Stanislavski and Shakespeare

Extract

I first saw Stanislavski’s work in 1922, when the Moscow Art Theatre presented in Paris The Lower Depths, The Brothers Kammazov, and The Cherry Orchard. I was carried away with admiration for The Cherry Orchard. The play is written in an impressionistic style that leaves room for silence and long pauses. Although it was bathed in a profusion of naturalistic detail, the production grew into a brilliant, comic, and moving spectacle. I felt that this was poetry—poetry without rhetoric, theatricality, or lyricism. Solely through the skill of the actors, everything became as true as life.