Practitioners

Constantin Stanisvlaski:
Constantin Stanislavski was a Russian stage actor and director who developed the naturalistic performance technique known as the "Stanislavsky method," or method acting.

Constantin Stanislavski was born Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev in Moscow, Russia, in January 1863. He was part of a wealthy family who loved theater. His maternal grandmother was a French actress and his father constructed a stage on the family's estate.

He started acting at the age of 14, joining the family drama circle. He developed his theatrical skills considerably over time, performing with other acting groups while working in his family's manufacturing business.

 In 1885, he gave himself the stage name of Stanislavski—the name of a fellow actor he'd met. He married teacher Maria Perevoshchikova three years later, and she would join her husband in the serious study and pursuit of acting.
        
In 1888, Stanislavski founded the Society of Art and Literature, with which he performed and directed productions for almost a decade. Then, in June 1897, he and playwright/director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko decided to open the Moscow Art Theatre, which would be an alternative to standard theatrical aesthetics of the day.

In 1912, Stanislavski created First Studio, which served as a training ground for young thespians. A decade later, he directed Eugene Onegin, an opera by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

During the Moscow Art Theatre's early years, Stanislavski worked on providing a guiding structure for actors to consistently achieve deep, meaningful and disciplined performances. He believed that actors needed to inhabit authentic emotion while on stage and, to do so, they could draw upon feelings they'd experienced in their own lives. Stanislavski also developed exercises that encouraged actors to explore character motivations, giving performances depth and an unassuming naturalism while still paying attention to the parameters of the production. This technique would come to be known as the "Stanislavski method" or "the Method."

The Moscow Art Theatre undertook a world tour between 1922 and 1924; the company traveled to various parts of Europe and the United States. Several members of the theater decided to stay in the United States after the tour was over, and would go on to instruct performers that included Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. These actors in turn helped to form the Group Theatre, which would later lead to the creation of the Actors Studio.

Method actig became a highly influential,  revolutionary technique in theatrical and Hollywood communities during the mid-20th century, as evidenced with actors like Marlon Brando and Maureen Stapleton.

After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Stanislavski faced some criticism for not producing communist works, yet he was able to maintain his company's unique perspective and not contend with an imposed artistic vision. During a performance to commemorate the Moscow Art Theatre's 30th anniversary, Stanislavski suffered a heart attack.

Stanislavski spent his later years focusing on his writing, directing and teaching. He died on August 7, 1938, in the city of his birth.

Harold Pinter: 
Harold Pinter was born in 1930 and grew up in the East End of London, to which influenced his plays later on. Once he had left school, he studied at Rada (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) and embarked on a career as an actor and started writing plays in 1957. One of his first productions was a one-act show, entitled "The Room." This contained many elements that later on, would characterize Pinter's famous masterpieces.

Like Samuel Beckett, Pinter refused to provide explanations for the actions of his playwrights. Pinter went on to write many absurdist masterpieces. Because of his incredible work, he received numerous awards including the Nobel Prize for literature.

Pinter has spoken about how people look too deep into what he says because they want to discover what is behind Pinter's work. Pinter has told how once somebody had asked him what his work was about. He replied by saying, " the weasel under the cocktail cabinet". To him this meant nothing. Over the years he had discovered that it was a huge mistake by saying this as many people have quoted him in a number of columns. He has also said how, "I never stuck categories on myself, or any of us playwrights. But if what I understand the word menace to mean is certain elements that I have employed in the past in the shape of a particular play, then I don't think it's worthy of much more exploration. "

Harold Pinter occupies the legendary position of being such a classic playwright. Because of this, the term "pinteresque" has become an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama.

Pinter's plays are typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feelings, used through colloquial language and long pauses. Basically, Pinter's characters never used to verbally threaten their victims outright because Pinter believed that it is not what you say, it is the way you say it.

There are two silences. One when there is no word spoken. The other is when a torrent of language is being used. The speech is speaking of a language that is locked beneath it. The speech we hear is an indication of that we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance which keeps the other in its place. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant strategy to cover nakedness.

During Pinter's Nobel Prize "Presentation Speech," a member of the Swedish Academy and Chairman of its Nobel Committee said, "The nervous perception that a dangerous story has been censored- all this vibrates through Pinter's drama."

Bertolt Brecht:

Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Germany, on 19th February, 1898. He studied philosophy and medicine at the University of Munich before becoming a medical orderly in a German military hospital during the First World War. This experience reinforced his hatred of war and influenced his support for the failed Socialist revolution in 1919. 

After the war Brecht returned to university but eventually became more interested in literature than medicine. His first play to be produced was "Bael" in 1922.

Brecht attempted to develop a new approach to the the theatre. He tried to persuade his audiences to see the stage as a stage, actors as actors and not the traditional make-believe of the theatre. Brecht required detachment, not passion, from the observing audience. The purpose of the play was to awaken the spectators' minds so that he could communicate his version of the truth.

Brecht's plays reflected a Marxist interpretation of society and when Adolf Hitler gained power in 1933 he was forced to flee from Nazi Germany.

After leaving Germany in 1933, Brecht lived in Denmark, Sweden and the Soviet Union. He arrived in the United States in 1941 and after settling in Hollywood, helped with the writing of the film, "Hangman Also Die" in 1943.

Bertolt Brecht died on 14th August, 1956.

Antonin Artaud:
Antonin Artaud associated himself with Surrealist writers, artists, and experimental theater groups in Paris during the 1920s. 

When political differences resulted in his break from the Surrealists, he founded the Theatre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. Together they hoped to create a forum for works that would radically change French theater. 

Artaud, especially, expressed disdain for Western theater of the day, panning the ordered plot and scripted language his contemporaries typically employed to convey ideas, and he recorded his ideas in his work.

"Theater of cruelty," is an intense theatrical experience that Artaud created. It combines elaborate props, magic tricks, special lighting, primitive gestures and articulations, and themes of rape, torture, and murder to shock the audience into confronting the base elements of life. 

Although Artaud's theater of cruelty was not widely embraced, his ideas have been the subject of many essays on modern theater, and many writers continue to study Artaud's concepts. 

Artaud's creative abilities were developed, in part, as a means of therapy during the artist's many hospitalizations for mental illness. While being treated in a hospital, Artaud was encouraged to express himself in poetry, which was later published. 

Artaud's life and his work, despite the efforts of psychotherapy, reflected his mental afflictions and were further complicated by his dependence on narcotics. At times he expressed faith in God; other times he denounced the Church and deified himself. He was also obsessed with the human body; he loathed the idea of sex and expressed a desire to separate himself from his sexual self.