‘Crooked Jimmy’ and ‘Limping Joe’: Russian Theatrical Satire in the 1920s

Abstract

With the opening in the year 1908 of the Bat theatre (Letuchaya Mysh') in Moscow and the Crooked Mirror (Krivoe Zerkalo) in St Petersburg, intimate theatres of ‘small forms’ made their first commercial appearance in Russia. Inspired in part by the cabaret theatres and caféschantants of Paris, Berlin and other Western capitals, these new theatrical undertakings soon established themselves as an alternative to the regular dramatic and operatic theatres. Beginning as tiny chamber theatres intended primarily for the bourgeois intelligentsia, the Crooked Mirror, and to a lesser extent the Bat, developed into genuine aesthetic theatres of parodox and wit. The Crooked Mirror in particular sought to entertain by satirizing and parodying stale conventions and stultifying routine prevalent in society and in the arts. The repertoires of these theatres consisted entirely of miniature forms – a combination of one-act plays and separate variety numbers with music and dancing. One important innovation to which both theatres contributed was the introduction to the Russian stage of the figure of the ‘conférencier’ or compère who, like his French predecessors, had the task of linking the various items of an evening's programme by means of witty, topical dialogue, innuendo and spontaneous asides. Nikita Baliev, the founder of the Bat, made a speciality of this.