ABSTRACT
Meyerhold's revolution in theatre involved him rejecting the realist assumptions that provided a common ground between Stanislavsky and Bakhtin. Of the three theatre practitioners in this book Vsevelod Meyerhold is probably the least known and his concepts of actor training are much less known than Stanislavsky's system. In 1905 Meyerhold was invited to be director of a Theatre-Studio that Stanislavsky created with his own money. One of the aims was to explore acting methods appropriate to Symbolist dramas which were of interest to both men. The challenge of Symbolism for Stanislavsky was the expression of spiritual content through the material form of the actor's body; for Meyerhold it was the creation of a stylised form of theatre. The old theatre is the literary, illusionist theatre where image and word coincide in the recreation of scenes from real life. Meyerhold's conception of the actor's movement and shaping was itself shaped by his conception of theatre space.
