It has been called the finest theatrical troupe in the world. Some 30 million people have seen its 23,000 performances of 121 plays. It has toured Europe and the U.S. in triumph, and its techniques have influenced the theater everywhere. Last week, in its home town (where few anniversaries over the 31st are celebrated), the Moscow Art Theater marked its soth birthday with full official hoopla.
The Art Theater was conceived in an 18-hour café conversation between two fervent young men: Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who became its administrator, and Konstantin Stanislavsky, its guiding spirit. Stanislavsky (whose dressing room is kept as he left it at his death in 1938) was a brilliant actor, director and author. He taught a new, true-to-life style of acting that was widely imitated. He built a large repertory of classics, trained his players as a team with no stars.
The Soviet government has pampered the Art Theater and showered its members with honors. The troupe seemed immune to the ideological purges that have swept the arts & sciences in the U.S.S.R. In January 1946, when all theater workers were called in for a dressing down, the Art Theater did not even send a delegate.
But soon afterward, the critics lambasted the institution for presenting such a bourgeois item as Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. Then came an official bawling out. Today the repertory is stocked with ten plays by Soviet dramatists.
Has the famed group finally been stunted by its arid totalitarian climate? Yes, thinks one of the few foreign observers competent to judge. Brooks Atkinson, the New York Times’s drama critic and onetime Moscow correspondent, saw the Art Theater in 1923, 1935 and 1945-46. Atkinson believes that the clammy hand of bureaucracy has turned the Art Theater into something routine and mechanical. Says he: the great spirit that nurtured Gorky and Chekhov and inflamed theater-lovers the world over is gone.
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