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p The chief problem of art is the matter
of being in step with time. Naturally, it is too great a problem for one man to handle, and the best article or the best work is only a drop in the ocean.

p The modern theatre is a combination of a modern play, modern production, modern acting, and a modern audience; a modern idea expressed in modern form. The modern theatre is a theatre which reflects life most fully and profoundly.

p We call contemporaries all those living at the same time. But a person’s youth or age is not determined by registration data. There arcmany people still guided in their life and work by a long-since outmoded code of behaviour. They may be officially registered as our contemporaries, but in actual fact they belong to a bygone age.

p Not every living writer, actor or spectator is a contemporary writer, actor or spectator. A play set in the past may well be contemporary, while a play set in the present is not necessarily so. A classic can be staged in a contemporary manner, a modern play in an old-fashioned, out-of-clate manner.

p In every single production I face the same challengc-the problem of making it contemporary. Yesterday’s solution rarely satisfies me today. Every new production presents new problems, forcing me to ruthlessly 74 reject everything familiar. Every production teaches me something new. One’s idea of what is modern is modified and enriched every time one reads a new contemporary novel, sees a fine new film, observes; a truly modern architectural ensemble.

p Our ideas of contemporary man were greatly enriched by the first space flights. Life in all its manifestations, in its swift progress, produces new thoughts and new feelings daily, hourly.

p The contemporary theatre is a theatre in eternal movement, a theatre of search and experiment. It is an extremely complex task to reveal the laws of progress and give an accurate definition of what is contemporary.

p The theatre is by its very nature contemporary, and the latter concept involves a great deal. There is the thirst for truth, the protest against falsehood, the urge to see life in all its wealth and genuine beauty and grasp the wisdom of the great achievements of our day and age. The social and the aesthetic are fused into one; questions of skill have become one with questions of allegiance. Only in this way can we present aesthetic problems without sliding into aestheticism, ideologically without dogmatism.

p The problems of contemporary theatre arc of serious concern to everyonc-theatre veterans, students at drama school, critics and public alike. Young and old, all want to feel the pulse of the times, find the words, melody and rhythm of art which, like a good song, will help the Soviet people along their hard road to communism.

p Yet the concept of what is contemporary in art, so often bandied around in polemics, has all sorts of interpretations, while even those who are in agreement as to what it means in theory often adopt a fundamentally different approach in putting it into practice.

p We are right in saying that art docs not keep pace with life, with the achievements of science, technology and industry, with the various processes, major and minor, that are in progress. But we are wont to draw primitive conclusions: the largest power station in the world has just been completed-Where is a play about it^?; a world-shaking scientific discovery has been made-Why hasn’t it been reflected in the theatre?

p This is of course an oversimplified, facile interpretation of contemporaneity. The words “art must keep pace with time” mean something far more involved.

p Indeed it is quite impossible to actually apply such an interpretation in practice. Suppose a power station has been built, someone has immediately written a play about it, and a theatre has put it on without delay. Even so, enough time will have passed for another power station even bigger than the first to have been commissioned, and life will again be one step ahead of the theatre.

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p When an artist hurriedly slaps a real slice of life onto a canvas or the stage without allowing it to percolate through his imagination and feelings art lacks the power to impress itself on people’s minds and move them, and their thoughts and feelings remain totally unaffected.

p The desire to be up-to-date has often moved us to mechanically transpose facts from life to the canvas, the film reel or the boards. Being in a hurry to be the first to tell of some significant or interesting event, we have made a careful copy of it, imagining that we are giving a true reflection of life, without allowing ourselves time to digest it properly and form an attitude towards it.

p We still have numerous attempts today on stage and screen to present events and heroes of purely local importance. Even where every effort has been made to present the events strictly according to eyewitness reports or a person the way his relatives have insisted, we can hardly call the result art and the public gets no more satisfaction from it than from a conscientious reportage. Talent requires conscientiousness, but conscientiousness alone does not equal talent, and reporting facts does not equal art.

p Nevertheless, there are many people in all the arts who suppose that the one and only real distinguishing feature of socialist realism is conscientious portrayal of life, and for whom verisimilitude is the sole criterion of contemporaneity.

