The Soviet Theater: A Documentary History ed. by Laurence Senelick, Sergei Ostrovsky (review)

As the editors of this riveting volume remind us in their preface, some tyrannical regimes burn books and evidence; others obsessively record, classify, and file their deeds away. The Soviet Union (1917–91) was of the latter type. To tell the tale from the bottom up of an enterprise as massively self-conscious and self-promoting as the twentieth-century Russian stage, Senelick and Ostrovsky spent two years in the newly opened—and still crudely inventoried—archives in the early 1990s. Famous directors (Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Tairov) and path-breaking productions had long been familiar in the West. The documents that permitted them to function, that funded them and sent them to their deaths, had not. But the editors, eminent historians of theater, do much more than string together state decrees, memoirs, and fleeting playbills. They provide detailed context for each period, devolving into a headnote whenever they judge a document (or several documents juxtaposed) able to speak more forcefully than might a historian. Because of this intricate interplay of levels and mobility of perspective, it helps to know something going in. Even an apprentice in Russian theater, however, will notice some fascinating, paradoxical arcs as the USSR rises and falls. One of these, usually unsung, is singularly appropriate for a “Workers’ State”: the status and mood of that category of worker known as the actor, a public servant and professional changeling.

Three successive flash points on this arc—beginning, middle, and end—will suffice for a sense of its shape and courageous outspokenness. First: October-November 1917. The acting profession in nineteenth-century Russia was part of the czarist state bureaucracy and thus, overall, conservative. So were the theater patrons. Revolution in the streets (a competing spectacle) was bad for ticket sales; the demand of uncouth soldiers to end bourgeois decadence in the theaters was initially met with horror. But actors have resources unknown to single-identity professions. The night of the coup in Petrograd, the chief of the Moscow police, attending a production at the Moscow Art Theater, begged a workman’s costume from its wardrobe manager, hoping to return to the streets in a new role. Within months, Mayakovsky was triumphantly retraining actors, and Meyerhold had nationalized the theaters. Second: 1938, the year of Stanislavsky’s death and second year of the Stalinist Terror. An actor declares “there is but one method in the Soviet Union. It is Stanislavsky’s method, the method of the realistic theater. . . . This is perhaps unfortunate—and perhaps it is fortunate.” Juxtaposed to this equivocating testimony is the NKVD interrogation of Isaak Babel, writer and playwright, who bravely (and futilely) had worked with Solomon Mikhoels to return to repertory his banned play Mariya. The current artificial party-line productions and acting styles, Babel told his police interrogators, were “inevitable and predictable failures.” (Babel was shot in January 1940 after a twenty-minute trial, one week before Meyerhold met the same fate.) Three: 1990, one year before the official end of Socialist Realism and the socialist state. Boris Yukhananov, young avant-garde director in Leningrad, has created his workshop Theater Theater—“a zone in which theater is to take shape on top of the performance,” a new reality that is improvised, uncontrolled, unrehearsed, unprescribed, different each time, a zone where “theater united with life, actor with spectator.” The wonderful thing about a documentary history like this, made up largely of narrative chunks given in their own real time, is seeing how naively and normally people spoke out. Even those who were eventually martyred were rarely frightened; at the time they spoke out, they felt enabled. As Alexander Tairov, director of the Moscow Chamber Theater, proclaimed in 1917, welcoming the fall of the old regime and putting high hopes on the new: “The artist is an individualist from birth.”