The Russian Theatre

I

THE New York playgoer, in general, does not have to leave Manhattan to enjoy the best of the world’s theatre. Instead, it comes to him, along with a hundred thousand commodities, from the four corners of the earth, and he has only to take a taxi or a subway to annihilate geography and make the latest play of London, Paris, Berlin, or Budapest his own. Though there may be a German stove in the corner instead of a gilded radiator, though the leading lady may be called Jacqueline or Hedda instead of Mary or Jane, and the characters may be quaffing schnapps instead of gin, or dancing the fandango instead of the Charleston, all the ‘ja wohls,’‘mon Dieus,’ and ‘nichevos’ in the world cannot prevent him from entering into the spirit of the play or production, if it has any, and identifying himself with it. In other words, even the most foreign of foreign plays or companies is hardly ever an absolute alien that refuses to be naturalized in terms of emotions which the New Yorker can share and understand. Beneath all externals of dialogue, costuming, or mise en scéne, he knows there are certain fundamental verities in characterization or plotting which conquer the sympathies or interest of theatregoers the world over; it is for these that he looks, and by these that all national frontiers are destroyed and the theatre established as a universal art.

There is one kind of theatre, however, that is beyond the reach of local taxis, that could never quite survive transplanting, and that must be seen in its native setting to be understood — in short, that strangely chaotic, hysterical, naïve, and crudely vital theatre which has invaded and conquered the playhouses of Moscow and Leningrad during the first eleven years of Soviet rule in Russia. Here is a very special kind of theatre that knows no parallel in the world to-day. It is, of course, the theatre of the Revolution, belonging to the proletarians, nurtured by the protecults, and indigenous to the emotions and the moment in Moscow. In these respects, as in many others, it is unique even among its many distinguished Russian predecessors. The Moscow Art Theatre, in which bourgeois realism rose to unequaled heights of perfection; the Musical Studio, with its tingling stylizations of Lysistrata and Carmencita; the Habima, in which the religious ecstasy of a Hebrew company gave a strange and stirring quality to its performances ; and Balieff, with the rippling gayety of his Chauve-Souris that was so reminiscent of the old régime, have crossed the Atlantic and been understood. But the vivid propagandist theatre of the Revolution needs the shadows of the Kremlin and the flaming banners of Moscow’s Comintern, or Leningrad’s bleeding memories of October, before its voice can roar with the thunder of complete authority.

The productions of the new theatre of Communist Russia, which are recorded in the State Bakhrushin Theatre Museum and which are actually to be seen in Moscow at Meyerhold’s Theatre, the Theatre of the Revolution, the Satiric Theatre, the playhouses in the parks, the workingmen’s clubs, and which have even forced their way in a modified form on to the stages of the Moscow Art Theatre, the Musical Studio, and Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre, are phenomena, isolated in aim and method from all other productions the contemporary theatre offers. All of them bear in some degree the stamp of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s personality, for he is the ‘Citizens’ Artist’ who plays in the revolutionary theatre the rôle Stanislavsky played in the realistic theatre. As a daring and violent innovator, and a tireless agitator, he has led his compatriots in dedicating the revolutionary theatre to the masses in those dirty, milling streets of Red Russia. It is so much a part of them, and they are so much a part of it, that it is almost impossible to tell where the drama of the streets leaves off and the drama of the playhouses begins.

It is the drama of the streets, however, and particularly of the streets of Moscow, which is an essential background to the shrill turbulence of the Soviet theatres. It is Moscow, mouldering, Asiatic, and mud-splashed, with its glittering star-spangled onion domes, the blues and reds and faded yellows of its old buildings, and the dull gray masses or fresh white horizontal planes of the recent structures of the machine age, that is the scenery which is always present in the minds of the men and women who meet in the playhouses to look at the bare brick walls of the stages which scowl at them from behind the zigzag outlines of Constructivist settings. It is Moscow, awakened from a slumbering past, half conscious of an uncomfortable present, and dreamily idealizing a difficult future, that is the heart and head of all that is happening throughout the vast stretches of the U. S. S. R. — a city quivering with a mysterious and exciting vitality that somehow surges upward through all its dreary ugliness, stern, relentless, and triumphant.

