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p The theatre I work in is named after
Maxim Gorky. Yet despite this, or rather because of it, it was some time before I resolved to try my hand at one of his plays. Indeed, despite the fact that some of the most illustrious pages in the theatre’s history were connected with Gorky’s plays and everyone was urging me to do one, it was only after I had been with the theatre for three years that I finally accepted the challenge with a production of The Barbarians. I realised that the theatre was encumbered by the traditions it had itself created, and strangely enough it was the company’s great respect for its past that was to prove the main obstacle on my road to Gorky, an obstacle I could not surmount, despite the fact that I was always perfectly aware of the great importance of his works, the fine opportunities they offer to director and actors alike as a school for skill and acumen, when one is forced to think big. The company and myself were agreed on this. But I was searching for a more subtle and complex agreement, that no amount of declarations or avowals of support was enough to create. The theatre’s pre-war and immediate post-war productions of Gorky were extremely intelligent and wellacted. But the general approach had been such as to bring out Gorky the propagandist rather than Gorky the subtle psychologist. There was 129 a certain amount of uniformity about them, a rather one-sided treatment of the conflicts, and almost classicist treatment of “colour”.

p This approach, while being perfectly natural and even progressive for the time, gave Gorky the reputation of being a profound, accurate and consistent writer but one who was perhaps a little too straightforward, lacking in the complex undercurrents, nuances and elements of surprise characteristic of Chekhov.

p Intelligent audiences were always pleased to see Gorky’s plays performed by a good cast, but were never really moved to the root of their being and the success of such productions was always short-lived. Hence the widespread myth that Gorky’s plays were not really scenic.

p I had always felt this view to be rathei unfair to Gorky, and wanted to disprove it in practice. It is true that Gorky is always publicistic. But it is surely significant that, apart from his articles on petty- bourgeois philistincs, he also wrote a play with the title The Philistines. The strong note of publicism in Gorky’s plays by no means contradicts their complex psychological basis and many-sidedness, but it must arisenaturally from the complex stream of events, feelings, unexpected actions, conflicts and clashes, and not be openly and insistently declaimed.

p When I began work on The Barbarians I first became fully aware of something which I like to call “ruggcdness”. Gorky thinks in philosophical categories of tremendous sweep, raising eternal problems of mankind. He appeals for humanism, without which the building of the harmonious society of the future is unthinkable, ruthlessly depicting such features as barbarity, philistinism and spiritual parasitism, which though changing with time and becoming “modernised” nevertheless remain essentially hostile to man in his efforts to achieve such harmony.

p Eight years have passed since we produced The Barbarians. If I were to return to it today, I would seek to present the same message, but using different expressive means.

p During the eight intervening years between my first Gorky production and my new one at the Gorky Theatre we should have drawn closer to Gorky by at least eight years, and that means penetrating deeper into his philosophy and the psychology of his characters, and presenting them more accurately on the stage.

p The fact that I produced the two plays in this order is not a mere coincidence. The Philistines is by far the more difficult of the two to produce, and the philosophy is expressed in a more complex manner and on a more sweeping scale. Moreover, the play has been more compromised by numerous productions, and the back-drag of theatrical traditions, supported by volumes of research and criticism, inter- 130 pretation and commentary sanctifying and fetishising these traditions is far stronger.

p The first question to be answered was: What characterises the philistine spirit? A canary in a cage, geraniums on the window-sill, a gramophone-later replaced by the transistor and other obviously upto-date objects-are simply the outward features and do not reveal the essence.

p Philistinism is a socially dangerous category. It is a way of thinking, a definite outlook on life, a mentality. Where does the danger lurk? Why is it that Gorky’s play can serve us as a useful weapon today?

p Only if I found very precise answers to these questions had I the right to undertake a production of The Philistines. My answers might be subjective, they might not take in the whole phenomenon in its entirety but only stress one aspect of it, yet if my interpretation reflected certain real, historically conditioned features of life, then I had the right to speak to my contemporaries on the subject, for the play would then be bound to provoke useful reflections for the audience.

