Anna Lācis and Bernhard Reich: Life and Love in the Theatre

Lācis and Reich in the documentary Skatiens. Par Annu Lācis un Bernhardu Reihu (1969, dir. Leonija Mundeciemas). Photo: Susan Ingram (from the screening on March 6, 2015).

A theatre director, actress, theorist, and organizer, Anna (Asja) Lācis (1891-1979) is often considered the first to have implemented true epic theatre in Latvian drama due to her working relationship with Bertolt Brecht. The evidence for that claim is difficult to find because she never staged any of Brecht's plays, and her directorial work in Valmiera Theatre during the years 1948-57 was more influenced by the proletarian and political theatre advocated by the father of European political theatre, Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), and by socialist realism, a mandatory element of Soviet art. In evaluating Lācis's historical significance, a distinction should therefore be made between her professional directing and theoretical work and her contradictory personality, because it is possible that the latter has left a more significant impression.

Austrian Jewish director and theatre theorist Bernhard Reich (1894-1972), on the other hand, is one of the most important personalities of the German theatre of the 1920s. As a director and dramaturgical collaborator, he worked with outstanding German directors such as Max Reinhardt and, especially, Bertolt Brecht. In 1922, Reich met Anna Lācis in Berlin, and together they moved to the Soviet Union in 1926 and spent the rest of their lives together in the Soviet sphere. Having survived the repressions of the Stalinist regime, Reich spent the last twenty years of his life in Latvia, where his creative work consisted of both theatre directing and writing theoretical essays. This article demonstrates how theatrical work structured Lācis's and Reich's biographies and makes a case for how interconnected the two theatre-makers were through their shared belief in the importance and influence of theatre. It therefore works against the tendency in scholarship to concentrate on Lācis's personal liaisons by showing the role her work in theatre played in mediating the most important and long-lasting relationship in her life.

Anna Lācis's Theatrical Activity

Anna Lācis (born Liepina), was born on October 19, 1891, in Kempju parish in Riga district and received her first education at Anna Kenina's Gymnasium in Riga. In 1912, she moved to St. Petersburg, where she enrolled in a two-year program in the Faculty of General Education at Vladimir Bekhterev's Psychoneurological Institute to study psychology. In Petersburg, she saw, for the first time, productions by Vsevolod Meyerhold (Всéволод Мейерхóльд, 1874-1940) and performances by Vladimir Mayakovsky (Владимир Маякóвский, 1893-1930), and fell permanently in love with the theatre. Between 1916 and 1918, she studied at Fyodor Komisarjevsky's (Фёдор Комиссаржéвский, 1882-1954) Theatre Studio in Moscow, where she saw the productions of the second most significant modernist theatre director at the time, Alexander Tairov (Александр Таиров, 1885-1950). Lācis's aesthetic perceptions were significantly influenced by her studies and by the theatre in Moscow and Petersburg:

Fyodor Komisarjevsky was fascinated by the medieval theatre. Me too. I liked the versatility of miseen-scenes of mysteries and miracles where the action took place in several places simultaneously. The principle of this simultaneous play I later used in my own productions. My teacher was convinced that art should reveal the most delicate nuances of the soul, and only then could it give to the public aesthetic pleasure. I was more interested in the jovial, coarse element of commedia dell'arte…

(Miglāne et al. 23)

Medieval theatre aesthetics impacted Lācis's staging work in the 1920s, and she used the principles of commedia dell'arte in her 1949 production of Carlo Goldoni's comedy The Servant of Two Masters at the Valmiera Theatre.

After completing Komisarjevsky's Theatre Studio, Lācis spent two years living in Orel, where she created and managed a study of children's aesthetic education. She also worked with children from a local orphanage and with homeless street children, mostly using the improvisational études method. The...