Vsevolod Yemilyevich Meyerhold

Russian theater director

• Born: February 9, 1874
• Birthplace: Penza, Russia
• Died: February 2, 1940
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Meyerhold departed from the powerful naturalistic influences of Konstantin Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre to experiment with more abstract forms of theater. Representing the other side of the universal duality in theater expressionistic versus naturalistic he dared to experiment with an ingenious stage language of his own invention and devised the constructivist principles of set design and the biomechanical approach to actor training.

Early Life

Born of German parentage, Vsevolod Yemilyevich Meyerhold (FSYEHV-uh-luht yihm-YIHL-yehv-yihch MI-uhr-hahlt) converted to the orthodox faith and adopted Russian nationality in 1895, thereby avoiding conscription into the Prussian army. In Moscow ostensibly to study law, he began to frequent the theater, where he was often disappointed by the mediocrity and pointlessness of the fare. In 1896, he joined the Moscow Philharmonic Society’s drama school, auditioning for the well-known Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko with a speech imitated in gesture and style from Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Othello. On graduation, he was invited to become a member of the Moscow Art Theatre, which had been formed by Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky in 1898.

From the outset, Meyerhold’s work at the Moscow Art Theatre came in conflict with the central mission of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko. He believed that he had discovered the limitations of the realistic acting style and held strong opinions against the aesthetic value of naturalism in the production of such playwrights as Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen. His leadership of the Theatre-Studio, a branch of the Moscow Art Theatre, was the beginning of his departure from the tradition (however young) of naturalism.

For four years, Meyerhold was a member of the Moscow Art Theatre’s acting company, playing some eighteen roles in a wide range of characterizations. His gaunt, angular face prevented his complete metamorphosis into the more romantic fictive characters, although he did play Treplev in Chekhov’s Chayka (1896; The Sea Gull, 1909). According to his notes during these four years, he was even then in search of new forms; his first attempts at a stylized approach to the stage came in 1905, with La Mort de Tintagiles (pb. 1894; The Death of Tintagiles , 1899), by Maurice Maeterlinck, a Belgian playwright writing what Meyerhold termed “The New Theatre,” a passive, actor-oriented, nonhistrionic dramatization of a silent moment in the tragedy of quotidian life.

A brief association with Vera Komissarzhevskaya’s Dramatic Theatre in St. Petersburg from 1906 to 1908 served as a transition for Meyerhold from the Moscow Art Theatre to the less protective environments of commercial theater. Meyerhold’s apprenticeship ended in 1908, when he accepted a position at the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatres, where, from 1908 to the October Revolution of 1917, he was to explore the possibilities of his unique theatrical vision in the unlikely venues of commercial enterprise, working at a series of “official” St. Petersburg theaters.

Life’s Work

“The essence of stage rhythm is the antithesis of real, everyday life,” declared Meyerhold as early as 1909, referring to his production of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde at the Mariinsky Theatre but stating at the same time one of the principles on which he built his theatrical style. Even during the years of his commercial acting successes, Meyerhold experimented in the private theaters of St. Petersburg, especially the intimate theater style of The Interlude House, run by a fellowship of actors and artists. To avoid contractual complications, he adopted the pseudonym Dr. Dapertutto, under which name he created many of his most imaginative stage pieces. His contribution to an evening of pieces in October, 1910, which he called Columbine’s Scarf, was a haunting, chillingly grotesque pantomime based on Arthur Schnitzler’s Der Schleir der Pierrette (1910; the veil of Pierrette) but turned the romantic story into a tragedy. It was typical of Meyerhold’s attempts at this time to treat traditional stage literature with a new interpretation.

By 1912, Meyerhold was splitting his theater career between a hectic acting and directing schedule at the Mariinsky Opera in St. Petersburg and a company of actors and artists in Terioki, under his artistic leadership, living in a communal environment. He still had time to write and publish his theories on theater in 1913. The smaller theater gave him several opportunities to experiment with a minimalist stage set, almost devoid of realistic setting, more a platform and background for action than an integral part of the play itself. These attempts solidified his theories about the function of the stage set, not as a photographic reproduction of real space but as an environment for the machinery of the stage action to be magnified, moved from site to site, and explored.

