Sergei Radlov: The Shakespearian Fate of a Soviet Director

David Zolotnistky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781134360734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

First Published in 1996. Professor Zolotnitsky provides a picture of the life and work of Sergei Radlov - one of the most outstanding interpreters of Shakespeare on the Soviet stage in the 1930s. Sergei Radlov started as one of the left-wing directors among the disciples and companions of Vsevolod Meyerhold in post-revolutionary Russia. He directed Jack London, Ernst Toller, Evgeni Zamyatin and updated Aristophanes. In the latter he did "modern" operas, such as "The Love for Three Oranges" by Sergei Prokofiev and "Der ferne Klang" by Franz Schrecker.

Part One

A Study in Scarlet

(1917–1937)

Translated from the Russian
by Tatiana A. Ganf and Natalia A. Egunova

Chapter One

A Running Start

The starting point • The Popular Comedy theatre • An encounter with M. Gorky and the crisis of the agitational satire • Tests for entertaining action • The influence of the circus on the heritage • The decline of the Popular Comedy

The Starting Point

Sergei Radlov started as director proceeding straight from the world of literature, passing by the phase of acting. He appeared as an actor at the age of about fifty. It happened in the besieged Leningrad, in the winter of 1941, when an actor who suddenly broke down had to be substituted immediately. The debutante did not spoil the ensemble, nor did he produce any sensation. It was not a time for sensations: theatrical art still remained within the framework of respectable academism. The ideas and designs of Radlov as director had been developing within these bounds, revealing their literary origins. Sometimes Radlov tried to free himself from the impact of literature, only to return to it again.

He was bom in St. Petersburg in 1892. His father, Ernest Lvovich (or, more exactly, Leopoldovich) Radlov, was professor of philosophy and then director of the Imperial Public Library. Having graduated from the University where he had got his philological education, Sergei Radlov took a deferential interest in the Antiquity and the Renaissance.

He was not yet twenty when his translations of poems by Stefan George appeared in the Apollo magazine. His original poems were published in St. Petersburg newspapers. Here is one of them:

Let it be so^*

Let a wave play in a drowsy sea

Or angry crests show white… Let it be so.

The joy of the sun, the dark cloud’s sorrow -

All of this I’ve long known by heart.

There are no habitual charms in the breakers’ chorus.

Sorrow is evenly spreading its fogs.

The world grows cold in a unanimous verdict:

Death shall swallow you soon, soon,

Death shall swallow you? Let it be so.

This melancholy omniscience with respect to fate was rather a romantic pose. Of course Radlov was far from guessing that forty years later his sombre presentiment would come true so perfidiously.

So far, it was nothing but a young poet’s fancy. And it was just as a poet that the theatre first claimed him. He was invited by Nikolai Evreinov, baron Nikolai Drizen, Natalia Butkovskaya and Konstantin Miklashevsky to the Ancient Theatre; they asked him to compose rhymed prologues to two plays of old Spaniards. This attracted Radlov’s attention to the history and the techniques of the theatre of old times and made him interested in the interaction of a word written and a word spoken, of dialogue and action, as well as in the actor’s improvisation, pantomime, and playing understood in a broad sense. The old theatre gave Radlov the initial impulse, whereas a more advanced course in traditionalism was taught to him by Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Meyerhold’s studio was opened in Borodinskaya Street, St. Petersburg, in 1913. Radlov joined it as a poet and a neophyte. His poems (‘I believe embracing is ardent, / I believe kisses bum like fire’) may be appreciated from different points of view. Somebody is likely to think them too rational. However, they were printed in the studio’s magazine The Love for Three Oranges, and Meyerhold, being its editor, recommended them to Alexander Blok, who managed the poetry section. Following the poems, Radlov’s articles on Sophocles’s tragedies and Menander’s comedies were published, and one of the magazine issues (1915, Nos. 4–7) contained his translation of Plautus’s comedy Twins (Menaechmi).

Meyerhold singled the gifted studio member among all the others. Radlov was part of the studio’s nucleus. There were two groups in the Borodinskaya Studio at that time: according to their inclinations, the students did their course of studies either in the group referred to as the ‘Grotesque’ or in the other called the ‘18th Century’. Alexei Gripich, who belonged to the ‘Grotesque’, recollected afterwards: ‘The leading position in the “18th Century” group was held by Sergei Radlov. The group was characterized by a preference for romantic subjects and the softness, elegance, and even affectation of performance. Its members were Elagin, Landau, Trusevich, who later became actors of the Theatre of Experimental Productions directed by S. Radlov’.¹

