Empty space. Peter Brook

We and space Life teaches us patience and humility through our family. You have to come to terms with them, you have to love them, because the world gave them to you. Find harmony with them, merge your auras with them, as with Space. Imagine your loved one, who you are

Empty space. Peter Brook.

Preface

There is hardly another contemporary director about whom as much has been said about Brook, and about whom they have been writing for so long. And in fact, at the age of seventeen he had already staged Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in an amateur theater, and by twenty he had staged six performances in a professional theater, including Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, which had been staged very little before. And where - at Barry Jackson's, at the famous Birmingham Repertory Theatre! Then the fame never left him. He was twenty-one years old when Barry Jackson, who undertook to renovate the Shakespeare Memorial Theater, invited him, among other young directors, to Stratford-upon-Avon, and twenty-two years old when he staged the play Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet at this theater ( 1947) - became a sensation of the season and caused such controversy that rarely arose in English theater criticism. He came to the fore early, Brook is now only fifty (he was born on March 21, 1925), but they have been writing and arguing about him for almost thirty years. And who writes, who argues! It is difficult to name at least one major actor, director or theater critic who, having come into contact with Brook, would not want to express his opinion about him. Brook's bibliography is enormous. And she keeps growing. They say that truth is born in disputes. One of them was born in this too. Not right away. Excruciating. But it was born and is no longer disputed. When he appeared, Brook was talked about - even by those who did not accept him - as an extremely original director. Then - as a significant director. Then - this time almost without a break - as a great director, one of those by whom the theater of the twentieth century will be judged.

And yet - what is he like, Peter Brook? “Great” is just a word, nothing more. You can fill it with a variety of contents. And here its meaning was not very clear. It first appeared in relation to Brook not so much in the minds of critics, who were accustomed to clearly formulating their opinions, but in the souls of thousands, tens of thousands of spectators who left his performances shocked, enlightened, having learned something new about themselves, about the world. It penetrated into criticism not without difficulty - Brook was so depressingly young when he achieved his first successes. It did not add up as a sum of values, but arose immediately as a kind of wholeness and was subject to analysis and decoding.

It wasn't easy. Each of Brook's performances provided an opportunity to see the author he was directing in a new way, but did not help to see “Brook himself.” No, Brook was not hiding behind the author at all. From the very beginning, he very definitely declared himself as a supporter of the all-powerful “director’s theater.” The thought of each performance was his, Brook's, thought. The mood is his, Brook's, mood. The form was given by him, Brook. Even more so than many other directors; after all, Brooke often acts as the artist of his own performances, and sometimes also as the author of the “concrete music” that accompanies them. But the difficulty was that the performances he staged were very different and dissimilar. They, of course, had something in common. But what? What determined that a particular performance belonged to Brook? Is it really just an obligatory dissimilarity with his previous performance?

The book “Empty Space,” published in 1968, was intended, it seemed, to clarify everything. There was no doubt about its literary merits: among Brooke’s many talents, there was also a literary one. The young director has repeatedly acted as an interesting theater and (much more often) ballet critic. Moreover, this book was born gradually, there could be no traces of haste in it. Its chapters correspond to the four parts of a short course of lectures on modern theater, given by Brook in 1965 in agreement with the Granada television company at the universities of Hull, Kiel, Manchester and Sheffield. Everything in it was tested in advance on a live listener. This book really made a lot of things clear. Of course, this was not the first time Brook expressed his views on the theater. He didn't hide them before. But he brought together much of what had previously had to be sought out bit by bit. By doing this, he certainly helped to look deeper into his work.

And into myself. Brooke is a man without pose. He doesn’t emphasize his successes. Failure is not hidden. He says what he thinks. He treats himself with that calm sense of humor, which is rightly considered a sign of inner intelligence. This man works with monstrous effort - he has staged dozens of plays, films and operas, written many articles - and at the same time is not at all internally tense, on the contrary, enviably relaxed.

But then why does Peter Brook still have to explain today, seven years after the book, in newspaper interviews who he is and who he is not, and not a single such interview puts an end to the controversy about him. Why was this so logical book so unclear? The point, I think, is that readers did not find in it what they were looking for. First of all, confirmation of his views: Brook expressed his own. He upset theater conservatives. He did not abandon tradition at all; on the contrary, he respected her, but at the same time he saw her somehow differently. It did not please the theatrical innovators, so to speak. He was one of them; he willingly acknowledged their discoveries, peered into them carefully and at the same time, as if looking through them. And they were also looking for a system in it - some kind of, say, “Brooke’s system,” but he pointedly refused to reveal it. Didn’t it follow from this that this system simply does not exist? Meanwhile, the book says everything clearly. It helps to see the dominance of Brook's creativity. Of the huge number of Peter Brook's performances, Soviet audiences saw only two: Hamlet with Paul Scofield in the title role, staged in 1955 and brought to us at the same time, and Stratford's King Lear (staged in 1962, shown here in 1961 -m). And yet one should not think that we have seen little: it was after Lear that Brooke was said to be “great.”

This word was spoken by Kenneth Tainay.

He said it not so much as a theater expert who carefully thought through and correlated all the components of this concept, but rather as a viewer - an experienced, intelligent and at the same time unusually emotional viewer. Sitting in the darkness of the Stratford hall, he feverishly scratched some words on the program to capture unique moments. “I don’t want to pretend to be calm and I remember very well all the feelings that overwhelmed me,” he wrote in a note about this performance. However, in the same note he threw out the words about Brooke’s “moral neutrality” that later received such resonance. “Gloomy and beautiful,” he called Brooke’s “Lear” in another note that appeared a month later, when the play was shown to Londoners. But why did Lear’s story, shown from the standpoint of “moral neutrality,” shock the audience so much?! And she was amazing. In Brook's book the reader will find a brief and, as always with him, extremely modest reference to how the play gained more and more success (and itself grew internally) during the famous Eastern European tour of 1964. Moscow and Leningrad were the last cities on the continent where Lear was shown. It was here that the performance found its best audience, and with its help it reached its own peak. Until 1971, Brook staged fifty-seven dramatic performances (five of them were taken on tour abroad), seven operas, seven films, television plays (the scripts and tracks for them were written by Brook himself, one by Brook in collaboration with Dennis Kenan), wrote prefaces to books by Jerzy Grotowskoto “To the Poor Theatre”, Jan Kott “Shakespeare - Our Contemporary” (this book by the famous Polish Shakespeare scholar gave a great creative impulse to Brook when he worked on King Lear), separate editions of “How You Get Well” by Shakespeare and “Marat/ Garden" by Peter Weiss, Michael Werr's book "Design of the Performance, and created big number other literary works. Could this viewer be so close to a performance that affirmed the principles of “moral neutrality”?

No, of course Brooke knows that's not true. It is not for nothing that he writes that the countries of Eastern Europe, where his “Lear” sounded so loudly, are the countries through which the war took place. Brook's Lear owes much to the influence of Samuel Beckett, a truly gloomy and hopeless writer. Kenneth Tynan immediately caught this, and much was said about it later in criticism. Brook himself notes this in “Empty Space.” But here the reader will find an indication of why exactly Beckett is valuable to Brooke. Beckett, in his opinion, does not say his “no” with pleasure. His “no” is out of longing for “yes.” Whether Brooke is right or wrong in this case is another question. It is important how things stand for him. Brook's goal was not just to show the world as cold and scary. He wanted to portray him as such with all uncompromisingness, so that the thought of how terrible the world is when it is spiritless would sound equally uncompromisingly. When a person does not bring humanity with him. When it is given to each individual person - only at the cost of severe suffering.

There is no doubt that theater occupies a special place in life that belongs to it alone. It is like a magnifying glass and at the same time like a diminutive lens. It's a small world. But it can easily go from small to insignificant. It is not similar to the life around it, so it is easy to separate it from life altogether. On the other hand, although everything is changing and we have to live less and less in small towns and more and more in endless megalopolises, the theater remains the same: the community composition of performers is the same as it has always been. Theater narrows life, it narrows it in many ways. It is difficult to set just one goal in life; in the theater, however, the goal is clear and united. From the first rehearsal she is always in sight, and not too far away. Everyone participates in achieving it. We see some social factors come into play: the tension of the premiere creates such cohesion, such passion, such energy and attention to each other's needs that governments begin to fear whether there will be an opportunity to start new wars. In our society as a whole, the role of art is not fully defined.

People for the most part can exist perfectly well without any art, and even if they regret its absence, this, in any case, does not affect their activities. In the theater everything is different. In any case, every practical question is at the same time an artistic question. Even the most unlucky imperfect performer finds himself drawn, along with experienced masters, into problems of space, intonation and rhythm, color and form. At a rehearsal, the height of the chair, the texture of the costume, the brightness of the lighting, the degree of emotion always matter. Aesthetics becomes practice.

It would be wrong to say that this happens because theater is an art. The scene is a reflection of life, but this life cannot be relived without a certain system of rules based on the observance of certain value judgments. The chair moves on stage because (it’s better this way). Two columns do not sound, but add a third and you get what you need - the words “better”, “worse”, “not so good”, “bad” are used every day, but the words themselves that guide decisions do not carry any moral sense.

Anyone interested in the phenomena of natural life will be rewarded by the study of the theater. His discoveries in this area will be much more applicable to the life of society as a whole than the study of bees and ants. Through a magnifying glass he will see a group of people living all the time according to precise, defined, but nameless standards.

He will see that in any society the theater either does not have any special function, or it is the only one of its kind. The uniqueness of this function is that the theater offers something that cannot be found on the street, at home, in a pub, in the company of friends or in a psychiatrist's office, in church or in the cinema. There is only one curious difference between cinema and theater. Cinema brings images of the past to the screen. Because this is what the mind is occupied with throughout life, cinema feels intimately real. There's really nothing like it. Cinema brings joy by prolonging imaginary everyday experiences on the screen. Theater always asserts itself in the present. This is exactly what can make it more real than the usual stream of consciousness. This is what can make it so exciting.