p I saw the danger of philistinism to consist in the invention of fetishes and blind belief in them, in their viability, the failure to glimpse real life behind the protective wall of concepts. Willing servitude makesman limited and hide-bound, unable to free himself from the grip of sterile schemes and canons, condemning him to perpetual confinement within the walls of his own sterile being.

p We often say: “You have to look at life philosophically.” But are we always ourselves able to philosophically reject false concepts? Are we always capable of sailing straight past petty things without stopping? Of course not. Only too frequently we stop and attach importance to things that do not even deserve our passing attention. We are sucked into this vortex and find ourselves in the grip of worthless concepts and illusions, and sometimes even false ideas, blindly believing in their reality, and failing to see that they are unwarranted and untenable.

p Sometimes we have an opportunity to see ourselves from the outside, as it were, and then we realise the futility and illusory nature of the aims we have set ourselves, sec that they are not really worth the efforts we have devoted to them. Many dramatists throughout the world today are greatly concerned by these problems, just as Gorky was in his time.

p Paradoxical though it may seem, it was the theatre of the absurd that stimulated me to new reflections on The Philistines. It forced me to think about the problem of contemporary petty-bourgeois philistinism as a definite philosophy of life, and I began to search for a play in which this problem was presented most fully and completely in an 131 artistic form that was close and understandable to me, where it was presented from head to foot, so to say. In the course of these reflections I “rediscovered” The Philistines for myself. I had long been thinking about producing this play. But the solution, a solution that made it possible to relate it to the present day, arose quite unexpectedly.

p Gorky presents the problem of philistinism with philosophical depth, and the process of refraction of phenomena of life in his work follows a logic directly opposed to that of the theatre of the absurd. Gorky’s play is based on real conflicts between real people whose lives arc .absurd and futile. These people arc drawn into a vortex of dead concepts, obsolete views, devalued values and illusory, imaginary relations from which they arc unable to escape, because it is stronger than they are.

p I based my interpretation of the work on Nil’s remark that in the Bessemyonov home, for the umpteenth time “they have played a dramatic scene from the endless comedy entitled Neither Hither nor Thither”.

p The most important thing for me in the course of my work was to find the key to this cycle of delusion into which these people had fallen and which made their very existence absurd. The tragedy of their futile floundering lies in the fact that people in general are apt to submit to delusion, create these vicious circles in which they cast around futilcly, and worship fetishes of their own creation. In short, they are prone to a kind of self-hypnosis.

p But how was I to find that circle of delusions so that we would be dealing with concrete factors and not simply vague generalisations? How was I to find not only concreticity but such concrcticity as would enable us to treat the subject on the level and scale of the work itself, with Gorky’s incisiveness?

p This was how the theme of complicated relationships between people and things arose in our production.

p The power of things over people had often been shown in the theatre. Often it was achieved simply by having people practically smothered by the clutter of furniture, ornaments and household objects. I wanted to reduce the quantity of things in the Bessemyonov apartment to a minimum, yet somehow instil them with the spirit of their owner. Bessemyonov regarded things largely as symbols demonstrating his power and unshakable authority over his household. He could easily change the clock that strikes so wheezingly and is so inconvenient to wind, acquire a new cupboard, oil the door to his room, or replace the dining-room chairs. But a king does not change his throne for a new one, and he prefers his inalienable possessions, the things that always were and always will be his. Any concession here is regarded 132 as a concession to new ideas, as attempts to destroy the old stable world. The less confident he becomes, the less sure of himself, the more fiercely Besscmyonov clings to the external attributes of his castle. This approach was suggested to me by Gorky himself, by his remark about the cupboard, by Bessemyonov’s lines about sugar, which “must be bought in a lump and broken up at home”, about the plank he put across a puddle, and which was stolen. It was suggested to me by the very first words of Piotr’s soliloquy on the cupboard.

p The parallel that immediately suggested itself between the latter and Chekhov’s “dear, highly esteemed bookcase” compelled me to think about the difference between the basic outlook of the two great writers. Tt is always easiest to discover such a difference through small detailssuch as these, through similar dramaturgical devices. Both playwrights employ the same device, the personification of an inanimate object, but their attitude to the object shows a complete contrast. Chekhov’s attitude is of warm irony. For Gorky the cupboard is a symbol of a ghastly way of life.

