Sergei Eisenstein

It wasn’t long before Eisenstein was given a bed in a student hostel, prior to his taking up his studies in Japanese at the General Staff Academy. The hostel was in the building that would later be converted into the Kremlin Hospital, where Eisenstein would spend his last days, thus bringing his life in Moscow full circle, ending where it had begun. He never, in fact, became a formal student of oriental languages, and the reason was an accidental encounter in the entrance hall of a Moscow theatre with his childhood friend Maxim Strauch.

‘In 1914, Eisenstein and I had been separated by the war, and for several years had completely lost sight of each other,’ Strauch recalled. ‘Then, in November 1920, we met in Moscow, on an occasion that was very strange, very funny, and full of importance for both of us. It happened at the entrance to the Kamerny Theatre, whose company was working at that time under the outstanding director Alexander Tairov [whose Expressionist style of acting was opposed to the naturalism of Stanislavsky]. I very much wanted to see his latest production, but in those days it was extremely hard to get tickets. I had begun to bargain for a seat with a middle-aged ticket-tout when I suddenly had the sensation that someone was watching me from behind. I turned round, and indeed there was a man staring at me, very intently too, and with great concentration. I said to the ticket-tout: “Let’s move on, I think we’ve been spotted.” So we walked to another part of the foyer, and continued our somewhat irregular negotiations. After a minute or so I turned round again, and the man was still there, and still watching me. In the end, he walked boldly up to me and said, very quietly, “Aren’t you Strauch?” It was Eisenstein! I hadn’t recognised him because he had just arrived in Moscow from the Front, and he still wore his service greatcoat. We both began to bargain for tickets, and we were both successful.’²

After the play, the two friends wandered the streets for hours talking about the performance and theatre in general. In the early hours, Strauch offered to put Eisenstein up at his home on Chysti Prudi, more comfortable than the students’ hostel. On the same night that Eisenstein and Strauch met at the Kamerny Theatre, they pledged to make theatre their profession. Not for them, however, the theatres of the past such as the Moscow Arts, but the new theatrical movement.

They decided to join one of the new workers’ theatres that were springing up around Moscow. At first they got nowhere, since these theatres were, by definition, restricted almost exclusively to the working classes. Only ten per cent of their personnel could come from other social strata, and this allocation had long since been filled. Undaunted, Eisenstein and Strauch continued to look for theatre work during the bitter winter of 1920.

Rationing was in place, but ration cards were only issued to those in work or to students. Having left the General Staff Academy, Eisenstein was not eligible for a card. One day, cold and hungry, he slipped into Meyerhold’s unheated RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federation of Socialist Republics) Theatre, where the shivering actors were rehearsing the first Soviet play, Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Bouffe. The play, which showed the Bolshevik revolution spreading throughout the world, had already been produced in 1918, then as now directed by Meyerhold. Eisenstein watched the man, whose production of Masquerade had so profoundly impressed him in Petrograd, put the actor Igor Ilyinsky through his paces. Suddenly, the rehearsal was interrupted by Mayakovsky, who strode over to Meyerhold and launched into a furious tirade. At this point Eisenstein was discovered in the shadows and firmly asked to leave. This was his first glimpse of the two theatrical giants with whom he was soon to work.

Mayakovsky was only five years Eisenstein’s senior. He has been described as ‘over six foot tall and built like a boxer, he lowered over everyone like a storm cloud. A scruffy lock of dark hair tumbled over his deeply lined forehead. In manner, he appeared alternatively morose and exuberant, taciturn and witty, cruel and supremely gentle. But whatever his posture, his genius was unmistakable – a goad to some and an insult to others.’³ Although they were very different physically and temperamentally, many of Mayakovsky’s character traits could have been attributed to Eisenstein in his prime. At this period, Eisenstein idolised the older man, who had joined the Communist party in 1908, and was twice arrested and imprisoned for underground activities.

In 1920, Bolshevik Moscow was teeming with literary movements and artistic credos – Futurists, Cubists, Suprematists, Imaginists, Expressionists, Presentists, Accidentists, Anarchists and Nihilists. Every credo had a movement and every movement had its literary café. Painters, poets and playwrights gathered at their preferred cafés to celebrate their liberation by the Revolution, and to test this new freedom of artistic expression in every conceivable way.

Among the artists who gathered at the Poet’s Café, which the Futurist artist-poet David Burliuk had opened with Mayakovsky and the poet Vassili Kamensky, were journalists, and Red Army soldiers and sailors laden with weapons and hand grenades. Anarchists dressed in black, with automatic pistols and daggers bristling from bandoliers that bore the slogan ‘Death to Capital’, mixed with an assortment of speculators, whom the management disparagingly referred to as ‘bourgeoisie who hadn’t had their throats cut yet.’ Scrawled across one wall of the café was ‘I love to watch children dying’, a line from A Few Words About Myself, one of Mayakovsky’s pre-revolutionary poems.

