small>Good news: method actor Marlon Brando with Frank Puglia in The Godfather (1972). Photograph: AP Photo/Paramount Pictures
There's something enormously appealing to earnest young drama students about the method. In three years at drama school you see a lot of it. It's not just the roll call of great actors and performances that are forever linked to the Actors Studio. The idea of an acting system that relies more on accessing (usually painful) experience than it does on textual analysis and technique is appealing because it plays directly into the romantic idea of the tortured artist. It turns the interpreter of a text into the creator of a character. In the right hands its impact on a play or film is extraordinary. But all too often actors fall in love with the idea of the Method without really understanding it. The result is self-indulgence: a rejection of technique as being nothing more than an unwanted layer of artifice between performer and audience.
So it's fascinating to read Jean Benedetti's essential new translation of Stanislavski's An Actor's Work, the source of the 'system' which inspired the founders of the Actors Studio, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis and Stella Adler, and which was later perverted by Lee Strasberg when he became the dominant force there. What Benedetti's lucid introduction makes clear is that even before Strasberg placed Emotion Memory at the root of his Method, Stanislavski's ground-breaking work was already grossly misunderstood.
The principal innovation of Benedetti's translation is to reunite two halves of a single volume previously considered separate works: An Actor Prepares, which deals with the psychology of character, and Building a Character, which introduces the techniques required to communicate the inner life to an audience. Stanislavski's journey - from his initial idea of creating a grammar and training for actors, to committing it to paper in a way that suited him - was a tortuous one. Thirteen years separated the publication of these works. This lead to the misconception that Stanislavski's system places the emphasis on character work above and beyond textual interpretation, physical and vocal technique. In fact, Stanislavski envisaged a total approach to acting and was horrified that his second volume was considered of less importance than the first.
It's not just the reuniting of two texts that makes this essential reading. Anyone who has dipped into previous Stanislavski translations will remember the stodgy quality of the prose. Stanislavski was attempting something so new that he had already recognised the potential for misinterpretation. Laboured prose was the result - that and the need to appease Soviet authorities who did not recognise the existence of the subconscious, a concept that was at the root of his system. Benedetti's translation tiptoes neatly through the original wording and delivers, for the first time, an edition which doesn't feel hard-going from the very first paragraph.
It's extraordinary that it's taken so long for a work that is the cornerstone of acting training in much of the world to be produced in a volume that clearly communicates the entire system. Whether it's enough to right the wrongs perpetrated by editors, authorities and translators over the past century is debatable. But one thing's for sure - for those earnest young actors, it should be made required reading.
