Content area
Full Text
AN ACTOR'S WORK: A STUDENT'S DIARY. By Konstantin Stanislavski. Edited and translated by Jean Benedetti. New York: Routledge, 2008; pp. xxviii + 693. $35.00 cloth.
An Actor's Work: A Student's Diary has excellent potential to correct the record in English-language theatre studies regarding what Stanislavski actually taught. Into one edition Jean Benedetti has translated, edited, and restored Stanislavski's English works, An Actor Prepares and Building a Character, their Russian counterpart, An Actor's Work on Himself, and other texts thought to be partial drafts for what Stanislavski conceived of as a final book. Benedetti's book has two parts: "Year One: Experiencing" and "Year Two: Embodiment." He believes this work follows the author's original intentions. Admittedly, authorial intention is a literary cul-desac, but Benedetti's work bears the earmarks more of historical restoration than critical analysis, thus Stanislavski's intention is a legitimate concern.
Although some will surely find fault with the book, and a great many untranslated and unpublished texts remain in the Stanislavski opus, Benedetti's work is far superior to the excised and rushed work of the American translator and editor, Elizabeth Hapgood, which has dominated non-Russian theatre classrooms for the last seventy years. Of equal importance are Benedetti's efforts to de-Stalinize Stanislavski's Russian versions, reviving terminology and concepts that Soviet censorship would not permit. Benedetti claims to have restored the unity of the Stanislavski system's psychological, analytical, and physical components, which were separated and muted by virtue of different manuscripts presented in the United States and Soviet Union, by state and self-censorship, and by American and Soviet editorial policies (xvi). The conditions surrounding all previous publications of Stanislavski's work were...