ABSTRACT
A member of the audience is not an abstract quantity, not the value of seats sold; he is a living human being with outspoken tastes and outspoken opinions. The Russian Theatre as a whole is in fact an “institute of morals”, a “school for human behaviour”. The morality is not our European morality, for it is a class-morality, and the aims of the school are also quite strange to people to some extent. A railway goods truck on the way to Eastern Siberia. The Komsomolites are alone in declaring themselves in favour at once. Youth is not only the subject of the theatre; it occupies, in fact, a great deal of space in the auditorium. It can happen that more than half the audience consists of young people, filling the rows partly in their best clothes, the girls often wearing gay frocks, and even with their hair waved, partly in working blouses, showing that they have come direct from factory.
