Actor Ludwig, of Berlin, played in a Cologne theater the part of a prosecuting attorney who, in a state of aberration of mind, carries out a burglary. This was a play by Lindau, entitled “The Other.” The actor, after the curtain had fallen, went home, and on the way broke into a jewelry store and carried off a mess of jewelry in exactly the same manner in which the burglary is presented in the play. The courts pronounced the actor not guilty, holding that he had acted under an imperative conception which temporarily had deranged his mind. The prosecutor appealed, but the higher courts sustained the decision of the lower court.
Method acting leads to temporary insanity. According to the Concise Britannica article, Stanislavsky started working on his method of acting about 1898, so it could be contemporary with the event above, but in Russia, not Germany. Perhaps Stanislavsky was somehow inspired by this actor?
Of course, skimming through some of the websites that appeared in my search, I’m wondering if I haven’t misunderstood what Stanislavsky’s method is all about. According to this PBS article, Stanislavsky was trying to get actors to draw on their own emotional history, to be essentially themselves in portraying a character, rather than “becoming the character” as seems to have happened to Actor Ludwig.
Then again, all I know about acting is the hearing cliché “What’s my justification?” in movies about movies.
The Other is Der Andere by Paul Lindau. Lindau is another person you should have heard of, but haven’t, unless you follow early German cinema or collect 19th century periodicals or write a book about Mark Twain.
Here’s a quote from the book
“We know what we are and how we look, and the fanciful picture presented to our eyes gives us only food for laughter, not cause for resentment. The jokes he made on our long words, our inverted sentences, and the position of the verb have really led to a reform in style which will end in making our language as compact and crisp as the French or English. I regard Mark Twain as the foremost humorist of the age.”
This excerpt is from an article discussing “Theater and Cinema in the Age of Nervousness”
Der Andere tells the Jeckel and Hyde story of Dr. Hallers, a Berlin public prosecutor who, in a state of somnambulistic automatism, commits the very crimes by night that he is supposed to be prosecuting during the day.
Der Andere inspired another silent film The Curious Conduct of Judge Legarde, starring Lionel Barrymore.
There aren’t any works by Paul Lindau in Project Gutenberg. I wonder if we’ve got some in the pile o’books?