It is the attitude of censorship towards theater that speaks volumes about its hidden power. Under most regimes, even when the written word is free, the visual arts are free, and sienna is the last to be free. Instinctively, governments know that a live event can cause a dangerous outbreak, even if, as we see, this happens quite rarely. But this ancient fear is a recognition of ancient possibilities.

The theater is an arena where live action can take place. Focus large group people are caused by a general tension, thanks to which the forces that at any time control the daily life of each person, finding themselves at that moment isolated, can assert themselves more impressively.

Now I have to be indiscreet. In the three previous chapters I dealt with various forms of theater in general, as they develop around the world and, naturally, in my own practice. If this last chapter, which inevitably turns out to be a conclusion in some way, will result in a story about the form of the theater, which I seem to recommend, then this is only because I can only talk about the theater that I know. I will unwittingly have to narrow my field of vision and talk about theater, as I understand it, autobiographically. I will try to give examples and draw conclusions based on my own practice - this is what my experience is made up of and my point of view is born. The reader, in turn, must remember that this is inseparable from my passport, nationality, place and year of birth, physical characteristics, eye color, handwriting, Moreover, all this is inseparable from today. This is a portrait of the author at the moment of work - a seeker in a dying and evolving theater. As my work continues and new experience accumulates, my conclusions will seem less and less convincing. The purpose of this book cannot be precisely defined - but I hope that it may be of benefit to someone trying to solve their own problems in other settings and at other times. If someone is going to use it as a manual, I must warn you in advance - it does not contain universal formulas, it does not offer a method. I can describe an exercise or technique, but anyone who tries to reproduce it from my descriptions will be disappointed. I would undertake to teach anyone everything I know about theatrical techniques in a few hours. The rest is practice, and this cannot be done alone. We can only try to trace something by analyzing the process of preparing the play for the performance. In the performance, relationships are in the foreground; actor - (thing) - audience. At rehearsal: actor - (thing) - director. At the earliest stage: director-(thing)-artist.

Scenery and costumes are SOMETIMES born during rehearsal at the same time as the entire performance, but often practical considerations force the artist to present a completed work by the first rehearsal. Often I design the performance myself. This gives certain advantages, but for a very special reason. When the director acts at the same time as an artist, his general theoretical understanding of the play and its embodiment in form and color appear in the same rhythm. Sometimes the director does not succeed in a scene for several weeks, some part the scenery turned out to be unfinished1 - then, in the process of working on the scenery, the director can suddenly find a moment that had eluded him; As he works on the structure of a complex wall, he will suddenly grasp its meaning in the expressions of stage action or in the change of colors. In the work of a director with an artist, consistency of rhythms becomes most important.

I have had the pleasure of collaborating with many wonderful artists, but at times I have fallen into strange traps - for example, in cases where the artist too quickly found an undeniable solution - so that I found myself forced to accept or reject certain forms before I could could feel which of them were organic for the given content. When I accepted an artist’s obviously wrong idea because it was not MINE to find a logical justification for refusal, I fell into a trap under which the production could never come to fruition. As a result, I staged a very bad performance. I have often noticed that the scenery is the geometry of the performance, so that the scenery that does not correspond to the plan makes some scenes unfeasible and sometimes paralyzes the actor’s capabilities. The best artist is the one who works step by step with the directors, going back, changing, discarding as the entire interpretation takes shape. A director who makes sketches himself never naturally considers that the completion of work on them in itself is the end of the work as a whole. He knows that this is only the beginning of a long cycle of development of the idea, since he himself still has the entire process of creating the performance ahead of him. Many artists tend, however, to believe that once the set and costume designs have been submitted, the bulk of their creative work is truly complete. This is especially true of good artists when they collaborate in the theater. For them, the finished drawing is complete. Fans of the fine arts They can never understand why stage design is not entrusted in all cases to great artists and sculptors.

What is essentially needed is an unfinished drawing, a drawing in which there is clarity without cruelty: one that could be called “open” as opposed to “closed.”

This is the essence of theatrical thinking: for a true theater artist, his drawings will always be in motion, in interaction with everything that the actor brings to a given scene as it develops. In other words, and unlike an easel artist who works in two dimensions, or a sculptor who works in three, a theater artist thinks in the fourth dimension, the movement of time, creating not a stage picture, but a kind of stage film frame. The film editor gives shape to the material after it has been shot; the theater designer often acts as the editor of a film reminiscent of Through the Looking Glass, giving shape to the material before it occurs.

The later he makes a decision, the better.

It is very easy - and quite common - to ruin an actor's performance with inaccurate costumes. An actor whose thoughts on a costume design are asked before rehearsals begin is in the same position as a director who is asked about his decision before he has made it. Plastically, the actor has not yet had time to feel the role, so his opinion is pointless. If the sketches are cleverly executed and the costume itself is beautiful, the actor will often agree with the designer, only to discover a few weeks later that the costume does not correspond at all to what he is trying to express. The artist's main problem is what should the actor wear? The costume is not born in the artist’s head: it arises from the environment. Take, for example, a European actor playing a Japanese man.

Even if all the details were taken care of, his costume would always lack the appeal of a samurai costume in a Japanese film. In authentic scenery, the details are true and interconnected; in copying based on the study of documents, a number of compromises are almost always inevitable; the material is only more or less similar to the real thing, the cut is simplified and approximate; the actor himself is not able to get used to the costume with the instinctive precision of the people for whom it is organic.

If we cannot decently portray a Japanese or an African by imitating them, then the same applies to what we call “era”. An actor whose work looks authentic in a rehearsal costume loses integrity by wearing a toga copied from a vase in the British Museum. In the same time; wearing casual suits is not a solution; as a rule, they are unsuitable for the performance. For example, in the Noh theater, ritual costumes of amazing beauty have been preserved. Church vestments have also been preserved. During the Baroque period there was a concept of “magnificent attire” - it could become the basis for costumes for opera or drama. The Romantic era shaft was a chain source for such outstanding artists as Oliver Messel or Christian Berard. In the USSR, the white tie and tailcoat, which disappeared after the revolution from Everyday life, have become elegant and indispensable professional clothing for musicians, immediately emphasizing the difference between rehearsal and performance.

Every time we start work on a new production, we are forced to raise this issue again. What should an actor wear? Does his behavior reflect the spirit of the era? What era is this? What are its features? Is the information we get from documents reliable? Perhaps a flight of imagination and a certain amount of inspiration will better convey the spirit of reality? What are the dramatic goals? Who needs suits? What does an actor need plastically? What does the viewer's eye need? Should you follow the taste of the audience or act contrary to it? What can enhance color and texture? What can they mute?

The distribution of roles gives rise to a new set of problems. If there is little time allotted for rehearsals, a typical distribution of roles is inevitable, but everyone is naturally upset. Any actor would like to play all the roles. In reality he is incapable of this. Each of them is constrained by its own limits set by its type. All that can be said is that in most cases, trying to predict in advance what an actor cannot do is usually futile. What is interesting about actors is their ability to reveal unexpected traits during rehearsals: disappointment is caused by an actor who submits to the prevailing ideas about him. Trying to assign roles “consciously” is usually a futile exercise.

It is much better to have the time and conditions under which it is possible to take risks. At the same time, you can make a mistake, but in return you will receive completely unexpected discoveries and solutions. No actor remains motionless in his creative biography. The easiest way is to imagine that he is frozen at a certain level, when in fact invisible but significant changes are ripening within him. An actor who seemed great at an audition may actually be very talented, but this is unlikely - most often he is simply a highly skilled actor and his skill is QUITE superficial. An actor who does very poorly at an audition is most likely a lousy actor, but this does not have to be the case, and he may well turn out to be the best. No rules apply to this: if production conditions force you to cast actors you don't know, you have to rely on guesswork.

At the beginning of rehearsals, the actors are not at all the calm, relaxed creatures they would like to appear to be. They come, burdened and constrained by their own worries and experiences, and these experiences are so varied that we are sometimes faced with the most unexpected phenomena. For example, a young actor playing with a group of inexperienced colleagues may suddenly discover talent and skill that puts the professionals to shame. And take the same actor, who has already proven his abilities, and surround him with older comrades whom he respects very much, and he may become not only clumsy and frozen, but his talent will not show itself in anything. Put him next to actors he despises and he becomes himself again. Because talent is not static, it ebbs and flows depending on many different circumstances. Not all actors of the same age are at the same stage of professionalism. For some, the mixture of enthusiasm and experience is supported by confidence based on small successes in the past, and not undermined by the fear of complete failure. They begin rehearsals in a completely different way than, for example, the same young actor who has already made a big name for himself and began to wonder how far he will go, whether he has achieved something, what his position is, whether he has recognized what lies ahead for him in the future . The actor who believes that one day he will play Hamlet has inexhaustible energy, while the one who realizes that the world is by no means convinced that he will ever play the leading role paralyzes his strength with painful self-analysis and the consequent need in self-affirmation.

When a troupe gathers for its first rehearsal (whether it be a team or a permanent troupe), there are always a number of unspoken personal questions and concerns hanging in the air. Of course, all of them are aggravated by the presence of the director: if he himself were in a state of absolute peace sent to him from above, he could help, but most of the time he is also in tension and busy with the problems of the performance, and the need to publicly fulfill his obligations only adds to the problem. fuel to the fire of his vanity.

A director can never afford to stage for the first time. I once heard that a novice hypnotist would never admit to a patient that he was hypnotizing for the first time in his life. He had already “done this successfully many times.” I started with the second production because, when at seventeen I found myself face to face with a group of ironically and critically minded amateurs, I was forced to fantasize a non-existent triumph in order to instill in myself the confidence that both sides desperately needed.

The first rehearsal always feels like a blind man leading the blind. On the first day, the director can give a formally structured speech, explaining the main tasks of the upcoming work. Or he can show models and costume designs, or books and photographs, or just make a joke, or have the actors read the play. Sometimes you can have a drink together, or play something, or take a walk around the theater - it should all work in the same direction. Since no one can truly internalize what is said, the purpose of everything done on the first day is to get closer to the second day.

