Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold

Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold
Born 1874 – Arrested and imprisoned 1939 – Executed 1940

Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), whose plans for a Moscow production of Boris Godunov in 1937 have informed the Princeton production, is one of the most influential directors and theorists in theater history. After training as an actor at the Music and Drama Institute of the Moscow Philharmonic Philharmonia, with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Meyerhold became one of the founding members of the Moscow Art Theater, which Nemirovich-Danchenko established in 1897 with Konstantin Stanislavsky. Stanislavsky's decision to create an "art" theater was his response to innovations introduced by George II, duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and others in the fledgling field of directing, a nineteenth-century invention; they worked to coordinate the various arts typically involved in an evening of theater in order to serve the intention of an author rather than the vanity of a star. The Moscow Art Theater became best known for its pioneering realism, a relatively new kind of theater at the time, and Meyerhold played a leading role in one of the theater's first successes, Stanislavsky's production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull. Working on plays by Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, Maxim Gorky, and Gerhart Hauptmann, Stanislavsky evolved a new psychological approach to the art of acting--the acting equivalent of the realism evoked by his favorite writers.

Despite his successes on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater, Meyerhold decided to leave in 1902 to pursue the role of director. In part, his decision stemmed from his resistance to psychological realism. He admired Alexander Pushkin's observation that "drama originated in a public square and constituted a popular entertainment." After touring the Russian provinces with more than 170 productions created by his own company, Meyerhold moved to St. Petersburg to work with the actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya on such experimental, metatheatrical works as Alexander Blok's The Puppet Theater Booth. If Stanislavsky is thought to be the father of a mode of directing that emphasizes fidelity to the playwright's style and intention, Meyerhold might be considered the original "concept" director; for him, every production is a director's "essay" on a play, a personal "take" informed by his own sense of the play's meaning. Stanislavsky found Meyerhold's approach to directing dictatorial, especially in relation to actors; but it is important to note that Meyerhold himself felt that he freed both actors and texts from the straightjacket of realism so that they might take on more expressive and fully embodied lives.

Whereas Stanislavsky emphasized the psychology of the actor and his work on what the director called a play's "subtext," Meyerhold focused on the actor's body. His actors employed physical techniques derived from commedia dell'arte, kabuki theater, circus, mime, ballet, gymnastics, acrobatics, Pavlovian experiments, and the time-motion studies of the American engineer Frederick Taylor. Meyerhold wanted his actors to get out of their heads and into their bodies, using all their corporeal potential in the service of the theatrical event. He took a similarly revolutionary approach to the stage itself, breaking down the barrier between actor and audience. To achieve a truly popular theater, Meyerhold believed, the theatrical space, like the actor, must be mutable, plastic. After the Revolution of 1917, Meyerhold's ideas were given the blessing of the government--for a time. In 1918, he staged what became known as "the first Soviet play," Vladimir Mayakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe, with a set by the avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich. For a brief period, he served as head of the Theater Division of the Moscow Cultural Commissariat, making decisions as to what constituted an authentically revolutionary theater. In 1922, he founded a theater of his own and began to use words like "biomechanics" and "constructivism" to describe his physical approach to performance and his radical stage interpretations of texts. Meyerhold achieved artistic and popular success with his imaginative recreations of Fernand Crommelynck's The Magnificent Cuckold (1922), with a set of ramps and ladders designed by the constructivist artist Lyubov Popova, and Nikolai Gogol's The Inspector General (1926).

In the 1930s the Stalinist cultural establishment liquidated the proletarian arts organizations that had been Meyerhold's lifeblood. The formation of the all-powerful Committee on Arts Affairs represented the end of the age of avant-gardism, and the introduction of the official doctrine of socialist realism, first in the sphere of literature and then in the other arts, resulted in a curtailment of Meyerhold's creative activities. As the cultural climate darkened, he continued to work, embarking on several projects, including Boris Godunov, that ultimately went unrealized. Meyerhold had worked on the play twice before (in 1918 and 1924) and had participated in a production of Musorgsky's opera in 1911. He hoped that his 1937 production, conceived as part of the Pushkin jubilee celebrations, would "return Pushkin to Pushkin." As Caryl Emerson writes, Meyerhold wanted "to recreate the sense of immediacy, intimacy, and risk that had long been lost through the poet's canonization and the monumentalization of Musorgsky's opera." His efforts went to waste. Meyerhold's theater was closed by decree in 1938; he was imprisoned on fabricated charges of treason in 1939 and shot in 1940. Like countless other victims of the Stalinist purges, his name was erased and his image airbrushed from Soviet encyclopedias and history books.

The 2007 Princeton production has used Meyerhold's director's notes and various memoirs about his work on the play as constant sources of inspiration. This influence is particularly appropriate given that the contemporary American theater has evolved out of the Russian milieu Meyerhold helped to create. American "Method acting," pioneered by Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, among others, is simply a native articulation of one part of the Stanislavsky system. Strasberg and Adler studied with two actors from the Moscow Art Theater, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, who were steeped in Stanislavsky's and Meyerhold's innovations. In the1930s, Strasberg and Adler went on to found The Group Theatre, essentially an American version of the Moscow Art Theater and similarly dedicated to realism in acting and playwriting. Meyerhold's emphasis on the importance of training the actor's body as well as his psyche has long been a staple of American conservatory programs. ***