While his experiments were being well received in the smaller theater community, his “extravagances” in the larger theater were beginning to be criticized by a more and more vocal “popularist” political body. Meyerhold began to be characterized in the press as decadent and megalomaniacal. Scholars regard this production (Masquerade) as the culmination of Meyerhold’s St. Petersburg career; it was to be revived repeatedly after the Revolution by Meyerhold himself as well as by his successors.

The 1917 Revolution transferred all artistic endeavors into state control. Theater, the most public art, saw many changes, but Meyerhold’s own “reforms” continued to progress as a kind of parallel to the revolutionary changes around him. He started a theater school in what was now called Petrograd, under the Theater Department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. The real question was how the repertory would change with the new political overview; after World War I, theater, according to the Petrograd Pravda, needed to be “born of that same Revolution, which we all look upon as our own great mother.” Meyerhold’s Futurist ideas, in tandem with Italian theater developments around the same time, were received with mixed reaction from the press. It soon became clear that Meyerhold’s theatrical activities would always be viewed as a political statement, interpreted by each side (the conservative reformists and the radicals) according to its own lights.

Meyerhold enjoyed the strongest support for the juxtaposition of his art form and the Communist Party ideology when, in 1921, he was appointed director of the State Higher Theatre Workshops in Moscow. It was a theater school, complete with courses in history and theory. By now “Master,” Meyerhold could formulate his acting theories into an actual course of study. A highly physical approach to acting, his “biomechanics” grew out of a series of physical fitness exercises, coupled with stage combat techniques. Awarded the title of “People’s Artist” in 1923 for twenty years of service to the theater, Meyerhold was free to examine the productive results of long years of experimental uncertainty in a series of highly publicized productions matching his acting theories to his staging style in a theater in Moscow named for himself.

In 1926, probably the height of Meyerhold’s career, the play by Nikolai Gogol entitled Revizor (1836; The Inspector General , 1890) finally brought together all the potential of Meyerhold’s theories in a highly successful stage production, seen today as a model of alternative theatrical presentation. Too controversial, however, was a play by Sergei Tretiakov whose thesis was contradictory to the Soviet “line” on the importance (or nonimportance) of family life; this and similar experiments eventually were to undermine Meyerhold’s popularity with the bureaucracies under whose authority he worked. On the other hand, Meyerhold and the playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky were particularly productive partners during this period, working together in some ten works, including Klop (1929; The Bedbug , 1931) and Banya (1930; The Bathhouse, 1963).

The Soviet government, entering the period of repressive measures that is now called the Stalin era, was not always happy with Meyerhold’s view of the world as expressed on stage. Meyerhold himself, in what can only be seen as a heroic defiance of good sense, continued to insist on the autonomy of the artist over the wishes of the social system, refusing to acknowledge any demands of the state to use his stage as a propaganda platform and ignoring the growing tensions and the clear signs of his incipient disfavor. In 1939, the government-controlled press had damned Meyerhold’s “decadent” work, primarily for failure to reduce his chaotic productions down to the Socialist Realism seen by the government as the proper sphere for theater. An anti-intellectual bias was working against him from 1930 to his death in 1940. Claims that he had ruined his theater were nothing more than excuses for closing it down in 1939. A victim of the paranoia of the Soviet government on the eve of World War II, Meyerhold was arrested shortly thereafter and shot in 1940.

Significance

Over a long career, Vsevolod Yemilyevich Meyerhold established a distinct ideology of theatrical presentation characterized by rapidly changing “loci” simply suggested by a montage of set alterations on a central “plateau,” or general acting area (sometimes referred to as “cinefication”), a method of physical preparation for actors (called biomechanics) complementing or rivaling that of Stanislavsky, and a style of visual spectacle celebrating the rise of industrial and technological invention, called “constructivism,” that today informs virtually all scenic design. His mature work, itself iconoclastic and irreverent, in so many ways the theatrical equivalent of the Bolshevik Revolution and its ideologies, and in other ways antithetical to the Socialist Realism embraced by its less imaginative political leaders, is responsible for the strength of the continuing combative dichotomy that still gives live performance its viability in an age of mass media: the dialectic between theater as hyperrealization of actual life and theater as an independent language whose vocabulary is larger than mere representational photographic replication and closer to the abstract spirit of theater handed down to Western civilization from the Greeks.