II

For melodramatic contrasts Moscow is without an equal. The most flagrant of these is, of course, the ever-present paradox of a crumbling, malodorous Oriental capital, at least two hundred years behind the rest of the world when judged by all the usual tokens of enlightenment, boldly striking out to realize a Marxian utopia by methods no other nation would dare to try even if it wanted to. Other contrasts are to be found at every step — in the Royal Riding School, now used as a public garage; in the famous inscription, ‘Religion is an opiate for the people,’ which looks down on the little Iberian chapel, ignored by the peasants, who continue to prostrate themselves before its ancient icon; and even in the coronation square of the Kremlin itself, which now resounds to the lusty choruses of passing squads of a Citizens’ Army. These are but a few physical symbols, and minor ones at that, of the silent conflict the new Moscow is daily waging with its past. Even a revolution has not been able to readjust the solid stones of architecture to the needs of a new and totally different government. Accordingly, the Revolution seems still to be fought in the streets, waged now with a melancholy irony instead of shrapnel, between the old buildings and the new purposes they serve and the new people they house.

That it is a new people is affirmed by every minute spent in the streets, the stores, the hotels, restaurants, trams, and stations — a new people in command, as new to Moscow as they are to the rest of the world. It is when this drab proletarian army is seen, and then alone, that the propagandist theatre which feeds it becomes explicable. Surely Moscow affords no greater shock to the foreigner than his initial impact with its citizenry. For the first time the wholesale social change, and the sacrifices, following in the wake of the Revolution, of all those minor manifestations of comfort and luxury which we take for granted without ever stopping to consider how much they contribute to the dignity of everyday life, are made brutally clear. These men and women, though assembled from all corners of the Union, present, when first seen, fewer contrasts than the people of any other metropolis. In fact, in a city that is alive with every shading of variety, they alone are robbed of it. The color of individuality seems to have faded from them. The men, with their gray blouses and black boots and trousers, and the women, with their shawls and shapeless calicoes, fuse into a mighty, unified host of workers, almost as strictly uniformed as soldiers, and apparently as forced as they are to submerge their personalities beneath the clothing that is common to them all. It is only after several days of being one of them, when the eye is adjusted and the mind relaxed and the heart quickened to an imminent sense of something terrible and great in the air, that the foreigner is able to see the individuals hidden in the mobs.

They are the army of the downtrodden, now in command. To-day Moscow is their city, Russia their country, and the world their dream. They swarm over the city’s full length, penetrate the chandeliered dining rooms of the best hotels, sit in the imperial boxes at the theatre, inhabit the houses of the fallen bourgeoisie, and spend their vacations in the rest camps made from the estates of the old nobility. If they are not equally rich, they are all equally poor. Their sad past has given most of them the patience and the courage to put up with the discomforts brought on by the Revolution, and enabled them to consider the present only an unavoidable period of transition and experiment. More backward than the laborers of any other country, held down through long centuries of serfdom and illiteracy, accustomed to few conveniences and no comforts, these new people have been able to bring but few of the requisites of living to their new liberty. They are a simple, grim, robust, and slightly bewildered horde, whose men are without vanity and whose women are without coquetry. They crowd the markets, the Soviet stores, and every inch of ancient Moscow, and their strong, bronzed peasant bodies gleam naked in the summer’s sun on the bathing beaches by the brown water of the city’s canals. The elegancies and refinements which the former ruling classes demanded and enjoyed have slipped into oblivion. With the triumph of this particular proletariat style and beauty in a thousand minor forms, individual taste and all the by-products of sophistication have, temporarily at least, been blotted out.

