ABSTRACT
The new building opened in October 1902 with Gorky’s The Merchant Class. However, the first play to receive its première in the Art Theatre’s refurbished, ‘art nouveau’ surroundings, on 5 November 1902, was Tolstoy’s play about peasant life, The Power of Darkness. This involved another naturalistic descent into the lower depths-this time into the primitive morass of the Russian countryside-an excursion through the mystical and the violent which culminates in the murder of an infant who is crushed to death. Stanislavsky defended his choice of play. People wished to see ‘truth’ on stage; they were tired of the artistic lie. It was possible to discover poetry in mud and in the peasant’s sheepskin coat (98). In fact, the setting was imagined as a sea of mud, with carefully sculpted ridges containing puddles of water and even, in Act Two, a muddy pond. The score calls for a horse and cart to appear and for a cat to wander about a barn in which there were also to be pigeons, calves and hens. Ethnographic attention was paid to the way in which peasants ate, hung footcloths to dry, scratched their backs (on the corner of the stove, like cattle), blew their noses (on a shirt corner) or washed themselves by first taking water into the mouth and then spitting it into their hands (98-9). Tolstoy may have believed, as suggested by the title of another of his plays, that light shone in darkness; there was little evidence in this production to suggest that Stanislavsky agreed with him.