In the wide-ranging reexamination of aesthetic principles begun after World War II, modern theater practitioners found themselves more indebted to Meyerhold’s vision and daring and more comfortable with the stage vocabulary that he had designed and implemented than his Soviet executioners could have imagined; Bertolt Brecht, the East German director of presentational, propagandistic, “alienation” theater, acknowledged a considerable debt to Meyerhold’s innovations, as have such highly regarded modern experimental directors as Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook. In fact, every experimenter in theatrical forms from 1950 on owes a debt to Meyerhold, who turned his back on the invidious and ultimately self-defeating naturalism of his peers and tutors to discover theater’s unique power to communicate directly.

Bibliography

Braun, Edward. The Theatre of Meyerhold: Revolution on the Modern Stage. New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1979. An important critical biography and a thorough examination of Meyerhold’s entire career, taking advantage of Braun’s thirteen years of study on the same figure. Deliberately avoids comparisons with contemporaries and successors, concentrating instead on the details of Meyerhold’s own contributions. Includes many illustrations, strong notes, a bibliography, and an index.

Eaton, Katherine Bliss. The Theater of Meyerhold and Brecht. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Defends the idea that the main source of inspiration was Meyerhold. The interchange of ideas between Germany and Russia, an exchange that went both ways, culminated in Brecht’s visit to Russia in 1936, three years into his own exile and three years before Meyerhold’s arrest and execution. A sturdy critical comparison, leaning slightly toward an overenthusiastic appraisal of Meyerhold. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Hoover, Marjorie L. Meyerhold: The Art of Conscious Theater. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974. A full-length scholarly study coinciding with the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, and, excepting Braun’s compilation of primary material, the first critical account in English of Meyerhold’s work.

Leach, Robert. Makers of Modern Theatre: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2004. Examines the work of Meyerhold and three other men who were influential in the history of twentieth century theater. Provides information about the nature of his life and times, artistic legacy, dramatic philosophy and practices, and contemporary perspectives of his work and ideas.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. New York: P. Lang, 2003. Chronicles the parallel careers of the two men, focusing on the development of their acting methods.

Meyerhold, V. E. Meyerhold on Theatre. Edited and translated by Edward Braun. New York: Hill & Wang, 1969. The first, and for years the only, study of Meyerhold in English, these excerpts from his theoretical writings are woven together with Braun’s commentaries to present a unified documentary record that validates his respected reputation in Europe and the United States. Includes more than fifty illustrations.

Pitches, Jonathan. Vsevold Meyerhold. New York: Routledge, 2003. Biography chronicling Meyerhold’s life, artistic development, and concept of biomechanics.

Rudnitsky, Konstantin. Meyerhold the Director. Translated by George Petrov. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis Press, 1981. Generated from archives hidden by the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, Meyerhold’s former student, and used here for the first time, this authoritative study concentrates on the artist as a director who worked in many contradictory styles. The more than two hundred illustrations include heretofore unpublished production stills and diagrams of Meyerhold’s stage blocking. Includes an index.

Sayler, Oliver M. Inside the Moscow Art Theatre. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970. For years, since its original publication in 1925, the definitive study of the Moscow Art Theatre, this report is interesting for comparisons between the traditional realism of Stanislavsky and the “cubist,” “Futurist,” “theoretical” Meyerhold, who is mentioned only five times, always as a foil for Sayler’s real subject. Index.

Schechner, Richard. Environmental Theater. New York: Hawthorne, 1973. As a highly visible successor of the experimental styles of previous “anti-illusion” stage directors, Schechner pays homage to Meyerhold’s overwhelming influence by citing whole passages of his theories throughout this study of the Performance Group. A clear example of how Meyerhold’s work broke ground for the next generations of presentational theater practitioners. Bibliography and index.