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p Once we have discovered the genre of
the play, we proceed to the task of translating it into scenic terms, realising our conception in theatrical forms, when the degree of convention, the whole material side of the production, has been determined, the author’s style is clear, and the director has already anticipated the “nature of the feelings”, the time has come to pass to the next stage of the director’s work-the shaping and realisation of the conception.

p The director must work on the first and second stages of a production independently, and only when he is familiar with all the material and has penetrated the spirit of the play, and has determined its genre, can he consider himself ready to work with the actors and set about shaping the plan of the work and realising it in concrete terms.

p There are two basic approaches to work on the conception which are completely opposite.

p One is to let the conception take shape in the course of work on the production, in the selection of circumstances, in collaboration with the actors. This can be regarded as an empirical approach, and the less preconceived ideas the director has the better.

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p The other approach is for the director to know exactly what he wants beforehand, down to the last detail. In this case the director’s conception must be as precise as an engineer’s blueprint, admitting no alterations or chance modifications in the course of its concrete embodiment.

p I personally am against both these approaches. I am against the first because the artistic image is left to the mercy chance. If I concede that everything must arise of its own accord and my job is simply to organise the creative process, I am depriving myself of the opportunity of achieving an artistically integrated production and at the same time of the active role and sense of purpose that are the hallmark of the director’s profession. This approach leads straight to dilettantism.

p I am against the second approach because it deprives the actors of all opportunity for using their initiative and capacity for improvisation. The director is driving the actor into a Procrustean bed, where he is unable to make an active contribution. The director thereby loses the most precious and rewarding aspect of his work-collaboration between himself and the actors. The director’s real job is not to draw up a precise plan but to discover the essential elements in each “piece” of the work, episode by episode, scene by scene, which decide the tone of the whole. To discover them, not make a blueprint of them. Once they have been found the director can proceed to realise his solution in practice, inspire the whole cast with them so that they become his co-authors.

p Thus, after traversing the hard road from finding the ideal intention via the stage of understanding the genre of the material we come to the realisation of the plan, to the search for a concrete scenic solution. While at the first stage of work I protested against thinking in concrete scenic terms, at this stage I am all for embodying the conception in the “flesh” of the definitive solution.

p What exactly arc the director’s conception and the solution? There still exist sharp differences of opinion on this matter.

p As I see it, the conception must comprise a civic, ideological interpretation of the work, not yet realised in concrete forms. The conception is the unrealised solution, the anticipation of the solution. The solution is the conception realised in all its scenic components, and above all in the actor.

p The solution is the materialisation of the conception. The conception must contain ideas that serve as the basis for finding the solution. Basically, I see the conception as the attempt to convey the solution. How must one expound the conception in order to make it tangible rather than to convince the actors and oneself even that it is the right one? For this the following conditions must be observed. Firstly, one 180 must make sure that the basic subject of the work is clear, as the precondition. Secondly, one must follow closely the inner life of the characters.

p The solution for each scene must be based on the psychological motivation of the characters’ behaviour. A solution is only genuine provided it is linked with the psychology of the people whose clashes underlie the conflict and action of the play. The emotional stimulus of each scene must be clear in order to create the necessary environment to bring out the inner life of the play to the fullest extent. One must find the psychological tuning fork, so to speak, for each scene in order to give soul to the solution.

p Finally, it is essential to say how all this will be expressed in concrete visual terms, how it will be related to the actual scenic embodiment. One must demonstrate that the solution one has chosen is the only valid one. Having forced yourself to formulate your conception you will have a definite criterion to go by and during rehearsals you will be able to test whether what you intended has been successfully realised or not, and if not, if it is because the actor has failed to realise your conception correctly, or if it is the conception itself that is at fault. Moreover, one must convey all this to the actors with conviction and in very definite terms.

p Different directors will have a very different interpretation of a play even at the conception stage for the simple reason that every director sees the life that underlies the play in his own way, perceiving the events through the prism of his own individual personality. One director may insist on a pause, for example, where another will consider it unnecessary, and both will be right provided their solution is based on the logic of the characters’ natures, which each of them will sec in his own way.

p Thus when A. D. Popov expounded his conception of The Taming of the Shrew he was most concerned with the relationship between Katharina and Petruchio. The tradition in all theatres and all ages was to stress the strife between them, but Popov based his production on the idea that they fell in love at first sight. This was a fundamentally new approach, and it explains why the director was so interested in the relationship between Katharina and Petruchio, since it was the basis of his whole production.

p But it is one thing to formulate one’s conception in general terms and quite another to find concrete scenic expression for it. One of the basic principles of real art is generalisation, but it must always be achieved through the particular. It is thus essential for the director to choose among the given circumstances those which will best serve the super-objective. This will ensure that the solution has vitality and that 181 a really important human theme emerges. We strove to achieve this, for example, in our production of Sholokhov’s novel Virgin Soil Upturned where the theme was a human feat and not simply the story of ;i good collective-farm chairman who got things working properly and made a success of things “down on the farm”. This means that the solution has to be such as to interest and move anybody, and not only those in some way connected with collective-farm life. Only then will the play cease to be a propaganda piece on the subject of country life and pass muster as a real work of art. We must adhere to these criteria unless the play is to become a cold, indifferent, rational diagram, a “study on a theme”.

p Thus the director must speak of the real circumstances of a given scene, and not about such matters as at what point the revolving stage will go into motion and where the lights will fade.

p A solution will only be a genuine solution when no other alternative seems possible. And this can only be on condition that the inner life of the characters is the leitmotiv of the director’s expose. The inner life is not the text and the first logical explanation that strikes one. If that were the case, there would be no need for the theatre. The most important thing is how one understands a character’s words, what lies behind them, what is going on. The solution can emerge from this.

p If I simply tell the actors that in the finale of The Death of the Squadron the sailors will come on one after another, is that enough? Of course not. I must help them feel the need for this solution, and this involves showing how the sailors’ behaviour is perfectly logical when they begin to wash the deck five minutes before scuttling the ship. This can only be done by revealing the sailor’s mentality. Then I shall be able to prove that this is the only possible solution and thereby convince the actors that they can play a whole seven-minute scene in silence and sustain the interest of the audience.

p If a director is not prepared to properly explain his conception to the actors then it is better not to mention it at all, for it is almost certain that he has no genuine solution to offer.

p A nebulous solution is a frequent failing in our work. It is possible to base a production on essentially correct but general and vague reflections. But this is not to be regarded as a genuine solution, since all connection between the imagery of the work and the means of its scenic embodiment, that concreticity that is the very essence of the scenic image, will be lacking.

p The director’s solution means finding the direct connection between the essence of the “ideal” conception and the means of realising it, finding the way of expressing the essence of the play’s content in visual terms and convince the audience of the correctness of your ideological 182 standpoint through an accurate scenic solution and its realisation in the actor. It is important not to plunge into reflections about the play but to see it in space and time, in definite tempo rhythm. For each work it is necessary to find the one and, only solution appropriate to the work, and author in question.

p Only too often we tend to get carried away with discussing the play instead of searching for its concrete scenic solution. The result is an illustration rather than visual penetration of the essence of the play.

p How then can one decide whether what one has found is a genuine solution or simply a “mirage”, “discussion on the theme” and in the final analysis “illustration”?

p Visual expressiveness and feeling are the criteria of the genuinescenic solution.

p This is not to say that the rational element is totally absent but simply that the process of cognising a work is the way from feeling to reason.

p Take, for example, Act One of the play Mashenka by A. Afinogenov. Leonid Borisovich calls to see Professor Okayomov. Coming in to the dark room from the street he has the natural desire to turn on the light. This is a perfectly logical action that is psychologically justified. But for me, as a spectator, this has another meaning too: when this man enters the house he brings light and warmth with him.

p The spectator will not grasp this other meaning unless it is percolated through his sensual perception. It is important that in an authentic, psychological play everything should pass through this medium. In Shakespeare the quality of this mediation is different, and it is different again in Pushkin’s Mozart and fallen. It is important that the nature of the feelings be appropriate to the respective playwright.

p The film Moulin Rouge about the life of the painter Toulouse Lautrec is a fine example of vivid expressiveness of this sort. Take the scene of the break-up between the hero and his beloved. He remains alone, with his painful reflections, and then comes the climax of the tragedy-he turns on the gas intending to commit suicide. It is six o’clock in the morning and he sits in his room, and we can hear the hiss of the escaping gas. Suddenly his eyes fall on his easel and he has a sudden urge to paint something for the last time. He approaches the easel, takes off his jacket and picks up a brush. He becomes so immersed in the creative process that when he begins to feel overcome he automatically opens the window and carries on. Fresh air and light flood the room and he is saved from death by his work.

p Here the author has expressed a profound idea through a very simple situation with great psychological authenticity. If the artist did not die it was only because his creative work saved him. Every genuine solu- 183 tion is bound to excite the imagination of the audience. Unless this happens we simply perceive the bare rational idea and remain uninvolvcd emotionally.

p A genuine scenic solution in my opinion must involve not only the features inherent in the conception, the concrete plastic and rhythmic forms, but also an unexpected clement that seems to blow open the author’s text from the inside. This unexpected touch must be infectious and at the same time warranted and logically justified.

p Unless this unexpected element is found the scenic solution will be insipid and uninspiring. Yet unless it is called for by the logic of the scene and the logic of life it will be pure sham and pretentiousness on the part of the director.

p Only this combination of the unexpected and the logical can produce an interesting and felicitous scenic solution. I must repeat that the felicitous solution is not to be understood as a blueprint of the future production, but as a world expressed in terms of images where the actor can breathe freely, without feeling in any way confined.

p Take the wedding scene in the Vakhtangov Theatre production of Arbuzov’s Irkutsk Story. The guests are sitting singing round a vast table almost as big as the stage. Then somebody suggests they dance. Everybody lines up gaily on one side of the table and the revolving stage begins to turn so that the table is carried away to the side. This solution has vitality and even bravado, it has an element of surprise, but it is not simply a clever device thought up by the director Yevgeny Simonov for effect: it is dictated by inner necessity, by the emotional key of the whole scene.

p I remember the time I was searching desperately for a solution for the finale of The Death of the Squadron where the crew are abandoning ship. What was the key to the tragedy of this moment? I realised that a ship is a sailor’s home. But how was I to make a person who has nothing to do with the sea or the navy grasp the full impact of this tragic moment and feel all the pain the characters must have experienced?

p In this case I employed the device of repetition to produce the unexpected element and the required emotional pitch.

p The sailors leave the ship. The first one leaves in cool military fashion, then a second, then a third, and so on. From the point of view of establishing the basic logical chain, five or six might have been enough, and one could ring down the curtain. But no, the sailors continued to march off one by one-the fifteenth, the sixteenth .... This gave the audience the feeling of endless motion conveying the profound tragedy of the departure.

