best turns on the spot. The young and still untainted actress Nina Zarechnaya refuses to act without a psychological foundation for her character and demands a “living character”. Using Dorn’s words from the same play, Anton Chekhov proposed another way – “express only deep and eternal truths”; art should aim for the kingdom of dreams and higher ideals. There, in the realm of the spirit, people and human relations are truly ordered. But few have adhered to this advice.