For the most part, however, these new people seem happy and contented. Having once realized that the Revolution did not mean the end of all work, they are slowly waking to the new privileges within their reach. They have gone back to their daily jobs with a new sense of the importance of their labors. They haggle in the markets, wait patiently for the clerks in stores and banks alike to do their sums on the wooden balls of Chinese counting boards, and push forward goodnaturedly in their crowded but efficient street cars. Their jawbones rotate with an almost American tempo as they chew sunflower seeds and spit out the shells wherever they happen to be. They can be seen clustering in front of the innumerable little booths on the sidewalks, or standing knee-deep in the forest of uncut grass which fringes the streets. Often they bounce over the cobblestones of the tortuous thoroughfares in their springless wagons — dead drunk, with their eyes glazed and their legs seeming to walk on air as they dangle over the sides. The luckier and more impetuous ones loll back on the filthy seats of droshkies that have not been cleaned since the war, their legs sprawled over the potato sacks they are carrying, or their arms clutched tightly around big-horn gramophones of a prehistoric vintage. Sometimes brutally unpleasant sights lurk around the corners. For Russians do not seem to want to hide their poverty or keep their diseases indoors in the manner of other people. They fight their way into the streets to die, and may at times be seen falling face downward in the slimy puddles, to shake convulsively with hemorrhages. Then, too, as they feel no shame because of poverty, their streets are cluttered with the festering beggars of the East. Occasionally, fierce, wild-eyed groups of those orphaned children of the Revolution, who take advantage of the summer’s sun to roam about the country, are to be met with in Moscow, living in any improvised shelter that the sticks and stones of the streets may provide.

But on the whole the citizens of Moscow seem kindly, good-natured, and orderly, and are controlled by fewer policemen than the people of any other city of its size. The woeful overcrowding of their living quarters, which the sudden increase of Moscow’s population has demanded, is not the terrible hardship it would be to a people less accustomed to being overcrowded. Though as many as eight families may be quartered in a single flat, cooking on little coal-oil stoves in a common hallway, and carrying their foodstuffs back to their rooms after each meal for fear of theft, the people know that they are living where they could not have lived before, and hope that, as soon as the sorely harassed government can afford it, new buildings will be built to take care of them. Even if they are suffering, they feel their suffering is in a good cause. For, when all is said and done, is not Karl Marx in his heaven and all right with the world? And, in any event, their government has not deprived them of vodka, and they can seek a welcome forgetfulness in the rationed quota they are allowed each day.

What their life lacks in those incidentals that are imperative to our happiness is apparently small cause of complaint to them. They do not miss what they have never had, nor are they far enough along in education or prosperity to have been fully tested by their dearth of comforts. Even their lack of liberty under the iron dictatorship of the new régime must seem to the toilers of Moscow an advance on what is in the background of their experience. It is, at any rate, a government that proudly proclaims it is of and for the working classes, and shows its good intentions in a thousand ways. Its rigid supervision, which to the world at large may seem only another form of Fascist coercion, cannot surprise a people who have been brought up on the old secret service, and to whom lettres de cachet, mysterious executions, and Siberia have been familiar as far back as they can remember. This government speaks as the people’s organ, faces cruelly difficult times, and has the perpetual alibi of continuing what is virtually a period of martial law until it is strong enough to encourage or tolerate an opposition.

III

The real victims of the new régime have, of course, been wiped out by death or exile or forced into a voiceless retirement. Those who remain and crowd the streets of Moscow cannot have suffered by the adoption of Communism. Having for so long been property themselves, they were peculiarly susceptible to the idea of eradicating everything for which it stood. Even its perquisites have come to symbolize for them all the vices of the bourgeoisie and capitalism. This new citizenry, ignored and despised by the old government, has suddenly found itself courted by the new one, and taught to believe, in theory at least, that it is itself the government. And it is in that other side of the picture, the side which deals not with the people but with what is being done to them, that the second explanation of the revolutionary theatre lies.

