1 NORMAN MARSHALL

THE PRODUCER AND THE

PLAY

MACDONALD : LONDON

The Producer and the Play they are not "spying on reality" seem to me completely un-necessary because I fi.nd it hard to believe that any audience ever becomes entirely unconscious of the fact that they are in a theatre watching an impersonation ofreality. For instance, the burst of applause which sometimes follows the exit of an actor after a well-played scene is proof that an audience, however completely they may be held by that scene, remain aware that what they are seeing is not reallife but a clever impersonation of it.

The attempt to destroy the representational theatre in Russia required the actors to abandon their old technique. The detailed and subtle portrayal of emotions was described as "worthless soul junk ". The actor was ordered to "forget his little, rickety ego" and become "an instrument for social manifestos ". The producers, in their hatred of a:l individualistic society, exercised every kind ofingenuity to deprive the actors of their individuality. "The principies ofthe propagandist theatre, declared Meierhold, "are in en tire conformity with those of Marxism beca use they seek to emphasise the elements which make prominent what is common to all men, the unindividual." He demanded from his actors '' the vigorous elimination of all humane feeling and the creation of an order based u pon mechanicallaws ". He invented what he called bio-mechanics -"the geometrisation ofmovement based on deep study ofthe human body and the laws of movement and sp.ace". Mean-while in Germany Piscator was enforcing "unindividualistic ac;ting" by dressing his actors in harsh, angular costumes which were deliberately at variance with the Iines ofthe humanbody, so that the players seemed more like robots than human beings. Tairov made his actors wear fantastically exaggerated make-ups to ensure that they would not resemble anyone in reallife and thus become individuals in the eyes of the audience. It was Tairov who invented the constructivist setting, a gaunt scaffolding supporting a few bare platforms on different levels, with every strut and bolt ostentatiously exposed to view. The aggressive functionalism of this kind of setting was regarded as having considerable propaganda value at a time when the

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Tke Revolt Against Realism Russians were being taught to revere the machine as part of their training .to become one of the great industrial nations of the world. The lack of colour and any form of decoration in these bleak constructions was considered to be part of their virtue because (to quote from an article by John Mason Brown written after a visit to Russia about this time) '' The ornamental

. was despised for its past, and hated as the flowering of a decadent and acquisitive idleness ".

1 saw Meierhold's constructivist production of Ostrovsky's Tke Forest when his company was appearing in Berln. Imagine a play performed on a builder's scaffolding by the Crazy Gang anda troupe ofacrobats and you may get some idea ofwhat this performance was like. The actors, grotesquely dressed and made up as drolls and buffoons, somersaulted, swung on trapezes, and depicted excitement by means of handsprings and flip-flaps. Naturalistic speech was forbidden; they shouted, chanted, intoned, and chorused. The stage was bleakly lit in a glare of harsh, white light from floodlights hanging immediately above the setting in full view of the audience. As slapstick entertain-ment it was immensely exhilarating; though in the end one became wearied by its crudity and noisiness. 1 heard someone sitting behind me say, "1 wish we had brought the children. They would have loved it." Meierhold might have considered this a compliment to his production, for at this time the Russian producers were catering for a huge new audience which had never been inside a theatre before the revolution, an audience which was mainly illiterate and still almost childishly un-sophisticated. For this audience every point had to be heavily underlined, humour had to be reduced to its simplest elements, characterisation had to be converted into caricature, everything had to be enlarged and exaggerated so that it was obvious and unmistakable even to the simplest member of the audience. Few plays had yet been written to fit the new style ofproduction or the revolutionary mood of the moment, so the plays of the Czarist regime were still performed-but in productions that savagely satirised the bourgeois characters and mocked every-thing that was sentimental and idealistic.

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Tkt Prorlucer anrl tkt Play beautifully composed, but one remembered them for them-selves rather than as part ofthe play. "lf one has any unfor-gettable memories of Baty's produtions," remarks Robert Brassilach in Les Anima.teurs rle Thdtre, '' they are of him and of him alone, not ofhis author or his actors." Myself, I find that although I ha ve forgotten nearly everything about most of the plays I saw him produce I can still vividly recall the effects he created by means ofhis scenery, his lighting, and his elaborately orchestrated "noises-off" -the dazzling tropical sunshine beat-ing clown on the white walls of the steep, winding street of the Mrican town in Prosper, and the contrast of the cool, shady room where one still heard as a distant murmur the innumer-able sounds of the life in the street outsid; the Atlantic liner towering above the quayside in Departs; the grotesque shadows thrown on the wall of a room by a flickering candle in a play even the name of which I ha ve forgotten; the customers thronging the chemist's shop in Mar/ame Bovary, and the box at the theatre with its glimpse in perspective of the auditorium beyond and the curtain rising and falling on the stage modelled in perspective.

In the Russian theatre, by the time the 'thirties had been reached, the more extreme forms of stylisation and anti-illusionism had been abandoned. The change had been brought about by the audiences, who plainly preferred those theatres where the acting was warm, human, and lifelike to those where the individuality of the actor was suppressed and the part he was playing reduced to an abstraction. They preferred, too, that their plays should be staged with at least sorne approach to realism instead of the aggressively anti-realistic manner of the revolutionary producers. Meierhold alone refused to yield to the tastes of the public and continued to create productions which Andr van Gyseghem in his book on the Soviet Theatre describes as "tapestries of fantastic devices woven by living puppets: theatrical tapestries composed not of colours and emotions and beauty but of geometrical designs, which fascinated the brain but never touched the emotions". In 1934 the government woke up to the fact that

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Tke Experimentalist Producers it was only to the intelligentsia that Meierhold's work made any appeal. Plans which were being made to build him a new theatre were cancelled. He was denounced as "the father of formalism ,; , accused of anti-national tendencies, of desecrating the classics, and of .having dedicated one of his productions to Trotsky. The Committee on Arts ordered all companies through-out the Soviet Union to condemn him.and endorse the govern-ment's actio~. Stanislavsky's response to this order was typical of his courage and generosity: he offered Meierhold a post at the Art Theatre. Meierhold declined it and little was heard of him until 1 939 Seemingly the government had by then decided to reinstate him in public favour, for he was invited to be one of the speakers at the First Nacional Convention of Theatrical Directors. He was, of course, expected to denounce his work in the past and declare his readiness to reform. The speech he made is recorded in Jelagin's The Taming of the Arts. "I, for one," said Meierhold in the course ofthat speech, find the work in our theatres pitiful and terrifying. I don't know whether it is anti-formalism, or realism, or naturalism, or sorne other 'ism'. But I do know that it is uninspired and bad. This pitiful and sterile something which aspires to the title of socialistic realism has nothing in common with art. Go to the Moscow theatres and look at the colourless and boring productions which are all alike and which only differ in their degree ofworthlessness. No longer can we identify the creative signatures of the Maly Theatre, -ofthe Vahtangov Theatre, ofthe Kamerny Theatre, of the Moscow Art Theatre. In the very places where only recently creative art was seething, where men of art searched, made mistakes, experimented, and found new ways to create produc-tions sorne ofwhich were bad and others magnificent, now there is nothing but a depressing, well-meaning, shockingly mediocre and devastating lack of talen t. Was this your aim? If so you ha ve committed a horrible deed. Y ou ha ve washed the child down the drain with the dirty water. In your effort to eradicate formalism you have destroyed art."

Next morning Meierhold was arrested. He was never heard ofagain.

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