p Many people today are able to show life as it is, for it is really quite simple. Some consider this to be the supreme objective of art, and theirs is indeed a shabby role. A naturalistic, photographic copy of life, a pale reflection of the truth require neither talent nor inspiration. Those who try to lead art along this road are either timeservers or cowards, afraid to have a point of view of their own.

p “Excuse me, but arc you suggesting the theatre ought not to play an instructive role?” some may rejoin at this point. Not at all. Art most definitely has an important instructive role to play; every work of art •shows people something new, makes them realise something for the first time. But it would be wrong to take what is an essential element •of art and make it the sole objective.

p The artist’s aim is to express man’s nature, his inner world. The objective aim of art is to create portraits typifying people, society, an age.

p It would be wrong to confuse, as we so often do, what is of the day and age with what is of the moment, contemporaneity with actuality. It is the job of newspapers, magazines, radio and television to provide accurate coverage of current events. The theatre’s job is to reveal the fundamental social processes going and indicate the trends of developJnent. That is what being contemporary means. But so wide in scope is 76 our life that we tend to fail to keep pace with events and only scratch the surface of things without getting down to essentials.

p The aim of art is not to transfer events from life straight into a work of art. A play which does this will never be more than a schematic presentation of factual material.

p A space flight presented simply as a spaceship with a man insidehandling the controls will be an impressive display of stage-properties, nothing more.

p A really modern play is one that shows people’s characters transformed by events, ideas which have only made their appearance today, in the nineteen sixties, not one that merely presents a certain actual event. Tt would be extremely tedious for an audience to find itself treated in the theatre to the very same things they have read in the morning paper or heard over the wireless.

p Marxist-Leninist aesthetics have always been strongly opposed to such an oversimplified, vulgarised concept of art. To transform the artistic image into illustration of events is merely to destroy it.

p Art is concerned with man’s psychology and outlook, his new qualities and traits. The object of realist art has always been the new features people have acquired as a result of some event.

p Today these new features have appeared; they have gradually, inconspicuously matured and actually exist in Soviet Man. We do not always notice this at home, but if we happen to be abroad we arcsharply aware of the very special outlook, psychology and nature of the people who have been educated a? a result of the fifty-year struggle for the New Man. Of course, even today when we have reached the stage of building communism we find hurdles to be overcome and not every individual is yet ready for the society we are building.

p It is this which should determine our present objectives in art, not the post factum representation of concrete events, although such themes may well appear in plays, only in a different light. To reach the heights of art, penetrate into the artistic cosmos, so to speak, is not just a question of writing a play about . . . let’s say a spaceman. It involves penetrating the secret chambers of human thoughts and feelings, which will show us how the characters of the men who conquered space were shaped, how they lived side by side with us, how such heroism, at oncemagnificent and somehow ordinary arose, how all this came about humanly and psychologically, the social and ethical processes that produced among us such a charming, remarkable young fellow, at oncesimple and complicated, with many qualities we had hardly suspected, as Yuri Gagarin, and then a whole group of Soviet cosmonauts. Arc we able to recognise these people for what they arc at the time when they are in the process of accomplishing their feat? Do we see them when 77 the foundations are being laid for their achievement? This, after all, is the aim of art, including the most human of the arts, the theatre.

p One theatre expert declared that he was only interested in the fact of Gagarin’s flight, not in what went on inside the cosmonaut, what he thought, felt and experienced. I must say that I myself am not only interested in his historic flight, which excites me as a citizen of my country, whose people accomplished an unparalleled feat for the first time in human history, but as a director, as an artist, I am fascinated by what this man felt and experienced the night before. Was he afraid? Almost certainly. It must indeed be frightening to think of being the first man to enter space. The objective of art is to find the psychological key, to understand what made him willing to undertake the task, what enabled him to carry it out so simply and then appear before his people so simply, so that we were impressed by his great humanity. But only too often we arc offered a photographic copy of a phenomenon instead of a penetrating analysis.

