Theatre in Europe between the Wars - II: Russia, Brief Bits on Italy & Spain, Literary Drama in France, and the British Isles

Meanwhile, in Russia after the war, experimental techniques continued and a number of different avant-gardists created exciting theatrical images in their work.  They were all 

Meyerhold, looking very revolutionary

affected by the 1917 revolution, which created the new soviet state. Meyerhold is a good example.  Like many other artists, he pledged enthusiastic allegiance to the new regime, and he was even given a post in the cultural offices of the new government. Like others, at the beginning of the new order he envisioned a new world, and was excited to create 

theatrical innovations for it. One of these innovations that Meyerhold and others experimented with was a new brand of scene design, called constructivism.  Constructivist sets were non-representational geometric structures made up of platforms, ramps, wheels, trapezes, all intersected to create “machines for acting.”  On these scenic machines actors performed using as a physical base biomechanics, an acting style appropriate to the machine age.  In this system, 

actors were highly trained in gymnastics, circus techniques, and ballet.  They moved like well-oiled machines on constructivist settings, attempting through movement to evoke emotional response from audiences.  In these experiments, Meyerhold’s directing was pervasive. He provided a sort of directorial “score” in which every move was choreographed and carried out under his watchful eye by his 

übermarionetten.  This style has received a lot of attention in other countries including the U.S. recently, and is a strong influence on many current experiments in actor training.  The first fully realized of these constructivist pieces was Meyerhold’s production of Crommelynck’s The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922), featuring a setting by Lyubov Popova, one of the so-called “amazons of the avant-garde.” She and several other women (including Natalia Goncharova and Alexandra Exter) created theatrical designs as well as paintings and other artistic forms in the Soviet Union.  Other important Meyerhold productions included The Inspector General (1926), Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe (1918, 1921) and the same author’s The Bedbug (1929).

      

Nikolai Evreinov (1879-1953), writer/director/theorist, also moved away from Stanislavskian realism and into 

“theatricality.” Via theatricality Evreinov desired to revitalize the theatre by re-discovering its origin as imaginative play. When applied to life, it could help cure society’s ills.  He advocated “monodrama,” in which the audience would co-create the work with the artists, and thereby dissolve the border between theatre and 

life.  Evreinov worked at several theatres, including a few with intriguing titles: The Merry Theatre for Grown-Up Children and The Crooked Mirror Theatre. He wrote several plays, directed even more, culminating in a huge Soviet spectacle called The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920), with a cast of 10,000. As the new regime began to tighten control over artists, in 1925 Evreinov wisely emigrated from his homeland to Paris.

   

Evgeny Vakhtangov (1883-1923) managed to reconcile the circus-grotesque style of Meyerhold with the psychological 

realism of Stanislavsky through his own creation, “fantastic realism.”  In his work as an actor at the Moscow Art, Vakhtangov created an “actor-eccentric” who should be an expert singer, improviser, dancer, and vaudevillian who can communicate through these skills the essence of a character.  He worked at approximately 15 theatres, teaching and directing, in spite of a serious illness. Vakhtangov’s best work was done at the Moscow Art’s Third Studio, where he directed Chekhov’s The Wedding (1920) and Gozzi’s Princess Turandot (1922) before his premature death.

     

Alexander Tairov (1885-1950), another anti-realist Russian, broke from his teacher Meyerhold and created his 

own form of abstract theatre at Moscow’s Kamerny Theatre.  Once scholar has suggested that if Meyerhold’s theatre resembled a circus, Tairov’s resembled a ballet -- controlled, exquisite, lacking in rough edges.  All movement was choreographed, all words intoned. He made inventive use of constructivist and cubist settings, frequently designed by Alexandra Exter, and among his successes included many foreign plays, including G.K Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1923) and O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and Desire Under the Elms (1926).  Unlike many of his contemporaries, Tairov was somehow able to stay true to his idea of theatre and to stay alive throughout the Stalinist purges.