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p This is not to say that repetition invariably produces an effect involving the unexpected element. It is a question of searching for the one and only possible solution in every individual case.

p Shostakovich did this brilliantly in his Seventh Symphony. We listen calmly to the first and second beat, but by the fourth we feel anxiety stirring and by the twelfth we realise that we are witnessing a human tragedy. The composer achieved this effect by the simple device of straightforward repetition.

p When I embarked on the production of Irkutsk Story I saw that the play contained no end of opportunities for director’s cliches no matter how fresh the mise-en-scene and realisation of the theme might becliches in the solution for the Choir and the scenic area and all the external effects that seemed to be crying out to be employed. Thus, to begin with I faced a negative task, the task of dismissing all this, especially since the play gave plenty of scope for imagination.

p There are certain dramatic works for which a director can hardly fail to find a solution appropriate to the author’s idea. V. Rozov’s plays are an example. In the numerous different productions of one and the same play of his I have noticed that practically all of them, to a greater or lesser degree, conveyed what was essential in the play for Rozov. Arbuzov, on the other hand, is one of those playwrights whose works are more often badly produced than well produced. In some productions all that should have been suppressed in the author simply forces its way to the surface. In Irkutsk Story there is a serious danger of it becoming a domestic melodrama. In the stage directions and the lines there is a great deal that a director ought to dismiss taking care, however, not to throw out the corn with the chaff.

p Naturally, the first question we had to resolve was the function and significance of the Choir. I regarded the Choir not as an auxiliary, extraneous group of people but as dramatis personae living in the future and telling the audience about their own past which is the audience’s present. This solution was suggested to me by the following line: “A mighty hydro-electric power station was built in these parts in the middle of the twentieth century.” Thus we have two sets of characters on the stage: one acting and the other reflecting on their own actions or the actions of their comrades. When they reflect, they exist in the year two thousand, for example, and the whole play is the story of their struggle for themselves, their struggle for purity, for purification from the slime of the past. When they reflect, they are people of the age of communism, when they act in the given circumstances of the play, they are people with all our contradictions and complexities.

p The through-action of the play is thus a story of man’s road of trials and soul-searching efforts to overcome, to transcend himself 185 and become Man with a capital M, the Man of the future. I regard this as a story/action at once brave and stereoscopically clear, without the embellishment usually associated with the word “ reminiscence”.

p Thus, two levels emerged, two times, two ages, two forms of existence for the actors—“I am” in the given circumstances and “I am” reflecting on these given circumstances, on my past actions.

p It was necessary to find the appropriate expressive means for this. Hence the conventional device of dividing the stage area into two, a lower and an upper levels. When the actors are on the upper level they are in the future. When they come down to the lower level, to the area of fragmentary details, they are in the present. They have only to climb two steps and they are already able to contemplate what is happening today from the vantage point of centuries ahead. They mix and communicate with those who are acting below. Coming down to the lower level, Victor takes off his jacket and throws it to his comrades so that he is in his shirt sleeves and takes a cloth cap from his pocket. No change of make-up was necessary. We sought combinations which would enable us to resolve everything in the manner of the variety show. The whole creative process took place before the audience’s very eyes.

p Moreover, I tried to avoid direct indication, “the pointing finger”, spelling things out for the audience, and to express everything through visual sensations. We did not hang up a calendar to help the audience determine the date of the action. The important thing for us was to establish for ourselves the nature of the relationship between the two time levels, so that the correct feelings could be imparted to the audience and the idea of the work, the author’s purpose in writing it would be conveyed to them through this sensual perception which everyone would formulate in his own way.

p A solution may or may not be controversial, it may be a success or a failure, it may or may not be understood. I am speaking here simply of the paths explored, the lines of thought. It goes without saying that there may be losses on the way, and that the most sincere and painful search may lead to incorrect results.

p I wrestled for years with the problem of producing Woe from Wit. Everything I have said above about the scenic embodiment of the classics-about traditionalism, academicism and anthologism-fully applies to Griboyedov’s great work. I had a dual attitude to the play. On the one hand, I loved the comedy with its noble and profound theme of the tragedy of wit, and on the other hand, I felt it was somewhat unscenic and archaic, and that the heavy text posed insoluble problems.

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p Thinking of the various productions of the play I had seen, I realised that it was far more interesting to read than to see it performed on the stage. In reading it one derived pleasure from every word, but when hearing the same word pronounced on the stage it seems somehow terribly familiar, almost stale.

p I remembered the story of how the work had first appeared. It began life as a seditious, clandestine chronicle of the age and was the most topical and actual work of the time. When Griboycdov read his expose in the form of a play to a carefully chosen group of friends, behind closed doors, by candlelight, the genuine flame of civic ardour arose immediately.

p But most theatres staged it in such a way as to suppress the oratorial nature of the play, as a comedy of manners where every word had to be “true of life”. The apogee of this aoproach was Stanislavsky’s magnificent study published in Volume Four of his works, quite remarkable for its imaginative power and his ability to subjugate the entire text of the comedy to the logic of life, an interpretation which he unfortunately never realised in practice. Stanislavsky put an end to the conventional traditional manner and created a new tradition of the scenic embodiment of the play.

p Yet for Griboyedov the play was simply a vehicle for the expression of political views. It was not so much a play as a fierce civic protest, written in play form. Griboyedov made no attempt to present an accurate picture of Moscow life and morals in the early nineteenth century. Perhaps the dramatic form was simply a necessary disguise? He attached no importance to it, and that is why he did not attempt any innovations in this respect, but chose a traditional and even rather a trivial theatrical structure. I repeat, the most important thing in the play is its civic pathos, its impassioned social plea. It was here that the key to its solution must be sought.

p But how must the play be performed so that the vitality of Griboycdov’s thought was present in the very nature of the actor’s existence on the stage? I felt that this was the most difficult and at the same time the most important thing to achieve in the solution. In setting ourself the goal of conveying the publicistic aspect of the work to the audience we could not, even had we so wished, by-pass what Stanislavsky had done to bring realism into the acting of the play. But what Stanislavsky found was a means for us and not an end. On the basis of the laws of the organic life of the actor on the stage we had to find a publicistic and not a slice-of-life solution for Griboyedov’s comedy.

p Why was it, for example, that many of Russia’s greatest minds, including Pushkin, regarded Chatsky as not very bright. Because he “cast pearls before swine”. The tradition was for Chatsky to address 187 himself now to Skalozub, now to Famusov, now to Molchalin, whereas in fact his words should be addressed directly to the audience.

p I remember reading in an old history of the theatre thatM. S. Shchepkin when he played Famusov addressed his lines to the audience thereby placing the other actors in an awkward position. The most realist of actors in the Russian theatre, Shchepkin sensed that this was essential to preserve the publicistic nature of the work.

p Mr. N. and Mr. D., for example, must on no account be played in an entirely realist manner, in the narrow sense of the word. According to the established tradition it is necessary to see a live person behind Mr. N. and invent a biography for him and so on. Why then did Griboyedov call him simply Mr. N.? He could easily have given him a name had he so wished. We are thus clearly dealing with a special kind of typification which requires a different style of acting and a different nature of feelings to those to which we are accustomed.

p Woe from Wit is addressed directly to the audience. It is not a question of occasional asides, but of the entire play being addressed to the audience. So I had an idea: why not have the play read rather than acted? Not literally of course. What I meant was that the manner of the acting should be similar to that of the famous reader of plays, Yakhontov, for example, with the same degree of convention. This seemed to me to be the right basis for the whole production and especially for the character of the hero, Chatsky. Then there would benothing artificial and phoney about Chatsky’s monologues, for he would be addressing the audience and not the other characters.

p As for the other characters, there must be a kind of struggle between various groups to win the audience to their side.

p Let us see how the scene where Chatsky and Molchalin are together in Act Three worked in our production. Chatsky stands at one side of the stage and Molchalin at the other. Chatsky delivers his monologue about Molchalin and the audience understands roughly the following behind his actual words: “Dear guests, Molchalin will come in any moment now. The time has come to find out whether it is really possible for such a preposterous thing to have happened as for Sofia to have fallen in love with this fool. Ah, there he is! Good day, Alexander Stepanovich. How do you like him then? Just listen to the things he says! He is a complete imbecile. You do realise, of course? How ridiculous! She can’t possibly love a man like that!”

p What about Molchalin? If he is really played as an imbecile, then the whole point is lost. He is no fool, far from it. But he realises that he can only occupy a place in the society of Famusov and Khlyostova on condition that he pretends to be no wiser than the others. Hence, to quote Saltykov-Shchedrin, his “irresistible desire to seem more stupid 188 than his master”. This is the essence of Molchalin. And from this point of view, from the standpoint of his philosophy of life, he regards Chatsky as the fool.

p That was how we determined the nature of the feelings, the manner of acting for this play. The cast was not to act as though their thoughts had only just occurred to them. The audience was perfectly familiar with the text of the play, it held no surprises for them, so there would anyway be no startling revelations in this direction. Since the actor was speaking lines that have long since entered our everyday vocabulary and become common household sayings, he delivers them as if to say to the audience: “As you know...” or “It is common knowledge that....” In this way the ground is prepared for every phrase, even the most well-worn, and the audience is involved in the conflict taking place on the stage.

p Words were to be all-important in our production, and the visual elements were to be presented separately from the actor’s life on the stage, indirectly. This is inherent in the fabric of the work itself, where Griboyedov has alternated the visual and verbal action. Thus, a monologue is suddenly interrupted by the stage direction: “Not a word is spoken. The couple dance in silence”.

p Directors are wont to devote endless effort to a detailed “lifelike” recreation of the ball scene. Yet this is quite unnecessary. The dances should transmit to the maximum Griboyedov’s poetic rhythms. The waltz must last as long as the stage directions indicate, no more, no less. And perhaps nowhere as in this play are the stage directions such an accurate guide to the nature and rhythm of the interpretation. It is therefore quite wrong to have the words of a monologue accompanied by background music. The words and the music should alternate. Perfect accuracy of rhythm is essential here, and during rehearsals we used a metronome.

