Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre

Process to Performance

Maria Shevstova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134313211
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Including a foreword by Simon Callow, a dedicated admirer of the Maly, Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre provides both a valuable methodological model for actor training and a unique insight into the journeys taken from studio to stage.

This is the first ever full-length study of internationally-acclaimed theatre company, the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg, and its director, Lev Dodin.Maria Shevtsova provides an illuminating insight into Dodin's directorial processes and the company's actor 4raining, devising and rehearsal methods, which she interweaves with detailed analysis of the Maly's main productions.

Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance demonstrates how the impact of Dodin's work extends far beyond that of his native Russia, and gives the reader unparalleled access to the company's practice.

Part I
The Maly in context

1 From Leningrad to St Petersburg
Dodin and the Maly: journeys to the future

The uncommon story of the Maly Drama Theatre unfolds in the city built by Peter I as a ‘window to Europe’ on the swamps of the River Neva. It was St Petersburg from 1703, Petrograd during the First World War and the Revolution, Leningrad after 1924, and St Petersburg, again, in September 1991. St Petersburg's last transformation took place three months before the USSR was dissolved and the Russian Federation became ‘Russia’ once again, a country faced with the enormous task of reinventing itself as best it could in circumstances far from propitious for renewal and growth. Peter the Great had made St Petersburg a European city in appearance, culture and outlook. The Soviet Union aimed to make it neither European nor Russian. It was to be Soviet, a transnational phenomenon meant to supersede the relativities of time, space and history for the sake not of a particular socialism, but of world Socialism. Today, St Petersburg has returned to its Russian roots and European aspirations in order to reclaim an identity that would not be narrowly national or inward-looking, nor, on the other hand, subordinate to an allegedly globalised world. This is the difficult act which the Maly Drama Theatre also aimed to accomplish at the dawn of the new millennium.

‘Maly’ means ‘small’, which describes quite adequately the 35-seat theatre that was founded in May 1944 to ‘service’ the outlying region of the city of Leningrad; and the term ‘service’, which was used without any prevarication at the time, indicates the populist intentions behind the enterprise. No one could ever have imagined that this theatre, designated for local communities, would radically alter direction and become, in the last decade of the twentieth century, a star player on the international stage. When the Maly was founded, the Leningrad blockade of 900 days and countless terrors had recently come to an end, as soon would the Second World War. Nearly a million people had died from starvation, disease and cold during the blockade; its survivors were nothing less than monuments to the city's awesome heroism.¹ Most theatres had been evacuated fairly early on, with the notable exception of the theatre named after the actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya, which worked right through those fearsome years. The Maly Drama Theatre was created to help bring life back to normal. This also meant performing for the troops at the battlefront in the region until the war came completely to an end. Like all theatres in the Soviet period, it was established by governmental decree, and, like them, was supervised by the Ministry of Culture and various committees answerable to the Communist Party. It performed in all sorts of makeshift venues, in factories, halls and clubs, to fulfil its mission of making theatre performances available, as well as culturally accessible, to people unable to see them in the everyday course of their lives. By and large, its purposes were similar to those of its people's-theatre and popular-theatre counterparts endorsed by governments after the war in western Europe and beyond, of which the salient example might well be Jean Vilar's Théâtre National Populaire.² When in Leningrad, the Maly Drama Theatre was located in its dedicated space in a building that had been constructed at the end of the nineteenth century as a variety theatre by its owner for his dancer wife. Here, in a corner of this Petersburg folly, it usually performed to some 30 spectators. The term ‘drama’ is used in Russia to distinguish this type of theatre from lyrical theatre, opera or musical theatre.