p The theme of attaching senseless value to things, a theme which has been treated time and again in art, and in very different ways, fits for me into the view of petty-bourgeois philistinism as a force that dehumanises man, and eventually destroys him. I searched for its development, as one of the major components of my interpretation. This was why apart from the cupboard we also had a clock which acquires a great significance in the play, living a stupid life of its own, making strong demands on people, insisting on attention, requiring to be wound up daily and so on.

p Hence the photograph on the curtain at the beginning and end of the performance, a photograph of the dignified greying merchant surrounded by his family with Vesuvius belching fire in the background. Absurd? Most certainly, as was the autograph, a pure Russian surname written in French.

p Such absurdity was a habit at that time, so that no one even noticed it. Indeed, on the contrary, it was regarded as being extremely “chic”. For us it was yet another detail showing the power of the absurd, the power of habit.

p Bessemyonov’s remark about the plank was another such detail. If the remark was made in an ordinary, matter-of-fact manner, the audience would feel that Besscmyonov was not only mean but honest, that he was not so much concerned over the loss of the plank as indignant about the fact that it had been stolen.

p For us Bessemyonov’s remark was not simply a plain, straightforward statement. He must be breathless and dry in the throat as he utters it, for the matter is of tremendous importance to him. It is one 133 of the signs of the collapse of the world in which he lives, a world which is cracking at the seams before his very eyes. The theme of the plank thus assumes a cosmic significance.

p The culmination of this theme in our production came in the scene where Bcssemyonov begins moving the potted plants around and then cries seriously, as a genuine appeal for help, “Police!”. At the moment when he realises that he is unable to prevent the world of his own household from collapsing, when the family conflict has reached its apogee, he goes around putting the plant pots in their “correct” positions with pedantic accuracy, because everything has its appointed place and the established order must be preserved now and for all time.

p The absurdity of this was the key with which we endeavoured to open the door to the essence of the play. Life had entered a blind alley, and the more accurately and convincingly we could demonstrate this, the more futile Bessemyonov’s attempts to stop the rot and thrust life back into its normal narrow course would appear, and the better we should be able to sound the tragic notes of his devotion to an invented faith which he had endeavoured to instil in himself all his life, and of his intimation of the truth which he opposed with all his might and main.

p This world and its inhabitants were obsolescent, both psychologically and objectively-such is the revolutionary theme of the play. And there is no need to have the Marseillaise sung off-stage for the idea of approaching revolution to be clear. Such obvious symbolism of this kind is definitely contra-indicated in this play. For me, outside the walls of the Bcssemyonov house there is nothing but a working-class district full of drunks.

p Within the Bessemyonov house, on the other hand, to my mind the Marseillaise is totally out of place, and can only sound highly ironical. Piotr, “a citizen of half-an-hour’s standing”, banging out the rhythm of the song while Yclena waves a red handkerchief taken from Tetcrev’s pocket-thcse people are really a parody of revolution. They will never go anywhere, they arc incapable of struggling, of creating anything, they have no aim in life. The revolutionary situation is created by the very existence of this house which, once strong and firm, will not be able to withstand the movement of life, for it is weakened from within so that all that is really vital and alive leaves it.

p These were the considerations we were guided by in developing each of the characters. I wanted to get away from the customary interpretation which I felt had become too closely associated with the play. On the basis of the general intention, I endeavoured to determine the exact place of each of the characters in the general system of relationships obtaining in the world of this house.

