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p The Soviet theatre emerged before
Soviet dramaturgy. At first it took Russian and foreign classics relevant to contemporary life.

p In the far-off days of the civil war, Schiller, Lope de Vega, Gogol and Lermontov served the cause of the revolution, inspiring the people in their struggle against foreign intervention, the capitalist world and the forces of the old order.

p As the years went by the Soviet theatre gradually acquired its own dramatists. The stage became peopled by heroes returned from the war, steelworkers, peasants, engineers and scientists. The life of the people became the life of the theatre. But the old classics still continued to serve the revolution. Shakespeare and Ostrovsky, Beaumarchais and Gorky rendered a valuable service to the Party and the people in the task of uprooting the survivals of the past and educating the feelings of Soviet people.

p The Soviet theatre is now in its fifties, and Soviet drama now has its own historians and its own classics. It is quite a normal thing for Soviet plays to be staged in London and Tokyo, Helsinki and Vienna. Yet the classics, such great names as Shakespeare and Pushkin, Ostrovsky, Chekhov and Gorky have somehow imperceptibly slipped out of the Soviet theatre’s repertoire.

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p The news that Lawrence Olivier has had a great success appearing in Uncle Vanya or that there has just been yet another première of ^a Gorky play in Berlin or Sofia are taken as a matter of course. But the news that a Soviet theatre is staging Woe from Wit or The Storm is not far short of a sensation.

p This is not only sad, it is alarming. There is something very wrong if the classics are being ignored practically everywhere. There is no room for complacency. We must not just shrug our shoulders: we must find the reasons and try to combat them.

p The watchword of the Italian futurists: “Throw the classics overboard from the ship of today” has never been accepted by the Soviet theatre. The fact that we are searching for the modern theme, the modern conflict, and the modern character does not mean that we arc free to cast overboard the great heritage of the past. It is our duty to preserve it and enrich it. Even increase it-for many Soviet plays which now rank as classics are also appearing on the billboards very rarely.

p A classic play is not an old newspaper, a kerosene lamp or a musket, whose place is in the museum. The classics preserve their value for all time, and their gradual disappearance from the theatre threatens us with spiritual impoverishment.

p The whole trouble is that we have no open opponents of Shakespeare or Gorky. Everybody loves the classics and appreciates their value. Everybody wants to act and produce them. At least they say they do. There are no actors who would not be delighted to have the opportunity of playing Astrov or Vassa Zheleznova, or no directors who would not jump at the chance to produce The Seagull or Yegor Bulychov. The classics have no opponents within the theatre. Nor do they have any adversaries among the critics. Admittedly, no one is in a hurry to publish a critique of a production of the classics. Thus a new production of a Western classic might very well receive no write-up at all. In short, there is a tendency to save time, newsprint and mental energy on the classics, but no open attack on them. The fact is that the theatregoers are the ones who are opposed to the classics. They just don’t attend. And the theatre managements, who have to make their receipts cover their costs, have eliminated from their repertoires “bad box-office” authors.

p We are thus faced with a situation which is not only contradictory and confused, but downright humiliating for the Soviet theatre and Soviet audiences.

p One cannot accuse a country, where universal literacy prevails and a quarter of the whole population are studying, of lacking respect for the classics. This is convincingly disproved by the vast editions of 98 Tolstoi and Chekhov, Shakespeare and Gorky that come off the presses and are immediately snapped up.

p But one cannot avoid facts, whether one likes them or not. A shameful silence, a desire to ignore the problem as though it did not exist and attempts to hide the unpopularity of the classics with the successful production of modern plays aggravates the disease by driving it beneath the surface.

p We have frequently seen good actors in good theatres play Hamlet, Yegor Bulychov, Larissa Ogudalova, Arbenin and Mary Stuart, and yet the productions only ran for a short time. The theatres that do not put on the classics today did use to put them on after all. They spared neither efforts nor expense and were sincerely distressed when their efforts proved to have been in vain. There were further attempts to stage the classics but they gradually became less and less enthusiastic and less and less successful. Finally the theatres deemed it best to drop the classics altogether in the interests of the public and box-office takings. The easiest solution was adopted, which amounted to a capitulation, an admission that “Moscow and Leningrad audiences are more cultivated than ours in the provinces. And then of course they have fine actors like Ravenskikh and Ilyinsky”. (Although few towns are lucky enough to have a director like Efros or an actress like Borisova, this did not prevent Good Luck and Irkutsk Story from being extremely well received in the provinces, so that the excuse that provincial audiences are not as “appreciative” as those in the major cities sounds a bit lame in the light of the facts).

p No, it is not the audiences that are at fault. Nor is it a question of the classics being too much for modern actors and directors to cope with. The problem is not a new one. It used to be referred to as “the problem of critical adoption of the classical heritage”. This problem was solved. A passive academic presentation of pictures of the past gave way to an active approach, showing the theatrical classic as a concentrated reflection of the social contradictions of an age. There •were pitfalls in this “new reading” of the classics: all too often the social was vulgarised and reduced to the cheap sociological, and many fine works were made primitively schematic. But the old uncommitted, unbiased approach was gone for ever, and it would no longer have occurred to anybody to produce Dowerlexs Bride as the story of a provincial girl seduced by a provincial society beau, or The Living Corpse as the drama of a tormented alcoholic.

p We now saw the classic work as a social canvas, the classic hero as a representative of his age, and the theatre no longer dealt with the abstract “eternal” problems of love or jealousy, ambition or duty but treated every character as the bearer of a particular class morality.

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p We saw how the “kingdom of darkness” destroyed Katerina, how hypocritical bourgeois society destroyed Fedya Protasov and were delighted to see the theatre become more aware, how it had learned to think and to present the complex social problems of the theatrical classics.

p But time passed and Soviet audiences grew up while the theatre marked time, and made no headway at all.

p It is impossible to stage a classic or even understand it without revealing the social essence of the conflict, without profound knowledge of the age in question and the forces at work: that is the foundation of the work. It is impossible to produce a theatrical classic without a good knowledge of history, morals and manners: that is the foundation of the production-the foundation but not the whole edifice.

p We do not want the emotional side of the classics to be crushed under the weight of social analysis; we do not want the poetry and the imagery of the masterpieces of the past to be buried beneath a pile of social and period details.

p Times have changed, and we no longer want pure social analysis from the classics. We want the classics to reflect the past and thereby help us live today and build our future. And it is not enough to look on the classics simply as documents unmasking the world of landowners and merchants, as graphic illustrations of the impoverishment of the Russian peasantry, the degeneration of the nobility or the reactionary nature of tsarist autocracy.

p Today, when our schools have taught us scientifically and methodically the social nature of life, taught us to view history as the history of the class struggle, and given us a correct understanding of the historical process, there is no longer any need for us to demonstrate these facts in every play we put on. Knowledge of history is an essential requisite but not an end in itself. The historical process exists in the classics in the very system of artistic images, and the creative interpretation of the facts. The theatre is called upon not to illustrate history but to interpret and recreate it. This is what the contemporary public expects of the contemporary theatre.

p The basic reason why the classics have disappeared from the stage of a theatre is the theatre itself. And, paradoxical though it may seem, a theatre fails in putting on the classics because it puts them on as classics.

p The theatre is by its very nature contemporary. Every theatrical production ought to provide an answer to some question that is of vital interest to audiences today. Soviet audiences have collected numerous questions to which the modern dramatists have so far failed to provide an answer. Often a classical play can provide an answer, and even a better answer than a mediocre modern play.