The second day is completely different; after the past day, each individual factor and the relationship between them have subtly changed. Everything that happens during rehearsal affects this mechanism. Playing together and about something is a process that gives certain results, such as trust, friendliness, simplicity of relationships. Even during an audition, you can play something to create a more relaxed atmosphere. Play is never an end in itself - and the short time provided for rehearsals and freedom of communication is insufficient. Painful joint efforts in the scenes of improvisation of madness in the play “Marat/Sade” brought certain results: the actors, who shared the difficulties, open up to each other and to the play itself in a completely different way.

The director knows that rehearsals are an evolutionary process. He foresees everything that will come in due time in this process, and his art is the art of determining the decisive moment. He knows that he should not suggest any thoughts prematurely.

Otherwise, he will have to see the expression on the faces of a seemingly calm, internally tense actor who is unable to comprehend what is being said to him. Then the director will understand that he can only wait, without pushing the performer too much. In the third week, everything will change and a word or a nod of the head will create an instant connection. And the director will find that he, too, is not standing still. No matter how hard he works at home, the director is unable to understand the play alone. Whatever thoughts he brings with him on the first day will gradually develop and be enriched by the process in which he participates with the actors, so that by the third week it will become clear that he himself perceives everything differently The actor's perception becomes a spotlight for his own, and he either moves further or becomes acutely aware that he has not yet discovered anything of value.

In fact, the director who comes to the first rehearsal with a ready-made script and recorded movements - dead man in the theatre.

When Sir Barry Jackson invited me to direct Love's Labour's Lost at Stratford in 1945, it was my first serious production. But by that time I had already worked enough in small theaters to know that actors, and most importantly, administrators, most of all despise people who, as they put it, do not know what they want.” So on the eve of the first rehearsal, I sat in a state of shock in front of the mock-up of the scenery, realizing that any further delay would mean death. I was handling pieces of cardboard in my hands - forty pieces, symbolizing forty actors, to whom I had to give clear and precise instructions the next morning. Again and again I came up with the first way out to the trial, realizing that it was on him that “sink or sink” would depend; I numbered the figures, drew diagrams, moved pieces of cardboard back and forth, making large groups of them, then small ones, on the side, behind, on the stairs, on the lawn, then swept everything away with my sleeve, cursed everything in the world and started from the very beginning. As I did this, I wrote down every movement and... When no one saw, I crossed it out and wrote it down again. The next morning I showed up at rehearsal with a thick notebook under my mouse. They placed a table in front of me, respecting the plump volume I had brought.

I divided the performers into groups, numbered and arranged them starting positions and then, loudly and confidently giving instructions, began the first scene. When the actors began to move, I saw that all this was no good. They were by no means pieces of cardboard - these huge living creatures rushed forward with a swiftness that I could not have predicted. Some of them continued to move without stopping, staring straight at me; others, on the contrary, lingered, stopped, turned their backs to me with a deliberate grace that surprised me. We had only completed the first stage of the movement, the letter “A” on my diagram, but no one was already in their assigned place, so it was impossible to move on to paragraph “B”. My heart sank and, despite all my preparations, I was completely at a loss. Should I start over, training these actors to the point that they will submit to my plan? Some inner voice told me that this is exactly what I should do. But there was another who pointed out that my version was much less interesting; that this new one, being born before my eyes, saturated with personal energy, individual characteristics, colored by the activity of some and the inertia of others, promises a wide variety of rhythms and opens up many unexpected possibilities. The critical moment has arrived.

Looking back, I think that my entire future, my entire creative destiny, was at stake. I stopped working, walked away from my notebook, approached the actors, and since then I have never looked at the plan I had drawn up. Once and for all I realized how stupid and presumptuous it was to assume that an inanimate model could replace a person.

Naturally, any work involves reflection. To reflect means to compare, to make mistakes, to go back, to doubt. This is what an artist does, and so does a Writer, but alone with himself. The theater director has to reveal his doubts to the actors, but as a reward he receives material that develops before his eyes; the sculptor claims that the choice of material always makes its own adjustments to his creation - living acting material constantly speaks, feels, studies. Rehearsing is thinking out loud.

Let me give you one strange paradox. Only a very bad director can be compared in effectiveness to a very good one. Sometimes a director is so bad, so directionless, so incapable of expressing his aspirations, that his lack of ability becomes a positive factor. It drives actors to despair. Gradually, creative failure leads him to an abyss, on the edge of which the performers find themselves, and as the premiere approaches, the horror that gripped them forces them to make immediate decisions. It happened that at the last moment the troupe gathered its strength and played the premiere in such a way that the director was later praised. When such a director is fired, the person who takes his place often has an easy job ahead of him. Once I had to completely remake someone else's production in one evening - and as a result I gained undeserved success. Despair had so prepared the ground that only a gentle push was required on my part.

However, when the director is competent enough, relentless enough and confident enough to inspire the actor's partial confidence, that's when the result most easily misfires. Even if the actor does not agree with what he is told, he still shifts part of the burden onto the director, internally feeling that “perhaps” he is right, or at least realizing that the director, after all, is “responsible for everything” and will have to “save the situation.” This finally relieves the actor of personal responsibility and eliminates the possibility of spontaneous combustion of the troupe. A modest, unpretentious director, often a pleasant person, should be trusted least of all.

Everything I said can easily be misinterpreted. Therefore, directors who do not want to be branded as despots are sometimes forced to do nothing, cultivating non-interference and believing that this is the only form of respect for the actor. This is an erroneous attitude - without leaders, the troupe cannot achieve results in the time allotted for rehearsals.

The director is not free from responsibility - he is responsible for everything, but he is also not free from participation in the process itself, he is part of this process. From time to time an actor comes into the world who claims that directors are not needed - actors can do everything themselves.

Perhaps that's fair. But what actors? For actors to be able to create something themselves, they must be in such a high level that they are unlikely to need rehearsals.

Once they read the play, they will be able to reproduce the invisible essence of it in the blink of an eye. This is unrealistic: this is what a director is needed to help the troupe achieve such an ideal state. The director is here to attack and retreat, provoke and retaliate until something starts to work out. An opponent of directing rejects the director from the very first rehearsal. The director always disappears, a little later, during the first performance. Sooner or later an actor must appear, and then the ensemble begins to control everything. The director must feel what the actor wants and what he is avoiding, what obstacles he creates to his own intentions. No director gives an actor an exact model of the game. In the best case, the director allows the actor to reveal his own capabilities, which may have remained unknown to him.

The game begins with a slight internal push, so small that it remains almost invisible. This is noticeable when you compare acting on screen and on stage: a good theater actor can act in films, but not always vice versa. What's going on?

I suggested the following to the actor's imagination: “She is leaving you.” At this moment, somewhere in the depths of his consciousness there is a slight movement. This happens not only in actors - the same movement begins in everyone, only in non-actors it is too insignificant to somehow manifest itself; the actor is a more sensitive instrument, he has an impulse - in cinema it is immediately recorded by the lens, so for the film the first impulse is quite sufficient. In the theater, at the beginning of rehearsals, the impulse does not go beyond a slight thrill.

Even if the actor wants to enhance it with maximum psychological stress, a short circuit and grounding will occur. In order for this impulse to embrace the entire organism, a general emancipation is necessary, either from God or developed in oneself.

This is what rehearsals are for. In a sense, the game is mediumistic, in Grotowski's terminology. the actor is “permeated”, permeated with himself. For very young actors, obstacles can be easily overcome, and “permeation” can arise with surprising ease. As a result, they produce complex and skillful incarnations that plunge those who have spent years perfecting their craft into despair. However, later these same actors develop barriers within themselves. Children often play with inimitable naturalness. Non-actors, taken from real life by the director, look great on screen. But for mature masters the process should be two-way; Excitation coming from within must be facilitated by a stimulus from without. Sometimes thoughts and knowledge can help an actor get rid of preconceived judgments that block his path to a deeper understanding of the material, and sometimes vice versa. In order to understand a difficult role, an actor must exhaust his capabilities to the fullest, but great actors sometimes go even further. While pronouncing words, they simultaneously listen sensitively to the echoes that arise within them.

John Gielgud the wizard. His acting art goes far beyond the ordinary, standard, and banal. His manner of speaking, his vocal cords, his sense of rhythm constitute an instrument that he consciously developed through the process of creativity throughout his life. His inner innate aristocracy, his personal and social convictions, determined many of his qualities, helped him realize the difference between sublime values ​​and counterfeits, and finally convinced him that the possibilities of sifting, weeding, selecting and purifying are endless. His art has always been more vocal than plastic: even at the beginning of his career, he decided that his mind was more flexible than his body. This limited himself in his acting material, but he did wonders with what he naturally had. It is not the speech itself, not the melodies, but the constant interaction between the word-forming mechanism and consciousness that makes his art so unique, so exciting and especially so meaningful. In Gielgud we feel both the meaning of what he expresses and the art of the performer. Such a high degree of skill only enhances our admiration. I always remember working with him with great pleasure.

Paul Scoffland speaks to his audience differently. Whereas in Gielgud the instrument is midway between the music and the listener and thus requires a skilled and prepared performer, in Scofpled the instrument and the performer are one - an instrument of flesh and blood, opening itself to the unknown. Scofield, whom I met when he was still a very young actor, had a strange peculiarity: he was not good at poetry, but he created unforgettable prose poems. It was as if the act of uttering a word caused vibrations within him that reverberated with meanings far more complex than his rational thinking could create. He uttered the word “night”, and then was forced to pause, listening with his whole being to these amazing impulses arising somewhere in the mysterious chamber inside him. Thus he experienced the miracle of discovery at the moment of its accomplishment. These pauses, these deep insights imparted a purely individual structure of rhythms to his performance and conveyed to the listener a hitherto hidden meaning.

