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p We often receive plays in which the
words “sputnik”, “semiconductor”, “quantum generator”, “computer”, and so on, crop up with disconcerting frequency, and yet the characters and events are such that if one were to cut out these modern expressions the action could very well be transposed to the last century. In all ages people have fallen in love, suffered from unrequited love, worked, written books, dreamed of justice and so on. Modern dress, a TV set and reference to contemporary events do not suffice to make a play modern. A play is only modern if the characters are modern, present-day people, when they behave not as people were wont to behave in the past but in accordance with the new, Soviet morality, when their “language” is modern, and they think and feel like our contemporaries. The situations and conflicts in a modern play, and even the plot, can be similar to those in the classics, but the characters and their attitudes to events must be different, must be modern. Try dressing the heroes of Ostrovsky’s comedy Even a Wise Man Stumbles in modern costume. It won’t work. The play will seem phoney, ridiculous, absurd. Does this mean that we no longer have clever careerists, superstitious old wives, old dodderers living entirely m the past and so on among us today? Unfortunately, we do come 48 across such people. But a modern Glumov has to be far more careful to avoid being exposed for what he is and stands to lose far more than Ostrovsky’s Glumov, whom the Mamayevs and the Krutitskys just cannot do without. The modern Krutitsky hasn’t a chance of weilding any effective power and could hardly offer patronage to a Glumov.

p Try imagining the action of Rozov’s In Search of Happiness transferred to the nineteenth century or a capitalist country and you will soon realise that it is quite out of the question. Yet one can easily do this with the plays of some authors for they only contain the outward tokens of our time.

p A lot of plays written recently differ vastly in form from Gorky or Ostrovsky. They have some rather unusual characters in the list of dramatic personae-Author, Master-of-Ceremonies, Choir.... The authors of these plays deliberately destroy the illusion of reality by making their characters talk to the audience, interrupting the action with author’s commentaries and so on. Unfortunately, some directors mistake novel and unusual form for genuine innovation and modernity.

p Yet no formal dramaturgical device in itself makes a play innovatory and modern. Choirs, masters-of-ceremonics, taking liberties with chronology and other such devices are only novel, modern, and indeed necessary in so far as they serve the author as the best means of expressing his idea and presenting modern people and modern human relationships.

p A real modern dramatist observes the development of the new in life-new attitudes to work, property, friendship, love and the people.

p In his In Search of Happiness V. Rozov does not feel at all cramped within the framework of traditional theatrical forms, and only departs from them in preferring to divide the action into two parts instead of the usual three acts. In Town at Dawn and Irkutsk Story A. Arbuzov feels the need to present his own personal attitude to events and therefore has a Choir on the stage, constantly switches from place to place, looks ahead into the future and returns to the present. Simonov has the living consorting with the dead and Stein has his characters meditate aloud. It is absurd to try and find a mean quantity of form obligatory for all dramatists.

p It is as ridiculous to criticise Soviet dramatists for not writing in the way Gorky or Ostrovsky wrote as it is to criticise the latter for not having written like Shakespeare. Every age produces its own writers, who are sons of their time. If they have talent, their works will differ in both form and content from works written in earlier times. The new cannot be created by imitating the old. We can learn a lot from the classics, but they have never taught us imitation.

p Unfortunately good plays are always in short supply. But it is far 49 worse when dramatists repeat one another’s mistakes and we have monotonous repetition in their choice of plots and characters. A vast number of plays have the most petty, insignificant conflicts. The characters are often primitive and stereotyped and the language is flat and insipid. Not infrequently, we fail to recognise a work of talent, individual weaknesses blinding us to its genuine novelty, bold message, original characters, and fresh language. But more often we are dazzled by an author’s brilliant external effects, strikingly original plot and vociferous characters and fail to notice the phoney ideological content and artistic impurity. And how often we are duped by a play’s apparent popularity with audiences!

