Work and Play: Some Aspects of Folk Drama in Russia

Work and Play: Some Aspects of Folk Drama in Russia Elizabeth A. Warner The date 1672 is generally regarded as an important one in the history of the Russian theatre, for it was on the seventeenth of October of that year that the first performance of the play Esfir or Artakserksovo deistvo was given in the specially built theatre at the village of Preobrajhenskoe near Moscow before the Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich and his court. Esfir has often been referred to as “the first play of the Russian theatre.” It was commissioned to celebrate the birth of Aleksei Mik­ hailovich’s son, the future Peter the Great, and it appears to have been a tremendous success. It is said the Tsar watched engrossed for ten solid hours. Certainly we know from contem­ porary bills that no expense had been spared, either on the con­ struction of the theatre or the preparation of the costumes. Many expensive materials were used for the latter—brightly coloured Persian silks, Turkish satin and fine cloth from Ger­ many—and they were lavishly decorated with silver and gold braid, lace and embroideries. Real ermine was used for Artaxerxes ’ robes. It was probably the lavish spectacle and the sheer novelty of the occasion which impressed the court rather than the skill of the actors, for the cast was composed of untrained clerks, artisans, and shop-keepers from the German quarter of Moscow. They knew little Russian and were gathered together for rehearsal approximately one month before the performance by the German pastor Gregory whom Alexsei Mikhailovich had approached with his proposal for the play. The Tsar’s enjoyment of the first play he had ever seen had a certain importance for the development of theatre in Russia. Its popularity at court was ensured for many years to come, 151 152 Comparative Drama although performances took place only sporadically during the four years between its inauguration and the death of its founder in 1676. The tradition was, however, carried on by Peter’s sister Natalya and Praskov’ya Fedorovna (widow of John V, Peter’s half-brother) and her daughter at the royal palace at Izmailova. Later, of course, Peter the Great himself recognised the im­ portance of the theatre both as a weapon of political propaganda and as an instrument of education and helped to introduce it to a wider audience with the building of the public theatre on Red Square in 1702. That Aleksei Mikhailovich should thus have been instru­ mental in acquainting the Russian aristocracy with the pleasures of the theatrical art is ironic, for the same man failed to recog­ nize and accept the desire to play and be entertained among his ordinary subjects. In the early years of his reign the Tsar had endorsed and indeed encouraged ecclesiastical condemnation and persecution of most forms of popular entertainment— dancing, singing, the playing of musical instruments, fisticuffs, masking at Christmastide, and taking part in the many ritual games so popular in the Russian countryside. Long before Aleksei Mikhailovich “founded” the Russian theatre, the ordin­ ary Russian people had developed their own liking and talent for play acting in a variety of different ways. Old Russian secular and ecclesiastical documents are full of references dating from the twelfth century onwards to the antics of the skomorokhi, Russia’s wandering players, to mumming at Christmastide, to spring ritual games and amusements at wed­ dings and funerals. An epistle from bishop Pamfil in 1505, for example, describes the celebrations on St. John’s Eve in which almost the whole town of Pskov took part. Women and girls danced with much hand-clapping and stamping of feet to the accompaniment of tambourines, reed pipes, and various stringed instruments.1 In Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich’s order of 1648 for­ bidding folk entertainments, the custom of putting on masks and costumes such as the skomorokhi wore, of dressing up and lead­ ing about the “devilish mare” (i.e., the hobby-horse) were among the condemned activities.2 The need to dramatise and “play” is clearly a deep-seated human instinct, common to all peoples including the most prim­ itive. One of the most important impulses towards the creation of drama is...