Makers of Modern Theatre

An Introduction

Robert Leach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134382729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Who were the giants of the twentieth-century stage, and exactly how did they influence modern theatre?

Robert Leach's Makers of Modern Theatre is the first detailed introduction to the work of the key theatre-makers who shaped the drama of the last century: Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud.

Leach focuses on the major issues which relate to their dominance of theatre history:

*What was significant in their life and times?
*What is their main legacy?
*What were their dramatic philosophies and practices?
*How have their ideas been adapted since their deaths?
*What are the current critical perspectives on their work?

Never before has so much essential information on the making of twentieth-century theatre been compiled in one brilliantly concise, beautifully illustrated book. This is a genuinely insightful volume by one of the foremost theatre historians of our age.

1     Modern theatre … Modernist theatre

The modern theatre is the theatre of today. ‘Modernist’ theatre refers to the theatre of the first fifty or so years of the last century, when Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht, and Artaud flourished. Their Modernism, however, infiltrates and influences all aspects of modern theatre. They bestride the gap between ‘Modernism’ and the modern. That is why they were, supremely, the ‘makers of modern theatre’.

Modernism is usually – and correctly – associated with startling novelty, with art which deliberately shocks or which deliberately – even joyfully – breaks conventions. It is often designed to be partial, contentious, and challenging. Modernism created the ‘avant-garde’: those who not only introduced new subject matter to art, but did so by the use of new methods and new forms. They were the Symbolists, the Futurists, the Expressionists, the Surrealists, and all the other innovators and iconoclasts of that period. The richness and originality which they brought to art and culture were almost overwhelming, and it often seems that artists ever since have been working out the implications of their ideas. Certainly in theatre, the giants of the end of the twentieth century, practitioners like Augusto Boal or Peter Stein or Lev Dodin, constantly if implicitly refer in their work to that of their precursors, and often specifically to the four practitioners who form the subject of this book. We may argue, for example, that Feminist theatre capitalised deftly on certain implications of Brechtian theatre, or that contemporary ‘physical theatre’ owes its birth to the experiments of Meyerhold – or, perhaps, Artaud. And so on. Thus the four may be regarded not only as the makers of Modernist theatre, but as the makers of modern theatre as well.

Modernism was perhaps most forcibly characterised by its awareness that the old certainties of life and society, religion and culture, were fractured for ever by the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and others. Post-nineteenth-century life, at least in Europe and America, became hard to anchor for many whose primary experience was of incoherence and fragmentation. The avant-garde artistic movements of the Modernists, therefore, were not only themselves fragments of the greater ‘Modernist culture’, they were also responses to the perceived fragmentation of experience. And the four practitioners whom we have identified as ‘makers’ of modern theatre all felt the force of this fragmentation, though all, of course, responded to it differently. We might suggest that Stanislavsky wanted to heal it, that Meyerhold wanted to make it cohere beyond the stage in the spectator (in Roland Barthes’ sense, he wanted ‘the death of the theatre artist’), that Brecht wanted to use it for political purposes, and that Artaud wanted it to cauterise. Insofar as this was the case, between them these attitudes encompass the range of Modernist theatre.

And after Modernism?

Probably the most noticeable developments in the second half of the twentieth century were less in the arts themselves than in ‘post-modernist’ critical theories of the arts, though surprisingly little of this was initially devoted to theatre. There were, of course, a few significant essays by Freud and Benjamin, Barthes and Derrida, which pointed to ways forward, but only towards the end of the century, with the work of critics like Keir Elam, with his semiotic approach, and Sue-Ellen Case, with her feminist orientation, did theatre become consistently the subject of theoretical scrutiny. The most notable theorist, probably, was Herbert Blau, who developed an interconnected web of critical ideas to produce a formidable, if pessimistic, critique of drama and theatre. Some of these works are set into a context of past critical debates and theories in Marvin Carlson’s anthology, Theories of the Theatre.¹ In the following pages, I have tried to sketch in very lightly the possible relevance of contemporary theory to Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht, and Artaud in the sections devoted to ‘twenty-first-century perspectives’. While making no pretence to comprehensiveness, these sections do attempt to suggest possible approaches, as well as referring briefly to some more recent work done, especially on Brecht and Artaud.

