Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen

Chapter 2. From West End to Rochester

17 Chapter 2 From West End to Rochester With the Russian civil war and the Bolshevik victory, many Russian subjects , including intellectuals and artists of all sorts, found themselves in exile from their homeland. Some were stranded in Manchuria; others established flourishing communities in Prague, Paris, and Berlin. With his sister already living in London, one of the world’s great centers for theater, the British capital was an obvious choice for a young man of his ambitions, yet he claimed no political or professional motives. “I did not flee. I simply went to visit my sister,” he later insisted.1 By the time he arrived on New Year’s Eve, 1920, Russian refugees were already active in London theater, especially ballet, which Russian dancers and choreographers lifted to new heights before World War I, but also in opera and other fields. Mamoulian might have already met some of these émigrés in Paris, including Theodore Komisarjevsky, an important director and stage designer from the Stanislavski milieu who presented groundbreaking performances in opera in London and would be acclaimed for introducing British audiences to Chekhov. Fifteen years older than Mamoulian, Komisarjevsky expounded many of the ideas already familiar to the young hopeful. When he founded an acting studio in Moscow in 1910, Komisarjevsky promised, “the naturalistic ideas of the theatre of Stanislavski will be completely unknown. It is to be a theatre purely esthetic and theatrical,” a harmony of color and form, scenery and costumes, music and light. In his stage work Mamoulian would mirror many of Komisarjevsky’s imaginative visual concepts, including MAMOULIAN 18 the older man’s ingenious use of a fine meshed gauze screen stretched across the proscenium, an illusion that pushed the actors into the distance without diminishing their size.2 Meanwhile, Mamoulian addressed himself to mastering English, “the last of my eight languages,” and lived comfortably for a short time on a monthly allowance from his father until the worsening situation in Georgia made the stipend impossible. Mamoulian claimed he was reduced to lodging in an unheated room, although he always maintained a polished appearance and might have embroidered his starving artist tale for the sake of good storytelling. He always found money to attend the theater. Mamoulian later recalled his excitement on learning that Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse, rivals as the most famous actresses in the world, were both scheduled to perform at the London Pavilion in October 1922. “I took a pencil and dedicated the next half hour to some complicated calculations,” he said. “At the end of that time I had the hard facts in front of me: Bernhardt and Duse would cost me five dinners, three breakfasts, two movies, a quarter of a pound of smoking tobacco, and two and a half haircuts! There it was in a nutshell —take it or leave it. And I took it, of course.”3 Mamoulian’s entry into the London theater came through a fellow refugee from the Russian Empire, Grigori Macaroff, formerly of the Imperial Opera in St. Petersburg. Macaroff was rehearsing a Russian variety show, featuring song and dance along with dramatic and comical sketches, in the former Russian embassy on Belgrave Square. Mamoulian was desperate for a chance to direct. “Why don’t you let me try?” he begged Macaroff. “Don’t pay me. Let me rehearse for a few weeks and then see if you like it. If it’s no good, you can always fire me.” Macaroff was generous with the young aspirant, paying him a salary of 30 shillings a week plus 10 for directing rehearsals.4 Members of the Macaroff Theatre had been engaged to sing musical interludes in the upcoming premiere of a three-act play on the Russian Revolution, Austin Page’s The Beating on the Door. During Mamoulian’s rehearsals at the old Russian embassy, a cast member of the variety show invited Page and Alexander Nethersole, manager of London’s St. James’s Theatre, to watch.5 The eagerness of British theater veterans to seek out the émigrés is no surprise given the Western vogue for Russian culture that began before World War I with Diaghilev and Stravinski, whose From West End to Rochester 19 primeval-modern, Euro-Asian aesthetic was pleasantly alien yet strangely familiar to Western eyes and ears. Although only twenty-five and unknown outside Tiflis, Mamoulian was asked to codirect The Beating on the...