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p But do we take this attitude to the classics? Are we always guided by the criterion of contemporaneity when we include a particular classic in our repertoire?

p Quite recently one of the managers of a leading theatre announced his intention “to revive the forgotten tradition of staging plays for the actors”. Doubtless he has found, and will continue to find, numerous followers.

p Only too often in our work we find ourselves proceeding from purely practical considerations, something like this: “I say, it’s a long time since we put on a classic. What could we do? How about Wolves and Sheep? Ivanova would be fine as Glafira, and we’ve got a Lynyaev. Sidorov hasn’t acted for some time now. It would be a good opportunity to give him something. Yes, let’s make it Wolves and Sheep. But what about Wild Money? Well, we could; but then it wouldn’t be so good with Lidia, and Sidorov would be left without a part again. No, Wolves and Sheep is definitely the answer.”

p I may be oversimplifying it a bit but this is roughly the sort of logic which often governs our choice of a classical play. Those who think along these lines fail to realise that they arc making quite sure that the play will be a flop before they’ve started, and that such an approach renders any constructive work quite impossible.

p Many people find it very tempting to match the repertoire with the personality of the actors and director. They feel it is a sure guarantee of success. Of course, there is a certain amount of logic in this. Thus a theatre may feel it is time they did a production of something by Dostoycvsky: why on earth should they do The Idiot if they have no one in the company who would be able to cope with the role of Nastasya Filippovna, when they have an actor perfectly suited to the role of Raskolnikov? Crime and Punishment is thus the obvious choice. Ostrovsky’s “turn” has come round. Once again they proceed from the inclinations of the company. There are always plenty of people only too eager to play Karandyshev or Katerina, Gurmyzhskaya or Glumov. And the whole question is immediately solved by the actor’s “status”, his popularity with the local public and his authority with the theatre management.

p Sometimes even less important considerations govern the choice of a play: the fact that the costumes are available, the director is prepared for it, a parallel production in the repertoire, the fact that it does not require a complicated mise-en-scene and so on.

p Theatres named after Ostrovsky regard it as their duty to perform his plays frequently, and the same applies to theatres named after Chekhov or other playwrights.

p Sometimes it is quite simply a matter of “What haven’t we done 101 Scene from Pompadours MESSIEURS ET MESDAMES POMPADOURS, a stage adaptation by Georgi Tovstonogov of themes from the works of SaltykovShchedrin. Leningrad State Academic Comedy Theatre, 1954 Scene from Pompadours Irina Zarubina as Nadczhda Petrovna and N. Trofimov as New Pompadour? Scene from Pompadours A. Benyaminov as Blancmange and Irina Zarubina as Nadezhda Pctrovna of Gorky’s yet? The False Coin’? Right! Let’s do it, then we’ll have done all Gorky!”

p The classics are put on for special occasions, centenaries and so on, for “last appearances” of actors retiring from the stage. Sometimes they are put on especially for a guest artist, who makes a particular play the condition for his accepting an invitation. “I’ll come on condition I can do Arbenin.” They want him badly, so they put on Masquerade, without stopping to consider for a moment what the play might have to offer the public today. In short, the classics are performed for the most various motives, which tend to be not even remotely connected with artistic considerations.

p I don’t deny, it would be pointless to put on a production of Hamlet if there were no one to play the title role, the Dowerless Bride without having a Larissa and so on. But this consideration, essential though it is, should not be allowed to become the determining factor.

p This sort of approach ensures that productions of the classics will be a flop from the outset. The best classic performed by the very best actors and actresses is a galvanised corpse, a dead weight, unless it raises problems that are of interest to us today, as having some relevance to our day and age.

p A play about the past, where the characters are dressed in clothes we have long since ceased to wear, live in houses such as we have long since ceased to build should nevertheless comprise thoughts and feelings that are relevant today.

p Classic plays all have their own different destinies. Some were highly acclaimed on the first night but within a few years had been condemned to oblivion. Some only became popular several years after their first performance. Even the greatest classics were not always wanted on the stage, even in days when the classics made up a considerable part of the repertoires, before being ousted by modern plays. Thus, during the civil war, Schiller was far more popular with the theatres than Shakespeare. This was only natural, for a play like Don Carlos could be made to sound an appeal for struggle against the foreign interventionists, while Hamlet’s doubts could hardly be made to serve the cause of the revolution.

p Today for some reason there is a tendency to lump all the classics together, as if it were all the same whether we stage Othello or King Lear, The Forest or A Profitable Job. Of course, the fact that Masquerade is so rarely staged does not mean that it is any worse as a play. But the matter of how it sounds today has to be decided by the theatre proposing to stage it. I personally would not be able to produce it today because I cannot see its relevance for the present, and only a person who can discover its relevance has the right to stage it.

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p To me Gorky’s Philistines is a highly contemporary play. That is why T produced it. So you see, it is not all the same what classic play you choose, even if they are all equally fine. This attitude must be the determining factor in the choice of classic both for actor and director. Otherwise it will be quite impossible to produce a real work of art. The director will invent something more or less original depending on his experience, imagination, skill and taste, but all his inventions will be somehow artificial and contrived (although it is by no means excluded that his production may have some very fine points from the purely professional and aesthetic point of view). If, on the other hand, the director has put his finger on certain points of the classic that are relevant to our lives today, even the most traditional device will be new, since its use will be dictated by artistic necessity.

p We often pay lip service to social and ideological commitment, while completely ignoring these categories in our practical day-to-day work. Yet our task is in fact to be continually guided by these criteria, to make them an essential part of all our activity since the intrinsic value of a production depends entirely on the social motives that a theatre company and its director were guided by in their choice of a particular play. A truth becomes weakened by repetition, becomes banal and less convincing. We are all the time repeating that the idea is the most important thing of all, but the trouble is we often fail to make it our inner need.

p Thus out of all the vast oeuvre of Ostrovsky, Soviet theatres periodically stage the same three or four plays, and most of these productions have extremely short runs. And the reason is the fortuitous choice of plays. Either it is The Storm, so popular with the theatres in the capital, or one of a few plays that are usually chosen out of such purely technical considerations as the small number of dramatis personae, the fact that they need no change of scenery, or can be conveniently combined with a modern play being rehearsed, which takes up most of the company, especially the young actors. It is not difficult to foretell the results.

p Yet Ostrovsky of all people is one of the classics whose plays are of high contemporary relevance, since they are plays of great ideas. But it is all a question of what plays should be chosen, for they can only be truly contemporary if the theatre can co-operate with the author to present on the stage its own social feelings and thoughts.

p I for one could not possibly produce a play like Wild Money today. Yet I enjoyed working on Even a Wise Man Stumbles tremendously. Why? Well, is the problem of the soul-destroying pursuit of wealth, a passion for gain making a spiritual cripple of a man, really of vital importance to us today? Of course there are people in our society who 103 are ruined by money, there are spendthrifts and corrupters of the young, but from the point of view of the moral criteria of our present-day society (without going into legal side of the matter) we can hardly say that this is a matter of top priority at the present time. Even if I am wrong, and it is, in any case it is not presented in Wild Money in an aspect which will evoke a real social response among the audience. This was a regular theme with the classics, a theme of which Balzac gave the classic interpretation. Ostrovsky is close to Balzac here, but there are many works in which it is treated in sharper terms.

p A production of this play may well come off all right, and even be a hit with audiences. Audiences will applaud its professionalism and the good acting of which there will undoubtedly be examples. But it will be the professional skill of the director and the cast which will account for the success of the production and not its social significance. Far be it from me to insist that this is bound to be the case. After all this is a very personal matter, and I may be wrong in my appraisal of the play in question. It is quite possible that another director might find a way of handling it that would make it relevant to contemporary life. But I could not, at the moment anyway.

p On the other hand I experienced real creative joy in working on Even a Wise Man Stumbles, for here Ostrovsky makes possible an extremely acute examination of the psychological springs of careerism together with all its attendant evils-treachery, cynicism, and a propensity for compromise.

p And I felt my finding this in Glumov was important today because we are constantly coming across such things in one form or another in our lives, and it is therefore a problem which cannot fail to arouse a response in audiences.

p When people say “Ostrovsky” I am immediately put on my guard, because it implies Ostrovsky in general, and there is no such thing as “Ostrovsky in general”, for the great dramatist was different in different concrete instances, in different plays. Ostrovsky is fine but which Ostrovsky?

p Here we must avoid abstract speculation, and adopt a very concrete approach. A theatre must first of all grasp the specific social content of a work, and only then set about finding the best form in which to present it.

p Alternatively, it must take a play which might appear to have no message for us today-like -Moliere’s Tartuffe-and give it a modern interpretation which brings out its tragic note, so that Moliere is brought to life for us and made relevant to our life, for his plays are open to numerous interpretations. If a director has not first found a real social key (but has simply said to himself, “Well, now I think 104 I’ll do Tartuffe. The Comedie Francaisc did it this-a-way, so I think I’ll do it that-a-way”) the production cannot possibly be a real success. The cast and the scenery may be excellent and the production may be rcaay in time, which may be more than anybody had hoped for, but the result will be a flop. Because they failed to lay the foundation and built the edifice on sand. It may not be a sensational flop, it might even pass almost unnoticed that it is in fact a flop. The production may pass muster, it might be “satisfactory” professionally, but that is the most disappointing thing that can happen for a director; there is no joy at all in having to one’s credit a mediocre, “run-of-the-mill” production.

p Indeed, if he tries to achieve a few innovations in the production the results will be even more deplorable, for they will simply appear pretentious under the circumstances. If there is no ideological and social petard in the production it is far better that everything should be as academic and modest as possible.

