ABSTRACT
Sergei Yutkevich, opened FEKS, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, in 1922. Their first production, of Gogol’s The Wedding, ‘engineered’ by Kozintsev and Trauberg, took place the same year, and Cocteau’s The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower followed in 1923. Like Eisenstein, who was working in a similar spirit, they then turned to film-making, though Kozintsev returned to some stage work after 1948. He is now best known in the West for his impressive film versions of Hamlet (1964) and King Lear (1971), where his earlier irreverence towards the classics is no longer visible. For more on Eccentrism, see Mel Gordon, ‘Russian Eccentric Theatre: The Rhythm of America on the early Soviet Stage’, in Nancy van Norman Baer, Theatre in Revolution: Russian Avant-Garde Stage Design 1913-1935, London, Thames & Hudson, 1991. For the influence of Italian futurism on Eccentrism, see Frantisek Deak in the Drama Review, vol. 19, no. 4 (T68), December 1975, pp. 88-94.
