Realism in Theatre

Realism is a major movement of the theatre, and Konstantin Stanislavski embraced this with his acting method focusing on real life. Realism “must depict truthfully the real, physical world, and… truth can be attained most fully through impersonal, objective observation and representation of the world around us” (370 H.O.T.T). Stanislavski took realism and expanded it to acting. When I began learning how to act my director had us study his book “An Actors Work” so that we could achieve real life, real art, and bring to life the human spirit. Stanislavski wanted to focus on human nature, how one would really react if put in the same situation, he didn’t want theatrical convention, and he did so in several ways. One was by studying and examining the given circumstances of a script to know what our characters limits were. From our given circumstances one could draw from emotion memory, which is relating a moment or event in the characters life with some moment from our own life so that the emotion is real. The gaps in script that describe a character are tied together by the imagination of the actor who creates this characters soul. He method was more than an inside out technique, and he believed that an actor’s body and voice had to be in shape so that the big moments inside ourselves could be shown and heard through our movements, expressions, and voice. He gave us the idea of “the magic if” that “provokes instantaneous, instinctive actions” (49 A.A.W.) thus giving an inner justification to our outside actions. The tricky bit is to experience this moment for the first time, every time on stage. He said “art itself is born at the moment when an unbroken sustained line, sound, voice, movement is created” (368 A.A.W.).