p What about Chatsky’s cry of “Look!” at the end of Act Three? This is far more than the final stop marking the end of the act. Something phantasmagorical occurs here, and it is necessary to find the appropriate visual means for expressing it. What exactly happens? The waltz is playing and then the dancing couples disappear so that Chatsky is left alone. He delivers his monologue and then turns and says: “Look!” and the waltz begins again. But this time it is not simply a waltz, it is the waltz as seen through Chatsky’s sick imagination now that he has been practically driven out of his mind by the events that have taken place. How is this to be presented in scenic, visual terms?

p We did it as follows. First the couples gyrate on the unmoving stage, but after Chatsky’s monologue the couples are static and it is the stage 189 that revolves slowly, with the actors in fixed dance poses. Every character is in his own pose, which is however not exaggerated to the point of the grotesque. He is himself and no mistake but himself perfectly immobile. This phantasmogoric mime slowly slides by before Chatsky’s inflamed imagination. I felt that the style of the work required this solution of presenting the phantasmogoric in immobility, since after such a dynamic, lively scene, only immobility could provide the necessary emotional pitch.

p I repeat: our chief aim was to reveal the intrinsic publicistic essence of the play. This being so, we did not seek a precise genre definition. The play is a mixture of diverse genre elements. It combines the tragedy of wit in the Russia of Nicholas I, a satire of Famusov’s society .and a straightforward comedy situation. The important thing is not an accurate definition of genre but an accurate choice of solution, and this is what we sought since only a sharp publicistic note, the fierce struggle between two irreconcilable philosophies of life, polemicism taken to the stage of open discussion involving the whole audience could make Woe from Wit of interest to, and directly valid for, the present-day audience.

p There arc works of art that become a part of the lives of vast numbers of people, a part of ourselves, as it were.

p We felt that Julius Fučik’s Notes from the Gallows on which my production The Road to Immortality at the Lenin Komsomol Theatre in Leningrad was based was one such work. Every page, every line of this searing book produces a tremendous impact.

p Shine, oh blessed sun! Thee I hail.
As in the radiance of dawning day
The lamp on my table turns pale,
So in the immortal sunlight of thought
Does false wisdom flicker and fade.
Welcome, oh sun! Avaunt thee, shade!

p These words of the great Russian poet Pushkin serve as a perfect definition of the bright optimistic content of Fučik’s book, written by a man who gave his life in the struggle against fascism but acquired immortality by virtue of his thought and his faith in a bright future for his people.

p A genuine people’s hero, Fučik embodies the best qualities of his people, drawing inexhaustible power of faith in victory from his boundless love for them.

p The strength of Julius Fučik lies in the beauty and grandeur of his life’s achievement, his courageous unremitting struggle against fascism, and the tremendous optimism which inspired that struggle.

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p Another essential feature of his heroic activity is that his struggle against nazism was primarily a struggle for peace. The happy futurehe dreamed of and for which he gave his life was part of the general struggle of progressive mankind for freedom and happiness. This is why we cherish him so today, at a time when progressives round the globe are struggling for world peace. We can join Fučik in saying: ”We Communists love peace. That is why we are fighting. We are fighting against all who engender war. We arc fighting for a social system in which a criminal will never again be able to emerge and in the interests of a group of bosses send millions of people to their death, to the crazed fury of war for the destruction of values that the living need .... That is why we Communists are sparing no effort and do not fear sacrifices in the struggle for genuine peace.”

p Fučik, the soldier of peace—this was the idea we tried to convey throughout the play.

p As soon as the curtain went up on the First Act the audience saw a sign framed by the flags of the nations which read: “In the name of progressive mankind the World Peace Congress has awarded the first honorary prize to the dauntless fighter for communism and brave son of his people, the writer Julius Fučik.” And the play closed with the word Peace on the curtain in various languages.

p An atmosphere of creative elan prevailed during work on the production. Everyone was eager to help bring out the basic idea of the play as clearly and vividly as possible. How did the production arise, what doubts assailed us, what problems did we have to grapple with, how did we overcome them, and what principles were we guided by in our work?

p In his speech at the International Peace Prize presentation ceremony, Pablo Neruda said: “We live in an age which in tomorrow’s literature will be called the age of Fučik, the age of simple heroism. Historyhas known no work more simple and more noble than this book, just as few, if any, works have been written in more terrible circumstances. This is explained by the fact that Fučik was a New Man . . . .”

p It was this characterisation of Fučik as a progressive people’s hero, embodying the most typical features of the contemporary revolutionary that we endeavoured to stress in our production. We immediately felt the link between the destiny and feat of our hero and the destiny of other peace fighters. Fučik stood side by side with Nazim Hikmet, Pablo Neruda and the members of the French Resistance. But in a. spectacle about the life of the people’s hero of Czechoslovakia Julius Fučik, it was important to find also the concrete aspect of his feat, •determining the distinctive nature of his heroic destiny.

p In order to fully understand both the features common to all the 191 progressive fighters of our age and the features peculiar to individual Fučik, we made a thorough study of all the material we could find on the life and activity of Fučik himself and carefully examined the most vivid and significant facts in the biography of people’s heroes of other countries who dedicated their lives to the struggle with fascism.

p Fučik’s individuality and charm are most powerfully reflected in his own Notes from the’ Gallows, and it was clear that this should serve as the basis for our production, and that we must organise it in such a way as to preserve the characteristic features of thoughts and actions and his personal tone so as to “resurrect” Fučik and let him address the audience directly. Fučik must appear as he appears in the book he wrote shortly before his death, in the book which Pablo Neruda so aptly described as “a monument to life created on the threshold of death”.

p Our scenic tribute to Fučik was thus conceived as a stage version of his book. That is why our production dealt mainly with the last period of his life, spent in the Pankrac prison.

p Several questions had to be answered in the course of work on the .script and the production. How were we going to present the essence of Fučik’s life on the stage in its full amplitude? Would it be better to present separate pages from his biography, or try to cover his whole life, all its consecutive phases? We are full of admiration for Fučik’s •whole life as writer, publicist and Communist. Our hearts go out to Fučik the man, with his joie de vivre, his sparkling humour, his tremendous charm, his total devotion and loyalty to his friends, and his implacable hatred for his enemies.

p We cherish all that we know about the life and activity of our friend and comrade-in-arms, but the last four hundred and eleven days of his life spent in a fascist jail, where he wrote his book, are quite overwhelming. These four hundred and eleven days in which his courage was revealed with special force would have been impossible but for the preparation he had for it throughout his previous life, without the atmosphere in which he worked, breathed, loved and fought.

p There are times when all that is best and most important in a man is revealed with special force, bringing him immortal glory. There are times when from the vantage point of experience a man can look back •over the path he has trodden and reassess his whole life. The time he spent in the Pankrac prison when he wrote his Notes from the Gallows was such a time in Fučik’s life, the time when his whole life became an inspiring example to future generations of fighters for freedom, the people’s happiness and peace.

p The last four hundred and eleven days of Fučik’s life brought him immortality, boundless admiration for his human feat and the love of honest men throughout the world.

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p That is why we decided to show the last, decisive period of our hero’s life, to show Julius Fučik in the most important and glorious moments of his heroic struggle.

p No doubt another solution is quite valid-to show Fučik’s whole life, strictly adhering to the continuity of events in his biography. But we felt that adherence to chronological sequence would weaken the dramatic impact, and that the last, prison period embodied the essence of his whole heroic life.

p Only when we had answered this question could we pass or. to another, perhaps no less essential, question: How were we to preserve all the passion and emotional power of the original? How could we best bring out the strong conviction underlying all the ideas and actions of the author of the book and the hero of the play?

p It was not simply a question of embodying the actual material of the book in scenic form: we must adhere to its principles, to the direct vision and sensation of life we find in it. The whole book is written like a kind of diary, where memories of the past are organically and naturally interwoven with clear, precise descriptions of the present, the whole lit by a real dream of the future.

p This was what gave us the clue to the scenic solution, a solution which we felt to derive directly from the nature of the work itself: we based the structure of the play and the production on the alternation of two different time levels. One was Fučik’s present life, his permanent battle with the Gestapo, his struggle for his fellow-prisoners, his search for ways of communicating with the outside world, with the Party, in short, all the aspects of his prison life and activity. The other was Fučik’s past, the most vivid episodes in his life prior to his arrest. They were treated as arising in Fučik’s memory and transporting the audience from the prison cell, now to clandestine meetings in the Jelinek’s flat, now to one of Prague’s picturesque suburbs, now to the sunlit hall of the Young Pioneers’ Palace in Moscow.

p This repeated alternation of two time planes gave us the key to the spatial solution. Thus we had two scenic areas corresponding to the two time planes: one, the main one, for the prison period and the other for the various remembered episodes from his past life.

We wanted to make it clear that the present level of Fučik’s prison life and activity was the main, decisive one, and to have the plane of memory simply underlining and strengthening the impact of Fučik’s prison life or providing a contrast with what is happening to him in the Pankrac jail. Accordingly, all the “flashbacks” must be connected with actual episodes from the hero’s life. These were not to be hazy spectral images blurred by vague dreams and feelings, but always accurate, authentic scenes from Fučik’s past.