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p Why do we find Nil such an attractive character? What makes him different from the others? To begin with, he is stronger. He tore himself free from the Besscmyonov way of life before the play opens, and now he sets about helping Polya escape too.

p The good, honest common-sense of a healthy-minded working man enables Nil to carry out his resolution to leave. All the others wanted to get away, but Nil was the first to go, and he went for good.

p For me, the contrast between absurdity and the sense is the most important thing in the play.

p Teterev and Perchikhin are also outside the vortex, for different reasons. The former is an outcast from life and by force of circumstance is placed above its conventions and the Besscmyonov way of life. He lives according to different laws, moving in his own orbit, and doing so without a compass, without any sense of direction. But he is inwardly free of the dogma fettering the others. Perchikhin is not fully aware of his own inner emancipation and relative independence. He acquired it by turning his back on people and seeking inspiration in nature.

p Both these characters are likeable for their unsusceptibility to Bessemyonov’s philosophy, but both of them abandoned his views spontaneously while Nil made a deliberate and complete break with him, which makes his position the most purposeful and active in the play. I had no need to try and find in Teterev and Perchikhin something that would make them very different from their numerous predecessors. In general, I found the usual form of expression adopted for these characters more or less suited my own understanding of them. This explains why they both seem far more traditional than any of the other characters in our production. The important thing for me was to find what principles they represented in the general idea of the play. I made no special effort to achieve other innovations or discoveries.

p In interpreting the classics from the standpoint of today we must deal with the core and not with the surface. I feel it is artificial to endeavour to avoid at all costs what has been done by others before. This path will lead a director not to any real achievements, but only to vulgarisation and “perversity”. Any innovation must be dictated by the logic of necessity, must be inherent in the material itself and fit into the framework of the basic solution. The idea is that of altering the illumination of a picture without altering the contours of the picture itself.

p In themselves, the features of everyday life, truth to life in externals, do not make a role archaic, provided the meaning it embodies captures the minds of the audience. In such cases I prefer not to depart from historical authenticity. In the case of relationships, however, I consider any departure from historical truth to be a serious crime.

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p A contemporary interpretation of a play docs not necessarily involve departure from period details. Everyone is familiar with productions of Shakespearean plays where the action was transferred to our own day that were no more contemporary for that. On the other hand, no amount of historical detail prevented Nemirovich-Danchenko from evoking a complex system of associations and reflections extremely useful to his contemporaries with his production of The Three Sisters. There arc things that should not be ignored. This is not the way to search for means of revealing the complex relationship between past and present. Primitive allegories, which are so often substituted for complex associations, remain totally unconvincing. The connections between past and present must be sought in more profound and subtle links.

p When we were working on The Philistines somebody suggested that Besscmyonov should be done without a beard. Why? Simply because he had always had a beard, in the hope that if we shaved him this would essentially alter the essence of the character? I rejected the proposal outright. To begin with this would have been doing violence to historical authcnticity-in those days only actors were beardless. Besides, this would have distracted the audience’s attention from essentials : they would have begun to attach importance to it and have tried to find some subtle hidden meaning, for they were used to seeing him with a beard. This would have been an unnecessary formal distortion. My chief concern was to determine the character’s place in the clashes that form the core of the main conflict. Besscmyonov was somehow never in the centre of the action, although the play contains social and human reasons why he should be. He is the most consistent of the characters, the strongest and most firm in his convictions. He has a fanatical belief in the indestructibility of the pillars of his world. And this gave us the right to make him the focal point in the play, from which the waves of his gloomy faith spread like circles in a pond.

p At the same time I wanted to make him as human as possible. The more he suffers from each loss, the more passionate and frantic his efforts to prevent the collapse of his world, the more the audience will be struck by the absurdity of what he is doing.

p Such was my interpretation of the essence of this character, and I thereby sought to break away from the traditional interpretation of the role as not being central to the development of the general conflict. In our production Bessemyonov is a tragic figure, since he is the victim of devotion to a false, unrealistic belief. I wanted to blow him up to the full size Gorky intended him to be, make him more important than he had hitherto been on the stage, and more human.

p Roughly the reverse took place with Yelena in our production. Usually 136 she was defined above all by her non-acceptance of the Bcssemyonov way of life, by her urge for independence. This was enough to make her a very positive, noble character in the play, an advanced and even somewhat progressive woman. Yet, unlike the others, she enjoys the process of living, and this is the only definite thing about her that provides grounds for setting her up in opposition to the Bcssemyonov world. She herself is a part of this world, and it is simply a question of its different reflection in her and Bessemyonov.