No authorities could have been quicker to utilize every means at their command to win support and keep their constituents enflamed than the Soviets. They have watched and edited the public press with a jealous, all-seeing eye. They have sent out special exhibition trains to teach the peasants, opened a Museum of the Revolution in every major city, and a Red Corner or a Lenin Room in almost every public building. Under them has been sponsored and organized a network of clubs and unions, which are an informal and invaluable means of instructing the people as well as feeling their pulse. Inspired by what amounts to genius, they have left the worst relics of Tsarism — the ugliest statues and the most hideously furnished palaces — intact as a visual plea against the bad taste of kings. In many of Moscow’s largest squares they have set up radios to bark out the news of the day to illiterates in the voice and phrases of the government. They have suppressed all forms of opposition, and watched the frontiers for dangerous literature which might mislead their people. Nor have they forgotten the youth of the country, because they are wise enough to see that the real test of Sovietism will come with the next generation and prosperity. Accordingly they have organized the children as militantly as Mussolini has in Italy, and taken every precaution to train them in the new order. By fostering a particularly telling form of the poster art, and instigating innumerable pageants to celebrate the triumphs of October, they have, in short, fed the people on every conceivable form of propaganda ever since the fall of Kerensky’s provisional government. It was inevitable that a government which is in advance of every other government in its scientific mastery of the art of propaganda should sooner or later realize the importance of the motion pictures and the stage as instruments of propaganda. That the Soviet Union perceived their extraordinary value from the beginning is both a credit to its perspicacity and an explanation of what the last eleven years have meant to the Russian theatre.

Faced, first of all, with the tantamount problem of winning the public, then of unifying and controlling it, and finally of keeping it stirred to a constant pitch of dedication and excitement, the government has found the theatre a meeting place ideally suited to its needs. Here was a forum where all the usual rigmarole of a political meeting — the facts, statistics, and appeals to the reason of a backward people — could be dispensed with, a rostrum from which the authorities could reach out with the utmost directness and touch the emotions of their voters.

The government knew, as all theatre people know, that an audience does not meet to exercise its logic, to heckle or interrupt. It assembles not to tell but to be told, not to debate but to hear a story. The more unsophisticated it is as an audience, the more it wants its thinking done for it, and the more it craves its villains painted in bold, broad, unmistakable strokes. It is not concerned with whether the cards are stacked or not. In fact, when they are stacked against a common enemy, — whether Punch in the guignols of the Parisian boulevards or the ‘Huns’ in an American war play, — the audience enjoys itself all the more, because it then feels that its secret emotions of cruelty and hatred not only can be released, but are being publicly condoned and justified. If an audience is at all times at the mercy of its theatre, asking only to be amused or moved or interested, it is in any time of public upheaval particularly easy prey. When the bands are playing, the flags waving, and common foes are introduced upon the stage, and playwrights and managers turn the theatres into but ill-disguised recruiting stations, then an audience is receptivity itself.

In Russia there has been, and is, so much drama being acted outside of the playhouses, and drama in which the public plays a prominent and heroic part, that the audience is half conquered from the theatre point of view even before it enters the auditorium. Particularly in Moscow and Leningrad, where the spirit of revolt fermented into decisive action, audiences bring an emotion to the plays they are given which is already strong enough to put flesh and blood upon the skeleton of any drama they may be asked to see. Their theatre is not a world apart, where they can forget themselves. They have not as yet been granted any productions devised purely for the recreation of tired revolutionists. During the eleven years of the Soviet régime they have been asked to remember themselves and hate their enemies, to be aware of this present which is theirs and prepared for the future to which it may lead. Such, in fact, is their momentary fervor that the merest mention of Lenin’s name by a captured American soldier in such a play as The Armored Car can arouse an audience to a pitch of enthusiasm that a big scene, built up to by a whole act of steady preparation, could not equal in the theatres of other countries. Hence it is that the foreigner, unless he has some personal inkling of what these last eleven years have meant to the workers of Russia, and has actually seen them in the grip of their new ideas and fresh surroundings, is often both puzzled and unmoved by what is obviously most affecting in their productions. The emotions of the Soviets are fired not half so much by the technique of their dramatists as by the preparation of their politics. For theirs is a uniquely local and topical theatre, which belongs to and exists for the new people of the new Russia. Without them it would fall on deaf ears, for they are its only consideration. As a result, it is the details of their daily life, the events of proletarian history which they have shaped, the wickedness of those who have oppressed them or who are now opposing them, that are the incessant subjects of their plays.