No matter who was there, Mayakovsky was always the centre of attraction. He declared in his Left March:

Deploy in marching ranks!

There is no room for verbal tricks.

Silence, you orators!

Your turn to speak,

Comrade Rifle.

Enough of living by the law

Given by Adam and Eve.

We will ride the mare of history till she drops.

Left!

It was the beginning of an ideological struggle over what sort of art was proper to a Communist system. In Lenin’s view, Art and nothing else could serve as a substitute for religion. Amid the heated debates and revolutionary intoxication of the first years of the Soviet regime, Lenin declared, ‘Every artist, and everyone who regards himself as such, claims as his proper right the liberty to work freely according to his ideal, whether it is any good or not. There you have the ferment, the experiment, the chaos. Nevertheless, we are communists, and must not quietly fold our hands and let chaos bubble as it will. We must also try to guide this development consciously, clearly, and to shape and determine its results.’

Lenin recognised the fact that the artist required creative liberty, but he declared that the regime, not the artist, should and would determine the outcome of the arts. Although he was a reasonably cultured man, Lenin was far from being a cultural revolutionary. His preferred taste was for a kind of Russian Victorianism, as was Stalin’s, the difference being that Lenin did not try to impose his preferences. He encouraged new developments in the arts, but he did not pretend to know exactly what these would be and he attacked what he regarded as ‘unhealthy’ schools of the arts without prohibiting any of them.

In the first flush of victory, many, including Meyerhold, would have swept away the Moscow Arts Theatre with other pre-Soviet organisations, but they were rebuked when Anatoli Lunacharsky, Soviet People’s Commissar for Enlightenment (i.e. Education), gave it generous support. Lunacharsky, who had written film scripts, saw that the revolutionising of a delicate organism such as the Moscow Arts Theatre, could not be done by decree, or by external change, but only by its absorption into the general stream of Soviet activity, strengthening what was healthy and rejecting what was decadent. This plan was the seed of a malignant plant that would finally asphyxiate radical artists like Meyerhold and Mayakovsky. Unfortunately, it would not be the creative artists, exhilarated by the possibilities that the Revolution opened up for them, who would decide what a Communist aesthetic should be like; this would be defined by the politicians and ideologues.

Meyerhold was indisputably the greatest figure in the new Soviet theatre. At the outbreak of the Revolution, he was the first artist of the theatre to offer his services to the new government, and in 1918 he became a member of the Bolshevik Party. Two years later he was appointed head of the Theatre Section of the People’s Commissariat for Education, where he began a campaign to reorganise the theatre on revolutionary lines, launching the slogan ‘October in the Theatre!’

He advocated the principle of ‘bio-mechanics’, that is, translating dramatic emotion into archetypal gestures, the abolition of individual characterisation, and the emphasis on the ‘class kernel’ of the dramatic presentation. In some ways he anticipated Bertolt Brecht in desiring the spectators never to forget that they were in the theatre, unlike Stanislavsky, who wanted them to forget. Meyerhold’s ‘constructivist’ stage dispensed with curtains, utilised movable stage sets, and attempted to create a ‘symphony of motion’ using the audience as co-creators of the drama. ‘Our artist must throw away the paint brush, and compasses, he must take in hand hammer and axe in order to reshape the stage in the image of our technical century,’ Meyerhold asserted.

Naturally, Eisenstein would have liked to join Meyerhold’s theatre company but, as it happened, he and Strauch were eventually both taken on by the Proletkult Theatre in January 1921. Proletkult (proletarian culture) had been set up during the February Revolution, but only during the Civil War and the immediate postwar years of reconstruction had it begun expanding into a union with almost two hundred local branches, dozens of theatres, and literary and musical circles.

The group around the magazine Proletarskaia Kul’tura, led by A.A. Bogdanov, declared that ‘bourgeois’ culture must be forced to give way to a new one of purely ‘proletarian’ character. It laid claim to express proletarian interests in the sphere of culture as the Party did in social and political matters and the trade unions in the realm of the economy. This amounted to a demand that Proletkult, free from Party control, should itself be allowed to act as collective dictator over the arts.