p For me the contrast was between Tatyana and Yelena. Tatyana is not simply an old maid who has gone sour on account of an unrequited love, but a human being who tragically breaks up before our very eyes. She loses the illusions and hopes that were connected with Nil, with escape from the house. At the end of the play she is like a miserable bird pining in captivity in a small cage from which she is destined never to escape.

p My choice and organisation of expressive means was dictated by the desire to reflect the whole world in the clashes between a small group of characters, and to capture as much as possible of Gorky’s wealth of characterisation and ideas, the conflicts in all their acutcncss. I strove to attain the maximum, in Nemirovich-Danchenko’s interpretation of maximalism in stage direction as taking circumstances to their logical conclusion without departing from the basis of reality.

p The Bessemyonov household is like a vulcano which is now dormant, now belching forth once more its molten lava. I endeavoured to express this in scenic terms through the alternation of three states: scandal, and pre- and post-scandal. We had no other state. A “scene” arises on the slightest grounds, and the lull that follows is only a short breathing space before the next explosion. The very air of the Bessemyonov house is permeated with the premonition of a new clash between its occupants. Everybody lives in a state of constant expectation of a scandal, since the smallest spark is enough to set off the smouldering passions in a new fierce blaze. There is no way of putting it out. All one can do is to wait for it to subside.

p Since this is quite senseless and absurd, and everybody is aware of it, a scandal becomes for every one of them an occasion opportunity for “play-acting”. I was intent on showing that these people lived an artificial, theatrical life, that they were the actors of that endlessly repeated comedy Neither Hither nor Thither that Nil spoke of.

This approach required a rather special stage design. Truth to life was not enough, for I was trying to emphasise another element, the publicistic note. The mises-en-scene were thus designed to ensure that the person who was at the centre of a given scandal had plenty of room, had a stage for his performance.

137 Maxim Gorky’s THE PHILISTINES, Gorky Theatre, Leningrad, 1966 Y. Lcbcclev as Besscmyonq Ludmila Sapozhnikova as Folya and K. Lavrov as Scene from The Philistines tcene from The Philistines enc from The Philistines

p The lulls between the scandals, the interludes of peace and quiet in this house, are extraordinarily short. People live cither before or after a scandal, and it is sometimes difficult to define exactly where one scandal ends and another begins. However, T felt that these intervals were extremely important. As the time goes on, the clashes become more and more violent and the intervals between them longer. I wished to stress this especially in the last act. The old Besscmyonov couple have gone to church and their children and members of the household are about to have tea. The room somehow seems brighter and more cheerful, and even Tatyana has brightened up. Yclena feels like singing, but unfortunately this is out of the question. “What a shame it’s Saturday today and the all-night service is not yet over,” she complains. Tn our production, to stress to the maximum Yelena’s joie de vivre which is such that she does not stop short of mild blasphemy, and the natural desire of the others to make merry, to extend this rare moment of “peace and quiet”, we had Yelcna deliver this line with a mischievous smile instead of seriously, and go straight off to Piotr’s room to fetch the guitar. Then she strikes up with “Those Evening Bells”, in which everyone joins in, and leads in to a rollicking, dashing improvisation. At this point the old couple enter, coldly dignified in their Sunday best, and the merriment is over. Before us are two hostile camps, completely incomprehensible to each other. From this moment on there will not be a single moment of silence, and the action rushes forward to the denouement.

p If we make the basic meaning of the play the idea of people living an artificial “invented” life, all the elements in the play must be subordinated to this basic idea. Moreover, the means of enlisting them to this purpose should not be superficial truth to life but something else.

p Off-stage remarks play a most important part in this play. It is well known that Gorky was very fond of resorting to this method for creating a certain atmosphere. This is an essential part of the play, and since it concerns the text itself there is no getting away from it anyway. But this is not enough. I felt that the off-stage remarks could reveal another, hidden meaning, that awaited decipherment.