p As regards the social side of our profession, it is extremely important that we be men of our times, with a perfect understanding of what makes our fellow-men tick, in order to achieve a correct attitude to the contingencies of a play. One must constantly bear in mind the temperature of the auditorium and have a clear sense of the latter’s mood. That for a start.

p What then is modern stage direction? Have the methods employed by our best directors of the past-Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko and others-become out-of-date? We must attempt to present truthfully the man of the past and the man of the present. Obviously Soviet people today are guided in their lives by different feelings and thoughts than people in the nineteenth century, but docs this mean that the methods we use must also be different?

p Obviously if we view the director in the same way as a photographer, and the means of stage direction as a camera, we are ignoring the whole question of modern stage production. A camera simply takes a straightforward copy of whatever lies before the object glass.

p The concept of modern stage direction is very involved and somewhat confused.

p I am firmly convinced that one cannot possibly become a really modern director unless one is familiar with the whole classical theatrical heritage, national and foreign. It is necessary to make a careful study of the history of theatres like the Maly, the Art and the Vakhtangov, and have a good knowledge of the work of Meyerhold. It is essential to be well-versed in what was created and is being created by such Soviet directors as Diky, Popov, Okhlopkov, Zavadsky and Simonov.

p The term “contemporary” covers a great deal. In a way, Pushkin 78 is our contemporary. Mayakovsky, although dead for over thirty years, is very much our contemporary. Being contemporary in art means having a sharp, precise and active awareness of reality, and the ability to express it via artistic means that influence the minds, will and feelings of the public.

p All our classics were once contemporary since they all, as far as their talent, knowledge of life and Weltanschauung permitted them, captured and expressed their times with the most effective, expressive means. Is it then enough for us to follow the classical traditions? Is there an essential difference between the artists of past and present as regards the way they saw and expressed life? Of course there is.

p The enemies of the new in the theatre are archaic acting and pseudomodern direction. Actor-innovators are rare, but pseudo-modern production is rather frequent.

p The tender green shoots of the new are there all right in production, but a constant battle is waged for the new in every new production, at every rehearsal. The struggle is a fierce one, with real casualties. Sometimes a theatre loses an engagement, sometimes it wins. There is still a great deal we do not know, but we want to know. We still have a great deal to learn, but we are willing to learn.

p May the struggle for the new be waged in every theatre, so that everyone can make his contribution to the theatre of the future. The search is hard enough but it is even harder to hold on to what has been found. It is not so simple to learn from one’s own mistakes and others’ triumphs.

p Recognising the new means rejecting a great deal of what one has accomplished, and that, too, is difficult.

p The struggle for the new should be waged honourably, honestly, and sincerely, with wholehearted commitment of all one’s resources, even if the scales often seem weighed against one. without ever losing sight of the main aim, which is to find means of expression worthy of the Soviet theatre of the future.

p A failing of many modern productions is that the directors tend to take an illustrative approach, seeking to present a work in breadth rather than in depth, concentrating on the superficial environment rather than probing the conflict.

p In staging Stein’s Ocean we tried to build up a great complex of external means that would help create an atmosphere of inner tension, in which the audience would see, as if through a magnifying glass, the most subtle nuances of the actor’s psychological state.

p Hence our decision to make use of such a convention as the stagewithin a stage in order to localise the action and reduce the set details to a minimum.

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p It is axiomatic these days to say that laconicism and convention are the tokens of modernity. In themselves these devices are not the expression of a “modern” style, unless their use is fully justified in each instance in which they are employed. In that particular production J feel they were in fact the best way of expressing the plot and helped slow down the psychological process and enabled attention to be directed towards the inner process, and not only the external events.

p Quite often, instead of striving for the introduction of the new forms that best correspond to the new content, we tend to search for new formal theatrical devices outside this content, and elements that are in vogue, attempts to find external features predominate over deep probing of the essence of phenomena in our concept of contemporaneity.