The theatre lived on in a hand-to-mouth sort of way until 1973, when Roman Malkin became its managing director and Efim Padve its artistic director. Padve already enjoyed a successful career in Leningrad and had been a pupil of the redoubtable Georgy Tovstonogov, director of Leningrad's Bolshoy Drama Theatre, which was considered to be ‘virtually the strongest Russian company of the post-Stalin period’ (Smeliansky, 1999: 13). He shared Malkin's ambition to give the Maly Drama Theatre an artistic project, which it had failed in the past to combine with its social plan. Padve demanded more of actors, raised the artistic and technical standard of productions, and focused on contemporary plays, both Russian and foreign, including plays by Edward Albee – a remarkable choice of repertoire for a lack-lustre touring company with no authority whatsoever in Leningrad and modest achievements in the Leningrad province. As a result of its general overhaul, the theatre was able to build up audiences in the city while continuing its work in the region, although now at a higher creative level and still at the gruelling pace of up to 200 performances each season, all of it in extremely difficult working conditions (Malkin, St Petersburg, 30 September 1998).

It is here that Lev Dodin enters the Maly's history. Padve invited this young, gifted director, among several others who had attracted his attention, within a year of taking office, as part of his brief to develop the theatre. Dodin had graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography in 1966 and had acquired something of a reputation from the imaginative and daring productions that he had mounted as an ‘apprentice’, one might say, of Zinovy Korogodsky at the Leningrad Young People's Theatre (LenTYuZ). The LenTYuZ had flourished under Korogodsky's leadership, and, by the time of Dodin's participation in it, was well known nationally for its experimental work. At the Maly, Dodin staged by Karel C v apek in 1974, The Rose Tattoo by Tennessee Williams in 1977 and texts by important Soviet writers of the 1970s such as Aleksandr Volodin and Valentin Rasputin, who disclosed grim realities usually beautified in the official media. Rasputin's Live and Remember staged by Dodin in 1979, for example, treated the taboo theme of desertion by Soviet soldiers during the war. In 1980 came The House, which Dodin had adapted from the novel by Fyodor Abramov, a major figure in the newly emergent ‘village’ literature.³ This was a rather curious genre which, in one variation, idealised peasant life, thereby echoing Soviet propaganda on the subject, and, in another, exposed the considerable deprivations imposed by the state on the peasantry, especially during the Stalin period. Abramov belonged to the second, critical strand for which Dodin had a deep sympathy. The House made a huge impact, and more or less consolidated Dodin's growing fame as a renegade director.

Other productions followed elsewhere, in particular The Meek One after Dostoevsky at the Bolshoy Drama Theatre in 1981 (revived at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1985), and The Golovlyovs, which Dodin adapted from Saltykov- Shchedrin's novel, at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1984. Innokenty Smok-tunovsky, a riveting stage actor best known outside Russia for his Hamlet in Sergey Kozintsev's 1964 film, played the leading role in this epic production in which Dodin attempted to transfer the collaborative working methods that he was developing at the Maly to a house that was anything but open to innovative approaches. Luminary figures like Smoktunovsky, or the MKhAT's director Oleg Yefremov, were the exceptions that confirmed the rule.⁴ Saltykov- Shchedrin's book is a denunciation of empty talk, which was taken by Dodin and his audiences to be an extremely relevant theme for the times.

Dodin was obliged to work in a freelance capacity because he did not have a ‘theatre-home’ of his own – that institution of the Russian theatre dating from the historical meeting in 1897 between Stanislavsky and Nemirovich- Danchenko when they resolved to create the Moscow Art Theatre. The Art Theatre was founded on the idea of a collectivity that would stay together a long time, bound by common artistic goals and perceptions which would come to be shared by its audiences. It was to be a ‘home’, too, in the sense that it would require the sustained care and loyalty of its members. The idea persisted right through the Soviet period, and its creative principles survived despite the fact that state bureaucrats decided who would run the theatres. Yefremov worked with a group of students that was to form the Sovremennik Theatre (sovremennik means ‘contemporary’) where, despite the bureaucratic impositions placed upon him, he created a veritable ‘home’, a tightly-knit organisational and creative unit with a distinctive theatrical style. He was transferred in 1970 to the MKhAT, basically to revive this once-glorious establishment. Yury Lyubi-mov, who was a highly esteemed actor at the Vakhtangov Theatre, managed to win over officials to give him the run-down Taganka in 1964, where he built a company of world renown. Tovstonogov, after a period in Moscow and his native Tiflis in Georgia, was appointed to the Bolshoy Drama Theatre. Anatoly Efros was the only one of the four major directors of the 1960s and 1970s who did not have a sanctified ‘home’, although he worked with his own actors at the Malaya Bronnaya and, from there, commanded the love of the Moscow public.

