Life as Theater: Five Modern Plays by Nikolai Evreinov ed. by Christopher Collins (review)

432 BOOK REVIEWS teresting 1974 book on lardiel in which he not only overcomes the difficulties McKay mentions but even represents the plot graphically. McKay's work also evidences carelessness in handling bibliography. For example , he cites Torrente Ballester's important book on Spanish theater but uses the first edition, rather than the expanded second edition of 1968, which includes an additional and very interesting analysis of Eloisa estd debajo de un almendro. And I might add that both of McKay's quotations from my own unpublished doctoral dissertation are erroneously attributed to that source. Apparently McKay wrote the present book in haste, and the result is an uneven work, useful as a reference but greatly limited as a scholarly study. PHYLLIS ZATLIN BORING Rutgers-The State University LIFE AS THEATER: FIVE MODERN PLAYS BY NIKOLAI EVREINOV, edited and translated by Christopher Collins. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973. xxxv & 272 pp. Cloth $10.95, paper $3.95. With the lone exception of Chekhov Russia has not produced playwrights in the twentieth century to match such influential directors and teachers as Stanislavsky , Meyerhold, Tairov and Vakhtangov. The success in their time of Gorky and Andreyev was a transient phenomenon and their work has dated and been largely forgotten. Such may also seem to have been the fate of Nikolai Evreinov, whose plays achieved remarkable acclaim in Russia before 1925 and were subsequently translated into 27 languages and staged in many parts of the world. But as Christopher Collins points out in his introduction to his new versions offive of the plays, the translations were often inferior and this, coupled with the suppression of his work by the Soviet regime, has deprived Evreinov of the reputation which is really his due. Evreinov was a man of many talents - theater director, theoretician, historian , musician and playwright. Of all the Russians active during the heyday of his country's theater before World War One he came closest to Gordon Craig's ideal of an all round theaterman. But unlike the friends of his St. Petersburg days, Komissarzhevsky and Balanchine, he was unable to continue his career abroad after his departure from Russia in 1925 and he died in obscurity in Paris in 1953. Nevertheless, with interest in the Russian avant-garde mounting in Russia and the West a full assessment of Evreinov's not inconsiderable achievement has become necessary. And Mr. Collins is probably correct when he asserts that Evreinov's most relevant talent to-day is his plays. They are masterpieces of theater , broadly philosophical works with a modern, at times absurdist point of view. Indeed Evreinov may be considered Russia's only modern playwright. Of the five plays chosen by Mr. Collins, the existing English translations of four have long been out of print, while the fifth is translated for the first time. The first two are one-act plays written according to Evreinov's theory of monodrama. In A Merry Death (1908) Harlequin, Evreinov's favourite theatrical figure, cheats death by accepting it merrily. The Theater ofthe Soul (1912) is an abstract dramatization of a single human personality, a middle-aged clerk in love with the bottle and an aging cafe-singer. The centre-piece of the book is Evreinov's finest play, a BOOK REVIEWS 433 four act "comedy for some, drama for others," The Main Thing, first staged in 1921, the same year as Pirandello's Six Characters in Search ofan Author. Pirandello himself staged Evreinov's play in 1924. Later it reached Broadway with Edward G. Robinson and Lee Strasberg. The Main Thing illustrates Evreinov's philosophy of life as theater worked out in many of his books and is a masterly example of stage technique. The last two plays The Ship of the Righteous (1924) and The Unmasked Ball (1927) reveal Evreinov's talent for combining parody, sentiment, farce and tragedy and also the dazzling wit of his dialogue. Evreinov's plays are theatrical to the furthest degree, exploiting as Mr. Collins observes, the theater's traditional resources - music, dance, gesture, colour, plays within a play, addresses to the audience, exaggerated characters, stock characters, masks, disguises, witty repartee, complicated plots and surprise endings . But they are also philosophical in...