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CHARLES CRANE LEATHERBEE IN MEMORIAM
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'Preface
B ooks in English about the Soviet theatre have been written for the most part by critics and historians of the stage who have criticized and chronicled. Being neither critic nor historian, I have attempted to make a record of the Soviet theatre not externally from the standpoint of an observer and recorder of effects, but internally through the eyes of a participating craftsman. No one who spends even half a year in Soviet Russia can expect to come out unaffected in one way or another. I went in expecting to concern myself only with the technical processes of an art. I came out six months later filled with all sorts of ideas (and confusions, too, I admit) about that art and about the Soviet experiment-which-is-no-longer-an-experiment and about the relationship between the two. The technical processes are recorded herein and some few of the ideas and impressions besides. These latter have become for me the significant part of the whole study.
I really have no right to call this an account of the Soviet theatre, for it is concerned only with the theatres of Moscow. Six months was not a long enough time for me to study with any thoroughness the dramatic work in other parts of the Union, so it seemed wiser to concentrate my attention within the capital. But I am aware, and wish to point out emphatically, that excellent work is being done in Leningrad, in Tiflis, and in other places to which I make no reference.
Since my study has been confined to Moscow, the theatrical center of Russia, New York, the theatrical center
of the United States, has seemed the appropriate city of
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America to compare with it when comparisons have offered themselves as a means of pointing the meaning to various things I have seen. I hope that the frequency of allusions to the New York theatre will be accepted with this understanding by readers in other parts of the country.
The reader who discovers that I have not touched upon the Soviet ballet, opera, or cinema must not conclude that I do not consider them worthy of report. Again the limitation of time has restricted my field to the dramatic stage, and it is just because I consider these other branches of the theatre to be so important that I have preferred not to do them the injustice of a cursory study.
In the rendering of Russian proper names, always a difficult problem, I have generally followed the scholars’ international system of transliteration which, while rendering such familiar names as Tschaikowsky unfamiliarly as Chaikovski, yet seems to me the closest and most accurate method to employ.
I have been frequently asked since I left the Soviet Union whether I was allowed to see the things I wanted to see, whether I had freedom to come and go and to talk to people as I pleased. I should like to record the fact that every effort was made by everyone with whom I came into contact to open up to me all the work of the Soviet theatre which I wished to observe. To P. I. Novitski, head of the Theatre Section of the People’s Commissariat of Education, I am particularly indebted, as much for the information derived from personal conversations with him and from public addresses of his, as for his courtesy in officially introducing me to all the theatres of the R.S.F.S.R. To all the theatre directors, actors, regisseurs, designers, playwrights, technicians, trade union and government officials with whom I was associated in my work, and
whose name is legion, I am equally obliged for generous cooperation.
My first acknowledgment, however, must be to the Guggenheim Foundation whose appointment of me to a Fellowship made this study and the writing of this book possible. My thanks also go to Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, who helped me to break the Moscow ice; to Lee Simonson for valuable assistance in the pursuit of my study and its publication; and to Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood for assistance in translating the material in the appendix to this book.
NORRIS HOUGHTON
Introduction
F or the artist all roads once led to Rome; yesterday to Paris. Today, for the artist in the theatre, whether actor, director, or designer, the road leads to Moscow and the theatres of the U.S.S.R. Like the successive schools of modern painting in France during the last half of the last century, they formulate with gusto and precision aesthetic problems that are hazily conceived elsewhere and produce astounding solutions that become patterns of experiment for the rest of the world. But unlike so many of the experiments of modern painting, the productions of the Soviet theatre are never purely technical tours de force, are rarely esoteric, and are not addressed to coteries of specialists. They have been understood and greeted with enthusiasm by huge audiences that continue to pack every theatre to the doors. The exponents of the art of the theatre in the Soviet Union have accomplished what the doctrinaire leaders of every other form of modern art have failed to do: they have been daring and original; they have not compromised for an instant with what, in every other country, the public is supposed to want, and have nevertheless created an art that is fundamentally popular, evokes mass enthusiasm from the Caspian to the Baltic, and is integrally a part of national life.