Efros unwittingly demonstrated the power of the theatre-home, not least in symbolic terms, when he was moved, in 1984, from the Malaya Bronnaya to the Taganka. The transfer occurred shortly after Lyubimov had been dismissed from his position of artistic director and deprived of his citizenship (ostensibly for criticising the Soviet government to the British press, although old scores for his outspoken, quasi-dissident productions were being settled for good measure). That Efros accepted the position and, further, appeared to believe that he could thrive in somebody else's nest was met with incredulity in the theatre community, as well as with hostility from a sizeable number of the Taganka actors. Anatoly Smeliansky, when referring to Efros's ill-starred move, observes that his own ‘family’ at the Malaya Bronnaya was breaking up and, consequently, the move was ‘prompted by a crisis in the very idea of the theatre-home and theatre-family’. He continues:

In Soviet conditions, this vital Russian idea had turned into a situation where the performers were feudally owned not only by the state, but by their own theatrical ‘family’. No one had any freedom, that is to say the natural right to leave – to be ‘divorced’. In such conditions the threat of losing one's theatre was for both actor and director tantamount to a death threat. The melancholy fate of so-called ‘free’ directors and actors (of whom there were only a handful in the whole country!) was plain to everyone. (Smeliansky, 1999: 111)

However stultifying the situation may have become, the point appreciated by everyone was that the absence of a theatre-home, even in these conditions of servitude, was a terrible fate. This was precisely the fate of Dodin all through the 1970s, right up to one year before the Lyubimov–Efros misfortunes and Dodin's staging of The Golovlyovs at the MKhAT.

Into the twenty-first century

The reversal of Dodin's fortunes occurred in 1983, when Padve resigned from the Maly, and Dodin, on Malkin's invitation, accepted the post of artistic director. He was nearly 40 years old with at least 22 productions behind him. The company supported Dodin's appointment, for not only had it worked well with him but, by then, it numbered a few actors with whom Dodin had studied at the Theatre Institute. Dodin may have been ‘homeless’, but he was certainly not without a roof: his permanent teaching position at the Institute allowed him to develop his own school of acting and directing, and it was towards this source that he was able to look when considering the possibilities for the Maly's future. Yefremov, who had a nose for talent, offered him a niche at the Moscow Art Theatre. Dodin turned it down. Having been deprived of a theatre-home for so long, he was keenly aware of the lessons to be learned from its axioms and knew, therefore, that he would be able to realise his artistic vision only with actors with whom he shared a whole way of seeing and being, which was more likely if he formed them himself. The imperative to create an intimate relationship between his pedagogical practice and his theatre practice, where his pupils would become his actors and continue learning – a school in the broader sense of the term – was tantamount to reasserting the ideals of Stanislavsky's studio-theatre initiative that Dodin felt had become tenuous, even though directors continued to mould actors to their theatre's particular perspective.

His reasoning as to the immense benefits for the art of the theatre of a tight relationship between school/studio and professional stage was borne out in 1985 by Brothers and Sisters, Dodin's first production as the Maly's chief. He had already staged a version of this work in the late 1970s at the Theatre Institute with his friend and colleague Arkady Katzman and their students. Brothers and Sisters belonged to Abramov's trilogy The Pryaslins which, when followed by The House, formed a tetralogy dealing with the Pryaslin family. Many of those who had played in the student version of Brothers and Sisters now performed in its professional edition, more often than not in the same roles. The great beauty of the production lay in the process of maturation undergone both by the actors and the work, and in the power of ensemble acting achieved through this process, which was possible because of the unbroken line linking pedagogy and performance. Abramov's material had captivated the actors by its sensitivity to how the villagers of an all-but-forgotten outpost in Archangelsk, in the far north of the Soviet Union, had made enormous sacrifices for their country during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath without seeing any improvement in their lot. A tale of unconquerable faith, delusion, disillusion and lies, which was performed with a finesse that can only come from total conviction, Brothers and Sisters bored into the very heart of people's concerns, eliciting sensations and hopes half-forgotten by them. Its reverberations nationwide have become legendary in Russia, as has the coincidence of its premiere on 9 March, the day that Konstantin Chernenko died. Chernenko's death turned out to be the prelude to the momentous transformations sparked off subsequently by Mikhaïl Gorbachev's reforms that go under the names of ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’. It was this Maly, the newly reconstituted company flying the colours of Brothers and Sisters and, with them, the signs of a new age, that was to become the Maly known to the world. Given the historical, emotional and emblematic significance for the company of Brothers and Sisters, the production could well be described as its signature piece.

Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Maly comprises, besides some older actors from Padve's days and several of Dodin's contemporaries at the Institute, what might be called two main generations of Dodin-trained Institute actors: those who were trained by him and Katzman in the 1970s and the brilliant trainees of the 1980s who performed Gaudeamus in 1990, a number of them not formally completing their course requirements until Claustrophobia in 1994. This last group virtually retained its student ensemble status until the mid-1990s, even though it was fully integrated in the Maly. Finally, there is a recent addition to the generational layers of the Maly. It comprises a handful of recently graduated students from the Institute – renamed the Academy of Theatre Arts in 1992 – who were taught there by Dodin's close associates – voice, music, singing and dance teachers, all of whom continue to coach the Maly actors. Since about the mid-1990s, Dodin has been prevented from taking new classes at the Academy on a regular basis by the company's commitments abroad. His teaching goes on in the daily contact of rehearsals, which means that it is now essentially done from within the company in order to keep nurturing it and stretching its capabilities.

In the year 2000, the Maly consisted of 64 actors of whom five were on probation. This is more than double the size of the troupe that Dodin had taken in charge in 1983. However, the theatre as a whole employs roughly 220 people (Malkin, 30 September 1998), who include teachers, designers Eduard Kocher-gin and Alexey Poray-Koshits, technicians, stage, props and box-office managers, administrators, assistants, a company manager and Dodin's assistant director Natalya Kolotova, and a literary manager-cum-interpreter Mikhaïl Stronin. It is, indeed, a large ‘family’ to feed, and the bread has to come from various quarters, not least because the Maly's growth has involved expanding spatially upwards and outwards. The auditorium was enlarged and a balcony added in the 1990s, the whole now seating 460 spectators. This is a noticeable increase on the number of seats available at the Maly's beginnings.

In addition, office space had to be found and decent dressing-rooms provided for the actors. The latter were built in 1997 after years of make-do arrangements. Since the Maly is in a residential building, these new spaces had to be appropriated from the communal flats (komunalki) packed around the theatre precinct. Malkin recalls how dozens of people living in them had to be resettled with the help of the local authorities, while the region spent huge sums of money on the theatre's rebuilding programme – its duty, according to Malkin, given that the Maly is a statutory regional rather than city theatre. Its official status has remained unchanged since the Maly was founded, although the city owns the venue as such and the Maly pays the city a nominal rent. The regional government has always paid the theatre's salaries. Always meagre, these all but stopped at the time of the national financial crash in August 1998. The city government, while not a source of funds, has provided help in kind before, during and after perestroika, the pivotal moment for the destiny of the USSR. For instance, over the years it has provided about 50 apartments for actors to live in separately, that is, no longer in the komunalka style where five and more families shared one kitchen and one bathroom between them. The importance of such aid to the well-being of a theatre-home cannot be underestimated.

The financial condition of the Maly was never prosperous, which meant that it was no better off than most theatres subsidised by the Soviet state. The subsidy syste...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The Maly in context
• 1: From Leningrad to St Petersburg: Dodin and the Maly: Journeys to the Future
• 2 The Work Process: Improvising, Devising, Rehearsing
• Part II: The major Productions
• 3: Dodin's ‘theatre of prose’
• 4: The Student Ensemble: Gaudeamus and Claustrophobia: 1 Postmodernist Aesthetics
• 5: Chekhov in an age of uncertainty
• Part III: Dodin at the Opera
• 6: Dodin directs opera
• 7: Anatomy of the Queen of Spades: From studio to Stage
• Notes
• Bibliography