While rehearsing a role, he passes over and over again through words his entire being, consisting, as it were, of millions of ultra-sensitive sensors. During the performance, the same mechanism is triggered, thanks to which everything that he has already recorded appears every evening both as before and in a completely different way.

I brought two famous names as an example, but the phenomenon itself constantly appears during the rehearsal, re-raising the problem of spontaneity and experience, spontaneity and rationalism. There are things that young and unknown actors can do that experienced actors cannot do.

The history of theater knows times when the work of an actor was based on certain generally accepted means of expression. There were fixed performing techniques that have been abandoned in our days. On the other hand (albeit less noticeable), the freedom of expression offered by the system is equally limited, since, based on his everyday observations and the immediacy of his own perception, the actor does not draw from the depths of creativity. He turns to himself for the alphabet, also fossilized, since the language of signs from life, with which he is well acquainted, is in fact not an invented language, but a language inherent to him. His observations of behavior are often observations of projections of himself. What he considers spontaneous is filtered and controlled many times. If the dog in Pavlov's experiments had improvised, it would still have salivated when called, but it would have been sure that this was happening on its own initiative. “I’m drooling,” she would say, proud of herself.

Those who work on improvisation see firsthand how quickly actors reach the limits of so-called freedom. Our public exercises with the Theater of Cruelty brought the performers to a state in which they mostly varied their own cliches, like the hero of Marcel Marceau, who, having escaped from one prison, suddenly realized that he was in another. We did an experiment with an actor opening a door and discovering something unexpected behind it. He had to react to this unexpected either with a gesture, or a sound, or with his entire appearance. The first reaction was required from him: an exclamation or movement - whatever he pleased. At first, everything shown was a stock of acting imitations. Open your mouth in surprise, step back in horror - where did this so-called spontaneity come from? It is clear that a truthful and instantaneous internal reaction was at one time recorded by consciousness, and now, with the speed of lightning, memory has replaced what it once saw with external imitation. Not knowing what to do, the actor at first feels himself on the verge of disaster, but at the right moment a saving ready solution comes. This is how the Inanimate Theater creeps into us.

The goal of improvisation during the rehearsal process and the goal of the exercises are always the same: to move away from the Inanimate Theater. This does not mean at all that the actor should choke in splashes of pleasure, as it seems to outsiders. The task is to bring the actor again and again to his own barriers, to the moment where he replaces the newly discovered truth with a lie.

An actor who plays falsely throughout a long scene appears false to the public because, step by step recreating the image of his hero, he replaces authentic details with artificial ones. Even insignificant fake passions are conveyed with the help of contrived theatrical poses. However, in the process of rehearsing large passages, this is difficult to overcome - there is too much going on at once. The goal of the exercise is to go back and, gradually narrowing and narrowing the area, to find the place where the falsehood was born.

If the actor manages to discover this moment, he is obviously capable of a deep, truly creative impulse. Something similar happens with two actors playing together. We know mainly the external signs of ensemble performance.

The basic principles of collective creativity, which the English theater is so proud of, are based on politeness, politeness, prudence: Your turn, I’m after you, etc. - a facsimile that works when the actors find themselves in the same performing manner, that is, the old actors play superbly with each other friend and also very young. But when they unite both of them - with all their correctness and mutual respect - nothing good will come of it. In the play that I staged in Paris based on Genet’s play “The Balcony,” I had to employ the most different directions- classical repertoire, film actors, ballet actors and, finally, just amateurs.

Long evenings of improvisations on obscene topics served one purpose - they helped this motley group of people come into contact with each other and find opportunities for direct communication with each other.

Some exercises reveal actors to each other in a completely different way. For example, multiple actors can play completely different scenes side by side. At the same time, they should not enter into a conversation at the same moment, so everyone has to carefully monitor everything that is happening in order to understand in time exactly which moments depend on him. Or again: the development of a collective sense of responsibility for the quality of improvisation and the search for new forms as the old ones become dull.

Many exercises are given primarily in order to liberate the actor, to help him realize his own capabilities, and then force him to blindly follow instructions from the outside. Then, having trained a sensitive ear, he will be able to sense impulses within himself that he would never have felt otherwise. For example, a Shakespearean monologue broken down into three voices like a canon would be an excellent exercise. It requires three actors to read it several times at breakneck speed. At first, the technical difficulty absorbs all the attention of the actors, then gradually, as they overcome the difficulties, they are asked to reveal the meaning without violating the rigid form. Due to the speed and mechanical rhythm, this seems impossible: the actor is deprived of the opportunity to use his usual means of expression. Then he suddenly breaks the barrier and then realizes how much freedom is hidden in the depths of the toughest discipline.

Another example is to take the words “To be or not to be, that is the question” and distribute them to eight actors, one word each. The actors stand in a tight circle and try to pronounce words one after another, trying to create a living phrase. It is so difficult that even the most intractable actor becomes convinced of how deaf and insensitive he is to his neighbor. And when after long work the phrase will suddenly sound, everyone experiences a trembling feeling of freedom for the blink of an eye, they will suddenly see what the possibility of group play means and what difficulties it contains. The exercise can be developed further by replacing the "" verb "to be" with others with the same degree of affirmation or negation, and finally, sounds or gestures can replace one word or even all of them and still try to preserve the lively dramatic impulse of all participants in this experience.

The purpose of such exercises is to bring the actors to a state in which, if one does something unexpected, but reliably, the rest pick up on it and respond at the same level. This is ensemble performance or, in theater language, ensemble creativity. It would be completely wrong to think that exercises are a school that an actor needs only at a certain stage of his development. An actor, like any artist, is like a garden, so it would be useless to try to weed it out once and for all. Weeds constantly grow - this is completely natural, and they have to be removed, which is also only natural, but also necessary.

Actors must learn to change their means of expression. They must be able to select.

Staniol's title "Creating Character" is misleading: character is not static and cannot be built up like a wall.

Repetitions do not lead directly to the premiere. This is extremely difficult for some actors to grasp - especially those who pride themselves on their craft. For mediocre actors, the process of character development goes like this: at the very beginning there is a painful moment: “What will happen this time? I have already played many successful roles, but will inspiration still come today?” Such an actor appears at the first rehearsal, gripped by horror, but gradually his standard techniques fill the vacuum created by fear. As he “discovers” the technique of creating each passage, he reinforces it, feeling relieved that he has again avoided disaster. So on the day of the premiere, although he is nervous, his nerves are the seals of a marksman who is confident that he can hit the target, but is afraid that he will not be able to hit the top ten in the presence of friends.

A truly creative actor experiences a completely different kind of and much deeper horror during the laziness of the premiere. During the rehearsal, he was constantly occupied with character traits, which he constantly feels as particulars, much less significant than the truth itself, so that, being an honest artist, he finds himself forced to endlessly reject something and start something again. A creative actor is always ready to abandon frozen forms at the last rehearsal, because it is with the approach of the premiere that his creation is, as it were, illuminated by a powerful spotlight and he sees its pathetic inconsistency. This actor also strives to preserve everything he managed to find, he also wants to avoid injury at all costs by appearing in front of the public naked and unprepared, although this is exactly how he should be. He must be able to break everything and refuse results, even if the new ones turn out to be no better. This is easier for French actors than for English ones, because by temperament they are more ready to accept the idea that everything is no good. And this is the only way in which a living person can be born on stage, instead of being artificially constructed. The role that has been created is the same every evening - except that over time it will slowly be covered with erosion. In order for the role that was born to always remain the same, it must be born again, which makes it always different. Of course, when we are talking about long-running performances, the attempt to recreate each day becomes painful and almost unbearable, so that the result is that the experienced creative actor is forced to go back and turn to the second level, called technique.

I staged a play with such a perfect actor as Alfred Lunt. In the first act he had to sit on the bench. At rehearsal, he suggested taking off a shoe and rubbing your foot as a reality of life. He then added shaking out the boot before he put it back on. One day, when we were on tour in Boston, I walked past his restroom. The door was ajar. He was preparing for the performance, but I realized that he was waiting for me.

He beckoned to me excitedly. I entered the restroom, he closed the door and invited me to sit down. “I want to try something today,” he said. - But only if you agree.

I went out for a walk today and this is what I found.” He held out his palm. There were two tiny stones lying on it. “In that scene where I shake out the shoe,” he continued, “it always bothered me that nothing was falling out of the shoe. So I decided to try putting some pebbles in there. When I start shaking them out, you will see how they fall and the sound of falling will be heard. What do you say to this? I admitted it was a brilliant idea and his face lit up. He looked tenderly at these two stones, then looked at me - suddenly the expression on his face changed. For a long time he looked at the pebbles with concern. “Do you think it would be better to be alone?” The hardest task for an actor is to be sincere and detached at the same time; It is usually drilled into the actor that sincerity is all that is required of him.

With its moral overtones, this word causes great confusion. In some ways, the most powerful characteristic of Brecht's actors is the degree to which they are "insincere".

Only through his detachment will the actor be able to see his own cliches. There is a dangerous trap hidden in the word “sincerity”. First of all, the young actor discovers that his work is so grueling that it requires certain skills from him. For example, he must be heard, his body must obey his desires, he must become the master of concerted action, and not the slave of random rhythms. Therefore, he looks for technical means and soon acquires certain skills. Mastering techniques can very soon become a source of pride for an actor and at the same time lead him into a dead end. It becomes skill for skill's sake, rather than an expression of art - in other words, art becomes insincere. The young actor, observing the veteran's insincerity, is disgusted. He is looking for sincerity. Sincerity is a loaded word. Like “purity,” it carries childhood associations with virtue, decency, and truthfulness. It seems to be an ideal, a goal more worthy than the constant improvement of technology, and since sincerity is a feeling, everyone can always tell when he feels that he is sincere. You can find your way to sincerity through emotional commitment, commitment to something, truthfulness and, finally, as the French say, “diving into cold water.” Unfortunately, this is sometimes the birthplace of the worst manner of play. When we're talking about about other arts, no matter how deeply immersed in the creative process one goes, there is always the opportunity to step aside and look at the result. When the artist moves away from the canvas, new senses are brought into play, which can warn him of excesses. A trained pianist’s head is physically less occupied than his fingers, so that no matter how far he is “carried away” by the music, his ear retains its share independence and the ability to exercise objective control. Acting is in many ways unique in its difficulties, since the actor has to use treacherous, changeable and mysterious material - himself. They demand from him that he be completely captured, but remain at a distance - detached, but without detachment. He must be sincere and he must be insincere: he must learn to be sincerely insincere and to lie with absolute truthfulness. This is almost impossible, but it is very important and is easily forgotten.