IV

The Soviet Government, and the more radical theatre agitators, have not stopped here. Nor have their instructions ended with the strains of the Internationale or with splashing the old régime with mud. They have had positive theories to spread and new ideals to preach. And these are linked up heart and soul with the focusing of the new order and the character of the new theatre. Holding the individual in but slight esteem, and trying to persuade him that the ‘mass soul’ should be substituted for religions which hope to save the individual soul, the authorities have devoted their stages to spreading the doctrines of the ‘superpersonal’ and the idea of ‘collective man.’ Even Meyerhold, the greatest of the modern Russian theatrical insurgents, is quoted by Herr Fülöp-Miller as saying that the purpose of the stage is to organize the mass collectively, and that the principles of the propagandist theatre are ‘in entire conformity with those of Marxism, because they try to emphasize the elements which make prominent what is common to all men, the unindividual.' With such an ideal, it is not strange that phrases like ‘little rickety ego,’ ‘worthless soul junk,’ and ‘cracking the old nuts of psychological riddles’ should be freely used against the realistic theatre to which we, and the world at large, are accustomed. Nor is it odd that, in the place of our dramas which revolve around the particularized love of one Jack for his Jill, and which are acted in one drawingroom or kitchen, a new type of play should evolve, set in a new manner.

Certainly it is not odd when the social background of this propagandist theatre is remembered. And it seems almost inescapable when that background is coupled with the managerial problems faced by the insurgent directors. Theirs has been a task which not only involved persuasion, but which also had to find means of persuasion that would appeal to their new public. Their public was, to a large extent, as new to the theatre as it was unaccustomed to holding the reins of power. Since the Soviet authorities were inciting the people to a deep detestation of everything for which the bourgeoisie had stood, all the bourgeois interiors that had been an integral part of the old realistic theatres were denied them. The old methods could only arouse either a sentimental or a jealous curiosity concerning the comforts of the old régime. Moreover, on those who had not lived in bourgeois interiors, the labor of reproducing them meticulously in the theatre would have been wasted, as their details would have lost their claims to recognition and hence to realism. This new public had the same right that the old public had exercised, of seeing their plays set in a setting which had its roots in their everyday experience.

Accordingly, as a final burning of all bridges that might possibly connect the present with the past, and as a bold glorification of the machines of the industrial age which was at hand, the so-called Constructivist settings of the revolutionary theatre came into being. They had, as things most generally do have that are the product of necessity, both logic and meaning behind them. The Constructivists waged a rebellious war on beauty, as the Western theatre understands it, and dedicated themselves to the gaunt ribs and bare platforms of functionalism. On their stages at any rate, as they could not possibly hope to do with the old buildings of Moscow and Leningrad, the Soviets were able to raise structures which caught the spirit of the present and the mood of labor. Instead of aiming to use the stage as a camera by which elaborate interiors could be photographed and ‘the fourth wall’ removed for the delectation of this public that knew nothing about the other three walls, the radical designers sought the laths and beams and whirring wheels of the machinery which was the ideal of the new proletarian State. Looking westward to New York, as the supreme achievement of mechanization, they found in the red steel ribs of its unfinished skyscrapers a basis for the physical aspect of their workingmen’s theatre. Paint and canvas and all the pretty knickknacks of realism were relegated to the dustbin, and the decorative was left ‘ to the secessionists and the Vienna and Munich restaurants.’ The cry of the industrial present, which was to prove to the workingman the dignity of being one of many, working at machines for the good of all, was for the sternly practical. The ornamental was despised for its past, and hated as the flowering of a decadent and acquisitive idleness. In its place, the crude, sweaty tools and outlines of the factories were reared upon the propagandist stages, symbolizing the present, and encouraging backward Russia to take its place among the industrial nations of the earth.

With their levels and platforms, elevators and whirling circles within circles, and their vehement avoidance of reality, these new settings — whether they were Constructivist in the most literal meaning of the word, or whether they were influenced only by its spirit — quite naturally revolutionized all the arts of the theatre they served. The old conception of the representational theatre was banished as a relic of the past, or permitted to continue, as in the case of the Moscow Art Theatre, out of reverence and love, in an eddy apart from, and generally untouched by, the mad current of reform. In its place a new ideal was introduced, the ideal of the ‘theatre theatrical.’ By thatMeyerhold and his disciples meant simply a theatre which was proud to confess at all times and in all ways that it was a theatre, which never devoted itself to being a slavish imitation of life, and which withheld no secrets from its audiences. When the Russian radicals broke with realism and put their theories into practice, instead of turning to the wagon, sinking, or revolving stages of the Germans, or any of the other contraptions devised to create illusion, they cleared their stages of machines, because the new Constructivist settings were in themselves machines which had the additional merit of functioning in full view of the spectators. Nor did the revolutionists, when their theatre was performing such a definite social service, seek the abstract forms of beauty sought by the Expressionists of post-war Europe and America. Though the new directors shared with the Expressionists the conviction that realism had had its day, they had a different substitute in mind, intended for a different audience. As proletarians these régisseurs wanted to share their back stages collectively with their proletarian audiences.