Neither famine, pestilence, nor the fear of sudden death impeded this theatre’s growth in the early days of the Revolution when our first American observer, Oliver Sayler, dodged street fighting on his way to the doors of the playhouses where Stanislavski, Tairov, and Meierhold imperturbably carried forward their programs. In spite
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of the successive economic crises of the Nepmen period, and the Five Year Plan, the Soviet theatre has grown to an amazingly fecund and vital national art. Under an absolutist political regime it has remained free to accomplish what most of the presumably free theatres of Europe and the United States still fumble for. Every variety of method is practiced simultaneously and is pushed to a maximum of expressiveness, every degree of realism and stylization in acting, direction, and stage setting. In contrast, the programs and the pretensions of our "art theatres,” dedicated to the cult of a romantic freedom of expression, seem uniform and even stereotyped. Often the same play, acted and staged in diametrically different ways, can be seen in the same season at rival playhouses. Every kind and variety of playwrighting holds the boards simultaneously: the classics of Europe such as Shakespeare and Schiller and the classics of bourgeois Russia such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Ostrovski; romantic plays such as "Camille,” the romantic operas of Wagner and Bizet as well as the romantic operas of Chaikovski and Mous- sorgski and in addition operas, plays, and ballets, proletarian in their ideology or vehicles for revolutionary propaganda. Eugene O’Neill’s "Anna Christie,” "The Hairy Ape,” "Desire Under the Elms,” and "All God’s Chillun” have been successfully staged. There are as well comic operas, satirical revues, theatres for children, puppet play's, and the folk plays of the Jewish, Ukrainian, and Georgian theatres. I visited Moscow twice, for a week in 1926 and for another in 1932. Had I been able to stay for three I would undoubtedly have written a friend what Norris Houghton wrote me last winter: "I have been in Moscow twenty-one days. I have been to the theatre twenty-one nights, and I have not seen the same play twice.” I ended each visit by seeing two plays a night, and climbed into
my sleeping-car berth and stayed there twelve hours to recuperate, each time, from the most exciting week of theatre-going I had ever known.
The Soviet theatre has been analyzed and described in illustrated books and illustrated lectures. I have read most of these books and given some of these lectures. But none of them, I think, has sufficiently centered attention on the questions which most interest any student of the modern stage: What is the source of the Soviet theatre’s amazing and inexhaustible vitality? How and why does it so consistently renew its energies? The Soviet theatre is of course heavily subsidized. But a subsidy in itself has never saved a theatre from routine dullness; witness the Comedie Frangaise, the Odeon, or most of the royal theatres and opera houses of pre-war Germany. Our experimental theatres rarely survive a decade and if one does it ceases to be experimental. Most of our younger generation can graduate from college courses on playwrighting and playmaking only into the little theatres that never grow up. The perennial complaint about most of our talented actors is that so few of them mature as artists. Why do the ideas of our innovators so rarely get beyond the pages of illustrated monographs, why does so little of the creative imagination they might give the theatre get through the stage door? What in contrast is the especial gift of the Russians which enables them to fuse and integrate their talents into a dynamic theatre, that cannot be stamped into a single mold even by the iron hand of revolution, that has survived half a dozen aesthetic revolutions of its own, that continues to foment them and yet remains an integrated whole?
This book is, I think, one of the first, if not the first, to analyze in adequate detail the aesthetic organization of the Soviet theatre in an attempt to understand the tech-
nique of its creative efforts, to study not only the product but the process, to explain how and why the work of the Soviet theatre is done so completely and effectively that the eventual performance is almost invariably dramatically expressive and emotionally exciting. Although Mr. Houghton spent every night in the theatre, he was wise enough to spend his days in the rehearsal room, wise enough, before he started out, to acquire a working knowledge of the Russian language so that he could understand what he heard there. Knowing at first-hand the methods of American theatre production he is equipped as well to give us a first-hand picture which reveals how complete the aesthetic organization of theatrical resources can be, how fundamental the training of the actor, whatever his method, how deeply a director’s imagination, whatever his theory, can permeate every moment of a performance. We begin to understand not only why the rehearsal of a play can take six months or more, but why the final performance is an expressive whole and not a mass of over-elaborated detail. Mr. Houghton gives us fresh, sharpened, and concrete analysis of the incessant interplay of theory and experiment, emotion and idea, the patient integration of body and voice, inflection and meaning, movement and environment, picture and action, which finally brings a script to life.
The road to Rome, Paris, or Moscow is a dangerous road if too piously trod. Salvation cannot be imported. An excessive admiration of the greatest models breeds the academy. Mr. Houghton, as his final chapters show, is well aware of this; he makes no pretense to have discovered a secret or brought home a formula. But even the casual reader of these pages will become aware of the kind of intelligent, coherent, and concerted organization that is needed in our theatres if the giving of plays is to remain
for us a vital form of contemporary art; and every worker in the American theatre, after sitting in at these Moscow rehearsals, should get a fresh sense of the kind of creative effort that lies before us if our own theatre is to fulfill its present promise.
LEE SIMONSON