Serafima Birman was an actress of the Moscow Art Theatre who worked in the First Studio and Second Moscow Art Theatre throughout the revolutionary and civil war period (1910s–1920s) and went on to have a distinguished career as a performer, teacher, and director in Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR (1920s–1970s). In this article Rose Whyman investigates her artistic and cultural contribution in the development of the Stanislavsky System and of her approach to acting, working alongside Vakhtangov, Michael Chekhov, and influenced by Meyerhold and other artists of the avant-garde. She was the first female director at the theatre, continued to act and direct in Soviet theatres, and worked in film, notably with Eisenstein on Ivan the Terrible. The development of her career required great determination and necessitated making theatrical and political choices in order to survive and maintain the artistic principles on which her work was based. Rose Whyman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham and is the author of The Stanislavsky System of Acting (Cambridge, 2008) and Stanislavsky: the Basics (Routledge, 2013).

The term ‘psychophysical’ in relation to acting and performer training is widely used by theatre scholars and practitioners. Konstantin Stanislavsky is considered to have been an innovator in developing an approach to Western acting focused on both psychology and physicality. The discourse encompasses questions of practice, of creativity and emotion, the philosophical problem of mind–body from Western and Eastern perspectives of spirituality. In this article, Rose Whyman attempts to uncover what Stanislavsky meant by his limited use of the term ‘psychophysical’ and suggests that much of the discourse remains prone to a dualist mind–body approach. Clarification of this is needed in order to further understanding of the practice of training performers. Rose Whyman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. She researches the science of actor training and is the author of The Stanislavsky System of Acting (Cambridge, 2008) and Stanislavsky: the Basics (Routledge, 2013).

This article considers the origins of Stanislavski's system and his insistence that the actor's skills, like the musician's, must be honed through daily exercises. Such practice must become the actor's ‘second nature’, as Stanislavski terms it. Rose Whyman here compares what Stanislavski has to say about skill acquisition with the psychologist William James's discussion of the role of habit in learning. This raises some problems in theorizing the system today, as it was rooted in the science of more than a century ago, when much less was known about the mechanisms of memory and learning. Rose Whyman worked previously in community and experimental theatre and is now a lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. Her book The Stanislavski System of Acting: Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance is to be published by CUP later this year.