Accordingly, Meyerhold and his followers came to regard the front curtain of their theatres as a symbol of the oldfashioned ‘peep show’ theatre, and allowed their audiences to take their seats facing a stage already set in the image of their own factory life. Nor did they allow the curtain to be lowered between the acts, or make any such concessions to a habit of the past that was foreign to their present purpose. If there were changes of scene to make, the directors sent their sceneshifters on in overalls to rearrange the setting and show that workingmen were assisting in the performance. And, as directors of a propagandist theatre that worshiped all that was practical, they left the brick walls of the back stage bare and undecorated behind their settings as a final tribute to functionalism. Believing as they did, and do, in the glorification of the practical, they were proud to grant the naked bricks of the back stage a dignity which the realistic theatre had consistently denied them.

On such a stage and in such a theatre, it was inevitable that the actor should have to make violent readjustments. Certainly a theatre dedicated to the ‘ unindividual’ must have cost the old-time performers untold difficulties, to say nothing of humiliations. In the theatre the world over, the actor, whether he is encouraged to believe it or not, considers his task the supreme expression of his individuality. His justification is a more than logical one, because he, of all artists, has only himself and his own body to use as his medium of expression. In the Soviet theatre he was asked to forget almost everything he knew and lived by and try to become merely a member of the masses, acting very often in overalls. His ears, not to mention his pride, must have been considerably stunned by such a phrase as that of Meyerhold’s in which the actor was told that he was no longer a star, acting for his own aggrandizement, but ‘an instrument for social manifestoes.’ Furthermore, he was informed that to survive he must feel himself a vital part of the new society and the new stage. If he was accustomed to the easy-chairs and ash trays of the old methods. Constructivism must have come as an unwelcome innovation. Its perilous levels not only violated all the old rules of ‘centre stage’ and controlling a scene, but demanded an entirely new style of acting. Often he was told that to catch the new rhythms he must forget himself and become an acrobat among acrobats. He, too, must serve the machines and perfect himself in the dynamic movements that are known in Russia as ’biomechanics.’ The cultivation of his body was what he owed to society, and the subjugation of his individuality was what he owed to the stage. He could no longer indulge even in the pleasant details of veraciously observed character acting, in which Russian actors had always excelled with particular distinction. For the dizzy structure behind him, he must find a new, broad, unreal, exaggerated, posteresque enlargement adapted to it. He must excel at ‘grotesques,’ caricature, horseplay, and violent, stirring movement, and, as a member of the masses, devote himself to serving them.