p Our theatre life has livened up considerably in recent years. Writers and theatre people have renewed their interrupted controversies, not just for the sake of arguing, but in order to find the truth, each man in his own way. They argue about how plays should be written, produced and acted with actual plays, productions and acting. They try to find the shortest path to people’s hearts and minds.

p The controversy is essentially centred around one major problem, that of the hero and the heroic. This is no abstract discussion, and it is productive in so far as those with a bone to pick demonstrate their views not in articles and speeches but in practice.

p What is the essence of this debate which, although not openly announced, is definitely in progress, a debate which is reminiscent of the arguments that raged among dramatists in the ’twenties?

p One group of playwrights, critics and directors presumes to defend the heroic, monumental theatre as opposed to what they consider theatre concerned with banal, petty themes, imparted in whispers, full of undercurrents. They point as shining examples to The Optimistic Tragedy, Break-Up, How the Steel Was Tempered and other works of Soviet literature of which our people are justly proud. Having come to the end of the list of Soviet classics with which they are familiar, the advocates of the theatre of heroism attribute to it according to their own personal tastes a medley of other works, unwittingly abandoning genuine, objectively-appraised values for works that have no claim to greatness by common consent. Having passed from objective to purely subjective positions, they then reject anything that does not conform to their cheapened aesthetic ideal. Anything that lacks epic sweep is classified as petty, anything that lacks heroism is dubbed anti-heroic. Plays and productions where the spotlight is on man’s inner world and the plot concerns family relations are as a rule placed in the category of petty-bourgeois, pernicious plays lacking ideological content. Volodin, and even Rozov and Arbuzov, are often included in this category.

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p True, without romantico-heroic plays the Soviet theatre cannot live and develop. The theme of heroism must occupy the leading place in our theatre. But in life heroism exists and manifests itself in an infinite variety of human characters and destinies, personal and social circumstances and conflicts. Art does not have the right to restrict itself to any one particular sphere in which heroism manifests itself, and anyway, the heroic theme even in its manifold forms is not life in its entirety.

p Surely the real aim of the Soviet theatre is to delve down to the grass roots of courage, to the grass roots of man’s spiritual life.

p Rozov’s On the Wedding Day is really far more than the family, domestic drama it appears at first sight. It tells of a girl who has found the courage to reject marriage with a man she loves but who does not love her, and in its own way affirms the moral purity, and, if you like, the heroism of the new Man. In my opinion this play fulfills the social objective no less than a play like Dora Pavlova’s Conscience. The two plays are vastly different as regards their themes, the range of characters the author has chosen to show, and the means used to present the authentic material, but both authors have the same civic passion and political views. It seems hardly right to contrast these plays to one another simply because the one is openly didactic and the other psychological.

p One can argue about the skill and talent of the dramatists, their temperament and way of writing, but it is wrong and unfair to pronounce the plays of one civic-spirited and those of the other shallow merely on the basis of their subjects.

p Choice of subject, plot, characters and scene of action cannot, and certainly ought not to, serve as a criterion for a dramatist’s ideological commitment, loyalty and civic “reliability”.

p Any theme can be treated in a petty, banal manner. The most runof-the-mill personal matter can be raised to the level of a most striking artistic achievement by an author and theatre with a highly developed sense of civic responsibility, while a powerful theme with sweeping historical implications can be reduced by a philistine to the level of the petty and banal. It is the duty of both dramatist and theatre to present on the stage not only the Revolution itself but also the way it is reflected in people’s lives. But this can be done through practically any kind of play. The contrasting of “civic theatre” and “intimate theatre” is one of the rudiments of standard aesthetics. Miniatures, watercolours and prints are as necessary as large canvasses, if they are skilfully produced in the name of high social ideals. An oratorio is in no way superior as a genre to Lieder. Declamatory verse may speak of matters of moment, but it may also speak of the most appallingly trivial matters. Simple unadorned prose can tell of great deeds, but it may also 51 describe the base and ignoble. The volume of sound means nothing. The scale of a play, its social and philosophical message and its power to move people are not determined by the number of characters or the scene of action but by its author’s talent and the depth of his civic outlook. Not infrequently a play is judged not by its ideas and artistic qualities but by certain superficial aspects taken out of context.

