Michael Chekhov

Michael Chekhov: The Other Road Out of Stanislavski

In 1976 Beatrice Straight collected an Academy Award for *Network* and used her few seconds at the microphone to thank a Russian émigré who had been dead for twenty-one years. Michael Chekhov had taught her in a Devon manor house and then in a small Connecticut town, and he is among the rarest figures in twentieth-century theatre: a man Konstantin Stanislavski is said to have called his most brilliant student, who then spent the rest of his life insisting that his teacher's method led actors in the wrong direction.

The Nephew Who Was Not the Playwright

He was born in Saint Petersburg on 16 August 1891, the son of Alexander Chekhov — elder brother of the playwright — and Natalya Aleksandrovna Golden, a Russian Jewish former governess. The surname was both a gift and a burden. He entered the Moscow Art Theatre and its First Studio, the laboratory where Stanislavski tested his system on a small company under Leopold Sulerzhitsky, and where a young director named Yevgeny Vakhtangov was pushing the same material toward something stranger and more theatrical. Chekhov's professional career runs from 1913. In 1914 he married the actress Olga Chekhova, whom he met at the Studio; their daughter Ada was born in 1916, the marriage ended in 1917, and in 1918 he married Xenia Karlovna Ziller.

When Vakhtangov died in 1922, Chekhov took over the First Studio, which was subsequently renamed the Moscow Art Theatre II. He was, briefly, one of the most powerful figures in Soviet theatre.

Breaking With the Master

The break was not careerism; it was diagnosis. Chekhov had pushed Stanislavski's affective memory — the technique of dredging one's own past for usable feeling — until he suffered a nervous breakdown. The episode was consequential for both men: it helped Stanislavski recognise the limitations of his early concepts of emotional memory. Chekhov drew a harder conclusion. Excavating the actor's own biography, he decided, delivered naturalism and not much else, and naturalism was the smallest thing a stage could do. He made the counter-argument in performance, most famously as Senator Ableukhov in a stage adaptation of Andrei Bely's *Petersburg* — a grotesque, symbolist construction that no amount of personal recall could have produced.

His alternatives came with unfashionable company. Chekhov read Rudolf Steiner and took anthroposophy seriously; he encouraged yoga, meditation and an interest in the supernatural and the subconscious among his pupils, and drew on symbolist literature, fairy tales and philosophy rather than on documentary realism. By 1927 this had become dangerous. Under advancing Stalinism he came into conflict with the Communist regime and was threatened with arrest, his spiritualist interests specifically at issue. He left.

Exile as Curriculum

Emigration turned a director into a pedagogue. In Germany in the late 1920s he opened a studio and began assembling the physical, imagination-based system of actor training that would carry his name. From 1930 to 1935 he worked at the Kaunas State Drama Theatre in Lithuania. In 1936 he founded the Chekhov Theatre School at Dartington Hall in Devon, teaching roughly twenty students drawn from Britain, the United States and Australia a curriculum of speech, movement, improvisation and scene study built on Shakespeare, fairy tales and classical texts. War closed it.

In 1939 he transplanted the school to Ridgefield, Connecticut, and grew it into the Chekhov Theatre Players — a professional touring company of twenty-two permanent members that took Shakespeare and Dickens around America to good notices. Military recruitment emptied it in 1942. Twice in six years, his life's work had been dismantled by other people's wars.

The Psychological Gesture

What survived was the technique, and at its centre sits the psychological gesture. It is not mime and not blocking. The actor finds a single physical movement — a crushing grip, an upward reach, a closing-in — that embodies the character's central need or internal dynamic, and rehearses it until it saturates the body. The gesture itself is then submerged: it shapes stance, posture and behaviour without ever being performed where an audience can see it. "The psychological gesture is your own secret," Chekhov wrote. "It is the basis on which you stand." One admiring account calls it the quintessential genetic code that separates one person from another.

Around it he built a vocabulary of movement qualities — moulding, floating, flying, radiating — and the idea of atmosphere, the emotional weather of a scene, which the actor generates rather than merely inhabits. He borrowed from Steiner the notion of a higher "I," an artistic self available above the performer's ordinary limits. His premise throughout was that the unconscious creative self is reached by indirect, non-analytical means: not by asking the actor what he feels, but by giving his body something to do. "The body is the instrument of my will," he told his students. Morris Carnovsky caught the difference in a phrase — where Stanislavski spoke of relaxation of muscles, Chekhov called it a feeling of ease.

Hollywood's Character Man

Between 1944 and 1954 he made his living in front of a camera, in accented supporting parts: Ivan Stepanov in *Song of Russia* (1944), Max Polikoff in *Specter of the Rose* (1946), Dr Fromm in *Invitation* (1952), Professor Schuman in *Rhapsody* (1954), his last film role. The one that mattered was Dr Alexander Brulov, the wry old analyst in Alfred Hitchcock's *Spellbound* (1945), which brought his only Academy Award nomination. The teaching continued alongside it, and the roll of students is the strongest argument anyone has made for him: Marilyn Monroe, Yul Brynner, Anthony Quinn, Clint Eastwood, Patricia Neal, Jack Palance, Sterling Hayden, Mala Powers, Dorothy and Lloyd Bridges, Elia Kazan, Beatrice Straight, Hurd Hatfield. He remained frustrated that America's individualist production culture gave him no ensemble framework in which the technique could work as designed. He died in Beverly Hills on 30 September 1955, aged sixty-four, and never returned to Russia.

Why Michael Is Called a Genius

The specific claim is structural imagination: Chekhov has been described as the only acting theorist of his century who built a complete, teachable alternative to the Stanislavsky system rather than a variation on it. Stanislavski himself is reported to have called him his most brilliant student. The quality involved is not intellect — Chekhov actively discouraged actors from over-relying on it, pushing them toward feeling and imagination instead — but an unusual gift for locating the physical correlate of an inner state and making it transmissible. That is a genuine invention. Anyone can tell an actor to feel more; Chekhov could hand a performer a gesture and watch a character assemble itself around it, then write the procedure down clearly enough that strangers could repeat it decades later.

The counter-case is real and worth stating. Much of the system rests on Steiner's anthroposophy, an unfalsifiable occult framework that many serious practitioners find awkward. "Radiation," his term for the energy an actor projects, remains stubbornly abstract on the page even for sympathisers. His institutions failed: Dartington closed, Ridgefield closed, and through the 1940s and 1950s he was overshadowed almost completely by his American counterparts and their reading of Stanislavski. His screen legacy is a handful of character parts. And a roster of famous students proves influence, not causation. What Chekhov unarguably did, in one critic's phrase, was open up the minefield that lay beneath subtext — making the body, rather than the biography, the entrance to a role.

The Long Return

He wrote it all down. *On the Technique of Acting* appeared in 1942, reissued in 1991 with additions by Mala Powers; the abridged *To the Actor* followed in 1953 with a preface by Yul Brynner, and was reissued in 2002 with a foreword by Simon Callow. His autobiography, *The Path of the Actor*, was edited by Andrei Kirillov and Bella Merlin and published half a century after his death. In 1980 former students reopened the Michael Chekhov Studio in New York; in 1998 the documentary *From Russia to Hollywood: The 100 Year Odyssey of Chekhov and Shdanoff*, narrated by Gregory Peck and Mala Powers, restored him to public view. Anthony Hopkins and Johnny Depp have both named his work an influence. The exile who lost two schools to two wars now has studios on several continents drilling his exercises — a slow, posthumous victory of exactly the kind he told his students to imagine.

Achievements

• Worked as film actor, stage actor and actor