p At the end of Act Two, when Tatyana has accidentally overheard the declarations between Nil and Polya, and Nil accuses her of eavesdropping, we hear Bcsscmyonov’s voice from off-stage: “Stepanida! Who dropped that coal? What do you mean, you see it? Pick it all up at once!” This serves to accentuate the uninterrupted course of the daily round household activities. We are being told that life goes on in its old monotonous way whatever dramas and complications there may be in individual destinies. But I saw something else in this as Emma Popova as Tatyana and K. Lavrov as Nil 138 well: it provided an opportunity to stress the petty vulgarity of what has just occurred between the three people on the stage.

p This off-stage remark must be presented as heard by Tatyana, for whom something terrible has happened. If these words are filtered through Tatyana’s mind they will heighten the impact of what has happened, force her to see once again Nil’s expression of profound contempt. In our production it was at this moment that Tatyana conceived the idea of suicide.

p I sought a combination of tragedy and vulgarity throughout. If asked to what genre I consider the play to belong, I should be hard put to it to find an answer. As for the style, I should define it with an invented word-“tragivulgar”.

p When it came to the task of embodying the conception in the characters, it was a question of observing the laws of the elementary existence, justified by the logic of inner life of each person. It was a matter of rejecting preconceived scenic solutions and sticking to the simple, unadorned truth.

p The scene where Nil and Polya declare their love for each other has traditionally been played as the billing and cooing of two love-birds, whose love is something of beauty in this terrible world. But if we look at the hard facts of the matter, who is Nil? He is an engine-driver, a healthy fellow on the whole, but fairly chaste-that is to say, he probably does not frequent brothels, and Polya is, if not his first, then one of his first women. Certainly he is her first man. Their love is earthy and sensual. That is why I made the declaration scene rather frank and unashamed. Tatyana unfortunately saw it, and Nil is embarrassed because she saw something that a third party ought not to witness. This is what makes it so vulgar and terrible. Nil is ashamed not because of what Tatyana has overheard, but because of what she has seen. He is beside himself, and angrily hurls his unjust accusation at her. After such an experience, the thought of suicide is understandable.

p It is the same throughout: the tragic becomes vulgar, and vulgarity leads to tragedy. It is a vicious circle, from which no one can escape.

p Surely Bessemyonov is not incapable of understanding that Nil and Polya make a fine pair and that their marriage is not a subject for a scandal. He understands it as well as anybody else. The dinner scene, when Bessemyonov learns that Nil is going to marry Polya, begins perfectly calmly in our production. Bessemyonov tries to fight down his anger that is ready to burst forth and stifle it. But the imaginery relationships between people, all that he calls order, are stronger than him, and control his reason and logic. And in the end he explodes violently.

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p Once again the tragic and the vulgar arc interwoven in an illogical, absurd fabric.

p I am speaking of what I was guided by in this work, of my search for my own concrete solution. I deliberately avoid referring to the picture of the age, or the social significance of the play and the characters, for all this is inherent in the work itself and will be present in any interpretation whatsoever. But if I produce something that only illustrates those aspects of the play that have become commonplace, my production will not have the right to command the attention of the present-day audience, since it will not make them any wiser than they already arc.

p What makes Gorky’s play so contemporary is the dramatist’s uncompromising attitude of condemnation for philistinism as a dangerous category that is not simply a vestige of the past, but represents a real danger today. What makes the production of the play so necessary is Gorky’s own interpretation of the concept as a senseless vortex of fctishiscd concepts in which people spin. Can we’honestly say that we arc free from this today? Are we always able to break free and escape from the vortex? The sphere in which we rotate may be different from the one in the play, it may be different in individual cascs-for some cupidity, for others a thirst for glory, for yet others clinging to obsolescent idcas-but it is all petty-bourgeois philistinism.

p If we compare art to a magnifying glass, we can say that our aim was to examine through it the phenomenon itself. Not individual people, but the phenomenon itself, which is fraught with danger for any age. The audience should adopt a philosophical attitude to the life we present, and sec it in its broad contours, not directly but mediated.

p But in order that this distance may be maintained, it is essentially that there should be an element in the production that continually brings the audience back to this position, compelling them to sec everything from this standpoint. In our production this clement was the music. I am not speaking of the period music that was intended and suggested by the author of the play, but of the music we introduced, which was charged with special meaning.

