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Michael Sheen explores the art of acting.

One night in March 1906 an actor gave a not-very-good performance.

Nothing particularly unusual about that – it happens, according to your taste, all the time.

But this actor was Constantin Stanislavski. He had already played a decisive role in forging a new kind of theatre company, the Moscow Art Theatre – a tightly disciplined, dedicated ensemble with high production values. The MAT also established its own approach to acting – away from the declamatory, melodramatic style of the day and towards something more emotional, more naturalistic, something possessing, as Stanislavski might have put it, inner truth.

But on that night in March 1906 his own inner truth, he felt, was lacking.

The crisis this triggered in Stanislavski – the Stockmann crisis, as it’s sometimes called (Stanislavski was performing the role of Dr Thomas Stockmann in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People) – prompted him to retreat and revise his firmly-held ideas on acting – as he did throughout his life – and to begin formulating what became known as the System: a codified way for actors to create believable, authentic, naturalistic characters night after night.

Stanislavski’s ideas have been passed like a baton down the generations since, with subsequent acting teachers adapting and modifying his ideas in different ways. They’re still part of the bedrock of acting training today.

Michael Sheen explores Stanislavski’s ideas, with writer Isaac Butler; actor and teacher Tom McClane; actors Adrian Lester and Simon McBurney; and legendary acting teacher Patsy Rodenburg.

Isaac Butler’s history of Stanislavski and the Method is called 'The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act'.

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