The Stanislavski System: The Professional Training of an Actor; Second Revised Edition (Penguin Handbooks) Paperback – October 2, 1984

Awesome book. Great explanation and very informative.

buen producto

Nice short book. Good exercises to do. Only think I wish it had a overall lay how to breakdown a scene and embody a character.

Sonia Moore is a well-kept secret within the acting world. She didn’t make a lot of noise within the industry, but she, in fact, was the ONLY student of Stanislavsky that come over to the west to teach (apart from Boleslavski who was everybody’s teacher Strasberg, Adler, Meissen, Lewis, Crawford, etc.).It ABSOLUTELY belongs in the shelf of any serious actor.RIP, Sonia Moore

This is the book I started with when really learning acting rather than going to it by "feel," rather than craft. Sonia Moore's text, though older now, is still as relevant as when first published. It breaks down the "System" - and oft maligned approach to acting - and demystifies it, giving it flesh and bone that all actors must be when they are on stage or film: human: all too human.

Amazing overview

This short work by Sonia Moore synthesizes the three foundational texts written by Konstantin Stanislavski that lay the groundwork for his "Method" of acting. In 90 pages, Moore, a Russian theatre scholar, gets "the Method" (which Stanislavski termed "the Elementary Grammar of Dramatic Art") down to its basics, this including a final chapter on the short but brilliant acting career of Stanislavski's leading disciple, Eugene Vakhtangov, the founder and ideological fountainhead of the pioneering Jewish theatre in Palestine-Israel, the Habima. Stanislavski's three volumes here synthesized ("An Actor Prepares", "Building a Character", and "Creating a Role": the "ABC" of his Method) provided actors and directors for the first time with a systematic course of teaching about how a stage actor might perform convincingly and effectively on the stage. Sonia Moore gets these three books down to their basics, and if her prose seems from the outset a little martinet-like and intolerant of divergent teachings on the art of the stage, it is to be explained by her thoroughgoing and total loyalty to both the justice and the success of the program as laid forth by Stanislavski. I would recommend this work to anyone, inside the theatre or not, professional or amateur, who wants to master Stanislavskian acting; in fact every actor-to-be should have access to this work, if they cannot acquire Stanislavski's "ABC" works. The most important chapters in Moore's work (since they provide the very kernel of Stanislavski's teaching on the art of acting) are "The Method of Physical Action", "Elements of an Action", "The Super-Objective and the Through-Line of Actions", and "Work on the Role: Building a Character". I have had to think about this, but the only minus to this volume is a significant one, and may threaten the reader's pleasure in finishing reading it. This debility in Moore's narrative is its nearly total certainty in the absolute correctness of Stanislavki's teachings as THE ONLY CORRECT guide for an actor in understanding his craft. KS (Stanislavski) was never wrong, according to Moore, and even his earlier judgements and teachings, which underwent significant evolution and modification over the decades when he was active in theatre, are deemed by her to be absolutely correct and mandatory-learning for the actor. Her phrasing uses short sentences that repeat constantly the watchwords of his System, and one is apt to find that the more she writes, repeating these key ideas, the more confusing and nearly metaphysical, they become, as they all melt into one another. In the end, she demands absolute obedience from the reader who wishes to look further into these teachings, and her neo-Stalinist rhetoric and rhythm of prose, repeated over and over, is what I found to be the major flaw in her argument, and in this book, as valuable it is otherwise for imparting, in synthesis, a school of ideas of continued value for the actor or for the general reader interested in the theatre.

Fantastic! As described.