p We had the balalaika and the mandolin playing the simple melody of a “cruel” love song or a tune such as one might expect to hear in a working-class suburb suddenly breaking into the action, enabling the audience to make a better evaluation of events. In other words, the music here was intended to create the alienation effect of which Brccht writes in his theory of the theatre. When one of the inevitable scandals in the Bessemyonov household reaches its climax and the audience is under the spell of the hysterical “play-acting” of the characters, this little melody rises to enable the audience to look upon the scandal 140 with irony and at the same time give the characters an opportunity to get their breath back and gather their strength for the next bout.

p We used music to help the audience to adopt an attitude of wisedetachment and let the characters continue in their vanity alone.

p Naturally, as a matter of course, the question arose as to what scenery would best fit the bill. I naturally wanted something that would correspond to the general principle of our solution, so that the outline of the interior would be natural and familiar and the scenery illusionistic. When the curtain rises the audience sec a normal box-set, in strict accordance with Gorky’s directions. Only somewhere in the middle of the second act does it suddenly strike them: Why, there are no walls! We built an extremely authentic room, but left out the walls, and stretched the “wallpaper” across the backcloth. On the one hand, this creates a perfect illusion of a real home. On the other hand, we are able to change the colour of the wallpaper at will, according to the mood of the passage in progress, by altering the light illuminating the canvas without changing the lighting on the rest of the stage. And so it is from the point of view of basic authenticity too, for the wallpaper in any room changes shade depending on whether it is morning or evening, a sunny or a cloudy day.

p In organising the scenic area in this way I was pursuing one aim, that of making this clement of the production fit into the general pattern of the chosen solution. In the sense that this is a perfectly normal room, only since there are no walls the house is not simply a house but a part of the great wide world.

p This was what determined the significance of the sounds. The wheezing gramophone, the squeaking door, which really ought to be seen to only nobody ever gets round to it, and the clock striking-thcse are not simply naturalistic sound effects, necessary to create atmosphere, but details symbolising the life in this house.

p In the course of work on a Gorky play all the components acquire significance for the revelation of the basic motive of the work, Gorky’s reason for writing it-his merciless, uncompromising attitude to all that is base and his virile love for the moral health of man-the basis of the harmonious society of the future.

p We have five Russian classics in our current repertoire. The characters and ideas in the great models of Russian and world literature retain all their power today and give tremendous scope for the imagination and raise present problems whose solution is essential if there is to be true mastery and a profound understanding of civic duty. Moreover, the classics provide the high criteria in the theatre which are essential in approaching contemporary Soviet plays and in choosing foreign works.

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p The classic contains something of value for all times and helps us in our struggle for the new man. Each play in its own way. It is thus wrong to regard the question of interpreting the classics today as a matter for abstract speculation: it is necessary to decide what is of value for today in each given play. And if the essence of the play, that which is most necessary, is revealed from within, then the play will be vitally alive and the characters will not become wax-work figures despite their authentic period costumes and make-up.

p In this way contact will be established with the present without any superficial additions or attempts to evoke individual direct correspondences with the present day and contrive to bring the classics up to date with external devices, seeing this as proof that one’s production is innovatory.

p In general, the question of tradition and innovation remains one of the most vital in current theory, although it seems to me that it has been solved long since in practice in the Soviet theatre where these concepts were always intimately related. Thus, Stanislavsky is unthinkable without the Maly Theatre, just as Meycrhold is unthinkable without Stanislavsky. In My Life in Art Stanislavsky is full of enthusiastic praise for the great Yermolova and Fedotova, as a supporter of their acting method. He makes a theoretical generalisation of their experience, adopting it as his own. For several years Meyerhold went along with the Art Theatre, accumulating experience for the creation of his own new programme on the boards of a young novel theatre.

p Continuity in art involves rejection of the obsolete, which is what determines progress, the movement forward to new discoveries and innovations. This is natural, for repetition in art is a step backwards, and we often confuse literal repetition with tradition, a practice which many find convenient, since the proper use of traditions involves ceaseless energetic search for the new. It is far less trouble to adopt the approach that the classics need not be in any way related to the present. This sterile “museum” approach to the classics has done a great deal of damage both to the classics and the theatres that produce them in this way, for their painstaking didacticism have made audiences indifferent and even frightened them away.

