Brecht And Stanislavski Essay

Brecht obviously had developed his own theatre practice not only independently of but actually, as we have seen, defining himself against (what he thought of as) Stanislavski’s work. Whilst he would have recognised these areas of overlap with his own practice, he also clearly laid different emphases upon different aspects of the work than Stanislavski would have. So, for example, Brecht took Stanislavski’s concept of the super-objective, which for Stanislavski represents the Ruling Idea of the play – what the play is essentially about, which then unites and guides the actors, helping them to work together in the service of a coherent and focused production – but then emphasised the distancing aspects of this process for the actors much more than Stanislavski himself would have done. Mumford notes that Brecht ‘By the ‘fifties... had become more aware of Stanislavski’s use of the
After his time with Stanislavski Meyerhold chose to take a very different path from his old teacher, but over the course of their working lifetimes each continued to stimulate and influence the other so that in the end Stanislavski could refer to the younger man as his only real heir in the theatre. Vakhtangov and Michael Chekhov were able to use the System as a foundation for their own practice, building upon and challenging some of its central tenets. Brecht had very different aims and concerns much of the time from Stanislavski, but nevertheless came to appreciate and use aspects of the System in his final years. Auslander’s analysis of Stanislavski, through the prism of Derridian deconstructive theory, was both useful and provocative, and Lehmann, Dafoe and Zarilli have proved to be challenging critics and artist / performers in a postmodern