But, in the end, the significance of these four men is to be found in their theatre practice. The starting point is to be found in their understanding that the theatre is always symbolic. It assumes that everything that happens on stage stands for something else. This is true even of the most naturalistic piece. As Magritte asked of the pipe, so Stanislavsky asked of the stage prop: is it a real thing (itself) or is it an illusion? And because the theatre is three-dimensional and freestanding, because the greasepaint really smells and the boards really creak, the answer is not easy to formulate. For Meyerhold, the prop was of the theatre, metaphorical, but not illusionistic; for Brecht, it was perhaps a signifier; for Artaud, perhaps, a reality. And what of the actor himself? Is he a cipher? A character? A convention? A type? These four practitioners all recognised the centrality of the actor in the theatrical process. Each helped to open up acting and to liberate it from old traditions. Each saw the actor as a creative artist in his own right.

Telling, too, was the influence these four men had on the form which drama was to take and the content with which it would wrestle. In terms of content, between them, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht, and Artaud cover the political and the non-political, the rational and the anti-rational, the public and the private. Their practice explores the place of the individual in society, and society’s responsibility to the individual (as well as the individual’s total rejection of society); it examines problems of narrative and plot, as well as of feeling and ‘historical fact’. Brecht noted how ‘we / Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness / Could not ourselves be friendly’,² and at the same time Artaud was developing a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’. But both saw in Bruegel’s painting, Dulle Griet, theatre swarming through life.

In terms of their ways of working, Stanislavsky and Artaud worked ‘from the inside’ outwards, whereas Meyerhold and Brecht worked in the contrary direction. For Stanislavsky, the actor’s felt emotion was to be shared with the silent spectator, while for Artaud the physical experience was to sear in equal measure the actor and the spectator. And where Meyerhold’s theatricality shadowed reality, and validated poetic truths and the fragility of being, Brecht’s theatricality argued about reality, made it accessible to reason and therefore changeable. Meyerhold and Artaud were concerned with theatre as primarily physical, but Stanislavsky and Brecht used a nonphysical starting point, the feelings or thought itself, as their springboard. In consequence, the practice of these four men raised all the problems of naturalism and non-naturalism, montage and the through-line, which we are still struggling with today. They each ask, What is theatrical truth? (And we hear Stanislavsky’s voice urging self-doubt, echoing down the years: ‘I don’t believe you!’)

It is perhaps surprising that these four men knew each other as slightly as they did. Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, of course, were more than mere acquaintances: they worked together from time to time, and at telling moments in their careers. Their parallel development has been documented elsewhere,³ but their collaborations occurred as each set out on his professional career, at the Moscow Art Theatre between 1898 and 1902, as well as in the summer of 1905, and at the very end of their lives, in 1938. Between these times, their relationship was stormy, or distant, or hostile, or intense. They followed each other’s work with hawk-like eagerness, and commented on and discussed each other’s tendencies and predilections. There was, however, a human warmth and undoubted regard between them personally at all times, whatever the nature of their professional rivalry.

However, the paths of each of the others in this group of ‘makers of modern theatre’ barely crossed. Meyerhold and Brecht both attended the performance of Mei Lan-fang in Moscow in 1935, but even though both wrote thoughtfully about the performance, it is not clear that they actually met. When Meyerhold’s theatre toured Europe in 1930, Brecht attended performances, but again there is no record of them meeting. Indeed, it is clear that throughout the 1920s and beyond, Brecht followed as best he could the progress of the revolutionary Russian theatre of which Meyerhold was the leading practitioner. But contact was never established between them. On the other hand, there were plenty of contacts between their worlds, if not between the two of them as individuals: for example, Edmund Meisel wrote music for the film Battleship Potemkin made by Meyerhold’s former student, Eisenstein, and, about the same time, wrote music for Brecht’s Man Is Man. And Asja Lacis, Bernhard Reich, Walter Benjamin, Erwin Piscator, Viktor Shklovsky, and Sergei Tretyakov were only some of their mutual acquaintances.

