The Moscow Art Theatre

Nick Worrall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134935864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Unprecedented in its comprehensiveness, The Moscow Art Theatre fills a large gap in our knowledge of Stanislavsky and his theatre. Worrall focuses in particular detail on four of The Moscow Art Theatre's best-known productions:
* Tolstoy's Tsar Fedor Ioannovich
* Gorky's The Lower Depths
* Chekov's The Cherry Orchard
* Turgenev's A Month in the Country

Part I
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MOSCOW ART THEATRE

INTRODUCTION

The considerable impact of the Moscow Art Theatre, especially in Europe and North America, has largely been on the development of acting theory through the writings of Konstantin Stanislavsky, one of the Theatre’s founders. However, although the Art Theatre began life in 1898, Stanislavsky did not concern himself seriously with acting theory until almost ten years later. A great deal of his theoretical work was written down during the 1930s, when his involvement in day-to-day theatre operations had ceased and the Theatre’s own traditions were increasingly moribund.

Since the death, in 1943, of the Art Theatre’s co-founder, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and his successful revival of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in 1940, the history of the Art Theatre has been undistinguished, despite attempts by disciples of both founders to sustain its values. Everything bequeathed by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko as an on-going legacy to be nurtured by inheritors who had acquired their experience at first hand, remains undeveloped. Despite the availability of key theoretical works (albeit incomplete), the scrupulous records of Art Theatre productions, and studies devoted to both, there is little evidence of Stanislavsky’s and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s positive influence on Russian theatre practice. At the time of writing, the Moscow Art Theatre is split and in crisis, and this seems symptomatic of a longterm decline, held in check and disguised by a less than disinterested, centralised state artistic policy.¹ What went wrong, and where did things begin to go wrong? It is perhaps necessary, at the approach of the Theatre’s centenary, to return to its origins in an attempt to discover why the creation of the Moscow Art Theatre was such an important event and why it remains of major historical and artistic significance.

When the Moscow Art Theatre first visited Britain in 1958, the cultural and political after-shock was negligible compared with that of the Berliner Ensemble’s visit in 1956. This was the Art Theatre’s ninth overseas tour and thirteen more were made, to various parts of the world, between 1956 and 1977. However, none of these tours made any real and lasting impression on the theatrical consciousness of the countries visited. We probably have to go back to the first European tour, in 1906 (an artistic success but a financial failure) and to the American tours of 1923 and 1924, to discover what made the Moscow Art Theatre one of the world’s great theatrical institutions. Moreover, the productions taken to America, whose effects proved so influential, were, in some cases, already twenty years old—and had already toured Europe in 1906. The international reputation of the Theatre seems, then, to be very specifically connected with its origins, and its historical significance with its very earliest years.

Important productions were staged at the Art Theatre between 1905 and 1917, as well as during the Soviet period, but nothing to compare in significance with those of the very first years. Who, outside Russia, can name any significant Art Theatre production staged after 1917? The international reputation of the theatre since the Russian Revolution has been almost entirely attributable to Stanislavsky’s theoretical writings and, in particular, to his two-part study ‘An Actor’s Work on Himself’.² Effectively, the appropriation of the Moscow Art Theatre as a cultural instrument of the one-party state and the canonisation of its exemplary realist methods served to seal the theatre off from any influence it might have exercised on the international theatre scene, especially from the late 1920s. Its only tour abroad between 1924 and 1956 was to Paris, in 1937. On the other hand, the proliferation of Stanislavsky’s theories, at first or second-hand, in translations of varying quality and accuracy, has resulted in their almost canonical status in drama schools throughout the Western world. Apart from ‘The Method’, however, no genuinely innovative theatrical developments have stemmed directly from these theories, only in reaction to them. Of their enlarged or extended application there is little sign, even in their country of origin where Stanislavsky’s writings have been regarded as virtually sacrosanct.(The terms ‘method’ and ‘The Method’ are used to describe the American adaption of the Sainislavsky ‘system’ associated mainly with Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio, which Strasberg founded in 1950.)

