Vsevolod Meyerhold
Vsevolod Emilyevich Meyerhold was a Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre. During the Great Purge, Meyerhold was arrested in June 1939. He was tortured, his wife was murdered, and he was executed on 2 February 1940.
Life and work
Early life
Vsevolod Meyerhold was born Karl Kasimir Theodor Meyerhold in Penza on to Russian-German wine manufacturer Friedrich Emil Meyerhold and his Baltic German wife, Alvina Danilovna. He was the youngest of eight children. His father came from an old noble family Meyerhold von Ritterholm. The elder Meyerhold emigrated to Russia in the 1850s.After completing school in 1895, Meyerhold studied law at Moscow University but never completed his degree. He was torn between studying theatre or a career as a violinist. However, he failed his audition to become the second violinist in the University orchestra and in 1896 joined the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School.
On his 21st birthday, he converted from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity and accepted "Vsevolod" as an Orthodox Christian name.
File:Meyerhold reads Chekhov's The Seagull in 1898.jpg|thumb|Meyerhold preparing for the role of Treplev in Stanislavsky's 1898 Moscow Art Theater production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov.
Early career
Meyerhold began acting in 1896 as a student of the Moscow Philharmonic Dramatic School under the guidance of Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, co-founder with Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theatre. At the MAT, Meyerhold played 18 roles, such as Vasiliy Shuiskiy in Tsar Fyodor Ioannovich and Ivan the Terrible in The Death of Ivan the Terrible. In 1898, in the first successful production of Chekhov's first play, The Seagull, Meyerhold played the lead male role, opposite Chekhov's future wife, Olga Knipper.After leaving the MAT in 1902, wanting to break free of the highly naturalistic 'missing fourth wall' productions of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, Meyerhold participated in a number of theatrical projects, as both a director and actor. Each project was an arena for experiment and creation of new staging methods. Meyerhold was one of the most fervent advocates of Symbolism in theatre, especially when he worked as the chief producer of the Vera Komissarzhevskaya theatre in 1906–1907. He was invited back to the MAT around this time to pursue his experimental ideas.
Meyerhold continued theatrical innovation during the decade 1907–1917, while working with the imperial theatres in St. Petersburg. He introduced classical plays in an innovative manner, and staged works of controversial contemporary authors like Fyodor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius, and Alexander Blok. In these plays, Meyerhold tried to return acting to the traditions of Commedia dell'arte, rethinking them for the contemporary theatrical reality. His theoretical concepts of the "conditional theatre" were elaborated in his book On Theatre in 1913.
Career under communism
On the day when the February Revolution broke out – on 25 February, under the old style calendar then used in Russia – Meyerhold's production of Masquerade by Mikhail Lermontov had a dress rehearsal at the Alexandrinsky Theatre, in front of an audience that included the poet Anna Akhmatova. That evening has been described as "the last act of the tragedy of the old regime, when the Petersburg elite went to enjoy themselves at this splendidly luxurious production in the midst of the chaos and confusion." Sergei Eisenstein, who was then a teenager but would later be a world-renowned film director, desperately wanted to see the production, having heard that it featured clowns, but having made his way across the city that was in the throes of a revolution was disappointed to discover that the Alexandrinsky was closed.Meyerhold was one of the first prominent Russian artists to welcome the Bolshevik Revolution – and one of only five out of 120 who accepted an invitation to meet the new People's Commissar for Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky in November 1917. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1918, narrowly escaping execution when he was caught on the wrong side of the battle lines during the civil war. He became an official of the Theatre Division of the Commissariat of Education and Enlightenment. In 1918–1919, Meyerhold formed an alliance with Olga Kameneva, the head of the Division. Together, they tried to radicalize Russian theatres, effectively nationalizing them under Bolshevik control. Meyerhold came down with tuberculosis in May 1919 and had to leave for the south. In his absence, the head of the Commissariat, Anatoly Lunacharsky, secured Vladimir Lenin's permission to revise government policy in favor of more traditional theatres and dismissed Kameneva in June 1919.
After returning to Moscow, Meyerhold founded his own theatre in 1920, which was known from 1923 as the Meyerhold Theatre until 1938. Meyerhold confronted the principles of theatrical academism, claiming that they are incapable of finding a common language with the new reality. Meyerhold's methods of scenic constructivism and circus-style effects were used in his most successful works of the time. Some of these works included Nikolai Erdman's The Mandate, Mayakovsky's Mystery-Bouffe, Fernand Crommelynck's Le Cocu magnifique and Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin's Tarelkin's Death. Mayakovsky collaborated with Meyerhold several times, and was said to have written The Bedbug especially for him; Meyerhold continued to stage Mayakovsky's productions even after the latter's suicide.
File:Grigoriev Meyerkhold.jpg|thumb|Double portrait by Boris Grigoriev, depicting Meyerhold sharing the stage with his alter ego 'Doctor Dapertutto', a pseudonym he had borrowed from a character in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Adventure on New Year's Eve.
Acting techniques
The actors participating in Meyerhold's productions acted according to the principle of biomechanics, the system of actor training that was later taught in a special school created by Meyerhold.Meyerhold's acting technique had fundamental principles at odds with the American method actor's conception. While method acting melded the character with the actor's own personal memories to create the character's internal motivation, Meyerhold connected psychological and physiological processes. He had actors focus on learning gestures and movements as a way of expressing emotion physically. Following Konstantin Stanislavski's lead, he said that the emotional state of an actor was inextricably linked to his physical state, and that one could call up emotions in performance by practicing and assuming poses, gestures, and movements. He developed a number of body expressions that his actors would use to portray specific emotions and characters.
His influence
Meyerhold gave initial boosts to the stage careers of some of the most distinguished comic actors of the USSR, including Sergey Martinson, Igor Ilyinsky and Erast Garin. His landmark production of Nikolai Gogol's The Government Inspector was described as the following:Energetic, mischievous, charming Ilyinsky left his post to the nervous, fragile, suddenly freezing, grotesquely anxious Garin. Energy was replaced by trance, the dynamic with the static, happy jesting humour with bitter and glum satire.
Meyerhold also gave a start to his one time assistant of "The Queen of Spades" Matvey Dubrovin, who later created his own theater in Leningrad.
In autumn 1921, Meyerhold was appointed head of the State Higher Theatre Workshops, in Moscow, where one of his first students was Sergei Eisenstein, who later wrote
The God-like, incomparable Meyerhold, I beheld him then for the first time and I was to worship him all my life.
But they fell out, apparently because Eisenstein failed to treat the older man with sufficient deference, for which he was, as he put it, "expelled from the Gates of Heaven." In his films, Eisenstein used actors who worked in Meyerhold's tradition. He also cast actors based on what they looked like and their expression, and followed Meyerhold's stylized acting methods. In Strike, for instance, the bourgeois are always obese, drinking, eating, and smoking, whereas the workers are more athletic.
For the original production of The Bedbug, in February 1929, Meyerhold hired the young Dmitri Shostakovich as a pianist. Many years later, Shostakovich reputedly recalled: "It's impossible to imagine now how popular Meyerhold was. Everyone knew him, even those who had no interest or connection with the theatre or art. In the circus, clowns always made jokes about Meyerhold. They go for instant laughs in the circus, and they wouldn't sing ditties about people the audience wouldn't recognise immediately. They even used to sell combs called Meyerhold."