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In December, as the third season of the HBO’s Succession came to a close, The New Yorker ran a profile of Jeremy Strong, the actor who plays the series’ most hapless figure. His character, Kendall Roy, is the son—and, as the series opens, the heir apparent—of an aging corporate media mogul. The father, Logan Roy, has a sadistic streak. Everyone in the family is both privileged and damaged. Arguably, though, it is Kendall who endures the worst of his father’s bullying: the reminders, both subtle and brutal, that the world feels little respect for a billionaire’s son.
Strong’s performance in the role is impressive, though The New Yorker revealed that his approach to acting—a theatrical discipline called “the Method”—had not endeared him to his colleagues on the show. It consists (per the article’s rendering, anyway) principally of remaining in character at all times while on the set, combined with a refusal to go over his lines with the rest of the cast, in the interest of preserving the unrehearsed quality of real-life interaction. This effect was not appreciated by everyone who worked with him; you get the impression that many expletives did not make their way into the piece.
Reduced to such terms, the Method may sound like a rationale for prima donna behavior—and possibly detrimental to the performer who practices it. (Playing make-believe for long periods at peak intensity is not ordinarily encouraged in adults.) Much online discussion in December turned on whether Strong’s approach was a matter of deep commitment to his craft, evidence of rampant egotism and willfulness, or possibly something in between.
The mixed reactions seem to echo the clashes of opinion that Isaac Butler recounts in The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act (Bloomsbury). The author, a director who teaches theater history and performance at the New School, frames his book as a sort of biography of the Method. It is, in effect, an immigrant’s story, with its subject born and growing up in Russia under the last two decades of czardom before coming to the U.S. and making it a home.
The man behind the Method was Konstantin Stanislavski, the co-founder and overall presiding genius behind the Moscow Art Theater, founded in 1898. Stanislavski’s ambition went far beyond directing. His goal was to redeem the miserable state of the Russian theater, which suffered not just from government censorship but from debased standards: stereotyped performance styles, inattention to set design and the need to stage as many different plays as possible in a given week, just to keep the seats full. Rehearsals were usually perfunctory and sometimes skipped entirely. A public accustomed to the inertia of mediocrity was in no position to demand anything better. Stanislavski and his associate Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko believed that a complete overhaul of every aspect of stagecraft was necessary, and in creating the Moscow Art Theater, they showed the audience what it had been missing.
As artistic director, Butler writes, Stanislavski “became known for his unrelenting attention to detail and his use of pauses, little moments when the world onstage existed without—or perhaps beyond—language. A shaft of light, a cough or sniffle, a piece of paper dropped and then picked up: Out of these Stanislavski created a visual and auditory poetry, glimmering like the reflection of light on snow. The accumulation of everyday microdramas was an invitation to the audience, beckoning them to watch more closely, discover more, feel more; it seduced them into the world of the play.”
At the heart of his work was Stanislavski’s approach to working with actors—a body of principles and techniques that became known as his System. The prevailing tendency had been for actors not to speak their lines so much as declaim them, accompanied by gestures and postures imitated from previous performers. Stanislavski instead pushed actors to find the essence of the character’s personality and relationships—the motives, overt and hidden, driving their actions—and to draw on their own memories when expressing emotion onstage.
The goal was not simply to get more vivid and compelling performances out of his actors—though that certainly was part of it. Butler quotes Stanislavski on the possibility of creating a state of consciousness in which “the actor passes from the plane of actual reality into the plane of another life, created and imagined by him.”
By the time the Moscow Art Theater toured the United States in 1923, it was perhaps the most admired theatrical group in the world, and certainly the most discussed, with performances so electrifying that American audiences seemed not to care that the dialogue was all in Russian. Members of the ensemble who settled down in the United States began teaching aspects of Stanislavski’s System to younger actors, whose adaptations of it for Broadway and Hollywood were eventually dubbed the Method. How faithfully the Method followed the System was a heated question among practitioners in its day, with no scholarly consensus likely now—although it seems fair to say that Stanislavski’s vision had a spiritual dimension, an almost religious notion of art’s power to transform consciousness on both sides of the proscenium, that did not take root in the U.S.
His American disciples absorbed (or screwed up, depending on whom you ask) mainly the potential to create richer, deeper characters onstage—not only their personal psychology but the nuances of social background, including class and ethnicity. The movement really began to have an impact during the Great Depression among left-leaning theater people committed to realistic depictions of people and problems.
As with Butler’s account of the Russian background of the System, his treatment of the American theater, particularly from the 1930s through the 1950s, is crowded with personalities and offstage developments, social and political. As the Method takes shape as a school or movement, the author always shows it in the context of changing mores and audience expectations. That is particularly true of the chapters on the Method’s adaptation to Hollywood and early television. The Supreme Court’s 1948 decision that forced the studios to divest themselves of their theaters set off a series of changes, including at the level of performance: “Whereas before, actors had signed long-term contracts, been paid by the week, made back-to-back films, and parlayed their type into every project,” writes Butler, “the new actor was versatile, serious-minded to a fault, and idiosyncratic.”
That new actor had probably performed a scene at the Actors Studio in New York, before an audience solely of peers, under the searing gaze of artistic director Lee Strasberg, whose critical assessment set the standard for generations of actors—Sidney Poitier, Shelley Winters, Dustin Hoffman and Marlon Brando among them. Martin Landau’s description of Strasberg’s teaching on emotion is incisive. He wanted the actor to “find it,” Landau said, “express it, [then] suppress it … find the emotion, and then find a way to allow it out, and then hold it back the way the character would, and if stuff leaks out that’s what’s supposed to happen.”
The approach drew criticism from those who regarded Method actors as, in Butler’s words, “a group of self-involved mumblers,” prone to bringing out their characters’ neuroses and self-loathing. But “the camera loved their approach,” he adds, “and producers and directors loved having actors who had trained for years in improvisation.”
Routine-shattering innovations in the arts tend to grow familiar and respectable—and that process is indeed part of Butler’s story: Method-style expressivity and nuance long ago became something many theater- and moviegoers regard as essential to a memorable performance, while Stanislavski’s insistence on rehearsal as an organic phase of creating the world of a play now seems obvious. I had any number of aha moments while reading The Method, as it became clear that the immediacy of numerous performances I’ve seen over the years was in fact thoroughly mediated by the developments Butler narrates.
At the same time, something about the Method is just outré enough to remain provocative long after its influence on the American stage and screen became pervasive. Hostile comments on Strasberg’s influence from decades ago echoed in the wake of that profile of Jeremy Strong: charges of self-importance, personal instability and so forth. Here the influence of the Method seems overstated. Nothing in Butler’s account suggests that staying in character at all times was central to what Stanislavski or his students had in mind. More to the point, perhaps, is a remark toward the end of the book about changing audience expectations in the 21st century: “The ever-escalating battle for the finite resource of a viewer’s attention encourages both storytelling and acting in which the choices on display are big, simple, and clearly communicated.” A school of performance focused on interiority and mood may have fallen totally out of step with a box office that wants superhero movies.