In the autumn of 1920, Lenin insisted on incorporating the movement into the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, ostensibly to counteract Proletkult’s continued ‘damaging’ attempts to set up a culture of its own, but in reality to curb Bogdanov’s increasingly powerful influence. In Moscow the movement was broken up into the Central Proletkult with its headquarters in the old Hermitage Theatre and the Moscow Proletkult, which were in conflict with each other.

Moscow’s Proletkult Theatre had its headquarters in a lush villa, formerly the home of a Tsarist millionaire called Morozov who had imported it stone by stone from Portugal, and it was here that Eisenstein was accepted as set designer. The town house became a centre for conferences, lectures and discussions attended by the young Muscovite workers. Among the lecturers were some of the leading figures of the theatre including Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Foregger.

On joining the Proletkult Theatre, then headed by the writer and revolutionary Valeri Pletnyov, Eisenstein had no very original ideas of the theatre. It was without conscious intent, almost by accident, that, searching for an approach to entertainment in general, he hit upon techniques more appropriately associated with cinematography.

Sergei Yutkevitch, a seventeen-year-old student of Meyerhold’s, who was working at Proletkult, explained: ‘Eisenstein’s first job as a designer for the Proletkult was for two plays … which went largely unnoticed. Then, and surprisingly early in his career, came the production that made him famous overnight – though still within a fairly narrow artistic circle – an adaptation of Jack London’s story The Mexican. The producer was a member of the famous Moscow Arts Theatre, Valeri Smishlayev, and Eisenstein was officially the designer of the sets and the costumes. But it was Eisenstein who really created the entire production. It was typical of him not to be satisfied with a subsidiary function, and it was impossible for him to do anything less than think out the production in its entirety; by which I mean that he worked out the director’s interpretation and applied it in a manner wholly typical of that extraordinary young man named Eisenstein.’⁴

The plot of The Mexican concerned a young revolutionary’s efforts to make enough money as a boxer in order to buy guns for the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Eisenstein’s visual treatment of the two rival boxing managers was to make the office of one circular and the other square. This stylisation applied to the actors as well; those on stage left had square heads and wore square checked costumes, and on stage right they were all circular. The make-up was also grotesquely caricatured, with only the boxer hero appearing without make-up as a sympathetic human figure.

Eisenstein based the advertising on the on-stage billboards to greet the boxer on those that greeted the arrival of Oscar Wilde in New York; ‘Who Is Coming? Who Is Coming? Who Is Coming? He Is Coming! He Is Coming! He Is Coming! Oscar Wilde!” Oscar Wilde! Oscar Wilde! The Great Aesthete! The Great Aesthete! The Great Aesthete!’ He substituted the name of the boxer for Wilde, and ‘great boxer’ for ‘great aesthete’, a subtle in-joke which, by definition, only a few people were able to enjoy.

In the interlude between Acts One and Two, fairy lights lit up the proscenium arch and the revolutionary leaders came forward to harangue the audience about the evils of capitalism, especially as manifested in Mexico. The speech ended with a policeman arresting the speaker as an agitator. Two clowns rushed out and knocked the policeman down.

In the text, the climactic boxing match took place off-stage while the cast on stage merely reacted to it. Eisenstein, however, placed a boxing ring downstage, as close to the audience as possible, with ‘real fighting, bodies crashing to the ring floor, panting, the shine of sweat on torsos and finally, the unforgettable smacking of gloves against taut skin and strained muscles.’⁵ (This was a few years before Brecht used a boxing match in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.) Eisenstein had wanted to stage the fight in the middle of the auditorium, but the Fire Commission forbade it.

Because of his lean and muscular figure and explosive temperament, the future film director, twenty-year-old Ivan Alexandrovich Pyriev, was ideally suited to the role of the young victor, the Mexican revolutionary, Filipe Rivera. One of the other boxers was played by an athletic eighteen-year-old boy called Grigori V. Alexandrov.

Eisenstein and Alexandrov met for the first time during that bitter winter of 1920. Eisenstein had arrived for a rehearsal with only one piece of black bread, which he left on the lighting switch-board. Driven by hunger, Alexandrov leapt on the board and was wolfing it down when Eisenstein spotted him. A fierce argument ensued. Only when Alexandrov explained that he had not eaten for two days did Eisenstein, who had eaten the day before, allow the younger man to consume the rest of the bread.