      

The same was not true, sadly, of Meyerhold, whose experiments left him at odds with an increasingly rigid, even nightmarish soviet regime under Stalin.  Meyerhold’s 

amazing modern theatrical creations were judged confusing. In a soviet state, Stalin insisted, art must be accessible to all.  The poet/playwright Mayakovsky took his own life in frustration, and Meyerhold, shortly after making a speech defending artistic experimentation, was declared a non-person, “disappeared,” and was brutally executed. His wife, actress Zinaida Raikh, was butchered in their apartment. She received 17 stab wounds, none near the heart, so that she would bleed slowly to death. That apartment is now a museum dedicated to the great innovator. 

Italy after the eighteenth century had struggled to find its theatrical voice.  Opera dominated, from Monteverdi and the Venetian Public Opera houses, through the young genius Rossini, to the greatest talents of the Italian opera, Verdi and Puccini.   Though we talked about some very talented Italian actors at the end of the nineteenth century, especially the peculiarly modern Eleonora Duse, dramatic writing remained undistinguished.

Then a fascinating Sicilian. Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), shocked Italy and the rest of the west with a new, often grotesque drama. Pirandello often used in his plays a sort of “theatre in the theatre.” This is not the same as a play within a play (though in one or two cases a play or rehearsals take

place in a Pirandello drama), but often Pirandello’s characters find themselves having to play-act roles in their own lives.  The lead character of Henry IV (1922), for example, has been thrown from a horse in an historical pageant, during which he was playing the king in the play’s title. The fall makes him believe that he IS he king, and his wealthy family and friends place him in a private sanatorium, decked out in kingly robes, assisted by costumed “servants” (sanatorium attendants) who act as his court.  As the play proper begins, the lead character has long been aware that he’s not really the king, but keeps up the pretense, because he has certain suspicions.  During a visit from his former fiancée, who is now engaged to the man who caused his fall from the horse, Henry IV kills the man. Then he realizes that the only way to stay alive himself is to remain in the asylum, retreat into his character and continue to play Henry IV, until he himself dies!

      

Not only has Pirandello set up a clever, theatrical plot; he’s also asked one of the great questions:  What is truth, what is illusion?  He goes even further in Sei Personaggi in Cerca d’Autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) (1921) in which, when a frustrated director is rehearsing a pretty bad play, and the rehearsals seem to be going nowhere, the doors of the theatre open and in a shaft of light enter six...characters!  Not real, nor really UNreal, they exist in the mind of their author, who abandoned the play about them without finishing it.  They beg the director to let them tell their story and enact their play. Grudgingly, they are allowed to.  The director likes the beginnings of it, casts it with his own company of actors, but as they try to play the scenes that the characters have just “performed”? (lived?) the six characters laugh at their pitiful attempts and themselves play their family tragedy to its bitter end.  And then they vanish into the light from which they appeared. What has happened?  What’s real, what’s not?  What in fact is reality?  The first performance of the play in Rome created an uproar, in part because Pirandello provided no answers, probably had no answers. But his vision of the world was powerful, dark, and highly influential to later writers, especially to those of the absurd, and more conventionally to Edward Albee who has his character Martha ask “What’s the truth? And what illusion?” in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. 

      

Pirandello’s life was a struggle -- he lost family money early on, and his wife went mad but kept on living. He cared for her until he was forced to commit her to an asylum. He was a PhD and taught at a university to make ends meet, until shortly after his fame was secured with Six Characters. He formed a rather impressive acting company, the Teatro d’Arte, in 1925, and toured extensively.  His biography is marred by his association with Mussolini’s fascists, though to his credit it was an uneasy relationship, and Pirandello always insisted that his writing had nothing to do with politics.  At any rate, his greatest plays remain disturbing and often performed in the repertoire of important western theatres.

