Tynan's Anger

I understand the need for top 10 lists at the end of the year. No critic likes them, but they sell papers, so they must. But what I don't understand is providing lists when they are unprovoked, just for the hell of it. I thought this was the whole phenomenon High Fidelity mocked. Witness every issue of Time magazine of the last decade for how these things get out of hand. The only pseudo-unprovoked lists that work, in my mind, are the A.V. Club's weekly feature, which are so over the top in their specificity that they usually end up mentioning every relevant work. McSweeney's lists are a clinical study of pretension.

In any case, the most recent absurd list may top them all, and it comes from someone who should know better. Benedict Nightingale, general guru of all things British Theater and The Times's head theater critic, recently came out with his list of top 10 Hamlets he's ever seen. His analysis of what makes a good Hamlet is interesting, but nothing new. Of course, very few people will actually read his analysis, they'll skip to the list, where he not only mentions the top 10 Hamlets (out of 60) that he's seen, but gives them a numerical order (ugh). Simon Russell Beale at the National Theatre in 2000 (woohoo this blog's namesake!), who of course gives a mind-numbing analysis of the role, summarizing Hamlet as a "decent chap."

In my mind, why not go further back? Why not go to David Garrick, inventor of the famed "dramatic pause" or Edmund Kean, famous for wowing audiences in the ghost scene by spinning three times, or Richard Burbage, the man who started it all?

Labels: benedict nightingale, crazy lists, hamlet, old timey theater

(RTFM means Read the Fucking Manual, for those readers over the age of 28)

One of the constant annoyances I face when I am introduced to people is that they automatically assume my name is spelled Stanislavsky. I am thus faced with the dilemma of either going into detail about how the real version of the name is the Polish version, but I'm not Polish, etc. etc., or just give them the correct spelling and say "I know, weird right?" Still, it's not a bad name to have for theater circles, and I was once even given free tickets to a show desperate to fill its house based on my name alone. So all in all, I'm about even with my last name.

Not so much for actors, to whom the most famous person named Stanislawski (or one of its alternate version) is still a constant source of contention. One of the biggest misconceptions about Constantin Stanislavsky is that he invented Method Acting, when in fact it was invented by Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen in the Group Theater of the 1930s, who used a modified version of Stanislavsky's technique based on An Actor Prepares. Benedict Nightingale wrote an excellent review of a new translation of Stanislavski's works, including the often-ignored Building a Charachter, which was unfinished at the time of his death. Wouldn't you know it, it turns out that "affective memory" is a minor part of the original Stanislavskian technique, instead the real emphasis is for the actor to truly imagine being in that situation. That's not to say Method acting doesn't work, but that it would be better off called the Strasberg Method than Stanislavsky. Though I suppose that would mean I wouldn't deserve the nickname "Method Man" that I acquired in the Maroon office last year, a nickname that I'm quite proud of.

Labels: benedict nightingale, lee strasberg, stanislavsky, stanislawski, uta hagen