‘Grisha’ Alexandrov’s life in the theatre began in his home town of Ekaterinburg (later Sverdlovsk), where he worked as a wardrobe assistant, scene painter and electrician at the Opera House. In 1918, he enrolled in the production course at the Workers and Peasants’ Theatre, and had just arrived in Moscow to become an actor with the Proletkult. Grisha captivated Eisenstein, and they were to become very close friends for over a decade. Ivor Montagu described Alexandrov as ‘that slim, strong, handsome, fair-haired and golden-skinned athlete – an Adonis.’⁶ If there was anyone who would have led Eisenstein to take ‘the road to perversion’, as he once admitted to a friend, it would have been Grisha. They once shared a bed, but Eisenstein resisted anything more than an affectionate kiss. Fortunately (in one sense) for Eisenstein, given the homophobic legal restraints that were to come, Alexandrov seemed to be implacably heterosexual.

The production of The Mexican demonstrated Eisenstein’s childhood love of the circus and his passion for the commedia dell’arte, but it was also plainly a first step on the road towards film direction. By unfolding the action on two planes simultaneously – thereby exposing the audience to a dual emotional shock – Eisenstein not only completely disregarded the conventional unity of action, but at the same time foreshadowed a film-making technique – the audience was, in effect, witnessing a sort of montage in embryo. As Eisenstein later recognised, bringing the events onto the stage was ‘a specifically cinematographic technique’ as distinct from the purely theatrical element of ‘reacting to events’. (The Mexican was filmed as The Fighter in 1952 starring Richard Conte and directed by the left-wing American documentarist Herbert Kline.)

According to Eisenstein, exactly concurrent with the triumphant first night of The Mexican, his father died in Berlin where he had been living as an exile, although Eisenstein only learnt of the death three years later. This dramatically ironic occurrence would have fitted neatly into Eisenstein’s Freudian interpretation of his relationship with his father – the father is dead, long live the son.

Although The Mexican was a popular success, Eisenstein was more concerned with how Meyerhold, whom he would later refer to as ‘my spiritual father’, would react to it. On the evening Meyerhold came to see the production, Eisenstein sat in the front stalls in nervous apprehension, watching Meyerhold’s reactions. Much to his relief, Meyerhold liked the show and invited Eisenstein to join him and Lunacharsky at the futuristic coffee house known as Sopo (Soyuz Poetov i.e. Poet’s Union). Eisenstein could only listen as his elders discussed Isadora Duncan’s dancing and the controversy raging round her ideas on plastic movement. He had not yet seen the American dancer, who had just married the ‘peasant poet’ Sergei Esenin and settled in Moscow.

Despite this approval from Meyerhold and others in the theatre, Eisenstein, like most of the population of Moscow, was poor, often hungry and badly clothed. At the end of the Civil War the city was on the verge of starvation but, despite the crippling shortage of both food and heating in Moscow that winter, creative warmth and fire pervaded the artistic circles.

‘No one bothered about cold or hunger,’ wrote the film director Lev Kuleshov. ‘Life seemed marvellously interesting, and there was no doubt at all that this moment marked the coming of a new era, the era of art. This art had to be as bold as the workers’ power itself, as pitiless towards the past as the Revolution … The extent to which we were crazed about art in those difficult years now seems quite astonishing … All were ready, at once and with no reckoning the cost, to carry out the “Order of the Army of Art” given by Mayakovsky.’⁷

Eisenstein was next asked to design the sets and costumes for Valeri Pletnyov’s Precipice (aka On the Abyss), but a clash of opinion with Smishlayev, who was again to be the nominal director, brought the production to an abrupt halt. Had the play been staged, it would have shown how Eisenstein’s ideas were moving further towards cinematic solutions, though he only later recognised ‘a film element that tried to fit itself into the stubborn stage.’ For one scene in which an inventor, staggered by his latest discovery, has to rush wildly through the town, Eisenstein devised the use of mobile props, pulled by actors on roller skates.

Of the scene, Eisenstein remembered ‘the four legs of two bankers, supporting the facade of the stock exchange, with two top-hats crowning the whole. There was also a policeman, spliced and quartered with traffic. Costumes blazing with perspectives of twirling lights, with only great rouged lips visible above.’⁸

In the spring of 1921, Eisenstein saw an advertisement announcing the opening of the State School for Stage Direction, to be run by Meyerhold. It was situated in a former lycée where Meyerhold himself had a small flat, and boasted a tiny classroom and an adjoining hall with a stage. Meyerhold, dressed in a faded sweater, trousers drawn in tightly at the ankles by gaiters, gigantic slippers, a woollen scarf and a red fez, presided over the Examining Board. Its other members included the poet Ivan Aksyonov, a member of the Centrifugal literary circle and author of a monograph on Picasso, the mysterious Valeri Bebyutov and the actor Valeri Inkhizhinov, later to star as the Mongolian fur-trapper in Pudovkin’s Storm Over Asia (1928).