It may seem heretical to suggest that Stanislavsky’s main contribution to modern European theatre was complete by 1917. But theory begins to be divorced from practice or, at least, from the daily exigen- cies of running a theatre, and this produced, by the 1930s, a divorce from social and political reality of a potentially disabling kind. If all that remained of Stanislavsky’s inheritance was his theory (rather than both that and the record of his earlier practice) he might have gone down in history as an earnest, rather old-fashioned theoretician with a nineteenth- rather than a twentieth-century world outlook. The testing of his theories in the unreal conditions of secluded and private rehearsals (a privilege conferred by a totalitarian leader) lent public support, ironically, to the suppression of anything which appeared to challenge the premises of those theories. Stanislavsky’s own ‘modernist’ experiments (mainly pre-1914) appear unsophisticated beside those of Edward Gordon Craig, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Antonin Artaud and others. His subsequent espousal of an apparently unproblematic notion of ‘realism’, based on the tangible reality of individual consciousness and emotional experience, seems both provisional and tenuous in a historical context which includes the philosophical perspectives of Luigi Pirandello, or post-modern ideas on the nature of the individual subject. When the ‘humanist’ elements of Stanislavsky’s ideology are viewed, retrospectively, in the historical context of the inhuman, irrational politics of the gulag and the Holocaust, his commitment to narrow versions of realism and his immersion in theory and private rehearsal during the 1930s can seem either blinkered or complicit with a public process which had more to do with the mad-house than with nuances of psychological or emotional ‘truth’.

Did Stanislavsky’s fundamentally humanist theories, based on realist premises, have any relationship then with the inhumanity of the surrounding world? Did they connect with the actual practice of the Moscow Art Theatre after 1928, when he had effectively retired from day-to-day work in the theatre? What is the connection between the content of ‘An Actor’s Work on Himself’, Stanislavsky’s intense rehearsal work during his last ten years, and the life-and-death struggle being waged beyond the confines of his cloistered, state-funded rehearsal space?³ How is it that Stanislavskyan theory could, later, be made to serve the apparently contradictory interests of unfettered individualist self-expression (in the largely American-inspired transmission of his ideas) as well as the political interests of a totalitarianism masquerading as collectivism?

Brecht’s main arguments against narrow versions of ‘realism’ were based on the tendency of realistic methods to underwrite the ‘status quo’ and reinscribe the contours of a ‘given’ reality within the consciousness of the perceiver, rather than to awaken new ways of seeing and interpreting social reality, or challenge accepted orthodoxies. There is little doubt that the state’s canonisation of the Moscow Art Theatre, and its espousal of Stanislavskyan versions of realism were devices used to underpin an orthodox promulgation of that state’s self-image— ostensibly humane and considerate of individual thought and feeling— when the real world outside the theatre required definition in much more complex terms.

The problem has as much to do with the legitimisation of realist theory as with the beatification of Stanislavsky himself. In a modernist age (not to mention a post-modern one) Stanislavsky’s seeming faith in a stable understanding of realism can seem culpably ingenuous. However, in his defence, it should be said that his version of realism was merely one among other, constantly evolving definitions. It fell to others to make a pernicious ideology of a single, static version—a form of ‘naturalism’ far removed from the idealism with which Stanislavsky sought to invest the term.

Stanislavsky’s interest in late-nineteenth-century ‘realist’ method was, inevitably, related to the ‘naturalistic’ interests of others during that same period. This coloured his work at the Society of Art and Literature and his early years at the Art Theatre. But the introduction of the ‘system’ and Stanislavsky’s dedication to the pursuit of truth in an altogether new, uncompromising humanistic and scientific vein reveal a spiritual discontent with the obsessional aspects of naturalistic disclosure. Stanislavsky’s religion of realism inveighs against the reductionist perspectives of naturalism’s faith in the absolutely material, against its belief in physiological and environmental determinants which reduce spirit to matter and desire to mere appetite in a spiritless universe.