A performance following Russian traditionalism imitated the style of one or another past epoch in the history of the theatre. It could be deliberately ‘common’, in the rather rough fashion of popular or outdoor spectacles, or, conversely, fine and aristocratic; emphatically verbal or improvisational throughout: in other words, the text could be uttered as a prayer or treated as freely and unceremoniously as one liked. The performance could be synthetic, making free use of performing arts, or strictly static, verbal, one of good recital and restrained action. The basic peculiarity of almost every experiment, whatever might be its stylistic purpose, was the fact that it would mainly occur within the studio walls. A student acting as director tried to make use of anything that came to hand. A regular stage would have required too much creative effort. What was necessary in the studio was the devotion of co-believers, the fervour of neophytes. Traditional productions on academic stage, even when directed by Vsevolod Meyer-hold or Fedor Komissarzhevsky, were achieved with difficulty and soon went off the repertoire. Meyerhold’s Don Juan and The Masquerade in the Alexandrinsky Drama Theatre were rare exceptions.

A mild echo of the studio traditionalism was the Theatre of Experimental Productions mentioned by Gripich. Radlov organized it in the summer of 1918 when, following his teacher Meyerhold, he joined the broad activity network of the Theatre Department (Teo) attached to the People’s Commissariat of Education. Radlov became member of the Teo repertoire section headed by Alexander Blok; in June 1918 he began teaching at the Classes for Mastership of Scenic Productions (Kursy Masterstva Scenicheskikh Postanovok, abbr. Kurmascep); and in April, 1919, after Meyerhold’s departure from Petrograd, he took on the post of the Kurmascep manager. Gripich recollected: ‘Before Meyerhold’s departure the promotion of S. E. Radlov to the post of the Classes manager had been discussed and approved’.² The organizer of the Red Army Theatrical and Dramatic Arts Workshop, Nikolai Vinogradov-Mamont, also testified that Radlov was the ‘focus of attraction for Meyerhold’s young students and followers. And after Vsevolod Emilievich had left Petrograd, Radlov was unanimously acknowledged as leader of the left-wing theatre’,³ – within the Petrograd boundaries, of course.

Like many Teo activists, Radlov worked in the mass cultural organizations of the Petrograd military district and the Baltic navy. On 9 October, 1919, the Teo newspaper Zhizri Iskusstva (Life of Art) announced the première of Emil Verhaeren’s Dawns which was to be shown in the hall of the Stock Exchange by a Baltic navy group directed by Radlov. It was one year before Meyerhold’s première in Moscow, and demonstrated the results of practical work on the Dawns by the Kurmascep students. It is worth mentioning that in staging the Dawns in Moscow, Meyerhold used the model made at Kurmascep by Vladimir Dmitriev and approved of in its initial version by A. Blok. It can be supposed that Radlov, too, made some use of a model made by some young designer of Kurmascep, possibly by Dmitriev himself: later they collaborated in many a production on the academic stage.

On the occasion of the 2nd anniversary of the Red Army, on 23 February, 1920, Radlov and the company of the Red-Army Theatrical and Dramatic Arts Workshop showed a production in verse, The Sword of Peace, written by Adrian Piotrovsky. The performance took place in the Cinizelli Circus, and some joint theatrical societies of the Petrograd garrison, as well as the chorus and the band of the military district, participated in the crowd scenes. According to the press,’ the spectacle was a great success with comrades Red-Army men’.⁴ There were also some detailed reviews. The Moscow correspondent Evgeni Kuznetsov wrote that it was ‘a concise chronology of the entire history of the Red Army’ during the two years of its existence. He was not enthusiastic about its dramatic merits and picked out some borrowings, for example, from The King’s Barber by Anatoli Lunacharsky; but he did justice to the director’s mastership: ‘If there was any effect produced, it was only thanks to the director Radlov and his apt production, rich in surprises and sudden turns. Perfect professionalism!’⁵ The production was ranked among the significant mass performances of the epoch of ‘war communism’.³

Radlov took part, as a member of a directorial team, in some other similar undertakings. In a three-part performance Towards the World Commune, shown in the portal of the Stock Exchange on 19 July, 1920, under the general direction of Konstantin Mardzhanov, and with Natan Altman as designer, Radlov directed the second part which dealt with the world war. (The first part was done by Nikolai Petrov and the third by Vladimir Solovyov and Adrian Piotrovsky.)

That year, Radlov and Solovyov also directed The Promethean Fire to mark the May-Day holiday. The performers were again the actors of the Theatrical and Dramatic Arts Workshop. One of the performances took place in the opera hall of the Narodny Dom (the People’s House). The newspaper account sounded well-meaning; it noted that the performance, which was attended exclusively by Red-Army men, was accompanied with a stormy applause’.⁶ It was a demonstration of organized emotions of organized spectators.