193 Tatyana Doronina as Sophia and S. Yursky as Chatsky UiOjf 30 fa UJOJJ Scenes from Woe from Wit « S. Yursky as Chatsky and V. Strzhelchik as Repetilov

p Thus, in order to reveal all the depth and complexity of what Fučik feels when he learns quite by accident of the arrest of his beloved wife and faithful comrade-in-arms Gustina, we show their first meeting. This meeting brings out their remarkably close spiritual kinship. The bright cheerful scene highlights the tense drama of the present moment when Fučik learns that the person who is dearest of all to him has been arrested.

p The “flashbacks” also served to show all the aspects of the characters’ lives which could not be presented in the prison cell or the office of the fascist interrogator Bohm.

p There was another important aspect of these reminiscences interrupting the main action. We intended that they should serve to embody the main message of the play, conveying its optimistic, life-affirming character. Fučik’s whole life and outlook were permeated with a boundless love for the world and his fellow men. This talent for “joy”, this ability to sec what was fine and noble, his passionate belief in a bright future for which he laid down his life with such courage, were to be felt in every one of the “flashbacks”-in his memory of his meeting with his wife, the May Day celebrations in the prison and his recollections of his stay in the Soviet Union.

p The nearer Fučik came to his tragic end the brighter and more positive the flashbacks became, the more they sounded in a major key. That is why one of our favourite episodes in the whole production was the scene at the Moscow Young Pioneers’ Palace, where Fučik, surrounded by children, joined in a Soviet song with them.

p This scene came near the end of the play, when Fučik already knew that he was going to be executed. It seemed to us that this scene, better than any other, would serve to present in clear visual terms the source of Fučik’s inexhaustible strength, his confidence in the triumph of the ideas he was dying for. The image of the beautiful future is embodied for him in the image of happy Soviet children singing joyful songs.

p It has often been said to me that the solution of The Road to Immortality was highly original and unusual. I think this is because Fučik’s work on which our production was based is so unusual. We endeavoured to retain and stress all the characteristic features of Fučik’s book in its scenic embodiment. For all of us who worked on the production this unusual solution seemed perfectly natural and logical, and indeed the only one possible.

p We wanted every act, every scene in the play, indeed every word, to reflect the basic, determining features of Fučik’s many-sided and purposeful personality. We felt it was important to convey the full drama of Fučik’s struggle during imprisonment, to show Fučik’s great achievement in and through the action. We wished to make the whole 194 scenic representation of the life of the hero who devoted himself to the future optimistic and passionate, and transmit all the fire and emotional power of Fučik’s notes.

p An soon as Fučik fell into the clutches of the Gestapo, his enemies were sure that it was all over for him and he would cause them no more trouble. The fascists did not realise that this was not the end, but the beginning of another stage of the struggle. They did not suspect for a moment that the man they had beaten unconscious who called himself Gorak, a teacher, would bring an accusation against them that was as powerful and irrefutable as it was simple.

p The contrast between the shortsightedness of the fascist thugs and Fučik’s courage and endurance, in the awareness that the future was his, had to be presented in the play and sustained throughout, from the first scene to the last.

p We thus endeavoured to show Fučik’s transformation from prisoner to victor, from accused to angry and merciless prosecutor.

p We wanted to show throughout, from scene to scene, how the nearer Fučik came to his end, the more his enemies feared him and the stronger he became, deriving his strength from the justness of the great cause for which he was fighting.

p That Fučik’s faith in the future was strong and real was due to the fact that he had seen with his own eyes the triumph of the people’s cause and freedom in the Soviet Union.

p We endeavoured to show as vividly as possible throughout the remarkable spiritual kinship between this loyal son of the Communist Party and our Soviet people building communist society.

p “May my name arouse no feelings of grief in anybody. I lived for a joyous life and I am dying for it and it would be unjust to place an angel of grief on my grave.” We had to embody this behest of Fučik in the play dedicated to his memory.

p Indeed, Fučik arouses not grief but pride in the strength of the human spirit and admiration for man’s courage and tenacity. Gorky’s words “Man-it sounds proud” make a fitting epigraph for a play about Julius Fučik.

p In the first act we wanted to show how Fučik, after undergoing cruel physical torture, gradually comes to and begins to prepare for a new, even more difficult, responsible and decisive stage of the struggle. Fučik hardly utters a word throughout the act. Only at the end, •when the prison authorities are forced to tear up the already prepared report on the death of the prisoner, does Fučik say: “Yes, we’re alive, dammit, and we’re going to fight.”

p But this is not enough to go on, this is not enough to give the audience a clear picture of the man, of who the new occupant of cell num- 195 ber 267 really is and how he got there. Any kind of explanatory monologue or account of the past would hold up the action, slow down the pace and destroy the rhythm of gradually mounting tension.

p We solved the question of Fučik’s life before his imprisonment with three “flashbacks”. First, his meeting with Honza Zika, a member of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party at the flat of Doctor Fried. Then, a conversation between Fučik and Gustina in a. train compartment. Finally, Fučik’s last meeting with his comrades at the Telineks’ flat, where he was arrested. With this we return to the cell.

p In Act One the “flashbacks” took up most of the scenic time. Act Two was constructed quite differently. Whereas in the first act we had shown Fučik gradually regaining consciousness and saying: “We’re going to fight”, we now set out to show how he fought. It was the embodiment of the various phases and methods of this struggle that formed the content and through-action of our play.

p Almost all the second act takes place in the cell. Our general approach to the solution of the first half of Act Two is best expressed in the following words from Fučik’s book. “But imprison two people together, and Communists at that, and in five minutes you will have a group that will put a spanner in the works of the Gestapo.” And further on: “Prisoner and solitude-one is wont to identify these two concepts. But this is a great mistake. The prisoner is not alone. The prison is a great united group, and even the most strict isolation cannot really isolate anybody, unless a man isolates himself.” Needless to say, Fučik was not a man to isolate himself from his fellows.

p Fučik’s whole previous life made him the natural nucleus of the prison group. His cellmates, the old teacher Pesek and the worker Karel Malcc are drawn to him. We wanted to show how, inspired by the example of their new comrade’s courage and tenacity, these people revealed their finest and most noble qualities. In his relationship with them, Fučik was able to strengthen this prison comradeship and ennoble it, raising it to the indissoluble brotherhood of men prepared to lay down their lives for the common just cause.

p Fučik’s work to unite the prisoners gradually develops throughout the second act, where we see this unity growing and expanding until it culminates in the jubilant May Day celebrations and the strains of the Internationale resounding throughout the prison.

p Our aim in this act was to show Fučik’s prison activities and the results. The audience sec revolutionary solidarity developing among the prisoners before their very eyes. At the beginning of the act many of the prisoners are still lonely, intimidated victims of fascism. By the end, influenced by Fučik, who has established strong ties of friendship 196 and loyalty with them, they have become determined fighters for their people’s freedom and happiness.

p Fučik is a true son of the people. He cannot live apart from the people, and he devotes all his finest powers to them, and they reciprocate. It was necessary to show on the stage how walls and prison bars cannot break the ties between the people’s hero and Communist and the people.

p The connecting link in the relationship between Fučik and the people continuing the struggle against fascism outside the prison was the warden Kolinsky. One of the focal points in the play was the scene where Kolinsky hands Fučik paper and a pencil. We intended to make this scene the turning-point in Fučik’s prison life and struggle. With paper and pencil in his hands, he was once more armed for struggle. The weapon had been sent him by the Party and delivered to him by a comrade-in-arms.

p The poignancy of the scene is heightened by the fact that the two men must continue to adhere to the rules of conspiracy. Outwardly, Kolinsky must continue to play the role of the rough fascist jailor. If the warden pacing the corridor outside happened to glance into Fučik’s cell through the open door, he would never guess what was going on.

p Suddenly Kolinsky says the Party pass-word, and quickly hands Fučik the paper and pencil. A short silent farewell ensues, and Fučik is alone once more.

p The scene only lasts a few moments in the play, but an event of tremendous importance has taken place. Two men whom the audience had believed to be sworn enemies have become friends, joined in friendship for life and death.

p In this scene we strove to achieve the utmost economy of action, setting and acting. Two men in the cell. A minimum of words and not a single superfluous movement. Here arc two comrades-in-arms who understand each other perfectly without uttering a word: the slightest glance or shade of expression is enough.

p But in the next scene, set in the same cell, we required all the expressive means of the theatre to present what is probably the most vivid and pregnant episode in the whole of Fučik’s prison struggle.

p The scene of the May Day celebrations in the prison, which Fučik describes with such inspiration in his book depicts Fučik as an impassioned fighter who is constantly with the people and leading their liberation struggle.

p Two men, two prisoners, arc there in the same ccll-Fučik and the old teacher Pcsek. They remember that today is May Day, the day 197 when the review of the militant forces of the proletariat takes place, and they decide to celebrate it here in the prison.

p The window, now letting in bright sunlight, becomes the focal point of the scenic action.

p We endeavoured to construct this scene in such a way as to give the audience the impression that the crowd of prisoners assembled in the yard for their morning exercise all have their eyes glued on Fučik, who is communicating with them through the window. We wanted the audience to feel that apart from the two men visible on the stage by the window, outside it, in the invisible yard, a countless army of people had gathered, people whose spirit was unimpaired by imprisonment.

p When this illusion reached its culmination, the faint singing of the Internationale began, gradually swelling to a full throated choir. The ceiling of the prison slid away and the audience saw the high prison wall and the cell windows, and crimson cloths being waved.

p All the means of theatrical cxpression-the sets, the lighting, and especially the music-were brought into play to convey the idea. The band began playing, and after Fučik’s last words was joined by numerous voices singing the Internationale. The sounds of the anthem rose, and despite the shouts of the wardens and the slamming of doors, soon the whole prison was singing, and there was no stopping it.

p Our aim in this scene was to put across the unity of people, divided by prison walls but nevertheless united in a monolithic group, living in unison, gripped by the same revolutionary fervour, demonstrating their loyalty and solidarity in the struggle against the enemies of their country and its people.

p In Act Three we tried to show how Fučik became a serious threat to his fascist jailors, how the tables were turned and he became master of the situation. For this reason the central scene was the one in the Flora restaurant in Prague where the Gestapo Commissar Bohm takes Fučik in the vain hope of loosening his tongue.

p Indeed, we planned this scene as the climax of the whole production. D. Volosov and M. Rozanov in the roles of Fučik and Bohm respectively spent the whole scene at table, and the episode derived its dramatic power from the fact that their conversation represented a decisive battle between two irreconcilable enemies, a duel between members of two opposed world views, two camps, the camp of peace and the progressive popular forces and the camp of fascism and darkest reaction.

p Fučik won the duel. The prisoner emerged the master, and Bohm, who had power of life and death over Fučik and his comrades, nevertheless showed himself to be spiritually bankrupt and doomed.

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p We had their conversation interrupted by the news over the radio of the nazi defeat on the Volga, our aim being to show how Bohm, after hearing of this serious blow to the fascist cause, felt the inevitability of the defeat of his miserable “ideas” as a representative of the “master race”.

p “Time we were getting back to prison, Bohm!” Fučik says with a sarcastic smile. We wanted these words to express a profound and clear message. Bohm still has power over Fučik’s fate, and is taking him back to prison. But Fučik is quite calm, in the knowledge that right is on his side, and in the quiet confidence with which he says these words we feel the judgment of history dooming the tormentors of the people to just retribution for their crimes. The accused and the prosecutor, Fučik and Bohm, have changed roles, and each of them now occupies the place he deserves in the life of his country and its future.

p Although the whole production revolves round the hero, we could only reveal this complex character to the full through his relationships with the other characters that appear in Notes from the Gallows. The other characters, both his enemies and friends, or to use his own words, both the people and the puppets, were revealed through Fučik, in relationship to him.

p Fučik’s thoughts, ideas and actions embody the will and reason of the people who have sent him to his immortal feat and gives him the inexhaustible strength for the struggle.

p Fučik’s Notes from the Gallows contains the following magnificent passage. “You retained only what was fundamental. Everything secondary, acquired, everything that smooths, weakens, embellishes the basic features of a man was swept away by a whirlwind in the face of death. Only the essence remained, the most simple: the loyal man remains loyal and the traitor betrays, the philistine despairs and the hero struggles.” The aim of presenting these basic features that are revealed in moments of great historical trial underlay our whole approach to the characters. On the basis of the rather scant material on Gustina and Kolinsky, Lida Placha, the Jelineks, Skofepa and Karel Malec, we tried to create authentic, accurate characters of people with heroic spirits, simple, modest fighters for their people’s happiness. Our task was to put across in a couple of scenes what was most essential in a character, so that his whole life and essence could be divined.

p We presented the “puppets”, the cowardly, stupid fascist thugs, Smetonz, Miiller and Patocka with merciless satire sometimes bordering on the grotesque.

p In short, in our approach to the characters we tried to be faithful to the ideological and artistic principles of their embodiment in Fučik’s immortal book.

