All the world's a stage...NIKOLAI NIKOLAIEVITCH EVREINOV
(1879-1953)
Playwright, Producer, Regisseur, Actor, Musician, Theoretician, "fount
of life and mischief."
Educated at the Imperial Law School, Petrograd, Evreinov later studied composition under Rimsky-Korsakov and followed the circus. In 1907, became the stage manager of Moscow's Old (or "Ancient") State Theatre where he focussed on producing plays from the theatre of the Middle Ages and the Golden Age of Spain. He attempted to recreate not just the conventions of the periods in question, but the entire milieu as well. Hence the acting company could be seen arriving, setting up and getting into costume, etc., through the strike and departure. In 1909, he organized the Happy Theatre for Grown Up Children in Petrograd where his brilliant parodies and sketches attacking everything from Italian opera to bad directing became the yardstick against such things were measured. From 1914-1917, he directed the Crooked Looking-Glass, a cabaret theatre.
In all these efforts, Evreinov turned to theatre history for practical models. He was fascinated with commedia dell 'Arte and collaborated on a number of experiments in the form with K. Miklashevsky who wrote an important study there on, which was published in the West by Constant Mic.
An avid essayist, Evreinov theorized an "instinct of transformation." This concept differs from Aristotle's mimesis in that Evreinov's transformation, as he says, "may best be described as the desire to be 'different.'" Thus primitive men of Borneo take great pains to scar themselves; Orinoco Indians tatoo themselves with costly pigments so they may become "a different man." He goes so far as to assert that "the theatrical instinct ... is responsible for the wearing of clothes." It even precedes the religious impulse. When the urge to embellish one's experience with material from dreams transforms reality into something more fantastic, primitive man "begins to realize that besides his physical 'ego' he also has a spiritual 'ego,' that man has a body and a soul and that this soul which possesses the talent of staging such wonderful plays while one is sleeping must possess it ... also while one is awake."
In his passionate and most famous essay, "Apology for Theatricality," published in 1908, Evreinov set forth his underlying aesthetic:
| "To make a theatre of life is the duty of every artist. ... the stage must not borrow so much from life as life borrows from the stage." |
Thus the purpose of theatre was not the familiar formula "to teach and to please" but rather to create a theatre of life that would be worth living to the fullest. Despite some superficial similarity to Walter Pater's Aestheticism, Evreinov is convinced that the theatrical instinct is more primitive and therefore precedes the "aesthetic impulse." In a fanciful dialogue between Pater's famous disciple Oscar Wilde and himself, Evreinov has Wilde say,
| Life is Art's best, Art's only pupil. ... I know ...that you dare to oppose my aesthetical principle with your 'pre-aesthetical' principle of theatricality. I am not going to discuss that question, for I am not quite certain whether I really share my own opinions. ... [But] I have solved the riddle of Truth: a Truth in Art is that whose contradictory is also true. The Truths of metaphysics are the Truths of masks. |
Earlier in the same dialogue, Evreinov has Schopenhauer say:
| If "the world of as idea" is but a visible image of the Will which lies in its substance, art is the best interpretation of this image. It may be likened to the play within the play...As though he were not sufficiently burdened with cares, troubles and duties thrust upon him by the world of realities, man creates for himself also an imaginary world of illusions and spends in it most lavishly his strength and his energy whenever he has a hour to spare...You should remember thaat one who indulges in such play of imagination is a dreamer: he runs the risk of confusing the illusions with which he pleases to amuse himself with facts of real life.... |
Evreinov replies:
| First of all, this is not so very terrible; besides, I haven't lost hope... |
Still, the theatre was, for Evreinov, "as it were a purgatory to which the soul is taken...Acting gives way out to the elemental forces of nature that have been in hidden in the human soul under the organized structure of culture, the systems of rules in society, and the gloss of decency."
From a sort of Hegelian synthesis of the above points of view, Evreinov came up with the notion of the monodrama in which the protagonist is the spectator's "alter ego." the monodrama was to transform the spectator into the participant with the viewpoint of the protagonist--a sort of emotional intensification of Wagner's identification. However, unlike Wagner, Evreinov sought directly to involve the audience. In theory, the acting, scenery and lighting were all to reflect the emotional state of the protagonist, not to represent three-dimensional reality.
Evreinov was most concerned with visual effect: "Words play but a subordinate role on the stage, and we hear more with our eyes than with our ears."
All this and more was spelled out in Monodrama (1909) and Theatre for Oneself (3 vols. 1915, 1916, 1917).
In practice, Evreinov used strictly controlled acting, masks, non-realistic scenery and lighting, but his productions were not as unique as his theories. He is seen as a precursor of the Expressionists and evey (by Martin Esslin who is always on the lookout for such things) as a forerunner of absurdism.
Link to: "The Storming of the Winter Palace" DIRECTED BY EVREINOV