Too often actors - and it is not their fault, but those of the dead schools with which the world is filled - build their work on the scraps of doctrine. The great system of Stanislavski, which for the first time approached the art of performance from the point of view of science and knowledge, has brought as much benefit as harm to many young actors who have misread it in detail and have been able to extract from it only hatred of doctrine. After Stanislavsky, Artaud's works, equal in importance to him, half read and 1/1 understood, gave rise to a naive conviction that emotional return and decisive self-expression are all that matters. In our time, this is additionally reinforced by the poorly digested and misunderstood provisions of Grotowski. Now there is a new form of sincere performance, which consists in the fact that everything must be passed through your body. This is a kind of naturalism. An actor of the naturalistic school sincerely strives to imitate the experiences and actions of people in the world around him and live the role in exactly this way. Following a new form of naturalism, the actor similarly gives his all, while trying to avoid the naturalistic. This is self-deception. It is only because the theater with which he is associated is at the other pole from old-fashioned naturalism that he believes that he, too, has managed to move far away from this manner he despises. In fact, he approaches the picture of his own experiences with the same conviction that every detail must be reproduced with photographic accuracy. The result is often vague, sluggish, and unconvincing.

There are groups of actors, particularly in the United States, who were brought up by Genet and Artaud and who despise all forms of naturalism. They would be indignant if they were called actors of the naturalistic school, but this is precisely what limits their creative possibilities. To be involved in the action with all the fibers of your being - this is the general involvement, but true art requires something else and needs more stingy, and sometimes completely different forms of expression. In order to understand this, it should be remembered that along with emotionality there is always a need for intellectual comprehension, which does not exist in itself, but which must be developed as an instrument of selection.

The need arises for a certain detachment, in particular for following forms that are not always easy to explain, but which have to be obeyed. For example, actors must play a fight with great dedication and genuine strength. Each performer is prepared for death scenes and conducts them with such spontaneity that he hardly has time to realize that, in essence, he knows nothing about death.

In France, when an actor comes to an audition, he asks to be shown the most emotionally charged passage, and without any hesitation plunges into it to demonstrate his skill. Playing the classic role, the same French actor pumps himself up backstage and then rushes onto the stage. He measures his success or failure by the degree of emotional return, whether his internal charge has reached maximum strength, and from this comes faith in influx, inspiration, etc. His weakness is that in this way he tries to play generalizations. I mean that in the "angry" sienna he becomes angry, or rather charges himself with anger, and this charge mechanically drives him throughout the sienna. This gives him a certain power and even at times a certain hypnotic power over the public, but this power is mistakenly seen as “sublime” and “transcendental”. In fact, such an actor becomes a slave to his passion, and he is not able to get out of it, even if a trifling change in the text requires something new from him. In a monologue in which elements of everyday speech are intertwined with the sublime, he pronounces everything with the same pathos, as if all the words are equally full of meaning. It is precisely because of this inflexibility that actors look stupid, and pompous performances deprive the character created by the actor of the inner naturalness.

Jean Genet dreams of theater breaking out of banality, and he wrote a number of letters to Roger Blain when he was working on the production of “Screen”, urging him to direct the actors towards “lyricism”. This sounds good in theory. What is “lyricism”? What does an extraordinary style of play mean? Does it imply a special voice, a pompous manner?

The actors of the classical school pronounced the words as if in a chant. Can this be considered turning traditions into relics? At what point does the search for form result in the acceptance of artificiality? For us, this is now one of the most difficult problems, and as long as we retain the inexplicable conviction that grotesque masks, exaggerated makeup, hieratic costumes, recitation, ballet plasticity are to some extent “ritual” in their essence, and therefore lyrical and deep, we will never escape traditional paths in the theater.

Anything can serve as a means to express something, but there is no such universal means with which everything could be expressed. Every action is valid in its own way, and every action is analogous to something else. I crumple up a piece of paper. The action itself is smoky. I can appear on the scene, and what I do should not go beyond what is happening at the moment. But it could also be a metaphor. Anyone who has seen Patrick Mengee slowly tear apart a newspaper exactly as in life, and yet in a very special way in Pipter's "Birthday", will understand what I mean. Metaphor is a sign and at the same time an illustration ; thus it is an element of language. The tone of speech, its rhythmic structure are linguistic elements that perform different tasks. Nothing often looks as bad as a well-trained actor reciting poetry.

There are, of course, academic laws of prosody, and they help the actor understand certain things at a certain stage of his development, but in the end he must understand that the rhythms of each image are as clear and unique as fingerprints. Then he has to learn that every note of musical literacy corresponds to something - but to what exactly? He must also establish this himself.

Music is the language of the invisible, through which “nothing” suddenly takes shape: it cannot be seen, but it can be felt. Declamation is not music, and yet it is something different from ordinary speech. Carl Orff staged a Greek tragedy accompanied by percussion instruments, using the elevation of rhythmic speech, and the result was more than astonishing.

Essentially, it differed both from the tragedy that is pronounced and from the trage that is sung.

This was something completely different. We cannot separate the structure and sound of Lear’s “forever, forever, forever, etc.” from its semantic meanings, and we cannot “single out Lear’s “monstrous ingratitude” without immediately seeing how the short length of the poetic line imbues the syllable with a special stress. Behind the words “monstrous ingratitude” there is excitement hidden. The texture of the language here is similar to Beethoven’s construction of sounds. In at the same time, this is not music, for these sounds are inseparable from the meaning.Poems are deceptive.

We once did an exercise, taking the sienna of Romeo and Juliet's farewell from Shakespeare and trying (artificially, of course) to unravel the interweaving various styles.

Siena sounds like this: Juliet. Do you want to leave? But the day is not soon; The nightingale was not a lark, That his fearful ears were confused by his singing, He sings here all night in the pomegranate bush.

Believe me, dear, it was a nightingale.

Romeo. It was a lark, a harbinger of the morning, - Not a nightingale. Look, my love, - With an envious ray, already in the east, Dawn cuts through the curtain of clouds.

The night puts out the candles: the joyful morning stands on tiptoes on the mountain steeps.

To leave is for me to live; to stay is to die.

Juliet. No, it’s not the light of the morning - I know that: It’s a meteor that separated from the sun, To serve you as a torchbearer And to illuminate the road to Mantua.

Stay a little longer, no need to rush.

Romeo, Well, let them catch me, let them kill me!

I'll stay if that's what you want.

I will say that the pale light is not the eye of the morning, But Cyptia’s brow is a misty reflection, And those sounds that pierce the vault of heaven There, in the heights, are not the trill of a lark. It’s easier for me to stay, there is no will to leave, Hello, oh death! Juliet wants it this way.

Well, let's talk to you, my angel: The day has not come, there is time ahead.

The actors were asked to select only lines that they could play about a real-life situation, words that they would feel comfortable using in the film. From this came the following: Juliet. Do you want to leave? But the day is not soon.

That was a nightingale (pause), not a lark (pause).

Romeo. It was a lark (pause), not a nightingale.

I could, my love (pause), if I left, I would live, if I stayed, I would die.

Juliet, No, it is not the morning light; (paujaa) stay a little longer. There's no need to rush.

Romeo. Well, let them catch me, let them kill me.

I’ll stay if that’s what you want (pause).

Hello, oh death! Juliet wants it this way.

Well, let's talk to you, my angel. The day has not come, there is time ahead.

The actors then acted it out as a realistic scene from a modern play, full of lively pauses: say the chosen elephants out loud, and say the missing WORDS quietly to yourself, to establish unequal lengths of pauses. The resulting fragment would be good for cinema, since passages of dialogue, interconnected by a rhythm of pauses of unequal duration, would be supported in the film by close-ups and other silent visual devices.

As soon as this crude division was made, the reverse became possible; play the cut out parts as if they had nothing in common with normal speech. Then you could experiment with them in different ways - turning them into sounds or in motion until it became absolutely clear to the actors that in each line of speech there are several cores of spoken language, around which the unspoken thoughts and feelings expressed in the speech are wound. in turn with words of a different order.

This change in manner from colloquial to stylized is so subtle that its work can be swept under the rug without being prepared. When an actor begins a monologue, trying to find a form for it, he must remember that it is not so easy to establish what is musical and what is rhythmic. For an actor playing Lear in a thunderstorm scene, it is not enough to start reading with a jerk, viewing his monologue as magnificent peals of thunderous music. There is also no point in saying these words in a hushed tone on the grounds that this is Lear's internal monologue. A passage of verse can be viewed, rather, as a formula with many characteristics - a code, and in which each letter has a function. In thunderstorm monologues, explosive consonants - in order to resemble thunder, imitate rain and wind. But consonants are not everything: inside these rattling letters lies a meaning, a meaning that is in constant motion, a meaning that depends on its carriers, images. Thus, “let it rain like a bucket and flood it”... is one thing, but scatter the prototypes of things and the seeds of ungifted people into dust!” is something else. To write it so succinctly requires an unsurpassed degree of skill: any loud-voiced actor can shout both lines at the same level, but a true artist must not only convey to us with absolute laziness the image in the spirit of Hierohim Bosch - Max Ernst in the second line where it says about the heavens casting down seeds, but I must portray this in the context of Lear’s rage..