p The question of form is extremely important in producing a classic, but the question of whether the form is “modern” or “traditional” does not in fact determine the result. An accurate reproduction of the external features of the age in question does not make the production antiquated, a museum-piece, provided the emotional conflict, the underlying idea are modern.

p On the other hand, a modern interpretation does not necessarily imply dispensing with the external details or departing from historical authenticity, let alone reconsidering the play’s form. Revolving stages, voices “off”, an austere expressionist decor, in short the superficial externals of modern form do not necessarily inject new blood into an old play. However “fashionable” the production, the play will not be brought to life unless the audience is made to feel that its thoughts and feelings are modern through a complex system of associations. The attempt to hide the wrinkles of age with a heavy application of “ makeup” will only serve to highlight the wrinkles. The outward features of modern form, a demonstration of acting talent and inventive production techniques can not reanimate people who have long since departed from life.

p I repeat, a modern interpretation of a classic consists first and foremost in the ability to treat it as a modern work, forgetting that the author is a classic and that it shows us the past.

p I think we should strive to understand the contemporaneity of the classics in the way Jean Vilar and Maria Casares, understood it in the case of Victor Hugo’s Marie Tudor. This is a romanticist work, with all that that implies, yet Vilar showed that if treated in a new way Hugo can rank with the realist Shakespeare. The most important thing 105 in the work of both the director and leading lady was the fact that they perceived a tremendous emotional wealth in the work in pinpointing both the universal and feminine qualities of the heroine. And they presented it through a deeply penetrating analysis of a human drama, avoiding the slightest hint of melodrama and histrionics, discovering in a writer who is generally associated with the most exaggerated high-flown theatricality genuine psychological depth. Hugo, who seems to belong to the past, was shown as belonging very much to the present. We should appreciate the classical heritage not only for its instructive value, but also for its tremendous aesthetic power, for its moral influence on the minds and hearts of our contemporaries. This does not mean that we should view it as something abstract humanist, ignoring its historical, social and class content. On the contrary, the theatre should try to present as fully and deeply as possible the complex links between the classic and the life that engendered it, the objective and subjective truth of its time. But this must be the means and not the end, the means of revealing the connection between past and present. We must make the past serve the essential objectives of the present. There is no need to modernise the classics, decking them out in modern “gear”, for this is merely to vulgarise the aim.

p In this connection we would do well to examine certain attitudes to the classics that prevail in other countries. It has become very common to dress a modern problem in historical costume, so to speak. We see Greek kings, medieval warriors and the scholars of Hellas discussing problems which are currently being debated in the French and British parliaments. Modern dramatists use Joan of Arc and Antigone as mouthpieces for ideas that are the subject of polemics between the intellectuals of today. The subject matter of many of these plays is extraordinarily reminiscent of all the fuss going on over European integration or the road to power of Adolf Hitler, while the action is boldly transferred to our own day. There are very few playwrights in the West who do not separate the subject of a classical play from its characters, the characters from the language and the whole from historical truth.

p Presenting the historically concrete, they artificially extract the typical from the typical circumstances.

p Some of the more talented and progressive directors however do manage to place the classics in the service of the present. Zola’s Therese Raqiiin was made into a very fine French film set in the present; while the theme of Romeo and Juliet was successfully embodied in the modern American musical West Side Story. This approach to the classics is perfectly permissible and far from new. The great Pushkin did not scorn it and adopted it in writing his Stone Guest. But the 106 “projection” of the themes, composition and characters of the classics into our own times is not the only, and in my own opinion not the main, way of preserving the classics. The classics may serve to inspire new works, but they still have a lot to offer us in themselves.

p There are various attitudes to the classics in the West. For some the old themes merely serve to prove that “there is no new thing under the sun”. Following the pessimistic message of Ecclesiastcs they are blind to historical perspective and the ways of renewing the world, and their art is deprived of life-assertive power.

p Honest-minded artists in the West make the classics and classical forms serve the end of destroying the existing order, while reactionary artists use them to affirm the impossibility of changing human nature, to show how senseless it is to change the time-honoured social and human relations: for the latter everything is eternal and immutable. Our attitude to the classics is essentially different at grass-roots level from the theory and practice of the contemporary bourgeois theatre. We have our own special aims and are well aware that if the danger of drifting towards abstract humanism is Scylla, Charybdis is waiting there at the other side of the straits-restriction of the classics to the aim of presenting a concrete historical picture. Both these extremes are an expression of a passive, objectivist attitude to the great values of human culture.

p There is little to choose between primitive allegory and primitivesociological synopsis. There is little to choose between anger at evil “in general” and passive contemplation of concrete manifestations of evil.

p We must endeavour to find the most profound and subtle links between the classics and the present day. Nor should we ignore the slightest opportunity to attract the audience’s attention to analogies between past and present. Trigorin’s rhetorical question in The Seagull, “Why keep digging at one another?” is still applicable to our presentday literary squabbles, while Repetilov’s “We talk a lot, that’s all we do” in Griboyedov’s Woe jrom Wit should be associated with the bravado of our present-day “rebels”.

p History does not repeat itself. But human feelings, failings and virtues do. We still have our thriving Molchalins, for many the arrival of the Inspector is still a “most unpleasant piece of news”, and even Feklusha from The Storm has not entirely vanished. By forcing audiences to make comparisons, by inviting them to associate past and present, we reduce the time gap and bring the classics closer to our own day. But a thousand individual links are no substitute for an underlying spiritual link between the classic and the life of our own day and age.

p This link does not arise automatically. A calm objectivist presenta- 107 tion of the world of the past will not make the audience hate it and be glad that they live in the new society. A few years ago a naive and extremely expansive young man from the provinces visited the Tretyakov Art Gallery. He was profoundly stirred by Repin’s painting of Ivan the Terrible murdering his son. He then, and I quote his own words, “went straight to Shishkin’s ‘Forest’ and had a little rest”. I feel that all too often our productions of the classics are very like this forest, ideal for a little rest. Wouldn’t we do better to see that our audiences are profoundly stirred?

p A conscientious but cold academic presentation of pictures of the past, intellectual but not emotional parallels and associations, and making particular details of a classic “recognisable” do not by a long chalk make the work modern in the full sense of the word.

p The modernity of the classics and their relationship with the present is extremely complex and subtle. The impact of the classics on the audience cannot be tailored down to elementary preaching and trite moralising. It is not essential that the audience should leave the theatre able to put into words what they have learnt from Gorky or what conclusion they have drawn from a play by Ostrovsky. The theatre is not a legal advice bureau let alone an enquiry office. The theatreis not there to provide ready answers to questions that are worrying the audience, but to help the audience answer these questions for themselves. The theatre is called upon to teach people how to live, not how to act in a given set of circumstances.

p The above applies both to the classics and to modern works. The classics do not require a special approach or special methods and devices: like any modern play the classics arc historicist, like any play written today the classics require truth. The degree and quality of convention differ from play to play with the classics just as they do with modern works. The acting techniques, scene design and musical effects must be equally contemporary for the classics as for modern plays.

p It would be absurd to act Schiller the way it was acted at the beginning of the last century, no less absurd than refusing to use spotlights just because in Ostrovsky’s day the stage was lit by oil and gas lamps. Yet even today there are directors who seek to transmit Schiller’s romanticism by means of the pseudo-classical histrionics in vogue in the last century.

p If we continue the analogy, we arrive at the need to restore the stage machinery of the old theatre, and its architecture. But we shall never be able to restore the old audiences!

p As the audiences pass away, they take the expressive means they understand with them. We only need historical authenticity in architecture, costumes, and domestic details to the extent necessary to bring 108 out the truth of the conflict, the logic of the characters, and ensure that the emotions are genuine. It must never be an aim in itself or attract the audience’s attention. It is possible to find contemporary features in the Greek tunic, the farthingale, the bonnet or the colourful dress-coat without sinning against ethnographic truth. When working on Woe from Wit, we found that there was no less variety of coiffures in those days than there is now. One of them bore a remarkable resemblance to the recently fashionable “pony tail”, and it was on this that our choice finally settled.

p The classics must be acted like the contemporary playwrights, for only then do they acquire immortality. The best productions of the classics both in this country and abroad confirm this. And it may well be that a large number of the unsuccessful attempts at the classics these days are to be explained by the fact that we confuse traditions with cliches and are unable or unwilling to break their hold on us.