Artaud, too, saw the Meyerhold Theatre in 1930, and he also worked with Georges Pitoeff, who had been an actor at Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s theatre in Meyerhold’s period as artistic director there. He also may have seen Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre in France in the early 1920s, and he acted in the French version of Pabst’s film of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. But beyond these few chance contacts, there seem to have been no encounters, or near encounters, between these four men, though in passing one might note other fleeting conjunctions and influences between them. The Dada movement, for instance, embraced Artaud in France and impinged on Brecht in Germany. More telling, perhaps, was the interest all four shared in eastern theatre, including Balinese, Chinese and Japanese theatres, especially Kabuki and Noh, as well as allied practices like yoga.

Peter Brook, in asking ‘How Many Trees Make a Forest?’ suggested that: ‘For Artaud, theatre is fire; for Brecht, theatre is clear vision; for Stanislavsky, theatre is humanity’.⁴ Others might suggest that for Stanislavsky theatre is psychology; for Meyerhold it is art; for Brecht it is political disputation; for Artaud it is apocalypse. There may not be much to be gained from such formulations. However, it is worth remembering that each of the four suffered grievously at the hands of society. Stanislavsky’s factories and home were expropriated by the Bolsheviks; and when he became their favourite theatrical guru, they confined him to ‘internal exile’, cut him off from the world, and allowed him access only to Party-approved doctors. Meyerhold was imprisoned by the Whites in 1919 and sentenced to death; he was arrested by the Communists, grotesquely tortured, and finally sentenced by them and actually shot in 1940. Brecht was exiled from his native land for thirteen years when he was at the height of his powers; as a writer his books were burned, and he died young, at fifty-eight. Artaud was confined to mental asylums, almost starved, and only released after he had been subjected to fifty or sixty electro-convulsion therapy treatments; his death at the early age of fifty-one was, some have argued, the result of the treatment he received.

In the end, however, each stands for himself, each offers the potential for development and extension. When theatre has no more use for Stanislavsky or Meyerhold or Brecht or Artaud, it will surely be a poorer institution than it is.

2 Konstantin Stanislavsky

Life and work

Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky was born on 5 January 1863. His real surname was Alexeyev, and he belonged to an extremely wealthy merchant–manufacturing family; but his maternal grandmother was a successful French actress who had married a Russian.

Figure 2.1 Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky.

Konstantin Alexeyev’s childhood was happy, privileged, and serene, and revolved almost exclusively round the family. He adored his mother and feared his father. He remembered family members swimming in the river, sometimes with his cousins, sometimes for prizes, and a brass band playing for them! And he remembered dressing up on St John’s Night, and he and his brothers and sisters leaping out at passers-by. They went to balls when ‘instead of tablecloths there were roses brought by express trains from Nice and Italy’,¹ travelled, read widely, and performed charitable works. What he remembered best in his childhood, he later wrote, were the emotions which he lived through, especially when he was obstinate or indulging in a tantrum: ‘not so much the facts that caused’ them, but the emotions themselves. His truth, even as a young child, was the truth of the emotions. ‘I remember all the spiritual stages of my childish fit as if the thing took place today, and when I remember them I experience again an anguished pain in my heart.’²

Despite the progressive capitalism of the family, the young Alexeyev’s childhood was lived with one foot in ‘old’ Russia. The serfs had only received their legal emancipation in 1861. It was a society dominated by the gold onion domes and swinging censers of the Orthodox Church, and indeed there are parallels to be drawn between Stanislavsky’s later acting system and the practices of the Orthodox mystics. He remembered holidays from school: ‘In the morning one must go again to church, rising early; then there is a long period of standing, the tasty holy water, the winter sun warming us through the cupola and gilding the iconostasis, around us people in their holiday best, loud singing’.³ When he approached the entrance examination for the local gymnasium, ‘so that the Lord might make me wise enough to pass the impending purgatory, my nurse hung a little bag with mud from Mount Athos around my neck, and my mother and sisters decorated me with holy images’.⁴ Unfortunately, during the examination, he fiddled so much with the little bag that all the ‘holy mud’ ran away!

