Russian Theatre & Vsevolod Meyerhold

The role of V.E. Meyerhold in helping to refine modern stage theory and praxis is widely acknowledged. Indeed, from the earliest phases of his career, Meyerhold appears to have been a self-conscious innovator whose theory of the stage encompassed dramatic forms and dramaturgy responsive to and metaphorically representative of dimensions of reality that could compress the dynamic interaction between past and present, the temporal and the eternal, the human cosmos and its history and destiny, into the barest mise en scFne. How Meyerhold meant to accomplish this in general terms can be seen from the experimental focus of virtually all of his study and work.

From czarist Russia to the Bolshevik revolution to the politically charged environment of the Soviet Union between the wars, the line of Meyerhold's life seems sharply marked by defining moments and by attempts on his part to control the shape of those moments. His strengths as a theatrical innovator appear to have been discerned during his earliest studies, at the Musical Dramatic School

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ed the theatre of Vera Komisarjevskaya, where he put his "symbolic or stylized method" to work. "In effect this amounted to 'abstract' theatre," says Hartnoll (638), "placing the human element, the actor, on a level with the other elements of production, thus reducing to nothing the actor's individual contribution to the ensemble, and making him merely a super-marionette in the hands of the producer." The name given to this approach to acting, and especially acting pedagogy, is biomechanics. As the term implies, the emphasis is on actors as physically adept biological machines, "highly drilled technicians assembled in a productive pattern of physical skills" (Arnott 426) Actors were no longer giving an illusionistic performance. The actor, indeed, had himself become a machine. Meyerhold's theory of biomechanics, which asked actors to translate inner emotion into overt physical faction, went back to the athletics and tumbling of the commedia dell'arte. Stanislavsky, directing a romantic love scene, asked the actor to concentrate on his mental preparation. Meyerhold sent a romantic lover onstage down a playground slide, to show the urgency of the impulse that motivated him (Arnott 426). The name given to Meyerhold's abstract theatr
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Approximate Word count = 2156
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)