Meredith Rogers on Stanislavsky and Place
Some thoughts from Meredith Rogers for the book launch of Stanislavsky and
Place, edited by Jonathan Marshall and David Shirley; part of the Stanislavsky and… book series (published by Routledge):
I acknowledge that we are meeting on the Country of the Wurundjeri and Woi wurrung people of the Kulin nation and I pay my respects to their elders past present and emerging.
I have lived for the past 43 years on a street that runs down to the Merri Creek,
very close to the place where John Batman made his fraudulent deal with the Wurundjeri so I never forget on whose land I live and work.
The book:
Yes, that is me on the cover, photographed by Bagryana Popov, ten years ago, at Steiglitz, Wathawurrung Country. I’m not shown reading and I don’t look angry or worried and Bagryana took the picture, so I think we must have been on a break in that beautiful room. Bagryana writes here (in the book) about her long engagement with Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. I think we did five seasons over six years, each in different places on different Country, in Australia, before she took the play to Bulgaria and made a production in Krivina, the village of her childhood.
Jonathan asked for “just a couple of war stories from the production” but the project was such a gift, that I have many thoughts and memories but no “war stories”.
When Bagryana confessed that she had thought to do the play without the character of Maria but decided eventually that it was impossible, and suggested I take on the role, she invited me to meet her at the gardens of Heide gallery, Ivanhoe. I don’t think I wondered why at the time, but as we strolled through the small birch grove that rounds off the garden before it gives
way to Australian eucalypts and Birrarung (otherwise known as the Yarra River). We were certainly there to sound each other out, but also perhaps to experience a woodland that Chekhov and Stanislavsky might have recognised – to stand in place for a moment, in one of the many ways this book asks us to consider.
Here's a quick list of the places we inhabited for Vanya:
• Lyndal Jones’ 19th c. two-storey, weatherboard house at Avoca – chooks, vegetables, possibly bees, near the river – a sense of gentle, artistic
dilapidation.
• Corinella at Eganstown with sheep agisted on the paddock and a terrible stench of decaying mouse carcasses drifting up from under the floorboards in the professor’s room; also, the first time the audience could see Vanya (James Wardlaw) climbing the dry hill behind the house
after failed shooting at the end of Act 3.
• Stieglitz – on the edge of the You Yang ranges, with a small flock of exotic black faced sheep and vistas for the audience out the windows to the sight of the family coming back from their long walk. Then the homes of two iconic Australian painters:
• Bundanon –Arthur Boyd’s home and bush property – the loveliest place to live and work even for a short time.
• Hans Heysen’s House in the Adelaide Hills in another forest of eucalypts, huge cedars in the garden, and perfect melancholy sunsets as Vanya, Sonia, Maria, Nanny and Richard Bly’s character returned to their work in the depopulated living room.
And this is where I started making what threatened to be a wickedly long list of the jewels to be found in the book - from Jonathan Pitches personal survey of Stanislavsky scholarship since his involvement in its infancy, to the magnificently diverse group of voices in the transcribed plenary panel that completes the book.
Other things to love -
• Richard Gough’s wonderfully rich account of his engagements with Stanislavski’s work over a long career … I wish I’d been in Perth to experience it as the multi-media presentation he gave there but even so his easy elegant prose and agility in shifting from one memory or
reflection to another is a delight.
• Jonathan W. Marshall’s “Planes, Trains and Russian Cosmopolitanism” fascinated, especially as it took us away from Vanya’s rural preoccupations and reminded me of Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s book The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the
Nineteenth Century (California UP, 2014).
• Matt Edgerton quotes Ian Maxwell on Australian actor training as a magpie assemblage of methods (and David Shirley’s possibly unconscious correction of the ornithological reference from “magpie” to “bower bird”)
• Maitland Schnarr’s moving discussion of language and Country for the Indigenous performer
• Peta Tait on affect, and the play as public meeting.
• etc, etc, etc
This little volume opens onto a vast network of avenues for exploration. So, buy it, read it and go forth and make wonderful pieces of site-specific, socially engaged, poetically infused work filled with equal quantities of laughter and tears.
Meredith Rogers, 8th July 2026 IFTR Conference, Melbourne, Australia.
Meredith Rogers is a leading Australian theatre director and academic, and has written on performance and theatremaking. She is an Honorary Associate of the Humanities & Social Sciences School at La Trobe University and, for over a decade has lectured in their Theatre and Drama Program