V

As a theatre without a precedent, its form has been restricted by none of those inhibitions which are commonly known as conventions. Its playwrights, as well as its directors, have felt free, in blazing a trail, to choose any materials or combinations of materials so long as they have their proper effect upon a proletarian audience. The playwrights, like the actors, found their profession reoriented. Everything they remembered in the dramatic practice of their own or other literatures they were asked to forget. Speaking to a new audience, they had to aim at an untried and different denominator of the intellect as well as of the emotion. Their chambermaids and butlers, and all the hoary devices they had relied on to oil the genteel drama of the past, were proscribed. In a world where everyone was of one class, where titles were done away with and officials hailed waiters as comrades, there was no longer any justification for presenting on the stage menials who had nothing better to do than to talk conveniently about their master’s business. That favorite pastime of ‘bourgeois’ playwrights, of using a microscope to study the sufferings of small and great souls, was also listed as the supercargo of the past. ‘Soul junk’and ‘rickety ego’ hurt the dramatists’ inherited subject matter as much as it wounded the actors’ pride, because, with the glorification of the ‘unindividual,’ the playwrights were suddenly forced to forget particularized characters for bluntly outlined types. All their painfully learned tricks of creating illusion, their ‘cover scenes,’ delayed climaxes, and the rest, were swept aside with one decisive gesture by the lightning tempo and physical differences of the new methods. What must have been most difficult of all, however, was that these propagandist playwrights found they could no longer flirt with the theories of futility which had been the mainstay of Russian dramatists for several generations. In the place of the ‘Russian soul,’ the unhappy Annas and Fedyas whose despairing inertia had sent them slowly to a suicide’s grave, they were asked to put the ‘mass soul’ of victorious workers and sing the joys of collective man. Their audiences were not any more concerned with refinements inside the theatre than outside, and did not want their problems or their emotions obscured by any of the ambushes so sacred to gentility. They wanted them raw and tingling, outspoken and obvious.

Outside of the playhouses, the workingman found that his old religion and all of its glamorous superstitions were being discouraged. He was being told that the faith in which he had been reared was his enemy, an opiate for his mind and a foe to the government of which he was a part. He had even seen several of his most holy cathedrals closed as houses of God and reopened as people’s museums. He could observe, too, in the hundreds of churches the government did not close, the empty frames from which sacred icons that contained stones or metals of any value had been taken by the authorities as a means of saving Soviet Russia in the darkest hours of its public credit. Though he knew his government stood in theory for religious toleration, he was given to understand that an age of reason was at hand, He was encouraged — as an act of reason — to worship the machines, which would bring him immediate well-being, rather than the holy images, which could offer him no practical benefits. But whether the churches or the machines were to be an outlet for his ecstasy and superstition had but little to do with the fact that he was both superstitious and ecstatic by temperament. No legislative act could rob him of that part of his being he had known as his ‘soul.’ No one was more aware of this than the authorities, or more aware that a people trained to being onlookers at processions of a visual splendor the modern world has rarely equaled could not suddenly be deprived of their ceremonies and their ritual and remain contented. With uncanny wisdom, the authorities did not try to change the spirit of the worker’s heart, but to divert it into a new outlet. They opened the doors to the playhouses at the lowest possible cost that a generous official subsidy would permit, and allowed the workingman to carry into the theatre something of the fervor he had brought to his churches. They designed the new productions to satisfy this among other needs, and in Karl Marx and Lenin they provided him with the real gods of the moment of emancipation, even though by doing so they seemed to contradict their theory of the ‘ unindividual.’ In short, in an age that was turbulently alive to the excitements of liberty, they gave the people a theatre that was, in its last analysis, only a High Mass sung to the spirit of revolution.

To satisfy this new need, the playwrights sought constantly to keep the fervor of victory alive and achieve an ecstasy worthy of a paradise that was being realized on earth for the first time. They forgot style and all the usual embellishments of language, and took the heart of the common people as their target. In words as simple and unornamented as Lenin’s own, they reached out for the new public before them, employing catchwords of the moment to excellent advantage, and drumming in their points by effective repetition. The themes of their plays became journalistic and topical. They wrote government editorials in the form of headlines and told them with the relentless visualization of the tabloids. Where they were afraid a point might pass unnoticed, they set up a silver screen above their stages and ran ringing shibboleths upon it to accompany the action. The present was, quite naturally, their province, the present of the proletariat, as The Wheels Are Turning, Mandate, Soufflé, and any number of their dramas prove. They were, however, also allowed to make excursions into the past, but they looked backward only to fortify and justify the present. If they revived a classic, such as in The Inspector General, in their most revolutionary theatres, they felt at liberty to alter its text and meaning to suit their aims. To them history was, and is, a mine rich in the ores of Tsarist villainies or glorious with the misfortunes of early revolutionists, as is indicated by 1881, The Decembrists, and The Plot of the Empress (the last Tsarina, of course, and Rasputin).