For Konstantin Alexeyev art and religion were near neighbours. One side of life was occupied with business, trade, money-making; the other centred on religion, art, the preoccupations of the spirit. ‘We decided that if we were to occupy ourselves with art, no thought of money must enter our minds.’⁵ He loved especially all the arts which involved performing. But it was quite natural after a visit to the circus, and the forming of a determination to run a circus later in life, that he should find it necessary to ‘make my decision binding with an oath’, and that the oath should involve taking an icon down and swearing by it.⁶ Art and religion were bound together, but it was the religion of old Russia. Going to the theatre proper was also somehow part of the same old Russian world, even if the play to be seen was modern: the young Alexeyevs were washed, and dressed in Russian blouses made of silk, velvet trousers, and soft chamois leather boots, and they wore white gloves on their hands. It was almost as if they were going to church.

Stanislavsky’s Moscow

Moscow was the city of merchants: solid, old-fashioned, and very Russian. Its churches, epitomised by Ivan the Terrible’s St Basil’s Cathedral, were topped with gaudy onion domes, and Red Square (literally, ‘beautiful square’) was dominated by its ancient Kremlin, or citadel. The rich Russian art collectors, Sergei Shchukin, Ivan Morosov, and Pavel Tretyakov, were all based in Moscow.

Artistically too Moscow was traditionalist. The Maly Theatre was renowned for the homely realism of Mikhail Shchepkin’s acting and merchant families’ domestic dramas created by Alexander Ostrovsky. Isaak Levitan, supreme painter of the Russian landscape, and Sergei Rakhmaninov, composer and devout Russian Orthodox believer, were both Muscovites, and even when a new group of artists did burst onto the Moscow scene, it was somehow fitting that they should be ‘Primitivists’ – Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kasimir Malevich, and Georgy Yakulov.

Only the astonishing serial music of Alexander Scriabin and, later, the hullabaloo of Futurism’s poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burlyuk, Alexander Kruchonykh, and Velimir Khlebnikov, seemed able to scratch the image of the canny, but still colourful and vital, city.

All the Alexeyev children adored the theatre and dreamed of creating their own productions, and in 1877 their father went so far to gratify them as to transform one room in their dacha at Lyubimovka into a theatre. They all loved acting there, and Konstantin became the director, perhaps because his love was the greatest, perhaps because he had the most talent. They created ‘the Alexeyev Circle’ and performed for the public. Konstantin’s attempts to train his siblings included going out in the evenings pretending to be tramps among real people, and later playing the same game for whole days ‘in the character’ of their current role. ‘Living the part’ even in adolescence was a serious business. By his later teens the Alexeyev Circle was more or less defunct, and Konstantin had begun to act with amateur theatre companies, some a little risqué. For him, theatre was serious. Found in a somewhat insalubrious performance place, he changed his stage name to ‘Stanislavsky’ and went on working at his acting. He took singing lessons with the leading professional, Fyodor Komissarzhevsky, and performed in some of the productions at the Mamontov Private Opera.

Savva Mamontov and Abramtsevo

Savva Mamontov’s estate of Abramtsevo, north-east of Moscow, was a colony for artists, which attracted not only painters, including the group known as ‘the Wanderers’, but also writers, architects, musicians, and more, who together built the famous Abramtsevo church in traditional style.

In the early 1880s, their Sunday evening play readings grew into full stagings of plays, in which Stanislavsky, whose cousin was Mamontov’s wife, often participated. Mamontov used artists in the colony to create stage designs, and in 1883 his Priva...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of boxes
• 1 Modern theatre … Modernist theatre
• 2 Konstantin Stanislavsky
• 3 Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold
• 4 Bertolt Brecht
• 5 Antonin Artaud
• 6 Afterwards…after words
• Notes
• Index