Vsevolod Meyerhold

Prof Jonathan Pitches

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351174923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Vsevolod Meyerhold considers the life and work of the extraordinary twentieth-century director and theatre-maker. This compact, well-illustrated volume includes:

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• a biographical introduction to Meyerhold's life

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• a clear explanation of his theoretical writings

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• an analysis of his masterpiece production Revisor, or The Government Inspector

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• a comprehensive and usable description of the 'biomechanical' exercises he developed for training the actor.

As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners offer unbeatable value for today's student.

1
A Life of Contradictions

Meyerhold’s life was abruptly brought to an end in the basement of a prison in Moscow over sixty years ago. He was an old man, nearing his seventies, and had dedicated over two-thirds of his life to the Russian theatre, much of it to the cause of Communism after the Russian Revolution in 1917. After a life-long career of innovation and experiment his presence as a theatrical figurehead was deemed too dangerous by the Soviet authorities. He was tortured, ‘persuaded’ to confess to charges of spying and finally shot, a little less than a week after his sixty-sixth birthday.

It was the last of many contradictions in Meyerhold’s life. From his theatrical theories to his relationships with others, Meyerhold courted controversy, even to the extent of promoting dissent among his audiences:

If everyone praises your production, almost certainly it is rubbish. If everyone abuses it, then perhaps there is something in it. But if some praise and others abuse, if you can split the audience in half, then for sure it is a good production.

(Gladkov 1997: 165)

His was a theatre based expressly on contradiction, a theatre which strove not to smooth out problems or to resolve paradoxes but to let them resonate within the minds of his performers and his audiences. A divided audience, Meyerhold argued, was more likely to engage at a deeper level with the content of the production, to turn in on itself, discuss and debate. We have all travelled back from the theatre with friends and talked about the spectacle we have just enjoyed. But how much more lively is the discussion if, for some reason, we don’t agree on everything we have seen? This was Meyerhold’s logic and it informed much of his practice.

There were contradictions in Meyerhold’s life as well. Often labelled an opponent of Stanislavsky’s, he ended his career holding the reins of his teacher’s last directorial project, described by the dying Stanislavsky as his ‘sole heir in the theatre’ (Benedetti 1990: 345). Although he was reputed to be a dictator and a control freak, Meyerhold’s workshop nevertheless produced a startling range of theatrical freethinkers, each one capable of enriching the Russian tradition in their own right. Notorious for being difficult to work with, his record of collaboration with musicians, artists, playwrights and co-directors belies this image, and instead defines a man with an irrepressible desire to move with the times and to learn from the people who defined those times.

Meyerhold undoubtedly manufactured some of this controversy, but the one contradiction over which he had no control was his relationship with the political powers of Soviet Russia. He was overtly supportive of the new powers from the earliest opportunity and much of his work in the early 1920s was geared to furthering the cause of the new Soviet regime. It is difficult to believe, then, that those who embraced Meyerhold’s vitality in the early years of the Revolution were also responsible for extinguishing it. But this was precisely what happened. It may have taken over twenty years for the turnaround to be completed but its conclusion was undeniably decisive. What is more, Meyerhold’s fate was anything but unique. He was joining a long roll-call of artists whose love of experimentation finally became an unendurable threat to the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin.

But why begin here, at the end of Meyerhold’s story, rather than at the beginning? First, because Meyerhold’s death offers us a measure of how seriously the authorities in the Soviet Union (and before the Revolution, under the Tsar) viewed the art of the theatre. British politicians no longer see the theatre as posing a threat to their authority, and the fact that people might be killed in order to silence its voice is almost incomprehensible to us today. But in the post-revolutionary climate of the new Soviet Union, live theatre was viewed as one of the most effective tools of communication – not least because most of its audiences were unable to read. To be in control of this weapon of communication gave the director great power, but it was power that came at a cost and for many Soviet artists the weapon proved double-edged.

