Radu Olăreanu – 14 steps of the Actor Character Towards the Character... of the Spectator

Abstract

Because Michael Chekhov – the nephew of A. P. Chekhov – only tried to psychologize the physics of the stage act, he had to flee from Stalinism to the Free (but not for long...) World. And so, we wonder how much courage or despair a man of theatre would need, in the days of other neomaterialist and in-humanist dogmas, to spiritualize the issue of dramatic space, even proposing a metaphysics of it...

And such an idealist with... a keen practical sense (!) deserves to be the author of the lines waiting to be read under the title The Actor, The Poetry of Human Knowledge by Radu Olăreanu from the University of Arts in Târgu Mureș. Unlike a plethora of famous interpretive recipes such as "do as I do", going in different steps from Stanislavski to Strasberg and from Meyerhold to Brook, we are proposed this time the first "14 steps" to recover the spiritual dimensions of theatre. And we use the plural in this case because its approach involves both the horizontal and vertical coordinates of this re-spiritualization.