p In New York I saw what at first sight appeared extremely modern: bright advertisements, masses of people, palatial theatres and cinemas, half empty despite the fact that they show fashionable plays and the latest film hits. What we saw conformed with our ideas of America, it was modern enough in form: but we saw something essentially modern not here but in a small theatre that was quite inconspicuous among the theatres of Broadway. Here I saw The Miracle-Worker, a play about a deaf-and-dumb girl who pronounces her first intelligible syllable at the very end of the play. Thus, after all the gleam and glitter of Broadway with its flashing advertisements we finally found ourselves in the laboratory of the human spirit, captivated for three hours by the exchanges between a little girl and her teacher. The great humane idea of the awakening of the human in an almost savage creature was presented with remarkable skill. The little girl and the young actress Anne Bancroft gave a superb performance, in which there was nothing modern as we arc so often given to understand the word. The play was deeply moving because it was human, because it was genuine.

p Like any other artistic category, real modern art is something very concrete. But in our choice of form it often happens that “fashionable” elements predominate.

p I think the trouble with many young directors at present is exaggerated rationality and amorphous means of expression, a tendency to fetishise devices, taken out of context, quite irrespective of the actual content of the play.

p And so we are brought to the question of innovation.

p The contemporary and the innovatory always go hand in hand. If a Soviet citizen is concerned with a noble social ideal that is of vital concern to the whole people, and if he works honestly, to further the accomplishment of this ideal, he is our contemporary. If a man is able to express the process of building the new society in visual terms, he is an artist. If he is a conscientious citizen of his country and a talented 80 and honest artist, his works will be innovatory. If we are genuinely emotionally involved in the social idea that moves us to produce a work and we try to present it via a system of artistic images, then there is no need to be concerned with innovation. One cannot set oneself the express aim of being an innovator. That would hardly be modest. As for what it means to be an innovator, I think only history can be the judge.

p If an artist does not know life, does not understand its laws or hear and perceive what is new, but is determined to be an innovator at all costs, he will never go beyond juggling with “fashionable” devices and petty actualities. A slavish adherence to fashion means copying what other people have thought of. A determination to do what nobody else has ever done, declaring everything to be new that one has not seen before, is merely pseudo-innovation and pseudo-modernity.

p Paradoxical though it may seem, pseudo-innovation is very close to archaism. This enemy of modernity, the two-in-one adversary of the new, has a pretty firm hold on most of us. Now and then it makes us go out of our way to be startlingly original, for fear of appearing oldfashioned. Now and then it causes us to be drawn to the old, steady, well-tested forms. In one case it is a question of not having the courage to get out of the proverbial rut, in the other it is a question of not having the courage to refer to an old truth.

p I am quite sure the painter Serov did not consider himself an innovator. It was certainly not his aim. He was merely tremendously sincere and unaffected, and posterity sees him as an innovator.

p One cannot deliberately become an innovator. One cannot set out with the express intention of directing a production that will be hailed as an innovation, decide “I am going to astound the world”, “I am going to do something that has never been done before”, “I’m going to think of something totally new”. For this approach leads straight to the most pathetic results, which we all condemn outright whenever we come across it.

p So it is not this that we arc after when we speak of innovation. Some directors maintain that modern stage direction involves abandoning the truth, letting realism, everyday life, go by the board. For them a modern production means having the actors leave the stage for the auditorium, having an empty stage, no curtain and so on.

p In an attempt to combat the monotonous repetition of old devices and properties they insist on eliminating walls, ceilings, windows and doors altogether, and dispensing entirely with natural behaviour and natural sets.

p Once again, this has nothing to do with a modern production, but is merely a pursuit of external effects, novelty for the sake of novelty.

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p Everything is possible on the stage. Sometimes a play ought to be staged with nothing but a backdrop, but sometimes it requires a box set, with ceiling, doors and windows. Some plays are better if we dispense with a curtain, but this by no means applies to all plays. In some cases it is right to insist on a maximum of authentic detail, in others this would ruin everything. There can be no general rule for all plays.

p To have a castle where every authentic detail has been taken into account for Hamlet would be as out of place and false as it would be to stage Ostrovsky’s A Profitable Job with austere backdrops and a constructivist raised stage. For the simple reason that Shakespeare was not concerned with such everyday details, whereas Ostrovsky was and wove them into the essential fabric of his plays. Chekhov’s plays require all sorts of sound effects, the crack of a taut wire breaking, the creaking of a gate, the sound of axe strokes as the cherry orchard is chopped down, and so on and so forth. In Goldoni’s comedies, on the other hand, sounds from the street or the nearby courtyard will be quite out of place, and will only distract from the action in progress.