First came questions to test general cultural knowledge, followed by the setting of a practical problem. Eisenstein was asked to draw on the blackboard a stage setting for the subject ‘six men in pursuit of a seventh.’ With swift strokes, he executed an ingenious and complicated mise-en-scène. For the final test, in expressiveness of movement, the candidates had to draw an imaginary bow. The next day, Eisenstein, who had also presented his huge portfolio of sketches to the Board, heard that he had been accepted. Thus began a two-year association with Meyerhold that was to prove decisively important for his development as a film director.

On the first day of lectures, Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevich, who had been accepted at the same time, rushed to take up two front seats, in order to be close to Meyerhold during the course he ran on stage direction and bio-mechanics. His lectures on stage direction incorporated formulae for the calculated planning of each separate step in stage production, though allowing for improvisation. It was through Meyerhold’s influence that Eisenstein developed that mixture of spontaneous improvisation and scientifically calculated planning that he later used in his films.

The parallel course in bio-mechanics included training in acrobatics, in which Eisenstein participated enthusiastically. Meyerhold insisted on his students gaining direct, practical experience of the stage and, when the season opened, arranged for them all to take part in the ball scene from Ibsen’s The League of Youth at his own RSFSR theatre.

At the end of the first term Eisenstein was asked to design the sets for Ludwig Tieck’s Puss in Boots. Again he displayed his originality by constructing a stage within a stage, the imitation stage being viewed as if from the wings so that the actors were shown in two distinct roles: as actors addressing an imaginary audience from the imitation stage as well as playing to the real audience.

Throughout Eisenstein’s period at the School, scholarships were non-existent and he lived a tough hand-to-mouth existence. He still lodged with Strauch, while Yutkevich, whose mother regularly baked him potato pies, saw to it that he never starved.

Aside from their work with Meyerhold and the Proletkult Theatre, Eisenstein and Yutkevich worked for MASTFOR (Masterskaya Foreggera), the Workshop Theatre run by Nikolai Foregger, the former Baron Foregger von Greiffenturn, who shared Eisenstein’s passion for the circus and the commedia dell’arte. Foregger, who transferred to the stage many of his observations of real life, was experimenting in the use of masks, though he refused to stylise them in the manner of the commedia dell’arte. Instead he chose his masks from contemporary life, depicting a young woman Communist, a poet, an intellectual philosopher, a city merchant and so on. In a sense it was the kind of typage that Eisenstein would use in his films.

Yutkevich and Eisenstein’s first joint venture at Foregger’s theatre was designing the settings for a triple bill of parodies satirising Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko’s penchant for operetta, the propaganda style of certain contemporary plays and Alexander Tairov’s excessively stylised performances at the Kamerny Theatre, especially his production of Racine’s Phédre.

The next play was by the poet Vladimir Mass, an associate of Foregger, entitled, after Mayakovsky’s poem, A Human Attitude to Horses (Good Relations with Horses) which opened on New Year’s Eve, 1921. It was divided into two parts, the first having a bitingly satirical content, highlighted by the use of typage masks, while the second was a music hall parody. Eisenstein designed a series of strange and fantastic costumes; instead of skirts, the chorus wore thin and revealing, wide, bell-shaped wire frameworks bedecked with multi-coloured ribbons. (Not unlike those Busby Berkeley chorines would wear in Warner Bros. musicals in the early 1930s.) The Poet’s costume was made up of half peasant dress half evening clothes.

Eisenstein also designed the sets and costumes for another of Foregger’s productions, The Kidnapper (aka Child-Thieves), based on Les Deux Orphelines, the old melodrama by Adolphe d’Ennery which D.W. Griffith had adapted as Orphans of the Storm, released in America almost at the same time. This time, Eisenstein took his inspiration from Honoré Daumier, whose caricatures of the middle classes and their pretensions delighted him.

In April 1922, Yutkevich and Eisenstein designed the sets of Macbeth for another group – the Central Theatre of Enlightenment. On a single set with no curtain was a throne and a huge cage that was used, among other things, as the entrance to a castle, a rampart, and the porter’s closet. The set was in grey and black, the costumes in red and gold. Even at this early stage of his career, Eisenstein was interested in the dramatic function of colour, which, alas, he was only able to test in the cinema in the colour sequence from Ivan the Terrible Part II. The helmets of the Scottish warriors covered their faces with slits for the eyes, a design which Eisenstein was to reproduce for the helmets worn by the Teutonic Knights in Alexander Nevsky.