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p To pass to another example: what is the story of the conception and realisation of my production of The Optimistic Tragedy?

p On a ship of the Baltic Fleet where a “free anarcho-revolutionary unit” had seized power in the first months of the Revolution, the Party appoints a woman Commissar. Gradually, relying on a small group of Communists, she breaks the resistance of the anarchist leader Vozhak and his group, first isolating him and then destroying him, and uniting the sailors in the First Naval Regiment of the Red Army.

p Such is the basic story of Vishnevsky’s The Optimistic Tragedy. But its real content is far broader, deeper and more significant. The play became a poetic hymn to the deeds of the Communist Party. Despite the fact that it ends with the death of the heroine, we are convinced that the Commissar’s death is really only the beginning of immortality, the affirmation of the great cause of socialist revolution.

p The intense drama of the action due to the exceptionally sharp conflict, the impassioned stage directions suggesting a mass of the most unexpected associations, and the apt, laconic language, abounding in images, revealing the author’s vast knowledge of the sailors’ life and manners at the time in question, the dynamic development of the plot, the elevated hcroico-romantic mood, the pathos, the passionate Party commitment and sharp didacticism-all this, moulded into a remarkably austere and monumental form, make The Optimistic Tragedy one of the masterpieces of Soviet dramaturgy.

p It is not often that one has the joy of working on such a well- composed, artistically satisfying play.

p What about the production?

p Clearly, the heroic pathos of the action required a corresponding scenic solution. But along what paths should we proceed in the search for a form to suit the content? How were we to find the key to the style which constituted the artistic strength of this play?

p The answer to these and many other questions involved in producing The Optimistic Tragedy were only found after a long, painful search. The conception took shape gradually in the course of work between the director, the stage manager and the designer and conversations with the composer, study of factual material used by Vishnevsky, in the process of the distribution of the roles and in arguments, involving the rejection of many solutions that suggested themselves, and further tireless searching.

p I know of no other work where the title so accurately reflects the style, nature and content. The Optimistic Tragedy is indeed optimistic, and it is indeed a tragedy. The two arc both fully present and expressed with the passion and artistic sincerity that always characterised Vishnevsky’s militant and virile writings.

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p We have seen quite enough optimistic works, or rather superficially •optimistic works, on the Soviet stage in recent years. Indeed more than enough, for in many plays the optimism was unfounded since it was not based on any real achievements by the heroes. After all, the measure of any victory is above all the scale of the difficulties overcome on the way. Man’s strength is revealed not in affected declarations and pathetic monologues, but in actions, in struggle with a real adversary. The stronger the adversary, the more important the victory.

p But if there was quite enough optimism, tragedy in the true sense practically abandoned our theatres, and in my opinion quite unjustifiably. The war years with all the losses, deprivations, broken lives and unparalleled acts of heroism had an immense impact on our lives. These turbulent years, the nature of the events, should have been truthfully reflected in works of art, including theatrical works.

p That was why all of us who worked on the production of The Optimistic Tragedy were so delighted to have the opportunity to achieve a truly poetic embodiment of the heroes of the revolutionary struggle. And although the events presented occurred several decades ago, depicted by a truthful and passionate artist, they arc extremely important, and indeed close, to present-day Soviet audiences. Our search for a solution was based on these considerations.

p Over a quarter of a century ago the writer-militant and orator Vsevolod Vishnevsky wrote his complex, emotional play, which in many ways represented an innovation. He endeavoured to condense in his tragedy the vast sweep of the revolutionary period, the period that saw the birth of the world’s first socialist state. He wanted to capture the most important features of this heroic time, show the common feat of the masses, the feat of millions of simple people who went out to fight for their future. His aim was to recreate the atmosphere of the first years of the Revolution, when life appeared in new and sometimes extraordinarily complex manifestations. I feel that the epic sweep and passion of the work were fully transmitted in the first production of The Optimistic Tragedy at the Kamerny Theatre in Moscow, twentyodd years ago.

p But for me, working on the material as a director for the first time (although I had often thought about the play and dreamt of producing it) it was important to find not what could be read in it at the beginning of the early thirties, but what it held for us today, when we began work on it. We wanted to make our production genuinely contemporary, by which I mean that it should reflect the spiritual experience, outlook, thoughts and views of Soviet people today. This, we felt, meant ensuring that Vishnevsky’s personal, highly individual voice was not drowned and lost in the general sound of the production.

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p Mayakovsky gave the idea of the unity of the artist and the time he extols magnificent expression in the opening part of his poem Fine!

p Time buzzing away
like a telegraph wire,
Heart and truth combine.
So it was
with the soldiers
or the land entire Or in this heart
of mine.

p The artist never dissolves in the historical events he is representing but becomes level with them, as it were, embodying himself, his revolutionary’s heart, his Communist’s soul in them. This was apparently the case with Vishnevsky in his The Optimistic Tragedy. At one time a fierce controversy raged around the play. Vishnevsky’s opponents accused him of primitive didacticism and predicted that the play would not last long. But since then many eventful years have past, and The Optimistic Tragedy continues to draw audiences and retain all its inherent power. It seems to me that the evergreen nature of the play placed a special creative responsibility upon us when we came to work on a new production. This aspect of the work had to be conveyed to the audience in theatrical terms.

p Naturally, it is not for me or anybody else who collaborated on the production to judge the results achieved. Between the conception and its concrete embodiment lies a hard road, and by no means everything materialises in the exact form the artist intends. Yet it is useful to compare the intention with the result, since such a comparison clearly reveals the correctness or fallaciousness of the artistic conception.

p Our aim, then, was to ensure that Vishnevsky’s live oratorial voice, addressing bold generalisations directly to our contemporaries and successors, was preserved throughout and never drowned out by theatrical means, weakened or depersonalised. It was this aim that dictated our solution of the outward form of the production, its tense rhythm, and the entire internal scenic development.

p But we were perfectly aware that we would be betraying the author’s intention if we failed to distinguish unique individual voices in the general chorus of his characters. We knew that in the reverse event we would simply be creating a kind of scenic oratorio, perhaps a requiem, and a very stirring one, but too abstract and devoid of the essence of theatrical poetry-thc real man and his destiny, his cause, his relations with other people. For it is in the matter of bringing out 202 the organic unity of the individual and the masses that we find most clearly manifested the features of Vishnevsky the dramatist that are most interesting and whose scenic embodiment poses the greatest problems.

p I have already pointed out how the life reflected in this play is complex and contradictory. It is as though one had many streams each rushing turbulently and irresistibly along its own course. But the important thing is that all these streams eventually meet and flow together in a single powerful current-the main action of the tragedy. Our task was to show the significance of each of the individual human destiniespresented for the destiny of the whole group. We therefore endeavoured to understand each character as well as possible, and thus his personal destiny, his place in the events.

p What did this involve?

p I generally find it difficult to answer this question without resorting to allegory. There is an extremely interesting entry in the diary of the great French painter Delacroix, which says that “all the resources of art are like the keys of a piano in the artist’s hands: he strikes some, producing various sounds, and leaves the others silent”. Even when the keyboard is open before him, the stage-director often finds it difficult to choose the notes which, when struck, will reproduce the main melody of the production most fully and accurately.

p The message of The Optimistic Tragedy is fully expressed, in my opinion, in one of the stage directions: “We are immortal, the revolution is immortal.” We chose these words to end our production on, taking them from the stage directions and having them addressed directly to the audience. We felt that it was appropriate to the whole logic of the work to have this idea expressed aloud as a voiced conclusion on the events that had taken place on the stage.

p The Narrators have a very special place in the play, both as participants in the action and impassioned, committed commentators. In another play, First Cavalry, Vishnevsky referred to the Narrators as “Our conscience, our memory, our awareness, our heart”. We wanted the author’s civic conscience, poetic memory, revolutionary awareness and militant heart to be revealed doubly-in the words the Narrators address to the audience, and in the actual life of the characters, reproduced with great fidelity and respect for realistic detail.

p One’s first impression is that Vishnevsky’s tragedy is written in a conventional form and that some of the stage directions are practically expressionist in manner. A first reading may therefore suggest an abstract solution of the scenic area and an equally abstract treatment for the heroes, making them mere mouthpieces for the author’s views. But this is only a first impression, which, needless to say, is often deceptive 203 and misleading. If one submits to it, one is in danger of never going beyond a superficial assessment of the events and the characters, and failing to grasp the real message.

p Indeed, the more one reads into the play, the deeper one delves below the upper layers into the complex and original world of the heroes, the clearer it becomes that the life it depicts, the atmosphere of the heroic struggle that develops there and the characters drawn in strong, sharp strokes by the artist’s hand, must be not only concrete but eminently human. This was our understanding of the spirit of the tragedy which we were guided by in our choice of scenic forms.

p There is nothing more difficult than trying to express the content of a play in a single formula. And when we groped our way intuitively towards the image of the play, we began to perceive the long difficult road along which the regiment-the first regular naval regiment, formed out of a disorderly, half-wild anarchist band-advances dauntIcssly for the revolution.

p We felt that the stern tone of the play, its tremendous conciseness .and emotional intensity required an exceptionally concise arrangement of the scenic area. But at the same time we wished the sets to somehow convey the profound sense of frustration of the people deceived by the anarchists, a force which could only be checked by the iron will of the Bolshevik Party. I think Anatoly Bosulaycv’s sets did this very well.