p The Bohemian forest in Schiller’s The Robbers cannot possibly have the same trees as the forest in Ostrovsky’s The Forest, although there may be every reason to suppose that the same kinds of tree grew in the two. The point is that in Schiller’s romantic play we have bold outlaws living in the depths of the forest, while in Ostrovsky’s comedy it is greedy merchants, coquettish old ladies and hangers-on. Brave people run into Schiller’s forest and out of Ostrovsky’s. One forest is the scene of passionate drama, the other is redolent with deadly nightshade and decay.

p Every play must be given the special treatment that best suits it, and this applies to the mise-en-scene, music where applicable, and especially the acting. Prior to the Revolution many theatres had to make do with the same limited collection of sets all the time-a forest, mountains, a rich room, a poor room, a medieval hall-and use them for all kinds of productions, for plays of every age and land.

p But while it is an easy matter to demonstrate how false the most realistic box set will appear if it is mechanically transferred from play to play, it is far more difficult to show that actors should act different roles differently.

p Actors, after all, are restricted to a certain extent by having to use their own voice, their own body and their own feelings: there is a definite limit to the variations that can be achieved.

p Plainly it is not a matter of assuming a special voice for vaudeville or somehow changing one’s appearance for tragedy. External transformations must depend mainly not on the playwright or style in question, but on the actual part being played. Thus, one cannot adopt 82 the same movements for an old man as for a youth, and a Frenchman does not talk like a Russian or a Ukrainian. The art of acting involves the ability to assume the aspect and manner of people of different natures, professions and nationalities. This is an essential aspect of acting, but not the be-all and end-all.

p Comedy and tragedy must be played differently. Gorky and Shakespeare, Pogodin and Chekhov require a very different approach.

p In attempting to present the playwright’s work the director is bound to intrude with his own personality. When the painter Vrubel set out to depict Lermontov’s Demon, he was attempting to present the idea and spirit of the original. However, he did not “dissolve” in the process, but revealed himself to the maximum as a great artist, for the artist’s personality leaves its mark on any work he produces, and thereis no getting away from oneself.

p We must decide which danger threatens most today-a slavishly •literal interpretation of the work or the tendency to ignore the author’s intentions and treat a work we think fit, reading in things that are just not there.

p I am inclined to think that the latter is the more dangerous. And it is those directors who take this for innovation that I am addressing.

p The director’s intention must be organically limited and subordinated to the author’s purpose. He can forget about originality, for if he has it it will show itself without prompting. But if we allow directors to indulge in an orgy of self-expression, the results will be most regrettable.

p Various directors have their own personal interpretation of artistic truth. Okhlopkov and Ravenskikh tend towards a poetic, romantic theatre, their best productions revealing a marked inclination for monumentality and a clearly-stated message. Efros and Ycfremov avoid outward effects, preferring to concentrate on human psychology. Their heroes look and behave as very ordinary men and women. Yet their productions achieve a very strong emotional impact, and great civic ardour. The wealth of plastic effects in Ravenskikh’s productions makes them quite the opposite from the severe, laconic style of Efros. You could never call Okhlopkov or Ravenskikh retrograde or routine directors. They are always willing to experiment. The same applies to Efros, Yefremov and Lvov-Anokhin.

p Many theatres are keen to keep up with the times and make for a more vital theatre. Which is the best path for them to take? Who is more modern-Ravenskikh or Yefremov? Efros, Yefremov and LvovAnokhin are closer to me personally. While I may beg to differ over details I am with them on essentials. But this of course does not mean that I refuse to recognise Okhlopkov. I am a great admirer of his work.

p Naturally, in any argument over what is best, everybody tries to win 83 as many people over to his own point of view as he can. But it would be pretty dreadful if all our directors suddenly came to resemble Okhlopkov or Lvov-Anokhin, Ravenskikh or Lyubimov. Unification and levelling are as intollerablc in stage direction as in any other art. Yet there are some critics who, while rightly attacking attempts to create a universal “modern style” arc actually, by their arguments, pointing the road to monotonous uniformity. They are even hostile to such terms as laconicism and austere simplicity. They confuse discreet feelings with lack of feeling, unwilling to realise that keeping things in the background does not imply burying them completely, and subtlety is not necessarily ambiguity, thereby making contrasts where no contrast exists.