p When Volodin wrote the play five Evenings (the action of which indeed took place in the evening) he was accused of a gloomy, “ twilight” mood. But the play was after all about love, about the difficult road to happiness of a highly-principled middle-aged woman. It was a sad play, although it had a happy ending. But sadness was tantamount to pessimism for those critics who considered sorrow and misfortune as synonymous with decadence. The play shows how two fine people almost missed the chance of happiness. They eventually found it, but too late. Surely there is every reason for sadness and regret at the thought of how much they had denied themselves.

p In Five Evenings there are no fine heroes performing great deeds or making great discoveries. But surely we are justified in writing and performing plays about ordinary people such as these-the workshop foreman, the driver, the student, the telephonist, the chemical engineer-who make themselves and their near and dear ones live better and more honestly. For these plays are about people who in different circumstances would most definitely find the courage for the most patriotic and heroic deeds.

p Certainly Tamara’s heroism is quite different from that of the woman Commissar in The Optimistic Tragedy. But I love both these women. Why should we class Tamara as an “anti-heroine”? Merely because she lives in a crowded flat and not in a military tent? Tamara has just as much integrity as Nila Snizhko in Salynsky’s Drummer Girl. The authors have chosen different times, different circumstances and different conflicts. But did not the Commissar die and Nila risk her life for the same reason-so that later, many years later, in peacetime, people might live according to high moral principles?

p The fact that the play is the basis of the mise-en-scene should be in no need of proving. Yet it quite often happens that this is just not the case, and instead the author’s thoughts are lost in the production. This may of course be intentional on the director’s part, but in the majority of cases it is accidental. The truth is that many directors just do not know how to read, or rather understand, a play and find the appropriate scenic expression. Anyone can grasp the moral of a play, but it is not at all easy to spot the sparks set off by the collision of conflicting forces, and the sad fact is that not all plays contain these sparks, this live fire.

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p There are plays that seem to contain everything they should- confiict and clashes, unexpected twists in the plot, intelligent dialogue, triumphant virtue and punished vice-and yet we are not satisfied, we feel that something is lacking. The conflict turned out to be contrived, the passions artificial and the fire a bengal light. And it is even worse if the director has failed to notice how contrived and artificial the play and characters are. We also find the opposite: the director has failed to spot the conflict in a slow, apparently calm scene, or to realise that the hero’s reserve and apparent singleness of purpose hide a particularly complex character.

p Can one learn to understand plays properly? And if so, how?

p They say there’s no accounting for taste. Some plays everybody is vying to put on, while with other plays the competition is slight. A play that has been turned down by one theatre may be successfully staged at another. One director regarded a play as a poetic, lyrical story, the other as a tense drama. And both productions are good in their own way, both have their merits. One seeks simplicity and home truths in the heroic, and the other seeks heroism in the mundane and everyday element. Which of them is right? Which of them has understood the play better?

p The only answer to these questions is to be found in practice, in the finished production. The only real criterion for judging a production is the power of the impression it makes on the audience.

p There arc no rules in art, no universally obligatory definitions. Does this mean that it is all a matter of personal taste, that a play has no objective value, but that it all depends on individual appreciation? Obviously this is not the case. A play’s power, meaning and valuemust be determined by comparing it to reality.

p Truth to life is the only objective criterion for judging a play. And the better, the more fully and accurately, the director understands life, the more exactly he can determine the degree of truth a play contains.

p Thus, the director’s prime task is constant, day by day study of life. He must know everything. He must not only learn to see facts but must be able to compare them and reveal the inner mainspring of human behaviour. We must look deeper into the inner world of the people around us, note the first green shoots of the new, perceive the complex laws of the struggle between the old and the new and the tangled links between major historical events and personal fortunes. Politics and economics, aesthetics and sociology are so interconnected that it is quite impossible to even imagine a modern director not versed in all these fields.