p The solution of the mise-en-scene, tremendously important though it was, did not mean that we were anywhere near the end of the many problems to be solved. The most appropriate, visually impressive sets and the most expressive scenic painting cannot be a substitute for the live actor on the stage. The poetic truth of a production is only achieved when its main idea-which colour, light, music and all the other means of theatrical expression serve-is expressed in human characters.

p Just as an architect designing a house should be concerned above all with making it convenient and comfortable for its future occupants, so the stage-designer should devise his sets with a view to providing the actors with an ambiance in which they will be able to bring out the essence of their roles to the maximum. The main hero of The Optimistic Tragedy is the people, and the people is made up of individuals who are very different but have certain things in common. We therefore sought the most expressive, striking features in each character that would help the audience understand not only the particular character in question but also his comrades.

p Hence our interpretation of the Commissar not as a symbolic figure, embodying abstract features of the Party leader of the Civil War period, but as a human being with an individual, concrete psychology, 204 a woman who did not cease to be a woman just because her destiny had brought her to the front line of the revolutionary struggle. Whilebeing perfectly aware that there was nothing particularly new and unexpected in the aim we set ourselves, we realised that in the context of a heroic play its accomplishment involved a firm, principled approach. That is why we strove so persistently to ensure that the Commissar was not stripped of such natural features as weariness, womanly tenderness and carefully concealed anxiety.

p This was how we solved the scene in which the Commissar writes a letter to her mother. Here the audience is able to catch a glimpse of her perfectly ordinary, human nature, and see that she too, like everybody else, is wont to be pensive and dream, and seek a spiritual refuge. We wanted the whole ambiance to help the actress reveal for a while these traits the Commissar was at such pains to conceal. We felt-and I think rightly so-that this solution, far from lowering the Commissar in the audience’s eyes would raise her even higher and give added impact to her revolutionary deeds. The fact that a small, frail woman chose to challenge such fearsome people as Vozhak and Siply and was able to triumph over them is largely accounted for by the superiority of genuine humanity over blind, irrational, brute force, the superiority of noble human purpose over petty, coarse merccnariness.

p Similarly, we wanted to make Vozhak and Siply too not symbolic figures but concrete bearers of a servile, inhuman ideology. Psychologically, these two characters who set themselves up as champions of the unrestricted freedom of the individual are really abject slaves. We strove to stress this with all the means at our disposal, including scenic hyperbole. But there are hyperboles and hyperboles. We, in our exaggeration, were on no account to violate or distort the realistic proportions of the work and destroy the realistic perspective we had chosen for its depiction.

p Our idea was that the head-on collisions between different characters and the implacable struggle between different outlooks and habits should convey to the audience that the anarchists, while professing and demagogically preaching the principles of individual freedom were in fact mutilating, enfeebling and debasing the human personality.

p We intended to make Vozhak and Siply a patent confirmation of this.

p This idea naturally gave lead straight to anothcr-the idea that revolutionary organisation, and conscious discipline serve the real, as opposed to the illusory, emancipation of the individual, imparting truly indomitable strength to the human personality and providing the conditions for it to blossom fully. An exposure of the anarchist prejudices and misconceptions would be quite pointless unless a positive 205 idea, affirming the true social ideal, were not ultimately given concrete expression in the artistic images. I am not a scholar or critic by profession, and I realise that my explanations and the way they are expressed may leave much to be desired. But I make no claim to accurate formulations, since I regard them as purely auxiliary in my work as stage-director and not as a basic means of forming a conception. I and my colleagues were far more concerned with having a clear picture in our minds of what it was we intended to show the audience, in all its details and full plastic terms. It would be strange to say the least if I were to attempt to pass judgement on what we actually achieved in this respect and how correctly I envisaged the characters of the plav and cultivated them in my imagination, so to speak. For this reason, I only wish to mention a few of the considerations that compelled me, as a director, to do this rather than that.

p I was convinced, for example, that it would be quite wrong to artificially belittle Vozhak. The audience must first be made aware of the strength of this man and only later perceive the nature and essence of this strength, which so rapidly and shamefully becomes weakness. This was essential if the audience were to believe in Vozhak’s power over the unit and not feel that it was contrived. It must be made clear that Vozhak knew how to get his own way and it was no easy matter to free the people he had deceived from his influence. This was perfectly understood by Y. Tolubeyev who played Vozhak, and his qualities-his remarkable ability to convince and sincere existence on the stage-were just what was needed. My task as a director was to ensure that the action helped reinforce and emphasise the image created by the actor.

p That is why we had Vozhak living apart from the rest of the unit, as though separated from the others by an invisible but insurmountable barrier. He is invariably accompanied by Siply, and there is always an empty space around them. We wanted there to be something ominous about this void in which Vozhak moves, and all the scenes in which he appears have the same, deliberately slow, heavy pace.

p We wished to avoid simplifying Siply too. We wanted the audience to witness the disappearance of the last human features in this degenerate type, to see him gradually advancing towards complete moral bankruptcy, corroded by his need to taunt and destroy other people, and secure his own ends by means of cruelty and treachery. We felt it was far more important and interesting to adopt this approach than to simply debunk him in a straightforward, superficial manner. The base, laughable features in Siply speak for themselves. Our main concern was to show what was most dangerous and vile in him-his cursed tenacity and ability to trim his sails to the wind, features that arc far from funny. A. Sokolov’s interpretation of the content of the role, it seems 206 to me, was suggested to him by just this desire to convey the repulsive, slippery nature of this venemous, degenerate individual.

p The complicated and contradictory inner world of the sailor Alexci required special attention. This man, whom personal misfortune had embittered and led to declare a personal war on the whole world and eventually into the anarchist camp, in fact concealed tremendous spiritual strength. The struggle waged by the Commissar to save him represents the struggle of the Party for the hearts and minds, the ’life and happiness of millions of simple people slowly but surely advancing and coming to embrace the revolutionary cause. We wanted Alexei to be a true man of the people in our production, full of the simple vitality, humour and expansiveness which so often conceal a rich and complex nature. Alexei combines superficial bravado, and a dull longing for a noble goal in life, the courage of a mature soldier and sudden fits of childish fright, bitter experience and naive ignorance of life. We felt there was a danger in showing one facet without the other complementary one, exaggerating some features at the expense of others. In embodying this extremely important character, all of us involved, including the actor Igor Gorbachov, wished to achieve an organic blend of contradictory human traits.

p It goes without saying that in describing our aims and intentions I do not presume to speak of what we actually gave the audience. It is up to them to judge for themselves, for they can do so more accurately and objectively.

p However, I feel I must mention at least some of the aims that we failed to achieve in our production. It was our aim, for example, to blend the general romantic atmosphere of the play and the realistic details of the everyday life of the unit it contains. I feel that we were not entirely successful in this: instead of forming a harmonious compound the two elements rather tend to alternate. We intended that the Narrators should be fully-fledged participants in the action and not mere onlookers, but quite possibly in practice our solution left something to be desired in places.

p The Narrators do not participate fully in the action and the development of events, and do not have any direct influence on the course of events. Yet it would be wrong to treat them as passive observers and commentators. The author’s description of them as “our conscience, our memory”, needs to be deciphered by the director. It is clearly not enough to understand and accept this qualification, it must be given concrete scenic expression and be embodied in the actors’ behaviour and existence on the stage. We endeavoured to do this mainly by including the Narrators in the general rhythm of action that applied to the other characters. Instead of setting apart a special portion of the 207 stage area for them and restricting them to their own particular entrances and exits, we had them appear now on the forestage, now in the thick of events where the main characters of the tragedy live and move. In each of their appearances they were to act in accordance with the mood and circumstances of the given scene. Take the scene of the sailors’ farewell ball, which begins with the laconic and sad words of one of the Narrators: “A dance. The sailors’ farewell ball. How many there were in those years!” We pictured this ball as a sad occasion, pervaded with harsh poetry, at which the sailors’ faces were suddenly lit up unexpectedly and their hearts were aflame. We regarded this scene where the sailors take their leave of their wives, mothers, sweethearts and children as an opportunity to reveal for a moment the personal private lives of the characters. The Narrators were to play an important part here: they were to represent the author’s heart beating in unison with the hearts of the sailors about to set out on the hard road of battle. The Narrators were to emerge from the ranks of the sailors, as if emerging from their own past, that had remained at just such a sailors’ ball as this, sad and unforgettable. I hardly think that we could have succeeded in realising our intention fully, but I think that it was important that we took as our point of departure in our search for a solution the author’s original, and in many ways unique, idea.

p I have already mentioned the fact that we strove to blend in our production the individual real-life details and broad visual generalisations, the general and the particular, the primary and the secondary. The first words the Finn, Vainonen, utters on the stage, “A twilight mist and not a single soul to say a gentle word to a lonely sailor”, arc commented on in a detailed stage direction: “The heart is moved by his despair, the alien accent and the eyes from which tears roll almost without cause, from the vast troubled silence of the world.”

p These words can hardly be applied literally. It was necessary to find a way of expressing the idea indirectly and revealing the meaning of the author’s sympathy for the “lonely sailor” through the whole atmosphere around him.

p We felt it was not enough to achieve naturalistic gloom at the spot where Vainonen is assailed by this profound sadness. We wanted the very air to be so heavy and oppressive that Vainonen was obliged to address his words to himself and no one else. We wanted to show that the anxiety of this thin, restive and profound man in the old worn sailor’s vest ultimately embraced the whole vast bulk of the ship and that it was broader, deeper and more significant than the sufferings of one man. This is what gave us the idea of having Ryaboi’s bodysprawled on the sloping deck and first one sailor walking past from 208 right to left, then another from left to right,-and so on at the same slow pace, the pace of painful, exhausting reflection.

p It was our search for great humanity and deep penetration into the hidden depths of man, the very essence of the human personality, that prompted us to restore the Commissar’s monologue, which it had become the habit to omit. This monologue, although uneven, is imbued not simply with faith in the future but with a penetrating vision of that future, which is our present. It adds to our understanding of Commissar’s inner life and at the same time builds another bridgespanning time, from the time the play was written and the time its heroes lived to the time when we, the descendants of these heroes, resurrect them on the stage.

p Similarly, it was not simply to embellish the spectacle or because of an inclination for violent action on the stage that we introduced the battle scene. We felt that it would enhance the action and help the continuity, and supplement the characters, by showing them in such a tense moment of their lives. Following in the author’s footsteps, we strove to convey a sense of this tension in moments, which determine a man’s destiny and the success or failure of his cause.

p It sometimes happens that a man has only to let himself go for an instant to bring all his past efforts and endeavours to naught. Vozhak felt he could already celebrate his victory over the Commissar, that his power was boundless. His stunted philistinc soul rejoiced and, longing to enjoy the fruits of his triumph, he began to celebrate. We wanted the forms of his celebration to reveal the inner Vozhak, his appalling taste and pathetic idea of what constitutes “the good things in life”. Hence the gaudy carpet straight from some third-class tavern, the patriarchal samovar and the antediluvian gramophone. Hence the heart-rending strains of the old romance “The Splendid Roses Shed Their Petals” sung by Siply. Hence the whole pace of the scene, conveying the real essence of the anarchists’ joyless revels.