He will see again that in the verse great importance attached to the words of “ungrateful people,” and this will become for him a remark extracted from Shakespeare himself. He will feel this and begin to look for a rhythmic structure that will allow these words to be given more force and weight, long line, and then in the general plan of the man and the storm his unshakable conviction in human ingratitude will flare up in close-up. Unlike close-up in cinema, this kind of meaningful close-up frees us from focusing solely on the person himself. The whole complex of our sensations is included in the work, and mentally we place “ungrateful people” both over Lear and over the world itself, his and ours at the same time.

We must be able to use common sense, especially when a correctly found technique sounds pompous and false. “Would you like whiskey” - the content of this phrase is better conveyed by conversational intonation than by chanting. “Would you like some whiskey” - this phrase has one dimension, one weight and performs one function. However, in Madama Butterfly these words are sung, and this one phrase by Puccini made the entire opera ridiculous.

“Dine” in Lear’s Siena with the knights is like “would you like whiskey.” Performers of the role of Lear often recite this phrase, introducing artificiality into the play, while Lear at the moment of uttering these words is not a participant in a poetic tragedy, he is simply a man demanding that dinner be served. Both of these lines: “ungrateful people” and “to dine” are taken from Shakespeare’s tragedy, but require completely different styles of execution.

At rehearsal, form and content are sometimes considered together, sometimes separately. Sometimes the study of form can unexpectedly reveal to us the meaning dictating it, and sometimes a detailed study of the content gives us a fresh sense of rhythm. "The director must look for the place where the actor is confused in his decisions, and here he must help the actor overcome difficulties. All this is dialogue and dance of director and actor. Dance is, of course, a metaphor, a waltz of director, actor and text. The movement goes in a circle, and who leads depends on where you are. The director will understand that new means are required every minute. He arrives at the conclusion that every rehearsal technique has its own meaning, but there are no techniques that can cover everything.Following the laws of crop rotation, he will make sure that sources such as explanation, logic, improvisation, inspiration dry up rather quickly, and then he will begin to move from one to the other. He will become convinced that thought, emotion and body cannot be separated, but nevertheless artificial separation is often required. Some actors do not respond to explanations, while others do the opposite. All this changes from time to time, and one fine day, quite unexpectedly, it is the non-intellectual actor who will understand the director through words, and the intellectual one through show.

In early rehearsals, improvisation, sharing associations and memories, reading written material, studying documents related to the era, watching films and works of art - everything helps everyone to understand the content of the play. None of these methods by themselves mean much - each is just a stimulus. In the play “Marat/Sade”, when kinetic images of madness arose and took possession of the actor, and he, improvising, surrendered to them, the others watched and made comments. Thus, a truthful image was gradually born, unlike those standard techniques that are certainly available in the arsenal of every actor for scenes of madness. Then, when the performer had succeeded in simulating madness and satisfying his colleagues with its apparent truthfulness, he had to face a new problem. He could have used an image drawn from his own observations, but the play was written about the madness of 1808, that is, before drugs, before treatment, when society treated the mentally ill differently, and they in turn reacted differently to it, etc. To show it. the actor didn't have it external model- he perceived Goya’s lines not as role models, but rather as incentives that confirmed his thief’s need to follow the lead of the most persistent internal impulses. He had to completely submit to these inner voices and, at his own peril and risk, abandon external models. He had to constantly maintain a state of obsession within himself.

As he moved away from this, a new difficulty arose before him: his responsibility to the play. And the trembling, and the screams, and all the sincerity in the world will not move the production from its place. An actor must say the words; if he creates a character that cannot say them, his work will be worthless. So the actor faces two opposing problems while working. There is a temptation to compromise - to somewhat weaken the impulses of the image so that they meet the needs of the scene. But its true task is the opposite - to make the image alive and effective. How? This is where the need for intelligence arises. Sometimes you need to analyze, study history and documents, and sometimes you need to scream, roar, and roll on the floor. It happens that there is an opportunity for respite, entertainment, and sometimes silence, discipline and complete concentration are needed. Before the first rehearsal with our actors, Grotowski asked to sweep the floor and remove clothes and all personal belongings from the room. He then sat down at the table, addressing the actors from a great distance, not allowing anyone to talk or smoke. Such a tense atmosphere created a certain creative atmosphere. When you read Stanislavsky's books, you see that some things are said specifically in order to put the actor in a serious mood, but the overwhelming majority of theaters treat this carelessly. However, sometimes nothing is more liberating than the absence of ceremony and the rejection of contrived forms of communication. It happens that it is necessary to focus all attention on one actor, and sometimes the collective process requires stopping individual work.

It is not necessary to design every detail. Discussing any possible option with all participants slows down the rehearsal too much and can be detrimental to the work as a whole. In this case, the director must have a sense of time, he must feel the rhythm of the process and follow it very accurately at every single moment. Sometimes it is necessary to discuss the general direction of the play, but there comes a time when it should be forgotten, paying attention only to what can be revealed through easy fun, extravagance, frivolity. There comes a time when no one should be bothered final result. I do not tolerate the presence of strangers at rehearsals, because I consider this work to be purely intimate, 4 closed: the actors should not be upset that they look stupid or make mistakes. Much in rehearsals is incomprehensible to an outsider - excesses are not only allowed, but sometimes even provoked, to the surprise and indignation of the troupe, until the moment comes to put an end to it all. And yet, even during the rehearsal period, there comes a day when the presence of strangers is necessary, when those present whose faces seem to express malevolence can cause new tension in the work, and tension in turn - a new rise. During the rehearsal process, the forms of work must inevitably change. And here is another requirement for the director: he must unmistakably feel the moment when the performers, intoxicated by their own talent and inflated by the creative process, lose sight of the play itself. One fine morning, the work changes radically: the result becomes the most important thing. Jokes and liberties are mercilessly eliminated, all attention is paid to the performance, the manner of pronouncing the text, performance, technique, diction, contact with the audience. It would be stupid for a director to take a doctrinaire position, that is, either to use technical terms when talking about tempo, fullness of sound, etc., or to completely avoid such concepts, since they are anti-artistic. It doesn't cost a director anything to get stuck in the system. There comes a moment when talking about pace, accuracy, diction turns out to be the only important thing, “Faster”, “keep going the same way”, “boring”, “change the pace”, “for God’s sake” becomes the only language understandable for the actors, while another week ago, such outdated terms could negate the entire creative process. The deeper an actor delves into the task facing him, the more instructions he is required to select, perceive, and carry out simultaneously. He must mobilize his subconscious, completely subordinating it to the demands of reason. The result as a whole is indivisible. However, emotions are constantly illuminated by the intellect, so that the viewer, who has been influenced either by persuasion, or pressure, or alienation, forcing him to change his assessments, as a result experiences something equally indivisible. Catharsis can never be simply an emotional cleansing: it must be addressed to the whole person.

There are two ways to get to the performance, if it takes place - through the foyer and through the exit to the stage. Are they, metaphorically speaking, connecting links or symbolizing disunity? If the stage is connected with life, if the audience is connected with life, then free access to the theater is needed, the task of which is to simplify the transition from the outside world to the meeting place. But since theater is essentially artificial, then going on stage reminds the actor that he not only finds himself in a special world that requires costume, makeup, transformation, but that the audience also dresses specially in order to escape from everyday life and in red carpet to go into the sanctuary. This is equally true for actors and spectators, since in both cases we are talking about completely different opportunities associated with different social conditions. The only thing that unites all types of theater is the need for an audience. And this is not just a truism: in the theater the audience completes the act of creation. When it comes to other forms of art, the artist can raise the idea of ​​working for himself as a principle. However great his sense of social responsibility, he can always say that his best criterion is his own instinct, and if he feels satisfaction when left alone with a completed work, there is a hope that others will also feel satisfaction from it. in the theater the situation is different due to the fact that it is impossible for one to take a last look at the completed work. Until the public appears, the work is not finished. Neither the author nor the director, even in a moment of megalomania, will want a performance for themselves. Even an actor who revels in himself will not want to play for himself, for the mirror. In order for the author or director to work only in accordance with their own taste and on the basis of their own judgments, they must work almost for themselves in rehearsal and only for themselves, surrounded by a dense wall of spectators. I think every director would agree that his own view of his work changes completely when he is in the audience.

It’s a strange feeling you experience at the premiere of a play you’ve staged. Just the day before, sitting at the rehearsal, you were convinced that such and such an actor was playing well, that such and such a scene was interestingly solved, that the movements were elegant, and that the entire passage was full of clear meaning. Now, surrounded by an audience, part of you reacts along with her, so your self says: “I’m bored”, “This happened before”, “If she behaves in such a suggestive way again, I’ll go crazy” or “I I don’t understand what they want to say at all.” Even if we take into account the super-nervous tension of the premiere, what is actually happening to change the director’s attitude towards his own work so much? I think that, among other things, it is a question of the sequence of events. Let me explain this with an example. In the first scene of the play, the girl meets her lover. She rehearsed this passage very softly, very truthfully, and found a form of simple, intimate address that touched everyone - but without context. In front of the public, it became absolutely clear that previous words and actions had not prepared this in any way. The audience was busy following completely different lines, relating to other characters and events, and suddenly they were shown a young actress muttering something inaudibly to a young man. In a later episode, when silence would have reigned on the stage during the action, this muttering would have been in place - but here it sounded formless, the intentions turned out to be vague and unclear.

The director tries to keep a picture of the performance as a whole in his head, but he rehearses in fragments, and even when the run-through comes, he inevitably perceives them as parts of a single whole.

But when the audience is present, forcing him to react with it, this vision of the play as a whole disappears, and for the first time he receives the impressions of the play in proper temporal sequence, one after another. It’s not surprising that everything looks different then.

