Post-Stanislavski
Benedetti’s investigation into the art of acting also led to the publication of a book about the eighteenth-century’s finest actor David Garrick (David Garrick and the Birth of the Modern Theatre) in 2001 and another more expansive book in 2005 about the history of acting from ancient times to modern, The Art of the Actor. Both of these volumes he wrote while he was deep into his work on the Stanislavski volumes. He even found time to produce a volume of the wonderful letters exchanged between Anton Chekhov and his actress wife Olga Knipper, Dear Writer, Dear Actress: The Love Letters of Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper (1997). These he also turned into a stage and radio play.
Always a witty and gregarious man of the theatre, Benedetti could also turn fierce and frosty when faced with bad acting and shoddy scholarship about the technique of acting. He thought that Stanislavski was, for the most part, being badly taught in schools and at university level. Having set new standards in theatre and actor training at Rose Bruford College and through his various educational associations, his books helped generate new approaches to the field now called ‘performance studies’.
Though a traditionalist and even a classicist about acting and theatre, Jean Benedetti has nonetheless redefined how we write and think about performance. He hoped that what he contributed to Stanislavski scholarship would start to influence others. To that end Benedetti gave Rose Bruford College all the results of his research to establish The Stanislavski Centre, containing one of the most singular archives outside of the Moscow Art Theatre. Under Dr Paul Fryer the Centre recently launched the new Stanislavski Journal.
Jean Benedetti’s lasting legacy now resides at the college he led and brought to prominence as a fitting and lasing memorial to a life ruled by theatre and scholarship.