Second, by reversing the chronology of his story, we are recognising that any version of Meyerhold’s life is somehow uncontrollably coloured by his death. The bitter irony of his demise hangs over his work, constantly reminding us of the volatile context within which he was practising his art. In a way, this foreknowledge captures the kind of attitude Meyerhold himself wanted to inculcate in his audiences. He, like Bertolt Brecht, did not want his spectators to focus their ‘eyes on the finish’ (Brecht 1978: 37), but instead to engage in the material of the production in a consciously enquiring manner. For this reason, Meyerhold delighted in revealing the mechanics of the theatre. He filled his productions with self-conscious theatricalities, arranging the order of the scenes in such a way that they might collide against one another rather than seamlessly fuse together. We might conclude from this that, in Meyerhold’s thinking, people’s lives are similarly unpredictable. They do not unfold in a smooth, organised way (as the naturalistic repertoire often suggested), but are multifaceted, problematic and surprising. In Meyerhold’s own case this could not have been more true.

So, with our eyes diverted from the finish and focused now on the course, let us examine the episodes of Meyerhold’s life, from his early years before he met Stanislavsky to the final period of his career before his arrest by the NKVD (the no-less-brutal predecessors of the KGB). We will cover the following ground:

• Apprenticeship (1874–1905)
• St Petersburg (1906–17)
• Meyerhold and the Revolution (1917–22)
• The Meyerhold Theatre (1922–31)
• The death of Meyerhold and his theatre (1932–40)
• Meyerhold today.

Apprenticeship (1874–1905)

Life Before the Moscow Art Theatre

As the eighth child of the family, Vsevolod Meyerhold had to work hard to make an impression. He was born into the affluent family of the German vodka distiller, Emil Meyerhold, on 28 January 1874, and, recognising that he would never inherit the family business, he developed a much closer relationship with his mother, Alvina, than with his businessman father. At such a distance from the head of the family, the young Meyerhold did not find himself obliged to espouse all of his father’s values. Instead, he mixed with the workers from the distillery and attended music concerts and the theatre. The artistic influence was so great that at the age of nineteen he was already able to define his career path, claiming an even earlier calling in his diary:

I have talent, I know that I am a good actor. . . . This is my most cherished dream, one I have thought about almost since I was five.

(Gladkov 1997: 4)

But the decision to enter the theatre wasn’t as clear cut as it might have seemed. Two alternative careers presented themselves to Meyerhold – one as a lawyer, the other as a violinist. In fact, it was the former occupation which first beckoned him and which provided his escape route from the provincial town of Penza to the bustling city of Moscow. Meyerhold began reading for a degree in law at Moscow University in 1895, after graduating with some effort from his school in Penza. Once in Moscow he faced what he called ‘a crossroads’ in his life (Gladkov 1997: 91), torn by the equally appealing possibilities of a theatre training or a career as a second violinist in the University orchestra. Failing the orchestra’s audition made the decision not to play ‘second fiddle’ unnecessary and instead, in 1896, he went into two years of actor training with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Philharmonic school. Music continued to play a significant part in Meyerhold’s career, however, and although he gave up the violin and later looked back at his failure with some relief, he never turned his back on the discipline of music itself. Indeed, the musicality of many of his productions is a notable characteristic of his directorial approach.

Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky

Nemirovich-Danchenko is best known for his stormy relationship with the director Konstantin Stanislavsky and for co-founding the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) with him, arguably the most famous theatre in all of Russia. But before he began this collaboration with Stanislavsky in 1898, Nemirovich had already established a well-earned reputation as a creative artist and, if anything, it was he who was the most experienced theatre professional in the early days of the MAT. For his part, Stanislavsky had begun cutting his teeth as an actor and a director ten years earlier at the semi-professional dramatic society known as the Alexeiev Circle. There, he developed an impressive range of character roles, many of which were revived under the auspices of the MAT.

Nemirovich was not an actor. Essentially he was a literary man with an intuitive eye for great writing. It was he, for example, who first recognised the dramatic talent of Anton Chekhov, calling for The Seagull (1896) to be awarded the Griboedov literary prize in place of his own play: The Worth of Life (1896). But although his talents lay first and foremost with the dramatic text, he also had experience as a director and, judging by the range of activities he lists in his autobiography, was clearly interested in teaching too. Meyerhold’s tuition, he tells us, ‘went far beyond the bounds of first experiments in stage technique’. It also involved:

Psychological movements, everyday features, moral questions, emotional mergings with the author, aspirations towards frankness and simplicity, the quest of vivid expression and diction, mimicry, plastics, self-assurance.