p Such a large volume of commentary, essential conditions and examples has grown up around the classics that we are often seeing them in someone else’s interpretation. It is often not Shakespeare we see on the stage but his commentator, not Ostrovsky himself but the traditional Maly Theatre interpretation of him. The playwright, and indeed also the director and the actor, are deprived of individuality, of their real personality. The Moscow Art Theatre brought us Chekhov, and we are very grateful to them for that. But today we should be staging Chekhov and not Stanislavsky’s interpretation of him, with all due respect to great names.

p Belinsky, Shchepkin, Dobrolyubov, Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov and Meyerhold all understood the time in which they lived very well, and they taught us not to engage in sterile repetition but to go forward.

p It is our duty to preserve and develop this great tradition of the Russian theatre and Russian criticism.

p The theatre creates traditions. Pedestrian repetition of the successful discoveries of others transforms these traditions into sterile cliches which are championed by shortsighted critics who cannot see beyond their own nose. They think they are upholding Ostrovsky and Chekhov, whereas in fact they are simply forcing their own commentaries upon us.

p Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Plekhanov, Vorovsky and Lunacharsky left us some brilliant models of literary and theatrical criticism. Their analysis of plays and productions has lost none of its validity today. But surely they do not limit the creative imagination of the present-day director or actor? It is not Dobrolyubov’s articles “The Kingdom of Darkness” and “Ray of Light in the Kingdom of Darkness” that produced the tradition of interpreting the plays of Ostrovsky or Plekhanov’s 109 articles that created the tradition of interpreting the plays of Ibsen. They have helped us, and continue to help us, to understand the essence of the plays and reveal to us their depth and beauty.

p Dobrolyubov’s view is not foisted upon us “from above”. We are impressed and convinced by the accuracy, logic, emotional power, order and harmony of his artistic credo.

p There are other views, less convincing and acceptable, which were declared to be the best, and to which we were more or less forced to subscribe. Yermilov’s studies of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky are by no means faultless, and give rise to serious objections. Slavish conformity to Yermilov’s works on Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, Nechkina’s works on Griboyedov or Byalik’s works on Gorky can lead to unnecessary monotony and uniformity in productions of these writers.

p It would be very unjust to blame Yermilov or the Moscow Art Theatre for unsuccessful productions of The Seagull at numerous Moscow and Leningrad theatres. It is those who try to do Chekhov “a la Moscow Art”, Ostrovsky “a la Maly”, “a la Alexandrinsky” and Lope de Vega “a la Sovietskaya Armiya” who are really to blame.

p A classic play, no matter how good it is, will be “dragged down” by a bad production and fail to make the grade. Paucity of ideas and imagination at a particular theatre can nullify all the fine qualities a play may possess. There is nothing easier than ruining a good play. A certain theatre once put on a production of Ostrovsky’s The Storm for sailors of the Baltic Fleet. On the whole it was a pretty reasonable production. At first glance it seemed that here was indeed a “kingdom of darkness” with a rather faint “ray of light”. But in actual fact the production contained only a token gesture to ideological content: the idea itself was missing. The sailors’ reaction to the play was most interesting. Since they did not see the drama of a pure, noble woman and the full horror of the life around her, they understood the play as to be a story of marital fidelity. Many of them had left behind wives and sweethearts ashore and were naturally worried that they might cease to love them and forget them. To them, Kabanikha seemed to be a guardian angel of family life. With such an awesome mother-in-law, a wife could be expected to behave herself!

p Is not the theatre to blame for the fact that Karenin, that “cruel machine”, often appears a far more attractive character than his wife Anna?

p Wherever the theatre fails to embrace the noble idea of man’s right to freedom, it invariably remains at the inferior level of the moral principle “the family is sacrosanct”. There is often a great temptation to substitute the moral principle for the idea, as being more concrete and actual. However, this practice is extremely dangerous, for it is 110 confusing and harmful to the audience, and injects their souls with the poison of philistinism.

p The Lenin Komsomol Theatre in Leningrad once staged a production of Your Own Business by L. Oshanin and Y. Uspenskaya. The play is about a Party member with a wife and children who falls in love with another woman, but, as the authors would have it, prefers to stay with a woman he does not love and keep a clean Party card. And I must say that I myself, then manager of the theatre, was not worried by the thought that in struggling for a healthy family we were propagating an unhappy family, in struggling for moral purity, we were affirming mendacity as a norm of family life. Moreover, together with the authors, we were presenting this as true communist morality. But the most awkward thing of all was that shortly before the theatre had done Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?, which preached the exact opposite. These two plays should never have appeared on the same poster. One intelligent theatregoer drew our attention to this. And although the critics and the public praised us for putting on such a “ncccessary” play, we were forced to agree that this criticism was perfectly justified.

p I must say in all fairness that this frank admission is not intended to imply that L. Oshanin, whom I regard as an extremely gifted poet, is alone to blame for the theatre’s mistake. The general creative atmosphere in those years and the notorious “no-conflict theory” sent many of us off in search of conflicts that might be acceptable, since without conflicts there can be no drama and no theatre. The labour and marriage codes seemed perfectly suitable material for the stage in those days. Unfortunately we still come across works today that bring to the stage important decisions in the sphere of ideology or economics, without expressing the essence of life. Thus we find plays which debase the tremendously important problems of the moral responsibility of the individual towards society, reducing them to such philistine principles as “It’s not nice to cheat the state. And it’s dangerous too. You can get put in prison for it”, or “It’s a good idea to do a turn in production when you leave school. It’s the quickest way of getting into university.” Stanislavsky bequeathed us his system, the crowning achievement of which is his teaching on the super-objective and the super- superobjectivc. We have mastered the super-objective, more commonly known as the idea of the play, pretty well. But the super-super- objcctive has somehow fallen by the wayside.

p The super-objective is hidden in the play. We may understand it in various ways, but it is given by the author. No one can claim to have understood the author better than anybody else, especially since the author himself does not always fully realise what he has created. Each 111 theatre makes a sincere effort to penetrate the innermost, often subconscious intentions of the playwright. But this is not enough. One must not only examine the core of the work itself, for we do not work in a vacuum, for some indefinite, abstract audience. While in the darkened theatre, with artificial lighting, the director and the cast reveal, sometimes joyously, sometimes painfully, the stores of wisdom, philosophic depth and psychological complexity of a classic play, outside the sun is shining brightly and people arc studying and arguing, working and inventing, achieving great things and making mistakes, wrestling with thousands of intricate matters.

p Do they need what we arc working on for them today? Will our art help them? Will it interest them?

p The super-super-objcctivc is the bridge between the play and life. The super-super-objective removes the walls of the theatre and enables us to see the play through the eyes of our contemporaries. The supersupcr-objectivc cannot be determined on the basis of the play alone. It requires knowledge of life, and of the people we are working for. It requires not only knowledge but feelings too. The super-super- objectivc cannot be foisted upon the artist. It must be the offspring of the artist-citizen himself. The super-supcr-objective makes the play the highly personal concern of the director and actor. Indeed this is what •constitutes the noble purpose of service to one’s people. The personality of the creative artist and the objectives of people, state and Party are fused in the super-super-objective, which is partisan and determines the spirit of the production.

p But in order to grasp this extremely elusive “blue bird” the artist must have civic ideas and feelings. He has to be capable of ardently defending or protesting fiercely, of loving and hating. It is not enough for him to understand that there is good and bad in our life, or even to understand what is fine and what is ugly. He must rejoice in beauty when he sees it and be genuinely pained by ugliness. Only such civic ardour can reveal in an old play an emotional charge of new thoughts and feelings.

p Clearly then, the question of the super-supcr-objective is central to the whole problem of interpreting the classics, the matter of deciding the purpose of a play, why it should be put on, to whom it is addressed. The degree of authenticity, naturalism, historicism and ethnographic accuracy observed in a production of a classic should be sufficient to satisfy the sophisticated contemporary audience’s highly developed sense of historical truth, but should never be allowed to become an end in itself, the primary objective, for in that case it will inevitably conceal the essential idea, so that there is no super-super-objectivc_r •and no civic objective.

