Theatre: Classic Festival

In Soviet Russia a theatre is more than a theatre. It is also an academy, a studio, an artistic tradition, a laboratory of illusion and a paid advertisement for the U.S.S.R. As such, the theatres of Moscow have impressed most visiting showfolk with the world-beating quality of Russian acting and direction, the relative mediocrity of Russian playwrights. This month hundreds of U. S. and European playgoers were given no chance to change this verdict during the most brilliant and crowded three weeks the Russian theatre has to offer.

As all Russians are acutely aware, it will soon be 20 years since the winter of 1917 when Lenin kept the theatres of Moscow open while the Revolution was being fought. To celebrate this anniversary, more elaborate plans were made for the National Theatre Festival than in any year since it was started in 1933. As late as last May Izvestia published a list of 20 new revolutionary plays which had been accepted for production.

Since then, however, Russians have become notoriously uncertain as to the proper meaning of ”revolutionary.” Such stout young reputations as those of Playwrights Kirshon and Afinogenov have suffered the ax of political disapproval. Old Vsevolod Meierhold, whose hatred for the artificiality of the bourgeois stage once made his theatre the favorite of “futuristic” Bolsheviks, was not asked to take part in the festival. Cautious Moscow régisseurs announced without batting an eye that not one of the new plays in Izvestias list had been finished, made up instead a repertory for ten days which certainly would not shake the world.

Weary after a hardworking summer which wound up with two weeks at the Comedie des Champs-Elyéeses in Paris, the Moscow Art Theatre presented Lyubov Yarovaya, a minor revolutionary classic which Parisians had found dull, Pushkin’s Boris Godunov and the immortal but familiar Anna Karenina, notable for a new live-hour dramatization and for the fact that Alla Tarasova was appearing as Anna, her latest role. Long regarded as one of the most accomplished Russian actresses, this stalwart woman had just been made a People’s Artist of the U.S.S.R. at the same time that her company was awarded the cherished Order of Lenin.

At the Vakhtangov Theatre, well-combed workers and foreigners were delighted with a seasoned production of Much Ado About Nothing played at a fast pace with all the bawdiness of the Bard richly emphasized. In the last few years Shakespeare-loving Russians have seen productions of Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear, which the Jewish Theatre played all summer in the Caucasus in competition with a Soviet version of Rose Marie.