Eisenstein spent the summer of 1922 with Foregger’s company in Petrograd, where he met Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, founders of FEKS (Factory of the Eccentric Actor). The group’s aim was to reform socialist theatre along the lines of circus and vaudeville. (Ekstsentrik is one of the Russian words for clown.) Trauberg and Kozintsev proclaimed ‘art without a capital letter, a pedestal or a fig leaf,’ and that ‘the streets bring revolution to art. Our street mud now is circus, cinema, music-hall!’

Among FEKS’ first presentations was an unconventional staging of Gogol’s Marriage, less an enactment of the play than of ‘the product of their own imagination’, and a play written by the group called Foreign Trade at the Eiffel Tower, both of which used some film sequences. This led to Trauberg and Kozintsev embarking on a remarkable twenty-year co-directing film partnership.

Under the influence of FEKS, Eisenstein and Yutkevich wrote a three-act satirical pantomime for Foregger called Columbine’s Garter, to music by Ernst von Dohnanyi. It was an extremely free adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s play Beatrice’s Veil, which had been produced by Meyerhold in 1910 as Columbine’s Scarf, and by Tairov in 1916 as Pierette’s Shawl. Eisenstein and Yutkevich’s play, updated to a contemporary setting, was divided into two parts: Mama the Automatic Café and Papa the Watercloset, with Pierrot turned into a bohemian and the exploiting Harlequin into a parvenu banker, who would enter on a tightrope. The authors wanted to call the work ‘stage attractions’, foreshadowing Eisenstein’s theory of the ‘montage of attractions’.

Another, less obvious, influence on the piece was Jean Cocteau. Eisenstein had read about the ‘scandalous’ play, Les Marieés de la Tour Eiffel, which had opened at the Théatre des Champs Elysées the year before, and was struck by the use of radio announcers standing on either side of the stage, dressed, as he wrongly remembered, ‘in Cubist costumes designed by Picasso’.⁹ (They were, in fact, Jean Hugo’s costumes, and they were not Cubist.) Eisenstein even cut out a photograph of Cocteau from the magazine Je Sais Tout, and pinned it to the wall of his flat.

The play, dedicated ‘to Vsevolod Meyerhold, the maestro of the Scarf, from the apprentices of the Garter,’ failed to be put on by Foregger and was never performed. Piqued at this rebuff, Eisenstein left to work as an assistant to Meyerhold, whom he ‘loved, revered and respected’ more than any other man.

Meyerhold later claimed, ‘All Eisenstein’s work has its origins in the laboratory where we once worked together as teacher and pupil. But our relationship was not so much the relationship of teacher and pupil as of two artists in revolt, up to our necks and afraid to swallow for fear of the disgusting slime in which we found the theatre wallowing … The theatre was sinking in a swamp of naturalism, feeble imitation and eclecticism’.

Grigori Kozintsev asserted that the cinema learnt more from Meyerhold than did the theatre. In 1925, Proletkult, knowing of Meyerhold’s interest in cinematographic problems, tried to get him to make a film of John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook The World, two years before Eisenstein made October.

Eisenstein worked at the GVYTM, the State Higher Theatre Workshops at 23 Novinsky Boulevard. ‘These two floors, with a mezzanine, were packed with life … The master lived in the attic with his family … The master had the rare facility of dressing up in the most outré clothing. Contriving not to let his slippers drop off his feet, he hopped round the edges of the steps of the tiny spiral staircase and flew downwards. I could barely keep up with his youthful speed. I caught him up in the kitchen … Shaking, the hapless old man [Meyerhold was forty-eight] lay on the stove. Who could have said that this same old man, playing Lord Henry in Dorian Gray, would embody the irreproachable dandy, rocking in his armchair and staring at his parrot, beak to beak? He huddled up. Frowned. His collar reached above his ears. His jaw was bound in a cloth. His long fingers were just showing out of his overcoat’s cuffs.’¹⁰

Meyerhold had, in fact, played Lord Henry Wotton in a lost film of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he directed in 1915. Of course, Eisenstein remembered him as the tall and thin Blue Pierrot in Masquerade in St Petersburg in 1917. When Eisenstein joined the group, Meyerhold was rehearsing The Magnificent Cuckold by the Belgian dramatist Fernand Crommelynck. It was his intention that ‘against the bare constructions of the set surfaces, young actors in blue linen overalls would demonstrate their mastery without make-up, in pure form, as it were, without theatrical illusions.’¹¹

At the workshop, Eisenstein made a model set for a production of Heartbreak House, which Meyerhold was planning for his own theatre. Eisenstein, taking his cue from George Bernard Shaw’s suggestion that the house in the play should resemble a ship, designed the set as a modern ship in which the actors, who would never leave the stage, moved to a large striped semi-circular divan at the back, where they would rest whenever they had finished each particular sequence in their performance. The play was never produced, but the model survived.

