ABSTRACT
Theatre currents such as this usually find their own leaders. Popov is not an initiator, not a theorist, not a setter-up of apparatus; he is a consolidator, a thinker, a man of the theatre with something much higher than mere talent. The Central Theatre of the Red Army was founded in 1919 to give a permanent centre, as its name implies, to the various transitory Army theatres that had been existing in small units all over the country since 1917. Its policy was to give plays that would interest Red Army men, and also to give the general public plays about the Red Army. The Theatre of the Red Army, therefore, was only an inner wrapper for the theatre of the people. It did plays that were of general interest, also. The Red Army Theatre is not a kind of super-military-band organisation with its members tuning up by numbers to the signal of a uniformed and commissioned director.
