Vsevolod Myerhold by Robert Leach (review)

Book Reviews ROBERT LEACH. Vsev%d Myerho/d. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. Pp. xiv, 223, illustrated. $49.50. Since the late 19608, a number of biographies and studies of Russian director Vsevolod MeyerhoJd's prolific theatrical career have appeared in English. The best among these. Marjorie L. Hoover's Meyerho/d: The Art of Conscious Theatre (University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), Edward Braun's The Theatre ofMeyerhold: Revolution on the Modern Stage (Drama Book Specialists, 1979), and Konstantin Rudnitsky's Meyerhold the Director (Ardis, 1981), as well as ample collections of Meyerhold's writings in translation (Braun's Meyerhold on Theatre [Hill and Wang. 19691 and Paul Schmidt's Meyerho/d at Work [University of Texas Press, 1980)), have all managed, in varying degrees, to capture much of the profoundly imaginative art of perhaps the finest theatrical artist of hi~ era. The most recent study of Meyerhold, Robert Leach's Vsevolod Meyerhold, the latest entry in Cambridge's Directors in Perspective series, avoids the standard chronological approach to focus on two assertions: (I) Meyerhold had a conscious and highly original system (biomechanics) and (2) Meyerhold's working style was that of a pedagogue (a teacher, researcher, and practitioner). Although neither assertion is especially startling or original, few Meyerhold scholars have contributed as lucid and insightful an understanding of Meyerhold's theories as Leach manages. Perhaps the contemporary fascination with Meyerhold's work results from the fact that Meyerhold, above all others, encompassed virtually all of the significant developments of early twentieth-century theatre. He began his career in the plays of Chekhov which were staged in a predominantly naturalistic style at the Moscow Art Theatre by Constantin' StanisJavsky. When he broke with the MAT, Meyerhold became one of Russia's most avant-garde artists of both the pre-Revolutionary and Soviet eras. He brought elements of the Symbolist movement, Oriental fonns, commedia dell'arte, medieval drama, (1991) 34 MODERN DRAMA 441 442 Book Reviews constructivism, the theories of Gordon Craig. the productions of Max Reinhardt, and the plays of Mayakovsky into a unique style that was charged by an intense involvement in the social and political turmoil in Russia between 1905 and his arrest by Stalin in 1939. As Leach suggests, Meyerhold created, ••a poetic theatre, popular and engaging, which had infinite potential and reverberations" (p. 174) to counter the " prose theatre of realism" (p. 174) created by Stanislavsky in the same era. The strongest element in Leach's approach is that he dispenses with the significant biographical details in a tightly constructed flrst chapter and is thus liberated to deal with the most potent artistic, social, and political influences on Meyerhold and his "system" in seven fascinating chapters, plus a concluding one on Meyerhold's legacy, which Leach detects in the productions of Sergei Eisenstein, Bertolt Brecht, and Peter Brook, among others. Much emphasis is placed on Meyerhold's sense of a total theatre unifying all production elements and, the ~ignificance of biomechanics. Leach himself has spent considerable time in experimenting with biomechanics, and, in this case, it proves extremely valuable to the reader to have the insights (and the demonstration photographs) provided by Leach's experience with Meyerhold's system, one which made the an of the actor paramount. Leach also painstakingly draws in a multitude of influences on Meyerhold, from the theoretical concepts of Gordon Craig and the productions of Max Reinhardt to the dizzying political tunnoil in Russia. Well-known Meyerhold productions of Blok's The Fairground Booth and Crommelynck's The Magnanimous Cuckold are examined here with somewhat less intensity than has been typical in other studies of Meyerhold, but Leach gives a well-deserved chapter to the complex relationship of Meyerhold with the Soviet playwright, Vladimir Mayakovsky. There was a special bond between these two artists, and Meyerhold, who often found the author's presence undesirable, truly collaborated with Mayakovsky. Meyerhold's staging of Mayakovsky's The Bedbug, the Bathhouse, and Mystery-Bouffe were among the most acclaimed and imitated productions of the Soviet period. Another chapter is devoted to perhaps the quintessential Meyerhold production, Mikhail Lennontov's Masquerade, in which Meyerhold's unique mixture of mise-en-scene, the actor's an...