In September 1922, a painful rupture between Eisenstein and ‘the grand old man of my youth, my leader in drama, my teacher … a combination of creative genius and treacherous personality.’ Apparently, Meyerhold was rather offended by a question Eisenstein asked him during a lecture. ‘I suddenly saw Mikhail Osipovich in his aquiline face, with its penetrating gaze and the striking set of the mouth beneath the bent, predatory nose. A glassy stare which darted left and right and was then utterly transformed, assuming an air of official politeness, a slightly derisive sympathy, before showing ironic surprise at the question.’¹²

Subsequently, Eisenstein was surprised to receive a note via the actress Zinaida Raikh (also Reich), Meyerhold’s assistant and soon-to-be second wife: ‘When the pupil is not merely equal, but superior to the teacher, then it is best for him to go!’ Eisenstein was devastated. ‘The countless agonies of those like myself who self-lessly loved him. The countless moments of triumph as we witnessed the magical creativity of this unique wizard of the theatre … What purgatory … I was expelled from the Gates of Heaven … My heart was heavy with great sadness … I was, beyond all argument, unlucky with my fathers.’¹³

Whenever Eisenstein was rebuffed or reprimanded by an older man, he would see his father in them. ‘Perhaps that was why I so hated all those features in Upton Sinclair, because I have known them since I was a babe in arms?,’ Eisenstein wrote after the American novelist had withdrawn his financial backing for Qué Viva México!¹⁴

In June 1936, while Eisenstein was struggling to make Bezhin Meadow, about a father who kills the son he feels has betrayed him, Meyerhold sent him a photograph of himself, with a dedication written in ink on his shirt collar. ‘I am proud of my pupil who has now become a master. I love the master who has now founded a school. I bow to this pupil and master, S. Eisenstein.’ There is certainly something of Meyerhold’s demeanour and personality in the manner in which Nikolai Cherkassov portrays the Tsar in Ivan the Terrible.

In the event, the rift with Meyerhold proved to Eisenstein’s advantage. He was almost immediately appointed artistic director of Proletkult’s Touring Theatre known as Pere Tru (Peredvizhaniya – The Strolling Players), a group of fifteen members of the Central Proletkult Theatre, who had founded an independent group.

Eisenstein now had a theatre of his own, which he could use to destroy the traditional theatre. ‘In a few words, Proletkult’s theatrical programme consists not in “using the treasures of the past” or “in discovering new forms of theatre” but in abolishing the very institution of theatre as such and replacing it by a showplace for achievements in the field at the level of the everyday skills of the masses. The organisation of workshops and the elaboration of a scientific system to raise this level are the immediate tasks of the Scientific Department of Proletkult in the theatrical field,’ he explained.

One of his first actions was to establish a systematic study programme that included conferences, serious study sessions on circus art, and practical training in acrobatics, his aim being to imbue his actors with an attitude to precise application to their work. The day began at nine in the morning and continued until the evening with sports, boxing, athletics, team games, fencing and special voice training.

Eisenstein’s debut production for Proletkult’s Touring Troupe was Enough Folly in a Wise Man (Enough Simplicity for Every Wise Man/Even a Wise Man Stumbles) by Alexander Ostrovsky. He had seen the play at the Moscow Arts Theatre in the cold and hungry days when he had cajoled the usherette to let him in without a ticket. It was while watching this performance that he conceived the idea of taking the bare bones of the plot and adapting them to a contemporary context.

For Eisenstein, it was not a matter of ‘revealing the playwright’s purpose’ or ‘correctly interpreting the author’ or ‘faithfully reflecting an epoch’. In what he called his ‘theory of focal points’, the aim was to ‘attract’ the audience, and then to smash an artistic fist in its face by a carefully planned sequence of ‘focal points’, of which the boxing match in The Mexican was an obvious example.

‘Its stylistic premise derived from a very simple starting point: the proposition that every action by an actor should expand in intensity to pass beyond the bounds of that activity itself,’ Eisenstein explained. ‘Roughly speaking, it meant that in registering “astonishment” the actor should not limit himself to “starting back” … it had to be a backward somersault in the air.’¹⁵ Among many other tricks were ‘visual puns’: when Kurchayev, the dim hussar, says to Mamayeva (Vera Yanukova), ‘It’s enough to drive one up the pole!’, she immediately thrusts a long pole into a socket attached to his belt, and climbs up it. To demonstrate Kurchayev’s commonplace character, he was played by three men, all dressed alike, moving together and speaking in chorus, an effect used for three shareholders in The Strike.

