The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution on the Modern Stage by Edward Braun, and: Meyerhold at Work ed. by Paul Schmidt (review)

Book Reviews EDWARD BRAUN. The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution on the Modern Stage. New York: Drama Book Specialists 1979. Pp. 299, illustrated. $10 (PB). PAUL SCHMIDT, ed. Meyerhold at Work. Austin and London: University of Texas Press 1980. Pp. xxii, 241 . $19.95. VsevolodEmilievich Meyerhold, after years ofdevoted and brilliant service to theatre in Russia, including the staging of the first ever Soviet play, Mayakovsky's MysteryBouffe (1918), and subsequent landmark productions in the emerging history of Soviet theatre, was arrested on 20 June 1939. Less than a month later, his second wife, the actress Zinaida Raikh, was found barely alive in their Moscow apartment, her eyes put out, her throat cut, and her body viciously stabbed. In hospital she took a further four hours to die. The killing was blamed on burglars, but they were never traced. Papers only were missing from the Meyerholds' home. On 2 February 1940, it seems Meyerhold himself was shot in prison, although he had just been sentenced to a term of hard labour. The persecution had started earlier, of course, with the appearance of insulting reviews and the subsequent "liquidation" of the Meyerhold Theatre. From that time, Soviet artists who knew how to keep their noses clean avoided the Meyerholds. Pasternak, Eisenstein, and Stanislavsky were the courageous exceptions. It was from this time also that the rewriting of Meyerhold's life began. The ideological intolerance and disgusting cruelty ofStalin's type ofsocialism bredmany hacks willing to connive at and contribute to the destruction of genuine talents in the name of so small a thingin the long story of art as a passing style: socialist realism. The damage done to Soviet society itself by such cultural politics is beyond calculation. But these politics also have damaging consequences for the West. They lead to our ignorance of really significant works of genius and, at times, to a distorted assessment of artists who find ways of opposing their Soviet masters and gaining attention in the West. In the case of Meyerhold, they meant years ofneglect in Russia and ignorance in the West ofone ofthe greatest theatre artists of our century. The books here reviewed go a long way to rekindling interest in Meyerhold outside the Soviet bloc and adding to the information we already had from Ted Braun's earlier Meyerhold on Theatre (1969). That book gave us the first collection in English ofMeyerhold's substantial comments on the art oftheatre, and it is now a standard source. Braun's The Theatre ofMeyerhold makes a good companion to the earlier volume. It is a shrewd, careful account of Meyerhold's career in the theatre from the time he gave up studying law until his arrest. The book is not a biography, nor was it meant to be, but a scholarly and sometimes enthralling reconstruction of the great director's experiments, failures, and production triumphs. Braun offers a convincing picture of a director with tremendous energy, talent, andfecund inventiveness, firmly committed to a socialist theatre determined to grow, experiment, reinterpret the classics, and nurture new talent. In this book, we follow Meyerhold's journey as actor, then director, from Stanislavsky's type ofrealism through symbolism, constructivism, and the rediscovery of commedia, clowning and rough, market-square theatre, to a style distinguished by many anti-illusionist techniques and stylization: in short, "the style of acting which the mask signifies" (p. II3), an approach to character that Lunacharsky called "sociomechanics" because it depicted man as a social and political being more than as an individual personality, and Book Reviews 577 above all that musicality which more than anything else "characterized Meyerhold's style and set him apart from every other stage-director of his time" (p. 222). Although the early pages are packed with detail and the writing is a little turgid even, the book thereafter lifts well, giving a clear, sometimes exciting, and always sensible treatment of the subject. Braun's book deserves and will get widespread use, for it is readily available in paperback, it is judicious and intelligent, and it complements Meyerhold on Theatre as well as Paul Schmidt's Meyerhold at Work. Schmidt has here collected translations by himself, Ilya Levin, and Vern McGee of...