When not concerned with history, or Soviet uprisings, or the wonders of Communism, or the need of sports, the playwrights have been permitted to graze elsewhere to find illustrations of the downtrodden whom Soviet Russia may save. American and English capitalists were villains ready-made to fit their needs, and they were introduced upon the stage as drooling fools whose hearts were as black as the records of their past, as D. E. (The Destruction of Europe) and Roar China testify. Even in the old Imperial Opera House in Moscow, now owned and operated by the State, the voice of the Soviet raises itself above the clamor of the orchestra, and a new opera, like The Red Poppy, shows a Russian crew come to the defense of some oppressed coolies and ends with the waving of the red flag. And often, too, when the playwrights invite the proletarians to wander from their local problems, they show them the proletarians of other countries shaking off the shackles of capitalistic bondage. The hope of a world uprising of the masses is kept steadily before them, because the radical directors have realized with Lenin that ‘one must have something to dream of.’

Outside of the regular propagandist theatres, such as Meyerhold’s or the Theatre of the Revolution, the work of flag waving and propagandizing goes on with the same insistency. Though Tairov and Stanislavsky may hold back from its most violent forms of expression, its methods spill over into a thousand different outlets. Especially in the workingmen’s clubs and unions, which operate even in farthest Siberia, the theatre is the servant of the new State. In the Blue Blouse performances of the clubs it takes the pleasant form of amateur vaudeville, and includes sports numbers, timely songs, playlets, humorous speeches, and unavoidable jingles at the expense of Chamberlain — who, by the way, is not only a favorite joke of the Russians, but is also the symbol of European capitalism, shot at in the shooting galleries and burned in effigy in the streets. Or propaganda lifts its head in the thin disguise of Living Newspapers, those pointed charades that the government has found so effective in relaying to illiterate groups its own version of the day’s news.

VI

It is slight wonder, therefore, that this propagandist theatre should be linked inseparably with the present in Russia, and particularly with all that Moscow stands for as its capital. By its own intention it is not an artist’s theatre, and admits no art that exists by and of itself. Its directors have willfully snatched the theatre out of the hazy limbo of the impractical and the purely entertaining, and forced it into the harness of public service. They have made a ‘house organ’ of it, and as such it can no more make a serious claim to being art, in our sense of the word or in its usual æsthetic implication, than can a government pamphlet on horse breeding. It is to the theatre, as we understand it, what a Chautauqua is to Shakespeare, what sky writing is to poetry, or what a poster is to a painting. Like the poster, it does not pretend that its beauty is its reason for being. Speaking to the majority, it proscribes all the subtleties that might appeal to the minority. Accordingly it puts a ban on genius and a premium on ingenuity. It is the paradise of the opportunist, of the man who is one step ahead of the streets to-day and two steps behind the theatre of next month. It has no time to think of posterity, and hardly enough time to keep up with the present. It is the loud speaker of the masses, and is therefore bound to be more conscious of its public than any New York manager has ever been of his box office. It produces what the government wants the people to want in such a way that they are forced to want it.

Crude, infantile, noisy, obstreperous, cheap, confused, and formless as it is, it has, however, a thrilling quality of life that has made it magnificently successful in being what it set out to be — a propagandist theatre. Already rumors are abroad in Moscow that the proletarians are weary of propaganda and tired of having to consider the waving of a red flag the highest emotional climax a drama can reach. The fact that they were not tired of its shouting and any number of its rasping puerilities nine years ago shows how shrewd this propagandist theatre has been in its attack, and how much it was needed both by the government and by the people. It indicates, too, how skillful the radical producers have been in changing their needles each time so as not to wear out the same old record they have been forced to play over and over again.

Even to its leaders, however, this theatre has not seemed a final form. They know just how precariously topical it is, and how close it is to the need that has mothered it. But to them, imbued as they are with strident and irrepressible social theories, this new theatre does not seem the prostitution of a great art that it does to us. They are proud of their success in prostituting an art which they have made their own. Certainly, when one measures them by their intentions, or judges them by some of the liberating experiments in technique they have stumbled on to, one must admit that they have reason to be proud. Because, both as a herald and as an echo to the sufferings and hopes of a sorely tried and yet ecstatic Russia, this propagandist theatre has performed a superb function as the first step toward the true people’s theatre which will some day take its place.