ABSTRACT
As we approach 1998 and the centenary of the Art Theatre’s opening, there has been a return in the former Soviet Union to the kind of market conditions which gave rise to the Theatre’s original foundation. In many respects, its origin is similar to that of The Theatre, constructed by James Burbage in 1576 and run on shareholding lines. There are other historical parallels between the two events. Just as England was experiencing the rise of capitalism and the decline of feudalism at the end of the sixteenth century, so a similar process was occurring in Russia towards the end of the nineteenth. The spread of entrepreneurial activity was centred in Moscow, whilst St Petersburg remained the bureaucratic centre of a crumbling Empire, whose tsar was to lose absolute feudal authority under the impact of new historical pressures exerted by a rising merchant class.1 The revolutions and civil war of 1905 and 1917 can, in this context, be seen to have a parallel in the rise of middle-class power and the resultant revolution/civil war in midseventeenth-century England. Just as, in England, the conflicts and tensions of the period were anticipated and reflected in revolutionary theatrical practice and in innovatory dramatic writing, so the theatre of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko also mirrored the innovativeness and social awareness of its Elizabethan/Jacobean counterpart and acquired its own ‘Shakespeare’, or in-house dramatist, in the person of Chekhov.
