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Michael Sheen explores the strange art of acting.

When the Moscow Art Theatre performed at Jolson’s 59th Street Theatre in New York in January and February of 1923 they were a huge success. It is said that they received a thirty-minute standing ovation on the first night. How did they manage to create such powerful performances? One of the answers to that question was found in the approach to acting of the company’s director Constantin Stanislavski. Over the previous three decades he had codified, adjusted and refined his own approach to actor training, which he called the System.

Stanislavski never spoke English and his System was taught by a sequence of associates. And, as happens, things get lost in translation.

The Moscow Art Theatre were an inspiration to the Group Theatre in New York, which aimed to emulate its artistic principles – and its approach to acting. Under its director, Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre took Stanislavski’s System – particularly the elements relating to the use of an actor’s own emotion and psychology – and transformed it into what became known as the Method.

However, when another leading member of The Group, Stella Adler, went to study personally with Stanislavski, she discovered that he had moved on from that emphasis on psychology and emotion and considered it damaging – he now emphasised a deep immersion in the context of the script and the importance of finding character through the process of action within that context.

Stella Adler’s news about the truth of Stanislavski’s teaching was not well received by Lee Strasberg and it precipitated a split within the Group Theatre, within the personal relationship between Adler and Strasberg – and, it might be said, within our own understanding of what exactly Stanislavski’s System and Strasberg’s Method actually are.

Michael Sheen explores the transformation of Stanislavski’s ‘system’ into The Method, with the writer Isaac Butler, the actor Anne-Marie Duff and journalist Michael Goldfarb, an ex-student of Stella Adler.

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