Tra ricerca estetica e acting training. Three Sisters di Anton Cechov diretto da Michel Saint-Denis (1938)

The essay aims to analyse the figure of Michel Saint­Denis (1897­1971), with a particular focus on his direction of a successful production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, staged at the London Queen’s Theatre at the beginning of 1938. The staging process and direction of the actors he led raises a number of issues and questions. The intersection of aesthetic research and acting training experimentation generates surprising outcomes and benefits as a result of the process of grafting different and distant theatrical cultures, as in the case of the contamination of Jacques Copeau’s doctrine about the forms of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s theatrical work. That in turn did strongly affect the acting training techniques spread by Saint­Denis since the end of World War II in the drama schools founded in England, France, Canada and the United States.