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p If the instructive objective is raised from a secondary consideration to the primary concern, a play will simply be a vehicle for information like a museum-piece and its artistic and civic impact will be considerably reduced. And it is, after all, for the latter that the theatre exists.

p Basically, it can be said that a classic play is a contemporary play. However, a danger lurks in this approach, the danger of getting carried away with superficial direct parallels and associations, where the audience is expected to recognise some concrete person. To my mind the classics require a far broader and more subtle system of analogies and associations than such direct parallels as are calculated to evidence the remark: “He’s just like John Smith.” This is an over-simplified approach to the classics, which are indeed recognised as classics because their theme is universal, and applies to all ages, taking a different turn and acquiring different aspects and facets depending on the particular circumstances and conditions of the time. A classic is a classic just because it comprises these various facets and reveals what the author may not have been consciously endeavouring to present, but which is nevertheless present in the work, there to be brought out.

p It must also be borne in mind that in writing his work, the author was conditioned by the expressive means available in the theatre of his day, since he could know of no others. It is very important that the contemporary theatre should not restrict itself to that position. The theatre should be the willing captive of the author in the realm of ideas, content and all that determined the choice of that particular work. Yet it is equally important that it should refuse to be a slave to the level of expressive means to which the work and its author were restricted at the time of its creation.

p Unfortunately, all too often we come across an unwarranted respect for tradition in just this matter. It is not the theatrical means of the period to which the author belonged that should become a tradition, but something quite different. To be attached to Griboyedov’s or Shakespeare’s theatre as a spectacle, with all its means of expression, is an extremely bad form of traditionalism which gives rise to many mistakes.

p How do we differentiate between tradition and traditionalism?

Othello has centuries of tradition behind it in the interpretation of the central role, and it would be absurd to ignore it. But every age adds something of its own to the understanding of the part. The tradition of the inner approach must be taken into account and can only be ignored provided a step forward is taken on its basis. We cannot afford to adopt a nihilistic approach to all that mankind has discovered before us. In this case it is as absurd to reject tradition as it would be to set out to invent the bicycle.

113 Scene from Act One Y. Knpelyan as Vershim,, and Tatyana Uoronina as Masha Gorky Theatre Production of Chekhov’s THE THREE SISTERS, 1965 ’Ccne from Act One from Act Three S. Yursky as Tuzcnbach and K. Lavrov as Solyony Scene from Act One f Ludmila Makarova as Natasha and O. Basilashvili as Andrei Prozorov Scene from Act Four N. Trofimov as Chebutykin and Emma Popova as Irina

p Tradition is a very good thing if we understand it as historically accumulated wisdom. But it is extremely harmful if it is understood MS a code of rules, devices and solutions. It is but a short step from tradition to cliche and from respect for the past to neglect of the present. All too often, tradition becomes a barrier between the classic and the audience, and the director runs around in front of it or behind it, not daring to remove it altogether. “The director has a pious reverence for tradition,” they say when a theatre regards a classic through a grille, afraid to touch him, as though he were a deity. “The director is a slave to tradition,” the critics write after a performance of this sort.

p If it is a museum-piece we are after, a play whose impact is the same as that of the relics preserved in mothballs in theatre museums for the interest of posterity, then we have no need to go to the classics. We might just as well turn to some second-rate work consigned to oblivion by all except those with a specialist’s interest. Why should we turn to Moliere, thereby placing him on a level with any of his contemporaries? How can we compare Moliere with those who have been quite rightly forgotten?

p This is as preposterous as it is to only employ the stage machinery the theatre disposed of at the time a classic was written, ignoring all that has been invented since.

p For a long time I myself laboured under the illusion that Chekhov should be staged with illusionistic sets. It was Svoboda and Krejca at the National Theatre in Prague, who destroyed this illusion and helped me realise that I had been quite wrong in my insistence. They made full use of modern lighting effects to express Chekhov for the modern audience. This is not a crime or disrespect for the great playwright. On the contrary-provided it was an artistic requirement expressing the essence of the writer, provided modern theatrical means were used to bring out the super-supcr-objective.

p Here lies the boundary between a healthy attitude to tradition and nihilism.

p I call for respect and due regard for tradition, but it sometimes happens that study and the possibility of reading and learning something about a play contends with direct spontaneous perception. Without realising it, the director is a prisoner of a preconception from which he is unable to free himself. Then another danger arises, which I call “perversity” when a director wants to be original at all costs and is thus on the slippery path towards vulgarisation and pseudoinnovation.

p It is difficult to envisage all the mistakes connected with staging the classics, and I have no intention of trying to do so. I merely wish to The finale 114 mention the basic points of departure which I consider to be of special importance. When I say that one must not be a slave to the expressive means of the theatre, it is difficult to determine where the line should be drawn. The theatrical philistine regards the very existence of new expressive means as a crime against the author, as “perversity” and formalism, and it is very difficult to come to any firm decision in this matter. It is not at all easy to preserve the essence of a work when using new, present-day means.

p It may be a misfortune, or it may be a blessing in disguise for art that there is no fixed standard of measurement as there is in building a bridge or a tunnel. It is a question of aesthetic views, and there can be no firm law.

p What is a good tradition which ought to be observed, and what is “perversity”?

p Let us return to Othello. There is a tradition of not regarding Othello as simply a jealous man. It is quite possible to transform Shakespeare’s profound, humane work into a melodrama. On the surface, there is the possibility of such a “reading”. But there already exists a tradition of interpreting this character and nobody can say today: “I have realised that it is wrong to play Othello as a jealous man.” This is a fine tradition which must be observed today. To find an approach that takes into account the personality of the actor playing the role-such must be the director’s contribution to a fine tradition that it would be absurd to depart from. There is no point at all in making traditional mistakes for the thousandth time. Such is man’s experience. Why cover the ground that has already been covered by many before us?

p Any new features should involve not the destruction of the essence of the work but an original approach to revealing that essence. There is nothing wrong in that approach being traditional, for there still remains a vast ocean of unplumbed opportunities for personal, individual, unique expression.

p In the case of Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit, the good tradition in the interpretation of the role of Chatsky has been to draw a contrast between him and the world of Famusov, and reveal his democratic spirit. But I felt that in making this contrast today one could adopt a slightly different approach, and I felt I could dispense with the tradition of the “dandy” Chatsky. It was history itself that suggested this solution to me. I saw a real historical figure like Kiichelbecker behind the character of Chatsky. Kiichelbecker was a nobleman, who moved in high society, but was by no means a society “dandy”. On the contrary, he was a rather awkward, eccentric person, and I felt that by revealing Chatsky’s democratic spirit through this approach I would be 115 making Griboyedov’s hero closer and more understandable to peopletoday.

p Chatsky’s democratic spirit was left unquestioned, but in our contemporary interpretation of his character we sought something more important, than the need to show a society dandy. Especially in view of the fact that the audience’s impression of high society has changed considerably and people today are no longer familiar with certain details which one could not have afforded to overlook as little as thirty years ago.

p I was training at the Art Theatre at the time when Anna Karenina was being rehearsed. I remember how much time and effort went on trying to produce an authentic picture of “high society” at the races. When the play came on, elderly people in the audience were not at all satisfied by the results. But for the people of those years the features the theatre chose to present were quite sufficient and perfectly convincing, since they had been chosen from the point of view of what people at the time would accept and understand. Nor should this be taken as implying a condescending attitude; it was assumed that the audiencewas of the highest level of intelligence, and no attempt was made to play on ignorance.

p Shakespeare understood this sort of thing very well indeed. He realised that Italian soldi would mean nothing to an English audience in his day, and although perfectly aware that Italians did not use English pence, his heroes do, thereby revealing his genuine realism. When we translate foreign plays in this country and an American says “I haven’t a cent”, we translate it into our own terms, for otherwise we would be translating the word but not the meaning.

p This is something that escapes the “restorers” in the theatre. They attach more importance to the letter than to the essence. Real Theatre (with a capital T) has no right to do this.

p In Woe from Wit there is the following line: “Here’s a sofa for you. Lie down and have a rest”. Our adviser explained to us exactly what the sofa should be like. But such a sofa suited neither the scale nor nature of our set and we decided to have a simple divan instead. Contrary to our expectations, it did not occur to anybody, even historians, to criticise us for this historical inaccuracy.

p All this is not to say that there arc not bad traditions too. Everyone is familiar with the traditions of the cloak-and-dagger plays. The production on The Dancing Teacher at the Sovietskaya Armiya Theatre led to dozens of repetitions and endless cliches in this genre.

p I have seen many productions of this sort in my time, where tradition has become its opposite. Lope dc Vega is in the position of having to once more earn himself the right to appear on the stage, in a new quality.

