ABSTRACT
The political purges which mystified an uninformed world outside were paralleled with theatrical deterrings. In the production, emphasis is no longer on human plastics or the pleasures of the eye and ear, but on the acting. Photographs of the Garden Scene, for example, tell people nothing of the play. In 1938 Tairov is determined, however, to persevere in his new way. The actor, as Stanislavsky’s aim was to make him, creates a figure that springs into the audience’s consciousness as “a realistic, full-blooded, organic figure,” and all his physical and psychological equipment is to be used to this end. A superb actor himself, he eliminated all symptoms of life-like creation in the rest of his company as ruthlessly as any Shakespearean ham in Britain—not that his own star should shine more brightly through the clouding of others, but that there should be no stars at all in the firmament he, Meierhold, had created.
