Born in Moscow, Russia in 1863, Stanislavski was an actor and moved on to become a director and teacher. He is remembered today for developing a new approach to acting, which took years of experimenting to get to what is now known as the Stanislavski System.

Stanislavski is rightly called the 'father of modern theatre'. Nearly all other practitioners use him as a starting point, either to build from or to react against. He cannot be ignored.

Much of what he says may seem obvious - but this simply proves how far his methods have been absorbed into our understanding of what acting is. In fact the 'obvious' points, which of course need to be stated in essays however banal they appear, are what make him so hard to write about as a practitioner. Remember what he has to say about acting and actors was revolutionary in his own time.

His books are full of contradictions, sometimes even within the same volume and this gives us another clue as to how we should approach him. We should always remember that he was forever experimenting. He was never satisfied with results and always sought better ways for an actor to perfect his craft. Those who try to use the System like a straitjacket will fall flat; the System was in a constant state of flux and was constantly being reassessed. Up to the end of his life he continued to change his mind - notably over the use of Emotion Memory - and this is part of his charm. If you see Stanislavski for what he was - an experimenter, ceaselessly trying to improve his methods - then you will cease to see him as a boring old stick-in-the-mud as so many students do, and be carried along by his endless energy and enthusiasm.

The System and the main body of Stanislavski's work is to do with Naturalism. This means that there are huge numbers of plays and styles for which his techniques simply are not applicable.

The System needs to be seen as a single unified entity. When studying it we tend to become immersed in the component parts and it is easy to forget this most important fact. Thus, one element is not followed by another, but most elements are happening at the same time and continuously. When you actually use the techniques, it is obvious that numbers of these elements are part of a continuous process.