Although it is now thought of as 'traditional', REALISM was a revolution in its time. The theatre styles that came before it were diverse, but shared an over-the-top presentational style that did not look like everyday life. As we have studied both last year and this term, Stanislavski sought to bring truth to the craft of acting, and created a system of actor training that is still possibly the most influential world-wide.

"Realism was a 19th-century theatrical movement, seeking to portray real life on the stage."

What makes up a realistic production? It’s hard to come up with a ‘recipe’, but there are a number of important elements that you might expect to be present:

• The fourth wall. The set of a realistic production will be solid, three dimensional, and most often in a proscenium theatre that enhances the sense of that fourth wall. The performers present the action realistically, without using techniques such as addressing the audience or a tableau, which immediately shatter any illusion of real life being played out.
• Everyday conversations and style of speaking. A realistic play would use prose rather than poetry and would use ordinary language, rather than a heightened emotional vocabulary.
• Ordinary people. Generally, the stories are about people who are more readily defined as middle or working class. For Stanislavski, it was substantially the middle class or bourgeois, to use the right term in the Russia of his day, that he put on stage.
• A carefully rehearsed acting style that creates or confirms the impression of reality. This is true whatever approach is adopted.
• A carefully selected and distilled representation of real life that is still theatrically effective.
• Real settings. These plays are set in realistic contexts. They won’t have fairy tale or fantasy settings and are likely to be contemporary. There’ll come a time when such a play, one by Chekhov, for instance, is no longer contemporary. It then becomes a directorial decision as to what to do. But most productions of Chekhov are set in their original period with as much realistic integrity in the production as can be created.