(Nemirovich-Danchenko 1968: 46)

It may not immediately be clear what he means by ‘everyday features’, but Nemirovich’s commitment to simplicity on stage and his call for a vivid expressivity in the performer are characteristics clearly reflected in the later practice of Meyerhold. Even more important, perhaps, is the implicit relationship indicated here between the inner and outer work of the performer – psychological movements as Nemirovich calls them – for this all-important relationship, often referred to as psycho-physicality, is a dominant theme in the Russian tradition of acting and we will encounter it in many guises in this book.

Meyerhold, Stanislavsky and the Seagull

Meyerhold (see Figure 1.1) graduated from the Moscow Philharmonic in March 1898, sharing the top prize for acting with Olga Knipper – Chekhov’s future wife and soon-to-be star of the MAT. Nemirovich had already seen the potential of the young artist, describing him in his memoirs as having ‘excellent directing quality and not a little technical skill’ (Nemirovich-Danchenko 1968: 123).

Both graduates joined the newly founded Art Theatre that year, as the talent drawn from both Stanislavsky’s Circle and Nemirovich’s school was merged to form the revolutionary new theatre. But although he had begun as an advocate of Meyerhold’s, Nemirovich’s support of him did not last and he offered no resistance when the company was reorganised in 1902, leaving the young actor without a job.

In the intervening four years (1898–1902), Meyerhold played an impressive range of parts (eighteen roles, from blind prophets to princes), developed a passion for Chekhov’s writing and, most significantly, observed a highly innovative and self-critical actor-director at work. Of all Meyerhold’s creative relationships, his time with Stanislavsky was the most influential, not because Meyerhold followed in his teacher’s footsteps – he didn’t – but because the two men shared a fundamental belief in the complete training of an actor and in the need to experiment continually. Stanislavsky’s famous System did not begin to be formulated until 1906, after Meyerhold had left the MAT, but his first experiments in realising a text with the emphasis on psychological truth were already being made as early as 1898 – with the revival of Chekhov’s text, The Seagull.

After taking the role of Vassily Shouisky in the inaugural production of the Art Theatre, Tsar Fyodor Ivanovitch in October 1898, Meyerhold was given the pivotal role of Konstantin Treplev in Stanislavsky’s production of The Seagull. Kostia (Treplev’s diminutive name) is a young experimental playwright, still living in the shadow of his successful actress mother, Arkadina, and fighting to assert his independence as a writer. He is deeply in love with Nina, another aspiring young artist, and casts her in his own highly stylised and symbolic play-within-a-play. Sitting in the audience at Treplev’s play is the already established writer, Trigorin, Arkadina’s lover. Trigorin, though, soon develops an amorous interest in Nina, becoming Kostia’s rival in both professional and personal terms. Thus, the fortunes of the young

Figure 1.1 Portrait of the young Meyerhold, 1898

moderniser, Kostia, are contrasted with the older Trigorin (representing a kind of established orthodoxy), with Nina as focal point.

This typically Chekhovian love triangle was given a further twist by the casting of Stanislavsky as Trigorin. Critics have been quick to point out the uncanny similarities between the power dynamic at work in the MAT and that reflected in Chekhov’s play, especially when you imagine these words being spoken by the young innovator, Meyerhold/ Treplev:

What we need are new artistic forms. And if we don’t get new forms it would be better if we had nothing at all.

(Chekhov 1991: 63)

It wasn’t long before Meyerhold himself was saying as much, criticising the Naturalism of the MAT and forging the same theatrical path as Treplev: towards Symbolism and a theatre of stasis. As Nina remarks of Treplev’s play: ‘It doesn’t have much action, your play – it’s just a kind of recitation’ (Chekhov 1991: 66).

A Baptism of Fire: The Fellowship of the New Drama

Between being sacked by the MAT Board in 1902 and his return to Moscow in 1905, Meyerhold...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A LIFE OF CONTRADICTIONS
• 2 MEYERHOLD'S KEY WRITINGS
• 3 MEYERHOLD'S KEY PRODUCTION: THE GOVERNMENT INSPECTOR
• 4 PRACTICAL EXERCISES
• Bibliography
• Index