Introduction

It is not unusual to end edited collections such as these with a glimpse of the future, a recognition of how a historical figure’s ideas have been picked up, transformed, and applied in new contexts. Yet, for Meyerhold at least, interdisciplinarity was anything but a futuristic way of working. As Amy Skinner notes in Russian Theatre in Practice (Skinner 2019), Meyerhold’s typical modus operandi was pointing up ‘the value for the theatre director of thinking beyond the theatres walls, drawing on developments in other disciplines and conceiving of theatre as a truly cross-disciplinary practice’. Hann is not just interested in architectural history, though. She also, crucially, uses her remodelling to examine Meyerhold’s theatrical intentions, inscribed in the 6 Principles of the new theatre, laid out by Edward Braun as early as 1972.