      

Spain had not recovered real theatrical force since its Golden Age in the seventeenth century, but finally in the twentieth, a few playwrights gained distinction.  Certainly the best known 

Lorca statue (holding a dove)
in Plaza Santa Ana, Madrid
on my trip there in 2013

of these is Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936), a poet who occasionally placed his poetry in a theatrical setting.  He was associated with a theatrical troupe and wrote many short plays in various styles, but his reputation rests on three poetic tragedies, Blood Wedding (1933) in which an unwilling bride elopes with her lover on her wedding night, leading to a bloody climax; Yerma (1934) in which a woman yearns so for a child that she murders her husband, who is too indifferent to “give” her one; and The House of Bernarda Alba (1935), where a mother’s insistence that her daughters mourn their father for 8 years leads to all sorts of frustration, not least sexual -- and when one daughter succumbs to a young man’s embrace, there is a bloody reckoning. Lorca’s life was cut short by the Spanish fascists. They murdered him when he was only 38 because he insisted on writing about repressive forces and how they destroy freedom.

      

Not all artists of stature responded so radically to the horrors of the twentieth century.  A few of these brilliant talents embraced new forms, but were less extreme in their 

approach.  In Paris Jacques Copeau had been around and active in the theatre just before World War I, when in 1913 he founded the Théâtre du Vieux Columbier.  The plays he directed at this theatre rejected naturalism and old-fashioned scenic ornament.  Instead, on a relatively bare platform of a stage, Copeau focused on the actor as the essential element.  It is the duty of the director, Copeau argued, to interpret the author’s words and to help the actor best express those words.  Although the war forced his theatre to close, Copeau was asked by the president of France to re-organize the company for an American tour, in order to give cultural thanks for the U.S.’s entrance into the war on France’s side.

      

In 1920 Copeau re-opened his theatre on the Vieux Columbier, with a stage even more bare than before, remodeled to resemble an Elizabethan stage.  On this 

platform stage, Copeau directed Shakespeare and the French classics, in smart and clear productions that focused on the actor and the text.  In addition, Copeau worked frequently at the Comédie Française and helped to re-build that theatre’s prestige.  Copeau also argued for the decentralization of French theatre, which had for centuries been centered at and focused on Paris.  His insistence led to the formation of important regional theatres, in which new acting, design, directorial and writing talent was discovered.  Finally, Copeau trained a number of actor/directors, most notably Louis Jouvet (1887-1951) and Charles Dullin (1885-1949), who started theatres of their own that maintained and modified Copeau’s tradition.

      

Perhaps the best-known French playwright between the wars was Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944).  Writing in an age where the avant-garde was intent on devaluing language, Giraudoux wrote a literary drama, one that rejoiced in language.  This of course connects Giraudoux with Copeau, but an even more direct connection existed in that most of Giraudoux’s plays were directed by Copeau’s disciple Louis Jouvet.  These plays always show a deep faith in humanity, though humanity is usually threatened by inhuman forces, and in the plays, language is the highest expression of reason.  Probably the most famous play is his last, The Madwoman of Chaillot (1945), in which crazy old ladies and beggars save Paris from oppressive forces. Amphitrion 38 is the umteenth re-telling of the Greek myth (Moliére wrote an excellent earlier version in French) in which, in order to sleep with the beautiful but faithful wife of General Amphitrion, Zeus appears to her-- as her husband!  And when it’s over, she has never felt so good!  Which leads to interesting questions, yes? 

Much of Giraudoux is today thought too verbose and oblique to be staged, and current scholars give the great director Louis Jouvet most of the credit for their success.  But in Tiger at the Gates (literally translated The Trojan War Shall not be Fought), Giraudoux rose to his subject.  Written in 1935, as Hitler’s power was on the rise, Giraudoux’s focus on intelligent and civilized Greeks and Trojans being dragged unwillingly to war. Helen’s depiction as a dumb, but in this case very dangerous, blonde, was prophetic.

      

In England between the wars, there’s not nearly as much of the avant-garde spirit as we’ve seen in Europe and Russia.  Of course we’ve focused on the avant-garde and not on what can be called “boulevard” entertainments -- easy, mainstream escapist entertainment, geared to allow people to escape from their drab daily lives, and at this time very possibly from the ugliness of the recent war.  There are worse ways to deal with a public in the midst of the worst war in the world. An exception to the mainstream was a movement called Vorticism, which bore a strong resemblance to Futurism. It was featured to an extent in London, but few plays were written in this style.