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p When I was working on Gorky’s The Barbarians at the Gorky Theatre, I found great difficulty in breaking free from the Maly Theatre traditions. But it was when we managed to get away from the traditional that we experienced true creative joy and a sense of achievement. I do not mean to suggest that we should make it our main aim to be original at all costs, and at every step take the attitude: they did it like this, so we’ll do the opposite.

p It is a question of finding in the essence of the play itself opportunities for a fresh, unbiased reading, and getting away from the cliches that are so often confused with tradition.

p For example, the traditions of staging Gorky and other classics tend to insist that the interpretation of the roles requires great skill and experience, which is mainly to be found among the older generation of actors. As a result we find the age balance becoming more and more distorted as time goes on. Yet age is a most important factor, determining the nature of human relationships and the manner in which people behave. If we freely alter the age of characters, a great deal becomes a mystery, and their behaviour seems most enigmatic and fortuitous.

p In The Barbarians, Nadezhda Monakhova is twenty-eight. She is young and beautiful. That is why, as well as her husband, the doctor and Tsyganov are in love with her, and even Cherkun cannot resist her charms. Romanticism and passion in the search for an ideal hero are perfectly understandable and attractive in a young woman. But we arc offering completely different explanations for her emotional upsurges if we have on the stage a woman who is no longer young, an “ experienced” woman, a woman who has “lived”. Exuberance, ingenuousness, and even stupidity may be pardonable in a voung person, but not in a mature person. In a mature woman ingenuousness looks suspiciously like weak-headedness, and passionate desire suggests a morbid pathology. If Anna is not twenty-three, but-god forbid !-looks even older than Nadezhda, all the complex, profound relationships in the play are reduced to primitive case of adultery, where a husband prefers a younger woman to his aging wife. Any alteration in the ages of the characters of Gorky’s plays distors their meaning. This being so, our theatre entrusted young actors with most of the leading roles. We did not even need an elderly actor for the role of Tsyganov, for after all he is only meant to be forty-five.

p It is necessary to see the characters through the author’s eyes. A production will be truthful if one departs from the traditional in the elementary matter of the distribution of the parts.

p However, important though it is, this is secondary to the problem ot finding a message for today in the classic.

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p A few years ago, when we at the Gorky Theatre began work on a stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot, we had an extremely hard time trying to answer the question: What does the story of Prince Myshkin contain for the modern audience? We realised that the answer must be basically very simple and human.

p We were not interested in the power of money in the eighteensixties, but in something very different. Through the character of Myshkin, Dostoyevsky appeals to the most profound wellsprings of the human soul: from contact with this crystal-pure, kind man, other people find themselves becoming purer and kinder. Myshkin’s goodness triumphs over many base feelings of the people around him, and affirms in the hearts of people today the noble truth that “man to his fellow man is a friend, comrade and brother”.

p Of course there arc times, as during the civil war, when appeals for brotherhood and forgiving one’s enemies would have been blasphemous, a betrayal of the cause for which the people were fighting. But today, when our ideological opponents arc all beyond our frontiers and within our Soviet household we arc arguing with people sharing the same basic views, humaneness, goodness and kindness produce far better results than the big stick or rough orders.

p It is useful and instructive to know that the only good, honest man in nineteenth-century Russia was dubbed an “idiot”, and we made this point in our production. But this was not the reason why we put on The Idiot, nor is it the reason why Prince Myshkin is so dear to us.

p In our age, when we are building communist society, our way is a thorny one, and not every individual is worthy in his heart of the noble ideal for which we arc striving, or of the noble moral standards that we affirm and must instill in people today. We still occasionally come across roughness and lack of respect for other people. Apart from the figures of the current economic plan, there arc also the people who are building the new society, and they must improve themselves. Writers like Dostoyevsky and Chekhov collaborate with us, as it were, in the task of improving man.

p Or take Shakespeare, who lived in the sixteenth century. It might seem that his plays have absolutely no point of contact with our time, but if we approach any one of his plays from the standpoint I have just mentioned, we shall find that it contains a tremendous power to influence, and that a work written several centuries ago is consonant with the spirit of our age.

p Let us take as an example Richard the Third, a play in which the question of power, the state and the individual is posed with tremendous dramatic force. The key to this work is to be sought through deciphering the philosophical concept of government rule and the 118 responsibility of a government towards the people. The betrayal of the noble aim for personal thirst for power, entailing disastrous consequences for other people, who become simply tools of Richard’s aspirations for self-assertion-such is the problem that can make Shakespeare’s tragedy consonant with our times, when we arc everyday witnesses to the actions of individual personalities not directed towards the good of the people but towards ends that do not justify the sacrifices involved.

p Admittedly, the evil which Richard III was responsible for is “child’s play” compared to that caused by, say, Hitler. But the great strength of Shakespeare lies in the fact that he revealed the inner workings, the psychological mainsprings by which we can explain many modern tragedies and disasters that have shaken the world by their apparently senseless cruelty.

p If we seek parallels and analogies along these lines, then Richard the Third acquires a great interest for us today. Coriolanus and Macbeth are also plays about power. But the twist Shakespeare gave to the problem in Richard the Third, it seems to me, reveals the problem more deeply and fully in the aspect that concerns us most today.

p If civic ardour is present in the interpretation of Richard the Third, it can be made to say more than any contemporary play. If the director feels this and manages to speak in the classic and via the classic of the present, then Richard the Third, quite irrespective of the scale and possibilities of the theatre, will emerge as a true work of art, powerful and valid, and its reading will not be traditional in the bad sense of the word.

p Calls to seek universal, eternal motives in each classical play were at one time condemned as idealism, objectivism, in short, extremely harmful. But surely the moral code of Soviet man, formulated by the Twenty Second Congress of our Party, was none other than an appeal to educate people for life in communist society, for life in a society where there will be no room for lies and falsehood and where there will be no evil or violence.

p We are the inheritors of the best that mankind has created throughout its long history. The struggle for the moral perfection of society rests with us.

p When we put on The Barbarians, we considered the question of what we could teach people with this work today. The answer was: directlynothing. The play elicits no direct, obvious associations with the present day whatsoever, and cannot possibly do so. Soviet life is too different from the life presented in the play. Nobody has the faintest recollection of excise inspectors, local dignitaries and police chiefs. The provincial Russia described by Gorky has passed into oblivion. 119 The prototypes of Gorky’s characters no longer exist. His play is peopled by characters who are alien to us, people we have difficulty in understanding. But there is something in the play that still concerns us, and that is the barbarity that is latent in every one of us, the barbarity that is expressed in parental selfishness, in lack of consideration for others, barbarity concealed in the old fashioned frock-coat and flaunting itself in fashionable trousers, restrained barbarity and aggressive barbarity.

p Despite the fact that there are no longer any social foundations for the barbarians, barbarity still persists here and there. There are still apathetic people and hypocrites. There are still those devoted to the past. Very often we lack the energy and strength to battle with routine and we let it get us down and debase us. Petty pride can lead to great suffering. Dissatisfaction with things one sees around one can be a source of vitality to a man who is struggling with it: it can equally demoralise the person who has renounced all struggle.

p It is not easy to become a real man. It is difficult to retain one’s humanity. The thirst for pleasure and a longing for peace and quiet, dissatisfaction with one’s lot and self-love can make a person cruel and cold towards others. Time and again we manage to justify our unseemly actions. But one day our failure to behave with sufficient consideration for others may lead to disaster. A little light flirtation, some petty insult, selfishness or indifference, which seem to be very minor sins, nevertheless corrode our spirit and can ruin other people’s lives. Thus, in The Barbarians, though passing unnoticed by anybody, a crime against humanity was committed, which resulted in the senseless death of Nadezhda Monakhova.

p That is how we understood Gorky’s play. For all of us who worked on it, it is this that constitutes the message of the play for us today. We were not content that our production would make the audience condemn and mock the old society that has passed away. Unless a play evokes some kind of associations with present-day life, it is simply an illustration for a history book.

p Several years passed after the premiere, and the production did not remain unchanged. It gradually became clear that we had somewhat cluttered the production with period details. We felt we required a radically different mise-en-scene. Certain characters were elaborated and developed. The fact that a particular solution has been found does not mean that a theatre is on a smooth open highway along which the production can speed unobstructed. New people and signposts appear on the “highway” and they must be acknowledged and carefully taken into account. If a theatre constantly compares its own calendar with that of the audience and makes sure that its own “time” does not fall 120 behind the time in which we live, a production will never “age”, even if the play was born long, long ago.

p The classics are immortal just because they are profound and manysided. Every time and every artist chooses from them whatever he happens to find of concern. Often a masterpiece that had hitherto evoked in me no more than admiration for the skill of the playwright today excites my deep interest as a citizen and an artist, and insistently demands: “Put me on!”

p That was how I came to feel the irresistible urge to produce Woe from Wit, and that is how the idea of producing Hamlet and Boris Godunov arose.

p For a long time Boris Godunov remained for me buried beneath operatic tinsel, heavy boyars’ robes, brocade and jewels. I was quite unmoved by the drama of a bad conscience presented in the productions I saw. But once, when reading Pushkin for myself, I was suddenly struck by lines about very recent events on the very first page of Boris Godunov. Pushkin wrote a new play for us, a contemporary play based on historical material.