p For me the laws of acting skill discovered by Stanislavsky remain inviolate. In this sense I regard tradition as sacred. But if Stanislavsky were alive today he would find many different solutions, and would search and experiment just as we do to the best of our abilities.

p I am convinced that it is essential to have mastered the method of physical action in order to present Brecht properly. True, Stanislavsky never produced Brecht, he was not in time to do so, but we ought not to forget his production of Warm Heart where the characters and their 142 relationships were sharpened to the point of open didacticism, which heightened the reality of what was happening, every step of the scenic action revealing new layers of the human soul.

p Here, as in every great teaching, it is the spirit not the letter that counts. And if we regard Stanislavsky as an eternally searching artist, we shall find the mark of his influence in the best creations of world art, just as we shall find that of Mayakovsky, Vakhtangov and Brecht.

p Another point about innovation in approaching the classics today. I feel that innovation at present is very much associated with determining the exact genre of a work. Each play contains its own genre key which opens the life-giving spring of the particular nature of the work itself, and not drama, comedy, tragedy, or what have you, in general. The genre a classic is regarded as belonging to is invariably determined by conventions dictated by the aesthetic principles of the age.

p Today aesthetic principles are becoming ever richer and more varied, and it is a shame not to take full advantage of the experience of many generations.

p Griboyedov intended his Woe from Wit to be a comedy, and indeed it is a comedy according to the formal features of eighteenth-century drama. But when we read the play today and go deeply into its moral significance, its human content, we have every reason to reflect on the real destinies of the heroes of this great work where the passions acquire a tragic impact. Nobody dies: Chatsky drives off in his carriage, and we have every reason to suppose that he will find the strength to continue to live and struggle. But this would be another Chatsky, and until he is reborn we must say goodbye to this Chatsky in the course of the play, and do so properly, without glossing anything over, without smoothing things with century-old cliches, for we arc interested in the man’s real destiny in the conditions of Famusov’s world and not the restricted conventions of stage comedy.

p When working on The Barbarians, I was convinced from the outset that the many directors who regarded it as a play of manners were mistaken. We were not going out of our way to make our production “different” but the deeper we delved into the atmosphere of the play, the stronger our conviction became that it was really a tragicomedy.

p The clash between provincial barbarians and “civilised” barbarians is more acute and dynamic if this genre definition is adopted. The comic becomes genuinely amusing and the dramatic becomes tragic. We endeavoured to achieve this both in the general and in the particular.

p In this respect a key point became the moment in the last act when Nadezhda Monakhova, shattered by the collapse of her ideal, embodied in Cherkun, asks Tsyganov to step out into the porch with her. “With 143 you—anywhere! Even onto the roof!” he says in reply. And hardly has the laughter subsided in the theatre than a shot rings out. Nadezhda has shot herself.

p In many theatres this line was omitted at the request of the actress playing Nadezhda, as reducing the tragic tension. But we can assume that Gorky knew what he was doing when he wrote this line. In this tragic farce set in a small provincial town at the turn of the century people fail to understand one another. And for me this remark was decisive in determining the genre of the play, in revealing the nature of the characters’ relationships. I regarded this situation of a clever man, with a kind, loving heart, totally unable to understand another person’s feelings, as the quintessence of spiritual barbarism. Tsyganov failed to realise that the wound inflicted on Nadezhda Monakhova might well prove fatal. He hoped that a joke would make everything alright. But for Nadezhda, unaccustomed to making compromises, this was the end, and a tragedy occurs before Tsyganov’s eyes.

p There are many such examples in this play, and they are all indications of the style and genre. We tried to overlook none of them, in order to bring out the distinctive features of the play that make it unlike any other.

Nowadays form and content are inseparable: the content has become much more important and with it the choice of an appropriate form. There is no offering one to the total exclusion of the other. The form is hidden in the content, and it is our duty to find it. Sometimes this involves throwing overboard all one’s preconceptions in order to reveal the psychological clement in a grotesque comedy and pungent tragicomedy in the play of manners.