The Theater: Russia Likes Plays Too

From Moscow, TIME Correspondent John Hersey cabled this account of the 1944 Soviet theater:

One wonders in Moscow whether Broadway has a firm grip on its laurel wreath. New York’s theater still has, in my opinion, a slight edge on Moscow’s—in scope, in splendor of production, in entertainment value, perhaps even in acting and in art. But at its present rate Moscow will soon be far ahead on all counts.

This week Moscow is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the organization of the Soviet theater. The celebration is taking the form of a series of four “concerts,” each lasting nearly five hours and embracing two or three scenes from plays, two or three passages from ballets, readings of poetry, songs, dances and speeches. There is one insistent note that runs through all these things: pride.

The Soviet theater differs from ours in almost every respect. The most important difference is its inner structure. Twenty-five years ago, Lenin signed a decree declaring that henceforth all theatrical property in the country would be State property. Now, a quarter of a mellowing century later, the final effect of this decree is that Russian theaters are run very much like private enterprises on a box-office basis—but with this important difference: there can be no such thing as a “turkey” in Moscow. At the moment all Moscow theaters are making money; but if anything went wrong with any one theater, the State would take up the slack.

The Government builds and repairs theater buildings. Moscow’s fantastic new Red Army Theater, which is shaped like the five-pointed Soviet Star, was built by the State to the tune of $9,090,000. The proudest two theaters in Russia, Moscow’s Bolshoi and Leningrad’s Kirov, were slightly damaged in the war and the State took this excuse to give them such renovation that, by comparison, New York’s Metropolitan Opera House looks like an elderly duchess decked out in moth-eaten flannel underwear.

Repertory Theater. There are no theaters in Russia which, like Broadway’s, show the same play night after night. They are all repertory theaters. They are organized, furthermore, as self-sufficient organisms. Each maintains its own stable of actors, its roster of directors, designers, costumers and musicians, its own traditions.

The greatest in tradition and still richest in performance is the famous Moscow Art Theater. It thrives on the heritage of its founder and first director, Konstantin Sergeivitch Stanislavski. There are no extreme experiments in the Russian theater now, as there were in the ’20s, but the most carefully experimental is Mossoviet. The pet theory of its director, Yuri Zavadski, is that decor usually gets in the way of actors’ portrayal of what is inside the characters; his plays are characterized by uniform sets and only slight changes of properties. Vakhtangov Theater is at the opposite pole: it stresses pageantry and theatricality. Finally, the Red Army Theater has a broad base of popularity. This is, accordingly, the lightest, gayest and noisiest of Russian theaters.

The Play’s The Thing. For the most part the produce of these theaters is nonpolitical. Their repertories are extremely broad. Probably nowhere in the world can you find such varied fare—on successive nights Shakespeare, Sheridan, Chekhov, Goldoni, Ostrovski, Shaw, Molière, Oscar Wilde, Gorki. Occasionally new shows about the “great patriotic war” are produced, like Leonid Leonov’s Invasion, a hot and angry placard. But actors and directors take a long view and do not feel that any new plays have yet come out of the war which will live as Russian drama.

It is a fair question to ask why at this moment the Russian theater is so retrospective—why new plays are being produced this season on Ivan the Terrible and on Admiral Nakhimov of the Crimean War; why so much reverence is accorded to Chekhov, who perhaps foreshadowed the Revolution in his plays but certainly satirized revolutionaries. It has been fashionable in America to attribute this to an abatement of Russia’s revolutionary and communistic spirit. This seems to me wrong. A better guess is that this country, shaken within a few inches of its life by this war, has, like any man when his mind has been terribly troubled, turned to the past in search of wholeness and security.

Actors in Moscow probably work harder and more seriously than actors anywhere. And they work over the most minuscule details. An actor must think very hard about the temperature of the air through which the character is supposed to be moving at a given moment, about what he ate for lunch, about the time of day and how tired the character would be by then, about the situation—whether in a damp 19th-Century dining room or out in a mellow garden.

One can say with absolute assurance that there will not be a single empty seat in any of the six top Moscow theaters at any performance this entire season. The hunger for good entertainment is very great. The audience is very well behaved. Curtains usually go up exactly on time, and playgoers not in their seats must wait for the first curtain before being let in. Intermissions are interminable. I was able to read the whole of each act of The Cherry Orchard in the intermission preceding the act.

The Bloody Circuit. When Soviet plays have gone on the road for the last three years they have gone straight to war. The Red Army Theater, which is typical, has sent 18 “front brigades” to entertain troops. They play in trenches, in forest clearings, in sheds and blockhouses. There have been many casualties: one whole brigade was cut off by the Germans while acting and never heard from again. One troupe worked for seven months without a change of clothes. One group was playing in a shed to 65 Tommy gunners; in a corner was the command post, at which an officer gave telephone orders from time to time. At one point an actor broke off his lines and asked: “Do we disturb you?” The officer answered: “Not at all. Do we disturb you?”

The nearness of victory brings with it a wonderful sense of relief and excitement which you can feel in the theaters. Chekhov’s line near the end of The Three Sisters, “Tomorrow . . . a new life will begin for us,” brings tears to Russian eyes. That is their real hope now. And yet, this confidence is not unmixed with uneasiness. The Russian theater knows it cannot detach itself from politics in the largest sense of the word. The other day Leonid Leonov suddenly broke off a discussion of play writing to say with great emotion: “But if in the world of tomorrow a three-year-old girl may be shot, as I have seen one shot by our enemy, then I say now that astronomical observatories are a lie, medical laboratories are a lie, railroads are a lie, techniques are a lie, writing is a lie, and our Russian theater is a lie.”