p Soviet audiences have not seen Boris Godunov for a long time, and Pushkin’s tragedy awaits its true embodiment.

p The treasury of the world theatre is truly inexhaustible. It is a shame to let this vast capital lie on the bookshelves, when it could be usefully “invested”.

p I had never produced Chekhov, although I had longed to do so ever since I can remember. For me Chekhov is more than a great Russian dramatist and writer, a world literary classic: he is a great explorer, the prophet and Columbus of the twentieth-century theatre. The great Gorky was a pupil of Chekhov’s. I am quite convinced that not only the Moscow Art Theatre and the Russian Theatre as a whole owe a great debt to him, but also Hemingway and Saroyan, and the Italian neo-realists. Without Chekhov there could have been no Leonov and Afinogenov, Arbuzov and Volodin, no... One could go on and on. Chekhov erected thousands of invisible memorials to himself in the hearts and minds of at least three generations of writers.

p Several times I was intending to do a production of Chekhov. Everything seemed to dispose towards it-good actors, and all the time and facilities I needed. But every time I shrank from it. I felt I could not add anything to what the Art Theatre had already said in The Three Sisters. I could not possibly put it any better than Nemirovich- Danchenko, and who needed poor copies of a brilliant production or senseless attempts to alter at all costs a perfect work of art?

p But did this mean that the solution the Art Theatre had found to Chekhov’s play had deprived the theatre forever of the possibility of 121 ovsky as Prince Myshkin and Tatyana Doronina as Nastasya Filippovna THE IDIOT, a stage adaptation by lovstonogov of Dostoyevsky’s novel New revised version at the Gorky Theatre, Leningrad, 1966 (original version tirst produced in 1957) Smoktunovsky as Prince Myshkj I. Smoktunovsky as Prince Myshl N. Korn as Totsky and Taty Doronina as Nastasva Filipp Scene from The Idiot Tovstonogov conducting a rehearsal Nastasya Filippovna and • Prince Myshkin Y. Lebedcv as Rogozhin,] centre Scene from 7 be l<liot I. Smoktunovsky as Prince Myshkin producing it differently? Of course not, as is proved best of all by Nemirovich-Danchenko himself, who created a completely new version of The Three Sisters. The great friend and interpreter of Chekhov realised that a new time and new audiences required a new approach if the play were to retain its vitality, and that time reveals a new ring, new ideas in Chekhov.

p Chekhov’s dream of a bright future seemed vain to his contemporaries, like building castles in the air. Astrov hoped that man would be happy in a thousand years time. Vcrshinin insisted that “in another two or three hundred years life on earth would be unimaginably beautiful”. This longing for the impossible gave rise to the tendency to regard Chekhov as a pessimist. But for us today, Chekhov is not a prophet of gloom but a herald and champion of a bright future.

p Treplyov in The Seagull says: “We need new forms.” But he invented them and was defeated in an argument with Trigorin, a man of letters who wrote well but in the old way.

p New ideas and new forms arc part of the very fabric of Chekhov’s plays. One needs time to discover them. Chekhov was bound to come to us as a young, inspired dreamer, a wise friend and stern judge and teacher, to help the great-grandchildren of Astrov and Vershinin, Uncle Vanya and the three sisters to love life more, to make it more beautiful and to dream more boldly of a “diamond-spangled sky”.

p I knew all along that I would one day produce Chekhov. It was something I just had to do. I saw it as the most difficult, but at the same time the most satisfying, examination for the right to consider myself a contemporary director. And I consider it no coincidence in my artistic evolution that I came to Chekhov via Dostoycvsky, Gorky, Griboyedov and, even earlier, Ostrovsky, Chernyshevsky and SaltykovShchedrin.

p Thus we faced a great challenge, the challenge of emulating Nemirovich-Danchenko’s great production, representing the highest achievement of the Moscow Art Theatre. But we accepted that challenge. Not because we wanted to try just another production of a classic, but because we felt that Chekhov was necessary, indeed absolutely essential, today. I cannot think of any other playwright who made such a passionate effort to transform the human soul, to bring the finest qualities in people. The poetry of the life Chekhov dreamed of, his civic protest against the philistinism that stifles this dream, make his plays have an impact on people’s lives such as no other dramatist, with the exception of Shakespeare, has achieved.

p Why did we choose The Three Sisters rather than any other of Chekhov’s plays? It seemed to me that in our age of active creative interference in life and nature, the theme of tragic inactivity acquires a 122 special impact and vital relevance. I felt that the more nobility, goodness and kindness the heroes had, the greater the tragic impact of the theme of their spiritual paralysis would be. In presenting today the story of the shattered dreams of Chekhov’s heroes, of the collapse of their ideals, I wanted to capture the full tragedy of their plight, for The Three Sisters is a profoundly tragic work. The somewhat subdued tone of the play is only a means. The essence of the work is the civic anger of the author and his boundless love for humanity, his tremendous involvement with life.

p Take Act Four, for example. It has always been played as a sad, wistful elegy, with a touch of faint, inexplicable regret for something that is passing away. We felt, however, that it could now be done in a different key, and that the shot at the remark “One master less” was the main emotional stroke, which quite possibly embodied the meaning of the whole play, Chekhov’s reason for writing it. After all, it is not Solyony who kills Tuzenbach, but the surrounding indifference, the unbroken silence that reigns. It is not physical death that is so terrible, but the slow moral, spiritual death. Such was the new tragic chord we wished to achieve in the finale.

p Today the tragedy of the action ought to be presented in higher relief and sound more terrible than before. We endeavoured to make the combination of the poetry of life and the evil opposing man’s dreams as emphatic and acute as possible. This involved reviewing all the expressive means at our disposal. The failure of the Alexandrinsky Theatre production of The Seagull was a lesson to us in many respects. Why was it that the professional actors of one of the best Russian theatres had failed, while yesterday’s amateurs, practically unknown actors under Stanislavsky, had succeeded?

p Chekhov is a strict author, and he always avenges egoism on the part of actors. Stanislavsky, an innovator himself, grasped what was novel in the essence of Chekhov’s works. Sixty years have past since then, and we should be that much wiser than Chekhov’s contemporaries.

p In tackling The Three Sisters we had no illusions about the incredible complexity of the task we were undertaking. Apart from having to bear in mind the essential condition of reading a classic from the standpoint of today, we had also to remember that Chekhov was an innovator in drama not only in the sense that he was creating something new for his time, but in his demand that the expressive means employed be new in relation to the time when the play is being produced.

p What did I feel to be the essentially new features in dramatic art without which our work on the play would have been in vain?

p I was amazed at the way the last few years had seen poetry readings 123 drawing vast audiences and often readings by unknown poets and reciters, who in themselves could not possibly have acted as a magnet for the public. Why was it that thousands of people snapped up tickets to listen to one man reciting poetry for several hours on end?

p It all seemed to contradict the generally accepted opinion of what the public wants, and suggests some new laws of audience response. If we wished to find more effective means of producing an impact on audiences with our art we had to understand these laws.

p Shortly before we began work on The Three Sisters I saw an unusual production at the Brccht Theatre. It was entitled Poems and Songs. On the stage were actors of the Berliner Ensemble and a small band. The only decoration was Picasso’s dove on a grey canvas backcloth. The actors read poems and aphorisms by Brecht, and extracts from his diaries, and sang songs to his words. But this was not simply a concert program consisting of separate numbers. It was an integrated spectacle in which a song passed into poetry, poetry into prose, prose into music and back to a song. It was a peculiarly organised stage spectacle, moulded and cemented by a single artistic will, and it was a tremendous success with the audience.

p I have been told that another production by the same company in which Brccht’s statements on the theatre are collected and organised into an integrated whole enjoys even greater success. It is done as follows. The actors are playing the last act of Hamlet when suddenly a man made up as Brccht comes onto the stage and says that you cannot act like that today. There follows a rehearsal during which Brecht’s directions are followed exactly as they appear in his rehearsal notes, and his statements on the theatre and extracts from his theoretical articles are quoted. These directions have all been carefully chosen so that they arc not only embodied in the rehearsal but really strike home.

p It might seem that such a spectacle could only be of interest to theatre people, to directors, actors and critics. In fact it was Berlin’s biggest box-office success.

p To take another example, the best thing I had seen at the Art Theatre during the last decade or so was Dear Liar. I began to wonder why it was that a theatre that had based its art on the aesthetics of verisimilitude should have scored such a triumph with a play which in its very essence had nothing at all to do with fidelity to everyday life, with a production where the same was true. Two actors read the letters of Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, making no attempt whatsoever to create the illusion of life on the stage. This is simply a clash of thoughts and complicated human relationships, so complicated that they embrace the whole world.