p It is not so easy to distinguish between good and bad plays. The only way to learn to do so is to be constantly increasing one’s ideo- 53 logical baggage, widening one’s horizon and improving one’s taste by devoting considerable time to the arts-literature, music and painting.

p But improving one’s taste is a long laborious process, and meanwhile plays have to be chosen at once. What is one supposed to do? Rely on the recommendations of the critics? I think the first thing to be done is to eradicate the insulting theory that the public is ignorant, that our Soviet audiences are incapable of comprehending complicated things, and one should give them entertainment. This lack of faith in the taste of the public is one of the most dangerous of errors, and one of the most widespread. There arc naturally cases when a good play is not given the reception it deserves. But no one is to blame for this except the author, or the director, or the actors, or all of them together.

p Unfortunately the opposite is often the case. We find appallingly bad plays, badly acted into the bargain, having a most successful run. But here it is the theatre that is to blame and not the bad taste of the audience.

p A director must be reading new plays all the time in search of suitable material. Surely the reason why theatres sometimes put on the first thing that comes along is that they simply have not got time to search and select.

p It is certainly far more reprehensible when a theatre has got a wide choice of plays yet selects a bad, phoney one without realising it.

p I have no firm recommendations to offer, but I would suggest that on reading a play through a director might try imagining its action taking place in a different country in, say, the last century. If this is remotely possible, then the play is phoney, for it means there can be nothing modern about it except for the setting, up-to-date dress, and bit parts like the man from the executive committee or the Young Pioneer. It means that all the events presented could equally well take place in any age in any country. It makes not a scrap of difference if the family drama is complicated by the fact that there are children or by the characters every now and then holding forth on the Soviet Man’s family duties and so on.

p It is far from my intention to suggest that plays about love, the family and children, or the problems of family life have no place in the Soviet theatre and are unsuitable for Soviet audiences. Of course love and the family must be written about. But only provided the old conflicts and traditional situations serve to reveal new human qualities, new features of human relationships and the nature of the people of today.

p Often a highly dramatic conflict, an engrossing plot and the superficial attributes of modernity serve to mask what is in fact a pedestrian 54 rehash of the worn devices of old-fashioned melodrama, thereby sapping the director’s vigilance, so to speak.

p It is a perfectly natural desire to wish to present to the public a play with a dramatic situation and highly intriguing plot. But however fascinating you may have found the play yourself, you should immediately ask why the author has treated us to such an intrigue and for what purpose he has made the events so dramatic.

p Unfortunately, only too often the answer will be: simply in order to evoke tears and give the audience a pleasant thrill.

p There is nothing easier than exciting or moving an audience, even to tears, with plays full of suffering-the old roue stricken with remorse, children suffering because of their terrible parents, or parents suffering because of their enfants terribles-but as often as not such plays leave no lasting imprint in the hearts and minds of the audience and are forgotten the moment they leave the theatre.

p This is surely a poor reward for months of work and effort by a whole group of people.

p Thrillers are usually considered modern if only the action is set in the present. They are in no way inferior to any other genre per se. But they are often the excuse for stereotype characters and situations, trite, cliche-ridden dialogue and a complete absence of psychological analysis. Not infrequently they are full of glib patter about patriotism by which they contrive to hide the fact that they are totally devoid of ideological content. These empty phrases simply serve to mask the emotional sterility of the heroes, and a closer look shows that the latter are entirely motivated by a thirst for adventure, that they are in fact not heroes at all but cheap adventure-hunters. One has no difficulty in imagining the action taking place in some other country: one can do so without anything essential being changed.

p If we take a look at some of the more famous heroes of great adventures to be found in the literature of former ages-Till Eulenspiegel, D’Artagnan, Robin Hood and so on-we find that they were motivated not by a thirst for thrills, but by love for their people, the longing to avenge cruel injustices, the noble desire to rescue the fair maiden, their beloved, from captivity and so on.

p Courage, boldness and enterprise are clearly worthy of emulation, but only if they serve the achievement of a noble end. After all, the most rapacious people, and even criminals and careerists, are wont to demonstrate courage and daring on occasion.

p The courage and heroism of Soviet men and women is of a special brand. I don’t intend to examine this here; it has been superbly done by Fadeyev in his Young Guard, Sholokhov in his Destiny of a Man, by Katayev and countless others.

