The 1890s stage movement Steiner credited with ending stock-type acting while judging its faith in the imitation of nature a superstition that deadens art.
Naturalism in Drama in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the dominant stage movement of the 1890s, which he assessed in the essays collected as Collected Essays on Drama 1889-1900 (GA 29), written for the Dramaturgische Blätter in 1898. Steiner credits naturalism with a real achievement: under its influence the theatre recognized that no two human individuals are identical, so the old template acting (Schablone) of stock villains, bon vivants, and comic old women lost its authority. At the same time he holds, with the novelist Friedrich Spielhagen, that naturalism rests on the superstition that nature can really be imitated, since art absorbed in imitation is only second-hand nature, and the purposes of nature and art never coincide. This double judgment, written before his esoteric period, prepared the anti-naturalistic stagecraft of his 1924 Speech and Drama course, and it still guides actor training in the Michael Chekhov technique.
Naturalism in drama reached Steiner not as a doctrine but as the working theatre of Berlin in 1898, where he reviewed plays for the Dramaturgische Blätter. He watched Gerhart Hauptmann's Fuhrmann Henschel performed to perfection at the Deutsches Theater and drew a double verdict: the movement had restored individual human characters to the stage, yet its program of imitating common reality could never be the whole of dramatic art.
In Steiner's Own Words
This kind of acting according to the template is unfortunately much more common than you might think. Naturalism transferred to the stage has done a great deal to overcome it. Under its influence it has been recognized that there are no two identical human individuals, and that it is therefore impossible to reduce all the characters to be portrayed on stage to five or six typical figures. Naturalism has made it so that people enjoy going to the theater again because they don't see the same general schemes, the villain, the bon vivant, the comic old woman and so on in different plays every time, but because individual characters are embodied again.
What it Means Today
The clearest heir of Steiner's double verdict is Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov. He trained at the Moscow Art Theatre, the company Konstantin Stanislavski co-founded in 1897, which made stage naturalism world famous with its 1898 production of The Seagull. Chekhov absorbed everything naturalism could teach about individual character, then hit its ceiling: observation and imitation alone left the actor copying life at second hand. After leaving Russia in 1928 he rebuilt his craft on Steiner's anthroposophy, drawing on speech formation and eurythmy, and developed the Psychological Gesture, a full-body archetypal movement that generates a character from imagination rather than from mimicry. His handbook To the Actor (1953) carried the method to Hollywood, where his students included Marilyn Monroe and Yul Brynner, and the Michael Chekhov Association continues the training today.
Thalira synthesis: Chekhov's career acts out GA 29 in a single biography, a naturalist formation that honored the uniqueness of persons, followed by a Steiner-schooled turn away from the superstition of imitation toward creation from the spirit. An actor who works this way still begins with observation, as Flavio Andò advised in 1898, but treats the observed detail as raw material for imagination, never as a template to copy.
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