Stanislavski
As he was bringing new prominence to the training of actors and stage technicians, Benedetti turned his attention more fully to his research on the life and works of Konstantin Stanislavski. Stanislavski was a central part of every drama school’s curriculum. But Benedetti could see that the accepted translations were wrong and the view of Stanislavski needed correcting.
Through the many books to follow on Stanislavski he formed a productive relationship with the publishers Methuen Drama. He first published a translation of Stanislavski’s own autobiography, My Life in Art, in 1974. A best-selling handbook eventually followed this for acting students, Stanislavski: An Introduction (1982). Then in 1988 he published to great critical acclaim Stanislavski: A Biography, the first and still the only biography to appear in English on the theatre’s most seminal theorist of modern acting. That book is now sadly out of print. In the years to come Benedetti would expand and revise this book twice as new material on Stanislavski’s life and art came to light.
For Benedetti and other international Stanislavski scholars it was a widely known fact that the trilogy of English-language volumes of Stanislavski’s writings (An Actor Prepares, Building a Character and Creating a Role), first published in 1930s and translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (a fine Russian linguist and academic but not a theatre scholar) were both inaccurate and sorely dated when compared with Stanislavski’s work as published and taught in Russia. While Stanislavski himself continued to work on his theories throughout his life and until his death in 1938, volumes like An Actor Prepares were found to be mistaken representations of what the Russian actor, director and teacher finally thought about what the actor does in preparation to play a role on stage.
Over decades gross misunderstandings grew about Stanislavski, the terminology he used and how his ‘system’ grew. Jean Benedetti spent the latter part of his life, following his retirement from Rose Bruford College, trying to rectify these mistakes through his tireless research in Russian archives, debates with other Stanislavski scholars and through his careful examination of Stanislavski’s own manuscripts.
Similar to John Willett’s relentless work on Bertolt Brecht, Benedetti became equally consumed by his exploration of Stanislavski and the Russian theatre of his time. His short summary Stanislavski and the Actor: The Final Acting Lessons 1935-38 (1998), set the stage for his newest findings. This would eventually be followed by the long promised re-translations, from Routledge, of Stanislavski’s most seminal texts that Benedetti based on Stanislavski’s final Russian manuscripts and published versions: An Actor’s Work: A Student Diary (2008) and An Actor’s Work on a Role (2009).
Benedetti always said that translating Stanislavski was difficult, time consuming and tricky because Stanislavski was not as great or as coherent a writer as he was an actor, director and teacher. Nonetheless, Benedetti’s translations set a new standard in Stanislavski research and research into the process of acting. Suddenly all previous translations by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood were looked upon as flawed. Through his work Benedetti helped introduce the field of post-Stanislavski research from which new theories about acting and performance have come by other contemporary authors and scholars.