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p But if the “modern” repertoire in some theatres was only recently represented by works of an extremely low standard both as regards ideological content and artistic qualities, we should regard this as no less than a disaster. Those theatres which put on “cruel” melodramas, “spine-chilling” thrillers and frivolous comedies with precious little dialogue and lots of singing and dancing are perfectly well aware of the objective value of such productions. They are none too keen to have visiting critics see them, and are not overworried if the local press fails to mention them. They allow their “boxoffice” repertoire scarce ideological content and certain lapses from modern standards.

p The worse such productions are the less dangerous they are. They are anyway far less dangerous than those ghastly petty-bourgeois dramas heavily camouflaged as “plays with a message” where dreadful philistines pronounce just what we like to hear and hidebound people deliver edifying sentences to us.

p In this category we find numerous large-scale plays, which we theatre folk call “canvases”. Producers are often taken in by the apparent modernity of some of these “canvases” with their show of exuberance and fearless optimism. The economic issue being solved, or the task of major importance to the national economy being carried out by the heroes is in most cases but the background for a love story. It is very sad when the director’s attention has been so drawn to the important economic question raised that he has failed to realise that it is all issue and no play.

p The essence of Soviet people’s lives is the struggle of the new with the old, a struggle being waged at Party congresses and conferences, in industry and agriculture, science and the arts, in short on every front. Playwrights have a habit of reducing the most complex issues to the simple pattern of the conservative trying to oust the innovator, or rather the innovator ousting the conservative from his post. The characters are stereotype: the conservative has a fine work record behind him, while the innovator has a foul character. To liven things up a bit the conservative’s daughter, or sometimes even his wife, is in love with the innovator. The conflict between the conservative and the innovator is completely pointless, since we get the message from the very first scenes: it is better to take a little longer and build something that will last, and grain in the granaries is worth more than the report on the table.

p But to keep the conflict going, everybody for some reason supports the conservative. As a rule all the arguments arc settled by the secretary of the local Party committee, various desperate attempts being made to bring this pale shade of a character to life and make him “oh- so-human”—perhaps he is gravely ill, or his daughter is in love with the 56 innovator’s son or the conservative. The Party secretary is wild about fishing, or occassionally on hunting.

p At first sight these plays seem modern. After all, the issues being debated are actual present-day problems. At first sight one has the impression that the action could not possibly be set in another country or in the last century. But upon closer inspection you will find that it is the old familiar characters of bygone days that are being paraded before us in a modern setting, masques uttering modern phrases. Many centuries ago the Comedia dell’Arte flourished, a masque theatre, where a group of familiar formalised characters-Pantaloone, the tricked father, Capitano, the cowardly warrior, Doctor Lombardo, the quack, the cunning Harlequin and Lelio and the witty Columbina and Smcraldina-walked the boards in production after production in the same stock situations.

p Some fifteen years ago one of our directors got the idea of putting on a modern masque comedy; with an old-fashioned doctor, his frivolous secretary, his wife, the epitome of cheap vulgarity, two pairs of lovers, one lyrical, the other comic, and an old couple, she a charwoman, he a concierge (or watchman-it makes no difference).

p Luckily the director in question soon realised that this would be the theatre of parody. But unfortunately there arc still dramatists and directors creating just this kind of theatre today, with the young stilyaga, the charwoman, the absent-minded scientists and the bureaucrat from the personnel department, as bad, if not worse than Pantaloone or Brighella, making their appearance in play after play.