When placing Stanislavsky and the Art Theatre in the context that produced them and examining aspects of Russian and European theatre history that can assist in an understanding of the Art Theatre’s emergence, it is also necessary to demonstrate the inextricable connection between the ideal and the real, the elevated and the everyday. The idealistic tones of Stanislavsky’s address to the band of disciples who gathered at Pushkino on 14 June 1898, to begin rehearsals for the Theatre’s opening that October, appear idly high-minded if divorced from the daily round which is the lotof any theatrical enterprise. Among those who ensured that the curtain rose on the successful first night (in fact it parted in the middle) were not only luminaries such as Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Ivan Moskvin, Meyerhold and Olga Knipper, but also 373 others—the total complement of staff employed by the Moscow Public-Accessible Art Theatre (as it was initially called) during its first season.

Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko came together in the first place in order to create a theatre both ‘public’ and ‘accessible’. For them the theatre was no idle, incidental pastime for a select few but, like the great theatres of the past—the Greek or the Elizabethan—was a fundamental part of the spiritual life, and health, of the community as a whole, as well as a profession worthy of the dedication of a lifetime’s spiritual and material effort.

The first part of what follows deals with the historical background and sequence of events which led to the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre and focuses on the early years. The latter part attempts a summarising overview of the theatre’s repertoire from 1898 until 1917. The total number of productions staged at the Art Theatre during this period was around seventy, which would be impossible to treat equally; therefore, four productions have been selected for treatment in detail—Tsar Fedor Ioannovich (1898), The Lower Depths (1902), The Cherry Orchard (1904) and A Month in the Country (1909)—and some justification of this particular selection seems necessary.

As well as being one of the most successful productions in the Art Theatre’s history, Aleksey Tolstoy’s historical drama, Tsar Fedor Ioannovich, was also its first. Amongst other things, it serves to illustrate the influence of the archaeological-naturalist movement in European theatre, to which Stanislavsky was exposed through contact with the Meiningen Court Theatre productions of historical plays. The historical and ethnographical authenticity which marked the production of Tsar Fedor were in stark contrast to the clichéd, stereotypical versions of the historical past which had been the hallmark of earlier attempts, by the Imperial Theatres and others, to stage Russian and foreign history plays. One of the most telling comments on the production of Tsar Fedor was made by the Imperial Theatre actress, Mariya Yermolova, who stated that, henceforth, anyone wishing to stage historical plays with any degree of artistic integrity would need to learn from the Art Theatre’s example.⁴

The production was also significant in that it marked the advent of the director into both the Russian and, to an importantextent, the European theatre. Prior to this, Russian critics and commentators invariably spoke of ‘performances’; henceforth they would speak of ‘productions’, with all the implications this had for ensemble, unity of intellectual conception and aesthetically integrated, effective mises-en-scènes. With this production, Stanislavsky might be said to have been making a deliberate bid for a place in theatre history in a manner conscious both of his own and its historical significance. He was not merely following in the footsteps of Ludwig Chronegk as a stager-of-crowd-scenes, but staking a claim for the importance of the role of the director as overall organiser of the production.⁵

Tsar Fedor not only proved to be the most popular production during the Theatre’s first season but was also immensely popular in the longterm, despite undergoing many structural alterations and changes of personnel. It was given its 700th performance in 1944 on the occasion of the actor Ivan Moskvin’s 70th birthday, when he repeated the performance as Fedor which he had first given forty-six years previously. The production was even to outlive Moskvin himself and record one thousand performances—perhaps not many by London West End standards but a considerable number in terms of the Russian repertory system.

The choice of a play by Maxim Gorky, and The Lower Depths in particular, may not seem to justify itself so clearly. However, its production needs to be seen in the context of a history in which Gorky was not only a romantic modifier of the naturalist tradition, but also the first Russian ‘proletarian’ playwright. Moreover, this production was staged at a theatre which had christened itself ‘public-accessible’ with the specific aim of appealing to working-class audiences. Somewhat ironically, by the time it staged The Lower Depths the Art Theatre no longer carried the phrase ‘public-accessible’ as part of its title and audiences in its new, 1902, premises were drawn from an increasingly affluent constituency.