What innovations there were appeared primarily in staging rather than in content. The most important theatre in London between the wars was the Old Vic. Built in 1818, during the nineteenth century it had been called the Royal Cobourg, then the Royal Victoria, named for the queen.  This theatre became tremendously vital when a director named Tyrone Guthrie took it over and ran it between 1937 and 1945.  During his tenure at the Old Vic, Guthrie worked on his own unique versions of the classics, particularly Shakespeare, often updating them to increase their relevance.  He also placed a much stronger emphasis on movement than had ever been used in the classical repertoire, in which all too frequently a star actor stood forth and intoned beautiful lines.  So with Guthrie, the look of the classical repertoire began to change in England, literally becoming more dynamic.

The Old Vic in 2011, when I saw Kevin Spacey play Richard III there

Just before, during and after World War I, the regions of England saw more and more important companies and festivals begin to spring up.  The Gaiety Theatre in Manchester and the Birmingham Rep were particularly strong companies.  The most important “festival” sprang up in Shakespeare’s birthplace, Stratford-upon-Avon.

      

The period between the wars in England saw the emergence of some of the twentieth century’s most famous English-speaking actors. Edith Evans played the nurse to Peggy 

Ashcroft’s Juliet, while John Gielgud was Romeo and Laurence Olivier played Mercutio. Talk about a dream cast!  Some of these names I hope you know, partly because you’ve seen them in films as well.  Michael Redgrave (brilliant in his own right and father of Lynn, Vanessa and Corin, and grandfather to all sorts of others, Natasha and Joely Richardson included), Ralph Richardson, Anthony Quayle, and my personal favorite, Alec Guinness, were all building their careers at this time.  Perhaps the most important between the wars was Gielgud, primarily because he organized and directed as well.

      

No revolutionary writers came out of England at this time, in fact you could say that the period was much stronger in its 

directing and performing than in its dramatic writing.  However, it managed to produce one of the finest writers of the form called comedy of manners in Noel Coward.  This multi-talent sang, acted, danced a bit, and wrote his own songs (some of them terrific -- “A Room with a View,” “Someday I’ll Find You”) and his own plays, in which he starred and often 

I saw this - the production was good, Dench was perfect

directed.  Among his finest are Private Lives (1930), Design for Living (1933), Hay Fever (1925) and Blithe Spirit (1941).  These and other Coward comedies remain staples of summer stock, and Coward is frequently produced both on Broadway and on London’s West End.  Private Lives is the perfect vehicle for stars, even imperfect ones (the Taylor-Burton Broadway production was notorious, and even worse was the one starring Joan Collins!)  Often accused of writing confections, fluff, Coward wrote fluff that seems to have endured.

      

a lifetime ago - early 1980s, me on the left with my pal Ed Ehinger on the right
in a short story of Coward's adapted for the stage - I narrated, in the character of
Sir Noel - I was very good.

T.S. Eliot, primarily a poet, wrote poetic drama as well, for the most part difficult, to say the least.  But at his best, Eliot produced a version of the Thomas a Beckett/Henry II story called Murder in the Cathedral.  Not often produced, it’s a beautiful piece of writing.

In Ireland, the Abbey Theatre featured a writer worthy of its founders, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Synge, in Sean O’Casey.  

He wrote powerful pieces for the Abbey about people caught up in the constant battlefield that much of Ireland had become at this time. In Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926), O’Casey depicted with grim humor the miseries of life in Irish tenements. He angered 

Irish nationalists because he refused to glorify the violence of the movement, instead depicting members of the citizen army as drinkers and talkers, caught up in dreams but accomplishing little. A riot occurred at the opening night of The Plough and the Stars, similar to the one that was provoked by J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World on its first night at the same theatre in 1907.  After the Abbey rejected his fourth play, The Silver Tassie (1929), which was written in the expressionist style, O’Casey left Ireland in self-imposed exile, never to return.  

       

And now I think it’s time to sail back across the Atlantic so we can investigate the theatre in the U.S. between the wars.