p Many plays that aspire to epic sweep for some reason or other just don’t seem to be able to do without such natural disasters as landslides and blizzards, droughts and burst dams, fires and traffic accidents. Such plays are themselves disasters as theatre. The trouble is not simply that these are worn cliches but that they create the appearance of drama, the appearance of struggle.

p An author has every bit as much right to present a catastrophe on the stage as any other real event, but many writers make use of disasters as an easy way out. It is very wrong, and rather unfair, to drown one’s heroine merely because one does not know what else to do with her.

p One must of course distinguish between a bad play and a play that is simply not modern. The latter may be very well written. That’s the trouble. That is why it is even more dangerous, for a false idea is worse than no idea at all.

p We are perfectly aware that there have always been very few really first-class plays, and theatres must play a most active role to promote their creation. What exactly does this mean, the active role of theatres in this process?

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p I think we have long since reached the conclusion that theatres should not take it upon themselves to write plays for the dramatist, that nothing good can come of this and it is really not within their province to do so. The role of the theatre is therefore rather that of setting high standards by insisting on quality and secondly of refusing to compromise and lower their standards, as so often happens. Therearc occasions when we are prepared to compromise and overlook “ minor” details provided the play satisfies the main requirements.

p Thus I think we arc justified in helping the author to improve on the artistic qualities of a play with all the means of which the theatredisposes, provided the play in question satisfies the essential requirement of fidelity to life. But if we violate truth and go against the dictates of our own conscience, putting on a play in which nothing but the subject appeals to us, then we arc doing both ourselves and the author a disservice and hampering our general advance.

p Saltykov-Shchcdrin wisely remarked that in order to make it clear to all how bad a play is one should stage it.

p We do this all too frequently. Saltykov-Shchedrin intended his remark as a satirical paradox, whereas we often set out to justify what is quite unjustifiable and thereby do a great deal of damage to the development of Soviet dramaturgy.

p I think our professional theatre, directors and actors alike, should wage an unrcmmitting struggle against topicality in the worst meaning of the word, when it is the sole excuse for the appearance of a bad play. It gave rise to the phenomenon of the so-called “local play”. If a play is a real work of art it belongs to all, and nobody is interested in the author’s place of residence. If it is “local” in the sense that its artistic qualities arc such as to make it of no interest to anybody but it should be put on at a particular theatre simply because the author lives locally, then it is a most pernicious phenomenon.

p It seems to me that there should be a special way of testing local plays. Thus if a play were written in Smolensk, it would be worth sending it to Voronezh, and only if it were a success there have it staged at a local Smolensk theatre. In this way we could ensure that theatres did not have local plays foisted upon them and were less tempted to compromise.

p I don’t mean that new plays should only make their appearance in Moscow and Leningrad, but merely that it is wrong for authors to be given preference in their home town.

p Naturally, the more writers there arc in various towns the better. But are writers always guided by artistic aims in setting out to write a play? I don’t know about other theatres, but we are literally swamped with new material and just don’t know where to put it all. Never 58 before has there been such a flood of material, such a quantitative boom in dramaturgy. Everybody’s writing, and though there are some honest, if not necessarily very skilful efforts, the majority of plays are completely uninspired and suggest that too many people are looking upon writing for the theatre as a way of making easy money rather than an art. And this is a very serious situation.

p It is not enough to point out that if dramaturgy is failing to advance, then the theatre as a whole is also falling behind. We directors must make high demands, and this is no time for us to sit back with our arms folded. We too have our shortcomings which we must strive to overcome, or when good plays make their appearance we shall not be ready to stage them properly.

p The theatre can, and indeed is duty bound to, promote the appearance of good plays. It can and must see to it that it has creativeprogrammes developed in collaboration with the playwrights. But how can we speak of theatres having their own particular line when the majority of theatres have absolutely identical taste as regards plays? We can note a most gratifying tendency in Leningrad: the city’s threeleading theatres are gradually abandoning their old haggling over plays.