Although Gorky became the ‘house playwright’ (the Art Theatre was officially named in his honour in 1932), this obscures the fact that the Theatre did not stage a single one of his plays between 1905 and 1933, despite ample opportunity. Moreover, the Theatre’s relations with Gorky had cooled as a result of rows over the rejection of Summerfolk and controversy surrounding productions of work by Dostoyevsky, of whom Gorky disapproved.⁶ Most characteristic of the Art Theatre’s relationship with the plays of Maxim Gorky during the author’s own lifetime was its meagre involvement with their staging.

The conferral, in the 1930s, of a ‘special relationship’ with Gorky was officially promulgated to endorse the Art Theatre’s exemplary realist methods, now offered as models for general imitation at a time when an ideological war was being waged against ‘modernism’ and ‘formalism’. The elevation of Gorky to ‘socialist realist’ status was both a political and an aesthetic promotion. It followed his decision to turn his back on ‘bourgeois’ Europe and opt for permanent settlement in the Soviet Union. Prominent among the official welcoming party on his return, in 1931, was Stanislavsky, whose last association with Gorky had been his production of Children of the Sun, in 1905, as a vehicle for élitist rather than socialist propaganda.

The association with the work of Gorky, once established, became persistent. Beginning with productions of The Merchant Class and The Lower Depths in its fourth and fifth seasons, the Art Theatre went on to stage a further ten of Gorky’s plays between 1933 and 1976, including excellent productions by Nemirovich-Danchenko of Yegor Bulychev and Others (1934) and of Enemies, in 1935. Following Gorky’s return, it became customary to confer retrospective ideological respectability on his earlier works. This was inevitably the fate of his novel Mother, with its clearly defined socialist theme of which Lenin approved, but it was also the case with an otherwise apolitical-seeming play like The Lower Depths.

By the mid-1930s, Stanislavsky’s official status in the Soviet theatrical pantheon had begun to rival that of Lenin and Stalin in Soviet politics. Some attempt to explain this phenomenon is offered as part of the conclusion to this book and may be seen to derive, in part, from the ideology implicit in many of Stanislavsky’s own productions, and from his deliberate espousal of realism. Moreover, it had been the (ostensibly bourgeois) Art Theatre which originally gave ‘the first proletarian writer’ a theatrical hearing and had been prepared to descend with him into ‘the lower depths’ of life. From these same depths Satin’s hymn to ‘Man’ in Act Four had rung out like a socialist clarion call—a paean delivered originally by Stanislavsky himself. A canonical work of socialist realism was seen to have been given a canonically realist interpretation. Gorky’s play and its production, as well as Stanislavsky’s performance, became hagiographic reference points for Soviet theatrical culture. Hence the retrospective significance of that 1902 production, however pragmatically the Art Theatre may have embarked on its staging.

The importance of Chekhov in the history of the Art Theatre is wellknown. Precisely what his fate as a dramatist would have been had not the Theatre championed his cause is uncertain. What seems clear is that, had the 1898 production of The Seagull been a failure, Chekhov would probably have kept his vow never to write another play so long as he lived.⁷ Thus, the generally accepted view that Chekhov is one of the most important dramatists of the last hundred years depended, crucially, on the public rehabilitation of The Seagull after the debacle of 1896. This then generated the writing of Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Despite being one of Chekhov’s most frequently performed plays, the original production of The Cherry Orchard is one of the least well-documented. Uncle Vanya has possibly an equal claim for attention but, unfortunately, the production score remains unpublished. As distinct from Uncle Vanya, however, which is a re-working of an earlier play The Wood Demon, the importance of The Cherry Orchard is that it is a completely original play which, like Three Sisters, was composed specifically for the Art Theatre with known actors in mind.

Another original feature of The Cherry Orchard is its rather unusual form. Written at a time when Chekhov was interested in the work of Ma...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
• A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND NAMES
• Part I: THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE MOSCOW ART THEATRE
• Part II: THE MOSCOW ART THEATRE REPERTOIRE 1898–1917
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY