ABSTRACT
The second season began with Aleksey Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan the Terrible, the first play of the trilogy in which Tsar Fedor Ioannovich forms the second, and Tsar Boris the third part.1 There were opportunities here to capitalise on the huge success of the Art Theatre’s première production. Once again, Stanislavsky carefully prepared a director’s score stressing the opposition between social levels which were mirror images one of the other. On the ‘lower’ level was a cowed people; on the ‘higher’, a sycophantic, hypo-critical, self-seeking group of aristocratic boyars, in thrall to the living corpse of a senile and semidemented ruler. The opportunities for naturalistic over-indulgence which this situation provided were grasped with both hands.