p Whereas they used to fight like cats and dogs over plays, practically snatching them out of each other’s hands, today they are gradually coming to accept demarcation lines, choosing their own “province” and keeping to it. The Comedy Theatre no longer snatches up the plays the Pushkin Theatre likes, and keeps away from the plays that arceminently suitable for the Gorky Theatre. A theatre’s repertoire is an essential element of its creative physiognomy. It is not a question of which theatre is right-that only time will show-but it is extremely important that there should be fixed limits and that the repertoire should correspond to the theatre’s general creative physiognomy.

p It is most important that our creative styles should be more and more varied, while remaining within the bounds of socialist realism. Every theatre should have its own artistic taste, for only then can they really deserve being called artistic organisations.

p Even when a play has been chosen, as satisfying all the essential requirements, there remains a great deal to be done to ensure that the production is a success. A modern play can be staged in a modern way, but it can also be staged in an old-fashioned way that is of no use to anybody. What exactly constitutes a modern production? How does a modern play dictate a modern production?

p In recent years we have seen many new, essentially modern plays. The characters seem familiar to us, people we meet in our daily lives. 59 Yet at the same time not so familiar, in the sense that we now see and learn a great deal about them that we had never suspected. The author introduces us to their inner world, showing us their nobility and moral fibre. We get to know our contemporaries, and perceive the wisdom and greatness of a social order that produces men cast in a very special mould. They arc all very different, each with his own special “kink”, his own peculiar nature, his own destiny. It might seem that the young school leaver Andrei Averin in Rozov’s Good Luck, and Platonov in Stein’s Ocean have precious little in common: yet they are both members of the same great Soviet family.

p The plays of Rozov and Stein, Pogodin and Arbuzov are written in a very different manner. Rozov’s plays seem to be traditional in form. Stein uses techniques straight from the cinema such as “the voice outside the picture”, having his heroes utter their thoughts aloud and playing around with the time sequence, using flash-backs and so on. Yet Rozov’s plays are in fact modern in form, by virtue of their very special composition and pregnant dialogue, compressing the maximum of meaning into the minimum of words.

p Soviet dramatists all have a lot in common: they all stand on the same ideological platform, professing the method of socialist realism.

p They are all equally averse to bombast and stilted mumbling. However, our job is to see not only what they have in common but also how they differ, not only the general but the individual too.

p Rozov’s Unequal Struggle and Arbuzov’s Tanya are both plays about love, about love as a moral force and its power to transform people. But the two plays seem to be written in different languages and require totally different solutions. The ground separating Vsevolod Vishnevsky from Trenev and Lavrenev is even vaster. The three plays The Optimistic Tragedy, Litbov Yarovaya and Break-Up are all about the Civil War, yet what a difference between the passionate didacticism of Vishnevsky, the lyrical romantic style of Lavrenev and the psychological depth of Trcncv! Both Shkvarkin and Mayakovsky wrote about the NEP period, but there is no comparing grotesque satire in Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug or the Bathhouse and the gentle irony and lyrical vaudeville style of Shkvarkin’s Last Judgement or Somebody Else’s Child.

p How can they possibly be staged in the same way?

p We arc wont to measure one author against another and grumble that Shtok is no Shvarts, and Shatrov is no Pogodin. But surely it should not be a matter for regret but rather for thankfulness that Shtok has his own special way of linking fairy-tales with the present day.

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p It is absurd to consider the intense, emotional language of Vishnevsky a shortcoming and wish he would simplify it a bit, take it down a tone or so. Just as it would be ridiculous to ask him not to have the Commissar killed at the end of the play, or to ask Arbuzov to show a moving Underground train in Long Road, or remove the baby crow from Tanya, although it would make no difference to the meaning of the play. History of a Love was just what one would expect from Simonov, yet not at all what one would expect from Dovzhenko. It is perfectly ridiculous to try and fit two artists into the same mould, having to cut off one’s head and the other’s leg in order to do so.