That is why every experimental artist is concerned about all aspects of the relationship with the audience. By placing the audience in different ways, he tries to identify new opportunities for himself. A proscenium, an arena, a light-filled theater, a cramped barn or a room - this in itself already colors the event differently. But the difference may be purely external: a deeper difference arises when the actor is able to conform to the changing internal relationship with the audience. If an actor manages to capture the viewer's attention, thereby weakening his defenses, and then convince him to agree with a completely unexpected decision, then the viewer becomes more active. This is an activity that does not need to be manifested. The public, which instantly reacts to what is happening, may seem active, but in reality this kind of activity is imaginary.

Genuine activity may remain invisible.

What distinguishes theater from other arts is the absence of unshakable foundations. And yet, certain fixed criteria and rules are easily applied to this moving phenomenon (due to critical habit). Once, in the English provincial town of Stoke-on-Trent, I had the opportunity to watch the play “Pygmalion,” staged in the theater-in-the-circle. Thanks to the lively actors, the beautiful venue, and the cheerful audience, the most brilliant parts of the play sparkled in a new way. She “walked” great. The audience directly took part in the action. The performance seemed the epitome of perfection. However, all the actors were too YOUNG for their roles: the makeup was very rough, and the gray hair was painted directly on the hair. If by some miracle they had been transported at that moment to London's West End in a typically London theater filled with London spectators, the performance would have sounded extremely unconvincing, and the audience would have remained dissatisfied. But this does not mean that the London standard is better or higher than the provincial one. Quite the contrary. Because it is unlikely that anywhere in London this evening the theater temperature would rise as high as. in Stone. But such things should never be compared.. You should never set up a test for a hypothetical “if”, when it is not about the actors or the play, but about the entire performance as a whole.

In the Theater of Cruelty, the object of our study was partly the audience itself, and our first public performance turned out to be an interesting experiment in this sense. The audience who came to the “experimental” evening brought with them that mixed feeling of condescension, playfulness and slight disapproval that the word “avant-garde” usually evokes. We showed a number of excerpts. Our own task was purely selfish - we wanted to see what some of our experiments looked like under the conditions of a performance. We did not give the public any program, no list of authors, no titles, no commentary on what was happening.

The program opened with Artaud's three-minute play "A Stream of Blood", in which there was more Artaud than Artaud himself, since we completely replaced his dialogue with exclamations.

Some of the audience sat spellbound, some giggled. We staged the play as a serious one. Then they showed a small interlude, which we ourselves regarded as a joke. Now the audience was confused: the merrymakers did not know whether to continue laughing; those who were serious and did not approve of the laughter of their neighbors were in turn perplexed. As the performance continued, the tension grew. When Glenda Jackson stripped herself of everything, as the situation demanded, tension of the first kind set in: now, obviously, everything could be expected from the performance. We had the opportunity to observe how unprepared the audience was for momentary assessments of what was happening. At the second performance the tension eased somewhat. No critical articles appeared, and I don’t think that many of those who came to the second performance were prepared in advance by friends who had been there the day before. And yet the audience no longer felt such tension. I believe that, most likely, new factors have come into play. The audience knew that this play had already been performed, and the very fact that nothing appeared in the newspapers was a safety signal. Apparently, nothing terrible happened in the theater. If one of the spectators had been injured or if we had set fire to the building, it would have been printed on the front page. No news - good news. As the play went on, word spread that it consisted of improvisations, a few dull passages, a bit of Genet, a mish-mash of Shakespeare, and a lot of loud noises. So a select audience had already appeared; some, naturally, preferred to stay at home. Gradually, the hall was filled only with enthusiasts and convinced scoffers.

When there is a failure in the theater, at all subsequent performances the theater is filled with a small audience filled with great enthusiasm, and on the last night of the failed performance there are always cheers. Everything affects the behavior of the public. Those who come to the theater, despite negative reviews, do not flatter themselves with hope - they are ready for anything, even the worst. As a rule, we take our seats in the theater, already having in reserve accurate information that puts us in a certain mood even before the start of the performance. At the end of the performance, we automatically get up and leave.

When, after the play “We,” the administration invited the audience to remain in their seats in complete silence, it was interesting to observe how this offended some and was liked by others. In fact, why is it necessary to push people out of the theater immediately after the end of the performance. In this case, many remained sitting silently for 10 minutes or even more, and then began to exchange impressions. It seems to me a more natural and healthier conclusion to a shared experience than immediately rushing for the exit, of course, to the extent that this is dictated not so much by habit as by necessity.

Today, the audience question seems to be the most important and most difficult. We came to the conclusion that ordinary theater audiences are not the most emotional and not very loyal, so we had to start looking for “new” viewers. This is quite understandable, but at the same time quite artificial. As a rule, it is quite clear that the younger the audience, the more mobile and free their reaction. It is quite natural that young people are scared away from the theater by the worst that still exists in it. Thus, by changing theatrical forms in order to attract young people, we seem to be killing two birds with one stone. At football matches and greyhound races it is easy to notice that the ordinary public is much more immediate in its reaction than that; called the middle layer. So, obviously, it makes sense to attract the common public through simple means.

But this logic is easily refuted. The common public, of course, exists, but it is still something illusory. When Brecht was alive, his theater was filled with West Berlin intellectuals. Help for Joan Littlewood also came from the West End, and she was never able to survive on the working class audience of her area during her difficult times.

The Royal Shakespeare Theater organizes traveling performances in factories and youth clubs (following the continent's example) in order to introduce the theater to those sections of society who, perhaps, have never set foot in its doors, convinced that the theater does not exist for them. All this is aimed at arousing interest, breaking down barriers, making friends. This is a great stimulating activity. But behind all this there arises a problem, perhaps too dangerous to raise, - what is actually being traded? We instill in the working man that the theater is part of culture, in other words, part of the contents of the great new basket of goods available to everyone today. Behind all attempts to lure the public there is always something patronizing: “You can come too tonight,” and, like all patronizing, there is a lie hidden in it. The lie is the desire to suggest that the gift is worthy of being accepted. Do we really believe in its value? When people who remain outside the theater because of class or age get into it, is it enough to present them with “highest quality”? National theaters offer "top quality". At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in a new building, the best European singers, under the baton of the best Mozart conductor and assembled by the best producer, performed The Magic Flute. In this case, the cup of culture was filled to the brim, since, in addition to music and performance, the audience had the opportunity to admire the magnificent paintings of Chagall. According to the accepted view of culture, there is nowhere to go further, as they say. A young man who invites a girl to The Magic Flute reaches the pinnacle of what society can offer him, in the language of civilization. Tickets are "scarce" - but is the evening itself worth it? In a sense, all forms of luring the public are a dangerous juggle with the same offer - come take part in the good life, which is good because it should be good, because it is of the “highest quality”.

And this will not change as long as culture or any of the arts remains an appendage to life, completely separable from it, and once separable, obviously unnecessary. Only an artist for whom it is vitally necessary fights with full dedication for such art.

When it comes to theater, we always return to the same thing: it is absolutely not enough for writers and actors to feel an urgent need for lei: it must become equally necessary for the public. So, in a different sense, this is not only a matter of attracting the public. This is a more complex problem of creativity, which must become as urgent a need as water and food.

A true example of the need for theater seems to me to be an evening of psychodrama in a madhouse. Let's see what's happening there at this moment. There is a small community leading a measured, monotonous lifestyle. On certain days, for some of its inhabitants, an event occurs, something unusual that they look forward to - an evening of drama. When they enter the room where the evening will take place, they already know: whatever happens here, it will be different from what happens in the yard, in the garden, in the room where the TV is. Everyone sits in a circle. At first, the participants in the evening are suspicious, hostile, and non-communicative. The doctor in charge of the evening takes the initiative and invites patients to name topics. Proposals are made, they are discussed, and topics of interest to many are gradually identified, topics that literally become points of contact between them. The conversation develops painfully around them, and the doctor immediately moves on to dramatize them. Everyone in the circle gets their role, but this does not mean that they start playing. Some actually come forward as protagonists, while others prefer to remain seated and observe, either identifying with the hero or following his actions in a way that is both critical and detached.

The conflict continues to develop. This is real drama because people here will actually talk about the issues that concern them and everyone present in the only way in which these issues come to life. They may laugh. They may cry, they may not react at all. But behind everything that happens in the circle of these so-called insane people, there is hidden a very simple, very healthy basis. They all sincerely want help to get rid of their illness, even if they don’t know where the help will come from and what form it will take. Here I would like to clarify that I do not at all consider psychodrama as a type of treatment. It may not produce lasting results at all. But such an immediate event always leads to an unmistakable result. Two hours after the start of the evening, the relations between those present are somewhat modified due to the fact that they were all drawn into what was happening. As a result, a certain revival arises, a certain feeling of liberation, and contacts arise between people who seemed boarded up tightly. When they leave the room, they are no longer the same as when they entered it. Even if what happened turned out to be painfully unpleasant, they are excited to the same degree as if they were dying there from fun. Neither pessimism nor optimism in themselves mean anything: some participants simply find themselves returned to life for a while. If it disappears after leaving the room, it doesn’t matter either. Once having tasted such a state, they will certainly want to return there. An evening of drama will seem like an oasis in the desert of their lives.

This is how I understand the theater that is necessary: ​​a theater in which the actor and the spectator DIFFER from each other only functionally, and not essentially.

When I write these lines, I still cannot imagine how the renovation of the theater will take place: is this realistic only within the modest confines of a small community, or is it possible on the scale of a large theater in a capital city. Will we be able to achieve the same results, based on the demands dictated by modern life, that the Glyndep-bourne and Banrept theaters achieved in completely different conditions, from the position of other ideals? In other words, will we also be able to shape the views of the public even before they cross the threshold of our theater?

The theaters of Glindenbourne and Bayreuth existed in harmony with society, with the classes they catered to. Today it is difficult to imagine that a living and necessary theater does not conflict with society, but glorifies legalized values. And at the same time, the artist does not exist to make accusations, read morals, make speeches, and least of all to teach. After all, he is one of “them.” He truly challenges the audience when they are ready to challenge themselves. He sincerely rejoices along with the audience, becoming their mouthpiece when they have reason to rejoice.