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p Why was it that a production that broke with the theatre’s fundamental aesthetic principles which it had always observed brought it the greatest success? Could it be a mere coincidence?

p I think not. I am convinced that the contemporary theatre should on no account be interested in making the illusion of real life on the stage the sole aim of art. I for one find myself getting terribly bored when I see the illusion of life on the stage. A man comes on, takes off his hat, advances a few steps and says: “Good morning!” “Life-like” though it is, it is extremely dull to watch if there is nothing else to the man’s appearance.

p In the days when the naturalist theatre was only coming into its own, verisimilitude produced a powerful impact. I remember several productions at the Art Theatre where a series of extremely life-like situations was quite captivating.

p But I am quite sure that today verisimilitude has lost all its power. However well done, a poduction that is “truc-to-lifc” and nothing more, can have no real impact at all.

p Andrei Mikhailovich Lobanov, a remarkable director whose importance in the Soviet theatre is still not fully appreciated to this day, understood this perfectly. Under his management, the Yermolova Theatre was the most up-to-date in Moscow.

p Lobanov produced Malyugin’s Old Friends, which was put on by numerous theatres throughout the country. I have a vivid recollection of one of the central scenes, the conversation between Shura and Volodya about love. Since the scene is one of the culminating points of the play, directors, aware of its importance, have invariably devoted the most scrupulous attention to its mise-en-scene. In Lobanov’s production, Shura and Volodya simply walked onto the stage, stood facing the audience and hardly made a single movement throughout the dialogue. I remember being quite amazed, not so much by the unexpectedness of this solution in an essentially naturalistic production as by the fact that I suddenly realised how absolutely justified it was by the logic of the play. The conversation between the two old friends was so exceptionally important that the director felt the need to clear the stage of everything that might distract attention from the ideas being expressed.

p It never occurred to anybody else to adopt this approach. Why? Surely other directors had sought to make the scene as expressive as possible. Of course they had. But only Lobanov sensed and grasped the new laws of audience perception that were emerging.

p Thus, this process began a long time ago, although directors failed to understand it. We at the Gorky Theatre first sensed it when working on The Fox and the Crapes. We began work quite convinced that the 125 audience would be thoroughly bored by a production in which five people recite monologues for three hours on end with nothing else happening on the stage. We felt then that we were doing this work more for ourselves than for the audience, but as it turned out the production not only drew full houses for several years, but even competed successfully with the cinema and television.

p When I took a fresh look at some of our older productions, I realised that where we had paid homage to illustration, to creating the illusion of real life, elementary verisimilitude, we had failed, and that our real triumphs had come when we had managed to avoid this-such productions were still as “alive” as on the first night.

p I consider poetic truth to be one of the chief features of the contemporary style at the present stage. The art of external verisimilitudeis on the way out, and all its means should be scrapped wholesale. The theatre of a new kind of truth is emerging, poetic truth, which demands that the expressive means be made as precise and concrete as possible. Every action must be charged with meaning and not simply illustrative. In this way every detail on the stage becomes a realistic symbol. This, far from disregarding the basic principles of realism, makes realism poetic and figurative instead of naturalistic, which is what is needed today.

p If at one time we got away with a great deal that lacked figurative and poetic quality but was simply true to life, and we were perfectly satisfied with such a production, today audiences are less and less prepared to accept such work.

p Once Ostrovsky went behind the scenes during a performance at the Maly Theatre and listened to the superb delivery of the actors. Only recently I felt that the theatre had grown up since those days when everything was for the ear and nothing for the eyes, how out-of-date this attitude was. But now I realise that Ostrovsky was perfectly right. The plastic aspect must be present in a production only to the minimum degree necessary to make what is happening understandable. Anything else is superfluous.

p Thus I recently found the answer for myself to what I feel to be the most important and essential thing in the theatre today. I now understand why people flock to Brecht’s Poems and Songs and why it is practically impossible to get tickets for a poetry evening.

p Such art provokes thought and cxites the imagination far more than spectacular sets or acting that is ostensibly true-to-life but not dictated by the necessity of the super-objective.

p Although this demand is by no means new-Stanislavsky himself insisted that the most important thing on the stage was to recreate “the life of the human spirit”—today it has arisen before us in a new quality, 126 as it were, and we must reinterpret a great deal in our practice if we are to capture the new, present-day nature of this law of art. It was my wish to try and embody that principle as far as possible in The Three Sisters.

p We made it a strict principle that not a single second of stage time should be wasted on showing a likeness to life, that we must show in domestic situations the intense inner life of the heroes, that there should be ho preconceived or premeditated mises-en-scene in our production, which was to be outwardly static despite the vitality of thought. The only way to achieve this was to apply the most stringent self-restraint. We agreed that no one should be allowed to slip into the comfortable, easy groove of familiar things, things already achieved.

p We should have found it far too easy to achieve our aim if we had been doing Brecht, for example. Chekhov is a playwright from whose works it is quite impossible to exclude period elements altogether. But we had set ourselves the difficult task of following the inner law according to which not a single physical action can be performed on the stage that is simply truc-to-life without embodying some other, intrinsic meaning. We had to check and regulate one another, to endeavour to overcome the force of habit, the inertia, the strong attraction for illustrative verisimilitude that abides in every one of us and often makes it extremely difficult to resist backsliding towards the old methods. I was determined to produce a feeling of real palpable life within the framework of the poetic, realistic symbol.

p In the course of our work we were constantly striving to achieve a combination of the terrible power of evil, tragedy and radiant faith in man.

p Chekhov’s play docs not involve a struggle between two camps. The struggle is invisible. The chief adversary is not named. Chekhov loved all his characters: what he hated was the absurd, futile existence which engendered in them tragic inactivity, lethargy, listlessness and, in the long run, total apathy. Naturally we had to reach some sort of attitude to Chekhov’s heroes, but the struggle is not between them but with the senseless lives they lead. It is significant that Chekhov wrote this play on the eve of the 1905 Revolution, that he was such an ardent opponent of petty actions. Behind this lies his fierce loathing for inactivity as a phenomenon of Russian life, for all his love of people themselves.

p We saw the contemporary validity of the play to consist not in showing how Chekhov’s heroes foresaw our life, the future. We wished to find the life-asserting principle in the work in a deeper, less obvious sense. As I see it, Chekhov’s optimism is expressed in the way he struggles for thought and deeds, for activity, and understands that the 127 way of life he is describing is doomed to obsolescence. This being so, we sought the life-assertive principle in rejection and negation: we wanted the audience to be infected by the same sentiment of passionate protest against the senselessness and futility of life as Chekhov was.

p We tried to contrast life and ideals, and express this contrast scenically by a combination of various very different effects. This is why we rnade a bright, carefree atmosphere reign throughout the first act, replaced by a cold, chilly atmosphere in the second act, and followed in the third act by a stifling, oppressive atmosphere, with a smell of burning, the very air throbbing with anxiety which seized everybody. Then the clear, crystal-clear quality of the last act came as the logical conclusion to the tragedy.

p We sought this combination in every character, in every scene, and sometimes it arose of its own accord, spontaneously, quite unexpectedly.

p We did not set out with the express aim of reinterpreting Chekhov, or amazing the world with a completely new reading of The Three Sisters. We only had one aim: to bring out in the work the thoughts and feelings that make Chekhov so necessary and vital today.

p In our age of advanced technology nothing but old cliches and worn traditions is conceived for communication with “the beyond” that is the world of the classics. The connection becomes ever more tenuous. Mayakovsky, by the strength of his imagination, love and talent, brought Pushkin to life and conversed with him for a whole night. Perhaps we shall succeed in bringing to life Shakespeare or Griboycdov, Chekhov or Ostrovsky, at least for an evening?

p It is worth all the time, energy and tremendous effort involved for the pleasure of spending an evening with the wisest, most amusing and most brilliant people in human history.

p We are duty bound to solve the problem of the theatrical classics, to solve it along with the major task-thc creation of works reflecting the processes of present-day life. Every director may have his own way, but all the individual paths lead from the same point of departure -the attempt to break free of all the customary, preconceived ideas about how they should be played in order to read them as though for the first time, as though they had just been written. We must approach a classic as we would a contemporary play.

For the time being, the problem remains a highly complicated one, and no individual director, however talented, is in a position to solve the problem of the classics in the modern theatre. Its solution requires a collective effort.