The production took place in a circus arena in which clowns (among them Ivan Pyriev and Maxim Strauch) juggled, performed acrobatics, threw water onto each other and placed explosions under their seats. There was a woman who had lamps for breasts which lit up from time to time when she got excited. The characters included the French General Joffre, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon and Pavel Milyukov, a prominent counter-revolutionary and white emigré, depicted as white clowns. Naturally, the red clowns were the goodies. One of them, Grigori Alexandrov, who had been a boxer in The Mexican, was required to walk a tightrope while holding a conversation with a girl walking beneath the wire. At this point in the play Eisenstein always hid in terror in the wings until the applause indicated it was over safely.

At one performance, Alexandrov was making his way across the tightrope when it suddenly snapped. He was almost killed and the metal support crashed down onto an empty seat in the auditorium, pulverising it. Had it fallen a few centimetres to the right, it would presumably have fatally crushed Edouard Tisse, thus altering the course of cinema history. Reputedly, Tisse, the future cinematographer of all Eisenstein’s films, hardly batted an eyelid.

The show was a great success, and among the first to congratulate Eisenstein backstage with a bottle of champagne was Mayakovsky. Though critical of Eisenstein’s textual adaptation of the original, he was sorry that ‘he himself had not thought of collaborating in this gay and lively show.’ So successful was the production at deconstructing (to use a contemporary expression) Ostrovsky’s play, that Anatoli Lunacharsky was worried that he might be forced to close down the Maly Theatre, which had become known as the House of Ostrovsky, whose statue stands at the entrance. (Despite Eisenstein, the Maly, meaning ‘small’ as opposed to bolshoi – big, has survived to the present day.)

Eisenstein presented an excerpt from Enough Folly in a Wise Man to a select audience at the Bolshoi Theatre. When the performance ended to applause, he was so overwhelmed that he failed to notice that he had ripped his expensive (for him) brand new suit on a nail.

Eisenstein’s next production was called Can You Hear Me, Moscow? by Sergei Tretyakov, one of the earliest of Soviet playwrights. The play, which opened on November 7, 1923, dealt with the recent revolutionary events in Germany. A few months before, the Communists thought their time had come in Germany. Inflation had reached an extent unparalleled in any other industrial country in modern times, there was popular discontent and many strikers were gaining in militancy. Hitler seized the occasion to launch his beer-hall putsch in Munich, invoking the Communist danger.

The title of the play echoed the dissension in Moscow on how to take advantage of Germany’s unrest. Zinoviev, Radek and Trotsky were in different ways inclined to hope for great things from a German uprising, while Stalin believed insurrection foolhardy at the moment. A ‘formalist’, Eisenstein seemed less involved in the content than the form. Throughout his life, politics was never an interest in itself, but only insofar as they affected his ability to function as an artist.

During the play, the cast addressed the audience, demanding ‘Are you listening?’, and they responded (with prompting), ‘I’m listening!’ A massive portrait of Lenin was unveiled in Act Three. Eisenstein described a scene from the play thus: ‘In the epilogue at the opening ceremony to the sovereign of the small German duchy, the official court poet recites a celebratory poem on the German defeat of the semi-cultured, naive population by German armour. He is himself wearing armour. He is also on stilts (his poetry is stilted too). And his knight’s costume covers his body and his stilts, so he appears as an iron giant. At the critical moment the straps break and the empty armour falls away from him with a crash of empty buckets.’¹⁶

This anticipated the hollow echo of the bucket helmet of the Livonian knight in Alexander Nevsky after being hit by a Russian harness, and the empty armour in the tent of the traitor prince in Ivan the Terrible.

Moving from the highly artificial atmosphere of his last two plays, Eisenstein’s final theatre production before embarking on his film career, was staged in the realist setting of the Moscow Gas Works during working hours in March 1924. For Gas Masks, also by Tretyakov, the audience sat on rows of wooden benches placed on the factory floor, while the machines kept on working. The actors wore no make-up, and the final scene was timed to coincide with the nightshift workers, who took over from the actors and set about lighting their fires.

It was not a success, owing to the mutual disruption of factory and theatre, and the noxious smell of gas, and the production ran for four nights only. However, Eisenstein realised that its failure lay deeper.

‘Gas Masks with its general aims … was the last possible attempt within the confines of theatre to overcome its sense of illusion … in fact that was already almost cinema, which builds its effects on precisely that kind of theatrical “material” through montage juxtaposition …’¹⁷

The theatre had become too confined for his imagination. As he explained, ‘the cart dropped to pieces, and its driver dropped into the cinema.’¹⁸

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Agitka!