If new phenomena were to arise right before the eyes of the public, and if the public were ready to perceive them, the stage and the auditorium would inevitably collide with each other. If this had happened, capricious social thinking would have centered around the most important motives of life: some serious tasks would have been rethought, revised and revalued. In this case, the difference between positive and negative attitudes, between optimism and pessimism, would become meaningless.

In a world where everything is so changeable and mobile, the search itself automatically becomes a search for form. Destruction of old forms, experimentation with new ones, new words, new relationships, new spaces, new buildings - all this relates to the same process, and any single production is nothing more than a single shot at an invisible target. It is foolish today to expect that a certain performance in itself, a style or direction in work will lead us to what we are looking for. Theater cannot develop only in a straight line in a world that moves not only forward, but also sideways and backward.

That is why for a long time there has not been a single style for theaters around the world, as there was in the 19th century.

However, not everything is just about movement, just about destruction, just about fashion.

There is also something unshakably strong. Performances of mass play arise somewhere, a theater of an actively acting spectator is born, proving the absurdity of the artificial division into the Inanimate, the Rough and the Sacred. In these rare cases, the theater of joy, catharsis, celebration, the theater of experiment, the theater of unanimity, the living theater are one. But now the performance is over, time has passed, and it cannot be restored by slavish imitation - the dead creeps in again, the search begins again.

Each instruction to action releases the inertia hidden within it. Take the most sacred of arts - music. Music is the only thing that reconciles many with life. Listening to music for many hours reminds people that life is worth living, but at the same time dulls the feeling of dissatisfaction and thereby prepares a person to accept the intolerable aspects of life. Or, for example, stunning stories of atrocities, photographs of a child struck by napalm - these are the cruelest manifestations of reality, but they open the audience's eyes to a need to act, which eventually becomes somewhat dulled. It is as if the feeling of such a need is simultaneously strengthened and weakened. What can be done?

There is one serious test in the theater. When the show is over, what's left? People forget about pleasure; moreover, even strong sensations disappear. And all reasoning loses track. But when sensations and arguments are used so that the public can peer into itself, then something ignites in the consciousness. An event scorches the memory, leaving in it an outline, a taste, a trace, a smell - a picture. What remains is the central image of the play, its silhouette, and if the elements are correctly combined, this silhouette will be its meaning, this form will become the essence of what it must express. When, YEARS later, I think about the most powerful theatrical impressions, I find imprinted on my memory: two tramps sitting under a tree, an old woman pulling a pike cart, a dancing sergeant, three people on a sofa in hell - or sometimes a trace that turned out to be deeper, than the image itself. I have no hope of accurately reproducing the meaning, but such a trace makes it possible to reconstruct the chain of meaning. A few hours could change my attitude towards life. This is difficult to achieve, but it is worth striving for.

The actor himself hardly remains scarred from the intense stress. Any actor, after playing a scary, awe-inspiring role, is both relaxed and happy.

It seems that it is useful for a person carrying a lot of physical activity to let strong sensations pass through him/herself. I am convinced that it is useful for a man to be an orchestra conductor, it is useful for him to be a tragedian. As a rule, they live to a very old age. But I also understand that there is a price to pay for this. The material you use to create these imaginary people (after the performance you throw them off as easily as a glove) is your own flesh and blood. The actor wastes himself all the time. Using as if his erudition, as if his intellect, he creates images that cease to exist when the performance is over. The question is: can we prevent the public from experiencing something like this?

Will the audience retain a sense of catharsis, or will the joyful consciousness of their own well-being be the limit that is available to them? Here, too, many contradictions arise. The impact of theater is liberation. Both laughter and strong experiences cleanse the body, and in this sense they are the opposite of what leaves a trace in the memory, for any cleansing is associated with renewal. And yet: are influences that liberate and influences as a result of which something remains so different from each other? Isn’t it naive to believe that they are almost opposed to each other? Wouldn't it be more correct to say that during the update process everything can happen again?

There are many rosy-cheeked old men and women. These are those who have retained amazing energy, but these are big children: without a wrinkle on their faces, cheerful, joyful, and have never matured. There are others - not grumpy or decrepit, but wrinkled, who have experienced a lot and yet are radiant, renewed. Even youth and old age can overlap each other. The question for the old actor is whether he will be able to discover new possibilities for himself in the art that so renews him? For the audience, happy and renewed by a joyful evening spent at the theatre, the question is the same.

What are the further possibilities? We know that there can be a fleeting release. Could anything be left?

Here the question again comes down to the viewer. Will he want to change the conditions surrounding him?

Will he want something different in himself, in his life, in the life of society? If not, then he does not need the theater to become a test for him, so that he can be magnifying glass, spotlight or meeting place.

On the other hand, he may need either one thing or all at once. In this case, he not only needs the theater itself - he needs everything that he can get from it.

Thus, we come to a formula, an equation that sounds like this: theater - teaching staff.

In order to decipher these letters, we will have to use an unexpected source. The French language does not have adequate words to translate Shakespeare. But, oddly enough, it is in this language that we find three words used every day, which contain the problems and opportunities of the theater.

Repetition, representation, participation. The words have the same meaning as the English ones, but the French repetition also reflects the mechanical side of the process, unlike the English rehearsal. Week after week, day after day, hour after hour, practice makes perfect. This is day labor, cramming, discipline is a boring activity that gives good results. Every athlete knows that training eventually makes its own adjustments. Repetition is a creative process; there are pop singers who rehearse a song for a year or even more before performing it in public. After that, they will perform it for another fifty years. Lawrems Olivier himself rehearses the dialogue until he brings the muscles of the tongue to a state of absolute submission - this is how he gains complete freedom. For a clown, an acrobat, a dancer, it is quite obvious that only through repetition can certain movements be mastered, and anyone who denies repetition knows that certain means of expression are automatically closed to him. At the same time, repetition is a word without a halo. This is a concept without heat. Direct association from him is always merciless. Repetition is the music lessons that we remember from childhood, this is playing scales. Repetition is a traveling musical troupe, playing automatically with the fifteenth cast, the actions have lost their meaning and flavor. Repetition is what leads to nonsense: a performance that goes on too long and exhausts the soul, the introduction of understudies - in a word, everything that sensitive actors are afraid of. This carbon copy imitation is lifeless. Repetition negates the living. It’s as if the word itself contains the main contradiction of the theater. For an event to develop on stage, it must be prepared in advance, and the process of preparation often involves repeating the same thing. Once completed, it needs to be viewed. It may then entail a legal requirement to be repeated again and again. In such repetition are the seeds of future decay.

How to resolve this contradiction? And here the answer is in the word representation, which in French means representation. Representation is the case when something is presented, something from the past is shown again, something that once existed exists now. A performance is not an imitation, but not a description of an event taken from the past.

Representation denies time. It erases the difference between yesterday and today. It takes yesterday's event and makes it resonate today in all its manifestations, including the immediate. In other words, representation is what it should be - the past arising in the present. It is at this moment on the stage that revival of life occurs, which is impossible in the process of repetitions, but is inherent in both the rehearsal and the performance itself.

The study of these phenomena opens up a wide field of activity. We begin to understand what living action is, what makes up movement in a momentary period of time, what forms falsehood can take, what is partly alive and what is entirely artificial, until the true factors that make the representation itself so difficult begin to reveal themselves to us. And the more we study them, the more clearly we see that in order for a rehearsal to grow into a performance, something else is needed. The event will not happen on its own; help is required. But such help is not always there, and yet without real help, the resurrection of the past will never be accomplished. We wanted to find this missing ingredient, and we began!] watching the rehearsal, observing the hard work of the actors. We realized that in a vacuum their work becomes meaningless. And here we find the key. This immediately brings us to the thought of the public: we see that without the public there is no purpose, no meaning. What is the public? In French, among the numerous designations for those who observe (audience, spectators), one word stands out - assistance. I'm watching the play: J "assiste a une piece.

Participate is a simple word, but it holds the key. The actor is preparing, he is involved in a process that at any moment may turn out to be lifeless. He is preparing to capture something and then bring it to life on stage. At the rehearsal, the living element of participation comes from the director, who is there to help with his audience participation.

But when the actor finds himself in front of the audience, he notices that the magical transformation does not happen as if by magic. If the audience simply watches what is happening, expecting the actor to do his job, then under their indifferent gaze he will suddenly discover that the only thing he can do is repeat the rehearsals. Deeply excited, he will try with all his might to breathe life into his work, but will immediately feel that nothing is working. Then he will explain it as a “bad” hall. In those cases when the performance “goes well”, it will meet with an audience that will react lively and with interest to what is happening on stage - such an audience participates. With her participation, with the participation of her attentive eyes and joyful concentration, the rehearsal turns into a performance. Then the word “performance” will no longer stand between the actor and the spectator, between the hall and the spectacle. It embraces them both: what exists for one, exists for the other. The audience itself has also changed. She came to the theater from life from the outside, which, in essence, is now repeated on this specially designated platform, where every moment is lived more vividly and with greater impact. The audience empathizes with the actor, and they, in turn, empathize with them from the stage.

Repetition, representation, complicity. These words sum up three elements, each of which is necessary for the event to take place. But the essence is still missing, because any three words are static; any formula is an inevitable attempt to establish the truth and always. The truth in the theater is always in motion. Now, when you read this book, it is already outdated. For me, this is an exercise frozen on paper. But theater has one feature that distinguishes it from books. There is always the possibility of starting over. In life, this is unrealistic: we will never be able to go back. We can't turn back the clock; we won't get a second chance. In the theater, everything can be considered not happening.

In everyday life, “if only” is a fiction, in the theater it is an experiment. In everyday life, “if only” is an evasion; in the theater, “if only” is the truth.

When I manage to convince you of this truth, then theater and life are one whole. This is a lofty goal. But it's hard work.

It takes a lot of work to play. But when we consider work as play, then it is no longer work.