ABSTRACT

Whilst Meyerhold swiftly and enthusiastically became part of the post-revolutionary theatrical establishment after 1917, Michael Chekhov (1891-1955) lamented the radical changes to his Russia. Indeed, at the very time civil war was raging, Chekhov was playing Malvolio in Twelfth Night and was said by Oliver Sayler to have cut a downtrodden figure ‘weighed down by Russia’s sorrows’ (Sayler 1923:93). Earlier in 1916, he had lost his great mentor and teacher of Stanislavsky’s System, Leopold Sulerzhitsky, and the Revolution served only to compound his depression. For Meyerhold, the Revolution brought great hope, for Chekhov it further distanced him from a culture he considered to be materialistic, superficial and mechanical. ‘I accepted the theatrical world as a huge organised lie’ (Chekhov 1936a:5), Chekhov says in the opening to his autobiography, The Path of the Actor (originally published in 1928), extending his criticism to the surrounding social conditions:

‘Research’, ‘experiments’, studios, schools, lectures…and side by side with it money, rank, servility, fear…all this lives, moves, agitates, shouts (loudly it shouts!), flies impetuously from various points on the surface of the sphere to the centre and there it discharges itself in a flash, a spark, a lie!