MODERN TENDENCIES The loth century has seen several new and distinct theories of acting. Different schools, academies of acting and theatres, mostly repertory, have done a great deal towards improving the standard of acting and team work or ensemble acting, on the stage : notably, in England, the Repertory theatre in Birming ham, and the Liverpool Repertory theatre; in Ireland the Abbey theatre, Dublin. Such English producers as Gordon Craig, Gran ville Barker, Basil Dean, J. B. Fagan, Lewis Casson, Nigel Play fair, performed very important work in improving the quality of acting, and creating stage ensembles, not only directly by their stage work, but also by their writings on the subject. In the United States, David Belasco, the Theatre Guild of New York, the Washington Square Players, the Provincetown Playhouse and such producers as Hopkins, R. E. Jones, the Reichzts and others contributed to this improvement. Moreover, the Little Theatre movement (q.v.) in America must not be overlooked.
In reviewing the general style of acting during this period, it will be noticed that everywhere on the stages of the theatres where there was no leading producer who had a definite theory or system of acting, and who trained his company without having a definite system or theory, there has been a mixture, not only of modern but of very many different styles of acting. In the so called commercial theatre, with star actors, the typical style of acting was generally not an art of creation of imaginary charac ters, but a kind of repetition of themselves by the actors in every part and in every play. These stars were not really acting, but merely showing themselves off to the public, using their personal ity and certain peculiarities of that personality, and trying to please and to obtain the sympathy of the audience.
Producers such as Max Reinhardt in Germany and Firmin Gemier in Paris used, for the most part, the methods of acting created by the naturalists, Andre Antoine in France, and Kroneg, the producer of the German Meininger Company and developed by Otto Brahm in Berlin and by Stanislaysky in Moscow. Some times these producers introduced, in this naturalistic acting, ideas of the formalists, Georg Fuchs in Germany, Meyerhold and Tairof in Russia, Gordon Craig in England and others. Sometimes they introduced touches of the synthetic theories of acting advocated by Komisarjevsky since 191o. The majority of the French actors trained in the Conservatoire in Paris remained still under the in fluence, not only of the old romantic school, but also of the pseudo-classical school of acting of the 18th century.
Naturalism.—The best known of all the new theories of acting which appeared after 1910 was the system of Stanis laysky, the leading producer and director of the Moscow Art theatre. His system was founded on the principle that an actor, having to be natural and sincere on the stage, could be so only by means of reproducing emotions experienced at some time or other in his life. That form of "psychical naturalism" became part of Stanislaysky's system as a result of "outer naturalism," which he advocated before he turned to psychology in the endeavour to find 'out a scientific system of acting.
The "inner naturalism" in acting was not a new feature in Stanislaysky's theory. Some French theatrical theorists had already, in the 18th century, founded their systems of acting on the same ideas. They held that an actor can represent himself on the stage only if it is desired that he should be sincere; that "love scenes are much better played by actors who are in love in real life." Like the followers of Racine, Stanislaysky believed that contemporary actors living in their own time, and each one in his special atmosphere, are unable to produce other emotions than those that are applicable to the time and to the surround ings in which they lead their every-day life. To be sincere, they must place, beneath the lines and stage directions of the author, their own emotions already experienced in real life.
It is quite clear that this type of acting destroys the form created by the author of the play and the rhythm of his lines, which express the inner content and the inner movements of the play. The actor who acts by the power of his imagination passes from the form and the rhythm of the play to the inner content of it. The idealistic and emotional content of the play, which he obtains through the form and rhythm of the play, exists in his imagination, and produces the necessary working of his intellect to create a stage character with all its peculiarities. The pupil of Stanislaysky neglects the form and rhythm of the play and substitutes his own remembered, intellectual states in place of those of the author.
The Formalists.—Another system, opposed to Stanislaysky's ideas, has been advocated by the symbolists, the formalists and the expressionists. Here we have a complete negation of sincerity and life-likeness; the less the acting is sincere and life-like the better. The actor must not try to create any definite characters ; he must represent abstract ideas, and convey these through his speeches delivered in a formal way, and through his movements and gestures, again produced in a formal, unlife-like and "pictur esque"- or marionette-like style. The Russian and German for malists, Meyerhold, Tairof and Piscator, after the Revolution, became much interested in acrobatics and circus business; the movements of the actors in their productions became something akin to a perpetuum mobile, dominating both the psychology of the play and the meaning of the lines. Thus the acting on their stages resembled a mixture of circus and cubistic ballet perform ance. Later, Meyerhold returned to the more or less naturalistic style. Some impressionists, such as Jessner and Evreinov, used formal methods interspersed with psychological touches. Actors on the French avant-garde stages worked on somewhat similar lines at the Atelier directed by Dublin, in the productions of Pitoef and Jouvet. At the Vieux Colombier, now closed, they used the same methods of acting. Copeau, the director of that theatre, must be considered as a pioneer, in France, in the fight against naturalism and the old fashioned Conservatoire acting. He definitely introduced such new methods of acting as the psycho logical and the formal on the French stage.