p The social theme was expressed quite differently in Ravenskikh’s production of Virgin Soil Upturned from the way it was expressed in our Gorky Theatre production. It is not for me to judge which of the two moves audiences the more. We saw Nagulnov as an idealist, Ravenskikh saw him as a fanatic. For us Virgin Soil Upturned was a poem about a sea change in people’s attitude to work, a major turning point in the peasant’s outlook and mentality, about the need for humanity towards one’s fellows and exacting demands on oneself. The most important thing in the novel for Ravenskikh was the irreconcilable conflict between the heroes. Our main artistic instrument was scrupulous verisimilitude expressed in a laconic, conventional style. Ravenskikh preferred to choose allegory and the poster. This surely docs not mean that the Gorky Theatre production was necessarily in any way less socially committed than the Pushkin Theatre production.

p It is not the lampshade or the factory chimney that determines a playwright or director’s degree of social commitment. Both a “ vociferous” and a “quiet” play can educate morally, politically and aesthetically. Stirring themes and psychology must both be present in any production, whether it is The Optimistic Tragedy or My Elder Sister, The Rout or On the Wedding Day. It would be wrong to impoverish our art simply on the grounds that some directors prove to be incapable of achieving this synthesis. We cannot draw up a scheme for use in creative work and on the rostrum.

p In this connection it is worth remembering the discussion between Maxim Gorky and Lenin in the Hall of Columns at Trade Union House in 1919. Gorky said: “That the new theatre public is no worse than the old theatregoers, that it is more attentive, is indisputable. But what does it need? I say it only needs heroics. But Vladimir Ilyich maintains that it needs poetry too, that it needs Chekhov and truth to everyday life.”

p The strict order of military parades is fine and inimitable in its way. 84 But in art, having everyone in step, even if the finest artists arc on the flanks, is disastrous.

p There never has been, and there never will be, an artist who expressed absolutely everything there is to express in a single work. Only if there is creative variety, freedom and a choice of themes and artistic forms, equal rights and mutual respect will the Soviet theatre be able to produce a collective portrait of the great age we live in.

p I hold that Soviet theatre should be a theatre of high social consciousness and the most subtle psychological penetration. The union of these two qualities which we should strive to cultivate in ourselves will enable us to create a theatre that meets the demands of contemporaneity.

p The deeper we learn to penetrate into the sphere of the human psyche, the more subtle the means we use to this end and the more brightly they are illuminated by the flame of civic ardour, the more influential, interesting and powerful our art will be. We must strive to make the theatre a laboratory of the life of the human spirit.

p Stanislavsky’s thesis that the processes of art are the processes of the life of the human spirit seems to me to be the most important and eternally-modern. The most valuable property of the theatre is the inner psychological processes that represent the mystery of art, its great power to influence people. Art should not “shout”. The actor’s educative power consists in the way he lives on the stage not in facing the audience and declaiming loudly.

p Our life in this country has the excitement of great achievements and deeds and Soviet artists must feel it. But while understanding the order of things and the significance of all these achievements it is by no means essential that we express the excitement of the age with excited words, with excited declamation on the stage. Especially since these great events come about very simply in life, without sound and fury, in a calm, determined, businesslike manner.

p I long for a large-scale, epic work, but I am for psychological art, “quiet” art. Quiet in the sense of the quiet that reigns in laboratories where people are absorbed in investigating the most complex natural, physical, chemical and other phenomena. In art too there must be this same concentration, this same keen attention so that we can perceive the interesting spheres for art, the spheres, into which the inner vision of the artist must penetrate.

Nor do I reject the most varied styles on the stage. A work may be heroic, pathetic, satirical, lyrical or anything else. It is not a matter of paring away all other genres until we are left with psychological plays but of seeing to it that works of every style penetrate the human psychology.