p Indeed, the one author may write very dissimilar works. Arbuzov has a Choir in the list of dramatic personae in both Town at Dawn and Irkutsk Story, but the plays are so very different in structure that the position and function of the Choir is bound to be vastly different in the two cases. Rozov adopts a very different style in such plays as Good Luck and In Search of Happiness for all the similarities between them.

p Much in Stein’s Ocean points to the need for monumental epic sweep in presenting the stormy sea, ships, the fountains in the gardens of the Peterhof Palace and so on. We read it as a deep psychological drama, a duel of morals. Other theatres may well see the play in a totally different light. Every play is a lock, and each director fits his own key to it. There are as many keys as there are directors. Finding the key is a task requiring great skill and filigrain precision, for great care must be taken not to break the lock, batter the door down, or make a hole in the roof, but simply to open up the play by constant search for the answer, for the magic “open sesame” which will make the door fly open of its own accord revealing the author’s treasure chamber.

p Many authors do not know themselves how the door to their secret treasure-chamber opens. But then it is not really their job to know. Their job is to collect a great store of human characters, thoughts, feelings, events and actions. Our job is to find the key to it and pass it all on to the actors.

p In my opinion it is best to refrain from putting on a play if you haven’t found the key.

p Indeed the ability to limit one’s imagination and harness it, to strictly refrain from everything that is possible but not essential, and hence only a “near fit” is the prime virtue and duty of the director.

p Unfortunately we tend to fall in love with our own conclusions, delight in our own inventive powers and offer the public a stew prepared from our own rabbit. We forget that the author should be 61 allowed pride of place, that it is he with his sharp eyes and ears that spends hours if not years as a pathfinder and researcher discovering and exploring the new with the aid of the faintest of clues, laying the path for us to follow.

p It is the playwright who gives the play its form and content while our job is to search out, hear, see and sense the authors individual pitch, the special, unique system of the play and translate it all into scenic terms. It goes without saying that the director, like the author, must know the life, the people and the events, presented in the play.

p Like the author, he will thoroughly disapprove of some of the characters. Like the author, he must be in love or enraged, bold or mocking. Nothing at all will ever come of a production if the author and the director have different standpoints, if they have quite different attitudes to life and art. The director is at liberty to disagree with the author over minor details, secondary episodes, linguistic inaccuracies or even the odd scene. He has every right to argue with the author if the latter, from inexperience or carelessness, has violated his own logic, contradicted himself, and been inconsistent, lacking in firmness in the views he expresses, or has failed to make his ideas sufficiently convincing. But he may do this only as long as he does so from the author’s standpoint, or rather from his own, coinciding with that of the author.

p Fidelity to the author does not mean a pedantic fidelity to the letter. The director has the right, and indeed the duty, to help the author express what he wrote and the aim he was pursuing in writing the play in the best way possible. If the director has a thorough grasp of the play and is in sympathy with the ideas it expresses, and the author is free from excessive petty pride, then the play can be freed of all that is superfluous, and be tightened to achieve the maximum clarity and conciseness.

p The director’s dependence on the author must not be slavish obeisance. Their relationship must not be that of teacher and pupil, commander and subordinate. Each of them is perfectly independent in his own sphere. But the play can exist without being performed, while there can be no performance without the play. That is why we consider the playwright the most important person in the theatre-but a person, not a god. And respect and gratitude, and even open enthusiasm should not take the form of idol worship. The fact that the playwright is accorded pride of place does not necessarily mean that playwright A is automatically superior to director X. There are cases where the director understands the play better than the author. There arc also cases where the director finds it necessary to disagree with a play- 62 wright he is fond of, to argue with him and demand changes, cuts and additions. We must not forget this, for there are those actors, directors and playwrights who regard the thesis of the primacy of the playwright as an unlimited indulgence granted to authors, placing them above reproach.

But the key to every production is always to be found in the play itself. Every author for every play finds a particular system of conventions, the “rules of play”. If the director does not like them, then he should not stage the play. But if he likes the play, then he should take the trouble to find the rules the author provides and follow them. Indeed, it is finding the “rules of play” for each given work that constitutes the director’s main task.