In mass performances, certain elements of traditionalism could sometimes be detected. Thus, it was not without looking back to some old popular court entertainments and amusements that The Siege of Russia was performed. It was shown on 20 June, 1920, on the Kamenny Ostrov (the Stony Island, renamed the Island of Rest), which had been transformed, for the occasion, by the architect Ivan Fomin, the artist Sergei Chekhonin and some others. An amphitheatre accommodating one thousand spectators was built near one of the ponds, and a small island in the middle of the pond was turned into the arena of action in the open air. The small island symbolized the RSFSR, which was besieged by the ‘gun-boats’ of the invaders. Many years later Valentina Khodasevich, a designer and once a Kurmascep student, recalled the episodes of the performance she had designed: ‘From beyond the island a skiff appears, decorated as a battleship, with a tower and guns. On board stands a caricature admiral, Lord Curzon (played by Konstantin Gibshman). He is watching the Land of Soviets through a big telescope. The Soviet workers catch sight of him and defend themselves, and after different adventures he is forced to tumble overboard’. Further, a Polish spy – an aerial acrobat Serge (Alexander Alexandrov) – fleeing from pursuit, climbed up a tree, leaping from bough to bough. A Polish general (the clown-acrobat George Delvari) turned a somersault and plunged into the water, where a firework battle was raging; etc. The acme of the performance was the choral apotheosis of the victorious Russian proletariat. ‘Since then I and Radlov felt quite enthusiastic about outdoor mass performances’, Khodasevich reminisced.⁷

True, a few years later, Radlov was one of the first to point out, soberly and rather skeptically, the exorbitant cost of designing such festive spectacles: ‘It was certainly naive and impractical to dress the rainy town in cloth shirts; and, in general, it then seemed more natural to decorate the wall of a building with a futurist mural than to mend the pavement or the water supply/ But he was right, adding that it had been ‘a romantically bold attempt of art to come out into the streets’.⁸ It was a characteristic feature of the period of ‘war communism’ in general, both in life and in art.

Radlov continued this kind of scenic practice for some years. Yet life’s new realities themselves called for rejecting old, worn-out forms…

In his first studio theatre, the Theatre of Experimental Productions, Radlov managed to stage only two comedies: Plautus’s Twins (Menaechmi) in his translation and The Sbitenshchik (The Hot-Mead Vendor) by Yakov Knyazhnin. The twins had masks over their faces, imitating ancient Roman actors. A mask deprived the performer of a reliable help, facial expression; but, on the other hand, it helped him develop the ability for corporal movement, expressiveness of pose and gesture, and self-orientation in space. In a way, it served the purposes of the ‘all-the-people’s theatre’, of which Radlov dreamed.⁹ Outdoor performances, the plasticity of the actor playing the leader of huge throngs required especially striking, forceful expressiveness. Facial expression, fine subtleties, minute nuances were simply lost on the audience.

A year later, when the Theatre of Experimental Productions had ceased to exist, Radlov transferred his experiments into another young theatre in Petrograd, which had taken on an unpretentious name of the Studio. It was organized at the beginning of 1919 (at 51, Liteiny Prospect) by the director Konstantin Tverskoy, the artist Yuri Bondi and some of the former members of Meyerhold’s studio in Borodinskaya Street. Radlov started there as director and playwright, his first production being a play in 3 acts, The Battle by Salamin, based on some motifs from Herodotus, Thucydides and Aeschylus. He had written it for children, in collaboration with Adrian Piotrovsky. The next season, when the Studio was reorganized into the Maly Drama Theatre, Radlov staged there a very old comedy Trumph by Ivan Krylov and quite a new comedy of Konstantin Miklashevsky, Four Lady-Killers. Thus, he was still true to the studio experience of his youth: these performances were reminiscent both of the experiments in the ‘18th Century’ group and of the ties with the Ancient Theatre where Miklashevsky had worked.

The Popular Comedy Theatre

Of all the initiatives of creative directorial activity in the Petrograd studios of that time, Radlov’s theatre Popular Comedy (1920–1922) proved to be most significant. In that theatre of topical political agitation, dramatist and director were fused in one person, a play represented by a script for the next day’s performance: it did not claim to be of an independent literary value, and the actor’s part served as an outline for the performer’s improvisation. These principles were supplemented by a principle of saturating the action with the elements of a circus show. The actors and the masters of the circus ring appeared hand in hand. In such a way Radlov tried to solve the problem of synthesis. However, the sum of heterogeneous items did not make a true synthesis. Each performer would do what he ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Russian Theatre Archive
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• List of Plates
• Part One A Study in Scarlet (1917-1937)
• Part Two A Study in Purple (1938-1958)
• Chapter One The Director and his Theatre
• Chapter Two On the Eve
• Chapter Three Events are Overtaken by the War
• Chapter Four The Outcome
• References
• Index of names
• Index of titles
• Sergei Radlov’s Productions
• A Radlov Bibliography
• Major Works on S.E. Radlov