The use of such inner contrasts is typical of Vsevolod Vishncvsky’s artistic thought and the whole poetic rhythm of his tragedy. Vishncvsky is equally truthful when showing the negative side of life, portraying Vozhak and Siply, or when depicting the triumph of great revolutionary ideas, the triumph of the cause for which the Commissar fought. We wanted our production to give full-throated expression to this truth and to ensure that the story of the “first naval regiment” would stir the audience and make them think, that it would help to bring home to them all the grandeur of the people’s revolutionary exploits for the triumph of the great cause of communism.

209 The farewell ball :enc from ’he Optimistic Tragedy . Yan as Vainoncn and . Sokolov as Siply

p Every scenic solution must contain a tangible material element. This does not mean that the director finds this material solution throughout a play, at every link in the chain of events, but he must certainly endeavour to do so. I am not speaking of the scenic lay-out, which is always concrete, but of the atmosphere in which the action develops.

p My favourite place in The Optimistic Tragedy is the transition from the waltz to the march in the finale of Act One. I did not arrive at my solution immediately, despite the fact that the following passage-thc march of the unit-had already been agreed upon with the designer.

p A waltz strikes up and people begin to dance. The couples gyrate slowly. A girl clings to a sailor. A little girl says goodbye to the old boatswain’s mate. And the strains of the waltz gradually change, passing into a boisterous march, cheerful and insistent, as though calling people back from their dreams to the world of reality.

p The transition from the waltz to the march, their interpcnetration, was decisive in the solution not only of this scene but of the whole play.

p I am speaking here of a hard, tangible material element in the solution. It may be at the beginning or at the end, or anywhere else you please, but without this element in the solution, it seems to me our profession cannot be artistic in the highest meaning of the word.

p Once the visual solution of parts of the play have been found, the parts which set the basic tone of the production, one can try to embody the solution in collaboration with the actors, the designer and the composer, bearing in mind that unless each one of them feels that he is a co-author of the production there can be no true creative process. The director’s role is not reduced, or restricted in any way by the fact that the solution is sought in collaboration with everybody else. There is no harm even in creating the impression that a solution has arisen automatically. One ought not to trumpet loudly: I have decided upon this solution and it’s your job to carry it out! This approach simply kills all initiative, deadens the rehearsal process and makes it impossible for the actors to achieve a vital, improvisational state.

p There is one more point worth examining while we are on the subject of the conception and the final solution of a production. Stanislavsky and Vakhtangov spoke a great deal of what they called “the ball of attention”. Basically, Stanislavsky regarded the art of stage direction to consist in the ability to throw around an invisible “ball of attention” at various speeds and degrees of force from one subject to another. Stage direction is the organisation of this invisible process.

p This involves artistic organisation of the play so that the audience’s attention does not wander at will but is drawn to where the director wishes.

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p In the dialogue too, everything must be calculated to ensure that the audience’s attention is drawn to the right place, and they listen to the person they should be listening to at a particular moment.

p Take the dialogue between Monakhov’s wife and Cherkun in the last act of The Barbarians. It is in this scene that final stroke is put to the character of Monakhov, although he remains silent throughout. The culmination of the role, its super-objective, its basic idea, the through-action-are all revealed in these minutes.

p Can we leave the audience to grasp this in retrospect? Certainly not. This means that a moment that provides the culmination of the role of Monakhov, must be found in the dialogue, in the words uttered by Monakhov and Cherkun, so that their scenic life organically includes Monakhov in such a way as to bring him into the foreground. It must be carefully and accurately solved, just as the conductor knows precisely where the bassoon comes in and the violins must play quietly.

p If we wish a dialogue to focus attention on a character who is not taking part in it, we can hardly allow this dialogue to flow loosely and haphazardly as in life. It must be specially handled in order to ensure that every second the spectator is aware that he is listening, as in the cinema, when the picture takes precedence over the soundtrack and the important thing is not what a person is saying but how another person is listening. The theatre also makes use of this device.

p Take the last scene of Simonov’s The Fourth, where He leaves. When I was directing this scene my aim was to ensure that the other person on the stage did not attract the audience’s attention for a single second. She was to move “out of the camera’s eye”, so to speak, as in a film. The whole scene was based on the principle that the audience should watch only Him, with Her playing a purely auxiliary role. Attention is only drawn to Her once and then only for an instant, when She says: “And I don’t want to go on living otherwise.”

p Thus, even in a simple dialogue we have not the right to let the audience’s attention wander freely.

p One must search for a special approach in each different case. It may be a conventional device, such as having the lights fade and training a spotlight on the important area. Far more difficult is the psychological approach, willing the audience to see what you want them to see at a particular moment.

p In My Elder Sister there is a scene where the two sisters are criticising a young man’s behaviour. During the conversation the uncle comes in, and they continue as though nothing had happened, until the uncle joins the conversation. How should this be handled? One can either show that they did not notice their uncle’s entry or somehow make a point of it, for the scene undergoes a qualitative change as a result 211 of Ukhov’s appearance. The answer is to throw the “ball of attention” to the uncle for a moment and then back again. But how? There arc various means of doing this. One could have the sisters exclaim: “Oh, Uncle!”, for example. The course we chose was as follows. The sisters pretend that their uncle’s appearance is of supreme indifference to them, and this automatically draws the attention of the audience to him, for they cannot help feeling that this is rather strange.

p Are there any other criteria of the genuineness of a scenic solution? One of them is plastic, musical, rhythmic expressiveness.

p The plastic solution must be so precise that it can be largely comprehended even without words. And, vice versa, if you shut off the visual aspect, what you hear should be sufficiently expressive to enable you to imagine it.

p A real solution, in my opinion, must be such as to make everything perfectly clear to a sighted deaf person or a blind person who can hear.

p The well-known director Alexci Popov pointed out that the director who does not bother about a visual solution is taking the easy way out. Say he is doing a scene from Tolstoi’s Resurrection-tor example, Nckhlyudov’s meeting with Katya in prison. As it is a prison, there must be a bench and two doors, one through which Katya is led, and another through which Nckhlyudov enters. What could be more logical? The bench is in place, and they sit down, and from here on everything proceeds as in life. How can one struggle against such “solutions”? Popov offers a most interesting recipe: a conversation ensues between Nckhlyudov and Katya which represents a major psychological turning point for them both. Therefore, even if I watch the scene through thick glass and hear nothing, I ought to understand, at least to some extent, that something extremely important has occurred between these two people.

p It goes without saying that words arc the most important thing on the stage, for it is mainly through words that the ideas of a work are conveyed. But speaking of scenic expressiveness, one cannot rely solely on words. In the visual emotive structure of the production, words arc only one of the several components, albeit the most important.

p If we forget this, we shall simply succeed in murdering the spectacle that is an inalienable quality of the theatre.

p Even the most highly psychological, philosophical play is always a spectacle, and this being so I insist that the combination of plastic and sound with visual expressiveness is of decisive importance in the director’s conception and its realisation.

p The climax of the Kamerny Theatre’s production of Madame Bovary, was the scene where Emma runs away from Rodolph. Tairov wanted 212 to show the heroine’s last road before her suicide. Running is something that is rarely conveyed successfully in the theatre, but here the director found a perfect plastic solution. Not a single word was uttered in this short scene. We have just the light and the music and the actress running on the spot. Yet it was intensely dramatic for the simple reason that it was not the flight per se that interested Tairov, but the flight as the hopeless end of Emma Bovary’s tragic road. This was perfectly conveyed in an absolutely concrete form of scenic expression. Thus, by means of plastic expression, “how” expressed “what” with the maximum precision.

p One must find precise physical action in order for the solution to acquire materiality. Not simply a physical action, but the physical action, the only one that is appropriate.

p When we came to rehearse the first scene of Irkutsk Story, the shop scene, we were already perfectly clear about the facts of the play. Two girls are closing up shop. They have had a hard day. They have sold some roach. What is this grocer’s shop exactly? A small stuffy premises where oil and paraffin, vodka and sweets that have lain a long time, and a quaint assortment of other things are sold. The girls spend the whole day working amid a great variety of strange odours. And now, to top it all, there’s the matter of the roach.

p After a long hard day’s work they come out into the fresh air and sit on a bench, too exhausted to move. Victor and Sergei come and sit down beside them. They have also just finished work and are tired. They begin to exchange playful remarks and glances, all in the apparent absence of a plastic solution. Four people sitting in a row on a bench, with their legs stretched out, practically motionless flirting listlessly. And we suddenly felt that life was flowing in its proper course when humour sprang from the appropriate physical existence. The whole scene of Sergei and Valya’s meeting acquired an unexpected sharpness. Thus, from the point of view of the inner logic of this picture, the very absence of plastic expression was the correct solution.

p If this solution is taken to its logical conclusion, expressed in plastic form, then a detail may become the unexpected and unforeseen solution for the whole scene.

p The closer the subject of a play is to real life and the less convention there is in the writer’s reflection of life, the more we must approach reality in our solution. In this case details can become the solution. But every piece of the work must be revealed in such a way as to ensure that these details are not purely descriptive but express the essence of the work. This is especially true of psychological drama and the play of manners. Only where such a detail is dictated by the logic of the action and the conflicts between the characters and transmits the 213 atmosphere of the scene and the essence of the conflict can it be regarded as a solution.

p During rehearsals of Rozov’s In Search of Happiness Vladimirov and I gave a great deal of thought to finding a solution for the finale of Act One where Olcg grabs his father’s sabre and begins to hack away at the furniture. We had grasped the main idea: this was an expression of youthful protest and revolt. But we lacked the details that would prise open the scene and reveal its inner content.

p We found our solution quite by accident in the course of our study of the play. According to the facts of the play Oleg’s revolt followed from his having accidentally overturned an inkpot on the table. We decided to make this a turning-point in the hero’s psychological state, a sudden swing from respect for the fine-polished furniture to complete contempt for it. Oleg takes the inkpot and calmly pours it over the table. Oleg’s upsurge of passion, his inner protest, is expressed in the very calm with which he behaves. All that followed was secondary and subsidiary because the detail we had found expressed the turning-point and had become the solution.

p This is an example of the way a detail can become the sought-for factor making possible the complete solution of a scene, and hence the conflict of a whole play.

p Although it is important to express the general through the particular, this is only true where the particular is warranted, logical and unexpected, like the solution as a whole. It is not enough for it to be logical, although this alone involves a great deal. If it is only unexpected, we are dealing with pure artifice, a contrived device that expresses nothing. A device in itself is impermissible on the stage, it must always be called for. But if a vivid and unexpected detail is found that accurately conveys the essence of the scene, it becomes an essential part of the general solution. The value of an artistic device depends on it being appropriate to the nature of the author’s aim. Otherwise it will have no intrinsic value.

p I make one of the last stages of my work on a production its rhythmic organisation. Generally speaking, a director cannot sense the rhythm in advance: it arises from the relationship between the parts of the internally constructed whole. In the conception it is hardly present, and then only as a rational hypothesis. Rhythm is an element that has such a real impact on the process of work that it can only be solved in the course of practical work on a production. I can never anticipate the rhythmic structure of a spectacle. It is one of the last and decisive phases that arises from direct contact with the ready production. I can only sense it vaguely in my conception, and often mistakenly. One feels sure that the action will have a certain rhythm 214 and then finds that quite a different one emerges in practice. The rhythm pace of each scene and of the production as a whole derives from the contextual relationship of each scene.

p Thus, to turn to The Death of the Squadron once more, I felt that the pace should be extremely fast in the scene where the sailors abandon the ship. But practice suggested something quite different-what had seemed extremely monotonous rhythmically in theory became a device producing strong emotional impact.

p A scenic solution is only valid when it is embodied in the actor. The solution for every scene must be based on close study of the characters’ inner life. A solution will be purely formal unless your search has involved the discovery of psychological truth. Any work must be based on live human conflicts. It is necessary to find the emotional stimulant that will help you find the ambiance, the atmosphere, which expresses the inner flow of “the life of the human spirit” to the fullest extent. It is the combination of ambiance and inner life that determines whether or not the conception is convincing.

p This involves finding a combination of what happens in life prior to, after, and parallel with the action, either in contrast or in unison with what is happening. It is this combination, consciously organised, that creates the atmosphere.

p Take the contrast in Pushkin’s Banquet During the Plague. The events in the play have nothing whatsoever to do with the plague, but the fact that they take place at such a time creates a highly tragic atmosphere.

p What was it that gave me the clue to the atmosphere in the Act Three of The Barbarians? We have a perfectly fortuitous celebration, developing according to the established rules, by inertia. This is a feint in relationship to the events occurring in the characters’ lives.

p A visual solution must involve atmosphere. Atmosphere is the emotional colouring that must be present throughout.

p I deliberately stop now and then to interpret in detail certain elements of Stanislavsky’s system, for in the majority of cases directors and actors play havoc with them. The terminology used by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko has lost its original meaning and become a collection of formulae which each director interprets to suit himself. 1 have never met two directors who agreed as to the meaning of such a term as Nemirovich-Danchenko’s “second plane”.

p This remarkably meaningful term has been debased and cheapened. It is something so difficult to put into practice that in my whole experience I have not come across more than a dozen productions in which it was present. We are always hearing people say: “And what second plane are we going to have here?” The actors have yet to master 215 their roles, the production still lacks any semblance of a coherent solution, and yet the director is talking of the second plane or even a third, fourth or tenth plane! How can there possibly be talk of a second plane when even the first plane has not taken shape!

p This careless, disrespectful attitude to the terminology of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko has meant that we directors simply fail to understand one another, as though we were speaking different languages. Yet Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko struggled for clear-cut, accurate definitions, for having each term carry a clear, precise meaning. Why should we presume to substitute one concept for another? We ought to wage a fierce struggle against such mutilation and adulteration of the “system”.

p What exactly is the “second plane”?

p For me it is the highest ideal in the scene, the part, the act, the production, the final objective of all art. I always associate it with an emotional sensation produced by the work as a whole which can be expressed in such words as “transparent”, “stuffy” and so on. It is atmosphere but not in the ordinary, everyday sense of the word. It is the emotional atmosphere of the work which makes it a work of art.

p The second plane presupposes the harmony of all the component elements of the production. It arises from the process of life on the stage, from the development of the conflict, from the whole course of action, from its period atmosphere and from all the means of scenic expression such as the sets, lighting and music.

p Naturally it can only be found in a genuine, highly artistic work. Occasionally it arises irrespective of the quality of the work, but in such cases it is generally a matter of chance.

p I can only presume to give examples from my own productions, but I am not claiming that in the productions I refer to a second plane was in fact present. I shall simply discuss what I was aiming to achieve.

p In Act One of The Three Sisters we have a birthday celebration. I decided to make the second plane a requiem. Everyone is making merry, trying to create a gay, relaxed and comfortable atmosphere, a sense of general wellbeing, and I tried to present this on the surface. But at the same time it was necessary to transmit the feeling that the birthday celebration somehow had not come off.

p What arc the most frequent misinterpretations of the concept of the “second plane”?

p Very often it is confused with the image solution. But the image solution is something concrete and must be expressed in terms of the means of which the director disposes in the given production. The second plane is an abstract, sensual concept, which adds a certain psychological and emotional colouring to the solution. It is something 216 the director felt in the play, but does not necessarily have to express in words.

p Even more often the second plane is confused with the subtext. We frequently come across references to “the actor’s second plane” in articles.

p What exactly is this supposed to mean? When directors try to explain, it generally transpires that what they are really referring to is the subtext. All the articles and books on the subject cite the scene of the farewell between Tuzenbach and Irina in the last act of The Three Sisters as the classic example of the actor’s second plane.

p But this belongs entirely to the sphere of the logic of the actor’s existence on the stage and has nothing at all to do with the second plane. The fact that Tuzenbach goes to fight a duel is a major fact of the play engendering a certain subtext, or what Stanislavsky referred to as the “undercurrent” of the text.

p The subtext is a very simple concept. It is merely a thought that is not expressed in words. We never say all that we arc thinking. This does not mean that people arc mendacious, but simply that the thought process does not correspond to words uttered. Thought always contains far more than words. A person can be speaking of one thing and thinking about many at the same time.

p The subtext arises from the facts of the play and the rhythm of the characters’ behaviour. It is a concrete, practical term, and there is no need for us to replace it with any other.

p Finally, it is necessary to distinguish between the second plane and the atmosphere of the whole production, the individual scenes and pieces of the play. Atmosphere is also a concrete concept, deriving from the facts of the play. The second plane derives from emotional shades, on which the real-life atmosphere is based.

p Thus the second plane is the emotional reaction the play as a whole produces. It is extremely difficult to achieve it in practice. That is why I regard it as the higher mathematics of stage art. This concept must on no account be debased and vulgarised by the substitution of other perfectly precise and concrete concepts.

p Stage direction is a practical art. It is best explained by concrete examples. This is rather difficult, since the artist cannot be objective about his own creations.

p Sometimes he sees far more in his work than there really is; sometimes he sees less. A conscientious, self-critical director suffers agonies when he watches his own production in the theatre. He feels the whole audience must be struck by the shortcomings he notices. Conversely, he is most upset when the audience overlook what he regards to be .a telling touch. One thing is certain: far more benefit can be derived 217 from attending a rehearsal and seeing a director at work than from reading his articles or books.

p Stanislavsky insisted that art cannot be taught, that the most one can do is prepare a person, create the most favourable conditions for inspiration and live feeling to arise.

p My descriptions of my productions and references to certain scenes from them should not be understood as suggestions or advice, let alone instructions for producing this or that play. My aim was simply to stress that the solution is a chain of logically justified and warranted actions, that in the chain of events the inner life always has its outward expression and that there is always a complex relationship between words and physical actions, and pauses and details can express the most involved emotional experiences.

p Other people’s solutions, however remarkable, however well described -with drawings, plans and photographs-will never enable a director or actors to create a real work of art.

p A production is worth nothing if it is only a copy of an original. Singing in someone else’s voice cannot provide aesthetic pleasure.

p I have done two productions of Korneichuk’s The heath of the Squadron in my time. Although the first was fairly successful, I realised when I came to the second that, with different actors and in a different theatre, there could be no question of repeating it. The “pattern” of the role that suited one actor in one theatre would be quite unsuitable for another actor in a different theatre. What was fine for the vast stage of the Lenin Komsomol Theatre would be quite out of place on the stage of the Gorky Theatre. New music and new sets were required.

p There are those who maintain that it is better to do something outstanding filched from somebody else than something that is one’s own but mediocre, or that there is nothing shameful in a young director borrowing from an experienced one, since it is a matter of “learning the trade”. I simply cannot agree with this pseudo popular wisdom. Creative conceptions cannot be taken on hire like televisions or refrigerators. You cannot train your own imagination by using somebody else’s head. Nobody would think of sending his pal to a rendezvous with his girl friend instead of going himself on the grounds that he is better looking or more experienced.

p Stage direction is a painful but immensely satisfying process. Anybody who does not enjoy it would be better employed elsewhere.

p There is nothing more satisfying for a director than a successful rehearsal in which real creative contact has been established with the cast, and from which an interesting detail has emerged or a solution been found for an exceptionally difficult scene.

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p There is no greater happiness for a director than a rehearsal where his imagination has infected the actors and aroused them to creative thinking, where an invisible bridge has been built between him and the whole cast.

p Stanislavsky, in his practical work as stage-director, preferred rehearsals to actual performances. This is perfectly natural, for it is in the nature of our profession that after the first performance a production somehow detaches itself from the director and begins to live an independent life of its own.

p For the actors it is quite another matter: for them every performance is something quite new. The actor lives his role dozens if not hundreds of times, laughs and cries, suffers and falls in love, jokes and fights. And if the logic of the action brings him to the logic of the feelings, he experiences the joy of creation in every single performance.

p Attempts to achieve results without working for them, bypassing the creative process, kill all the joy of creation. One cannot teach results. One can only point to the process, describe the chosen path, indicate the direction.

p When the director and the actors are clear in their minds about what is happening, about the circumstances in which the characters live and move, then a joyous creative atmosphere will attend the rehearsals. Only in such an atmosphere do successful mises-en-scene arise, successful and expressive tones, rhythms and compositions.

I am making no new discoveries. I am simply describing how I work, and saying what I think about our profession.