Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940?)

Born into a Lutheran family of German-Jewish extraction, Karl Theodore Kasimir Meyergold converted to Greek Orthodoxy in 1895 and took the name Vsevolod Emielevich Meyerhold. Having studied with Nemirovich-Danchenko at the Moscow Philharmonic Society, Meyerhold was one of the original members of the Moscow Art Theatre, ineptly playing Treplev in The Sea Gull. In 1902, because of MAT's preoccupation with realism, he left to work in the provinces with his own company of actors producing and acting in plays by Ibsen, Maeterlinck and Hauptmann. In 1905, Stanislavsky brought him back to MAT to direct two Studio productions: Maeterlinck's The Death of Tantagiles and Hauptmann's Schluck und Jau. His staging was decidedly anti-realistic (he quoted Voltaire: "The secret of being boring is to say everything.") and Stan the man forbade their public performance. Meyerhold, of course, left the fold to try to organize his Society of New Drama and finally went to the theatre owned by Vera Komissarzhevskaya.

Between 1906 and 1917, Meyerhold became deputy chief of the Petrograd Theater Section and recruited the leading Russian Symbolists (notably Blok). He became a Communist Party member in 1918 and continued to seek out avante-garde artists from Futurists and Cubists. He believed that the new society needed new forms of theatre and art, rather than the old forms with new content. He is perhaps best remembered now for his experiments with biomechanics and constructivism.

Biomechanics: A system of acting developed by Meyerhold in which the actor need only perform certain kinetic patterns to elicit particular emotions in the audience. The actor was a piece of technology, a bio-mechanism, is you will. Acting could be expressed by the formula:

Where N = the actor; A1, the artist who conceives the idea and issues the instructions necessary for its execution, and A2 = the executant who executes the conception of A1.

Thus Meyerhold's actor training centers on the physical, mimetic rather than the textual analysis of the classicists or the psychological sensitivity training of the realists/naturalists. Stylistically, this often entailed the unrealistic representation of elation, for example, as sliding down a waterslide or doing handsprings or swinging on a trapeze, etc. Strict obedience to the will of the regisseur is also required.

Constructivism: A movement in the visual arts dating from 1912 which consisted largely of sculpture made of intersecting planes and masses. Meyerhold borrowed some of the visual elements to create settings which would be a "machine for acting." This entails abstract sets like the one for his production of Gogol's Inspector General with fifteen doors surrounding the playing area from which officials emerged simultaneously to offer bribes. The earliest set was done by Constructivist sculptor Lybov Popova for Le Cocu magnifique.

An avid essayist, Meyerhold had many distinctive and influential theories. Says Meyerhold: "…I want to point out two methods of directing a play which in different ways establish the relationship between the actor and director: one system restrains the creative freedom of both the actor and spectator, and the other liberates both the actor and spectator, permitting the latter to use his imagination actively rather than merely to contemplate. These two systems are best understood if the four fundamentals of the theater-the author, director, actor and spectator-are graphically represented as follows:

"1) A triangle with the apex representing the director, and the bases the author and the actor. The playgoer sees the work of the author and actor through the work of the director. (Graphically the 'spectator' is at the top of the triangle.) This is one kind of theater-the 'triangular theater.'

2) A straight, horizontal where the four fundamentals of the theater are represented from left to right: author, director, actor, spectator. This is the other kind of theater-the "straight theater." The actor freely reveals his soul to the spectator after having incorporated the work of the director, just as the director had incorporated the work of the author.

"In the 'triangular theater' the director, after having discussed his plan in great detail, will rehearse until his conception is simply reproduced, until he hears and sees the play as he had heard and seen it by himself."
"In the 'straight theater' the director takes the part of the author, and makes the actor see his work (author and director are one). After incorporating the author's work by way of the director, the actor comes face to face with the spectator (author and director at the actor's back), and acts freely while enjoying the give and take of the two main elements of theater-the player and the playgoer. The director alone must set the tone and style of a performance so that the 'straight theater' may not become chaotic, and yet the acting will remain free and unrestrained."

In the 1930's, his experimental style ran afoul of the obviously superior tastes of Joseph Stalin, whose government began a steady barrage of criticism. In 1939, The Meyerhold Theater was closed. In 1939, he was arrested. In 1940, he was executed in prison. There are those who still maintain he died in the Gulag in 1942. There is no strong evidence to support this claim, but perhaps the mystery will be cleared up one day. Let's hope.