Система
The System
C2 · Proficient · non-fiction · 10 scenes · Premium story
A proficiency-level documentary about the problem that produced the most widely taught approach to acting there is. Two strangers sit down in a Moscow restaurant in 1897 to complain about the theatre and get up eighteen hours later having founded one. The question they leave behind is a practical one: it is Wednesday, half past seven, the part has been played two hundred times and the actor has toothache — how does he tell the truth tonight? Stanislavsky spent forty years answering it and changed his answer more than once, which is why what New York came to call the Method rests on a phase of his work he had already moved past. Also here: a play that failed in one city and triumphed in another, and an author who spent his last months insisting he had written a comedy.
Characters
- Konstantin Stanislavsky (Константин Станиславский) — 1863–1938
- Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (Владимир Немирович-Данченко) — 1858–1943
- Anton Chekhov (Антон Чехов) — 1860–1904
- Stella Adler (Стелла Адлер) — 1901–1992
Vocabulary from this story
- театр — theatre
- сцена — stage
- актёр — actor
- режиссёр — director
- роль — role, part
- спектакль — production, performance
- репетиция — rehearsal
- зритель — spectator
- зал — auditorium
- занавес — curtain
- провал — flop, failure
- успех — success