Discovering Meyerhold: Traces of a Search

Abstract

It is evening of December 17, 1898, opening night of Chekhov's play The Sea Gull at Moscow Art Theater. On stage, in roles of two opposed playwrights, Treplev and Trigorin, are Vsevolod Meyerhold and Konstantin Stanislavsky. What we need is a kind of theater, says aspiring Treplev/Meyerhold. We need forms. . And Nina, when she complains that his play no living people in it, he replies Why should there be? I don't want show life as it is, or way it should be, but way it is in dreams. Nina rejects Treplev/Meyerhold and becomes lover of Trigorin/Stanislavsky, who tells her: I'd like be in your shoes just for an hour, see through your eyes and find out what you're thinking and what kind of person you are. Like Nina, revolution rejected Treplev/Meyerhold and chose Trigorin/ Stanislavsky. It abandoned openly revolutionary vision of the way life is in dreams and chose prurient desire, private petty desire, to be in your shoes just for an hour, see through your eyes and find out what you're thinking. ... The reasons for that choice are less interesting than fact that a choice had indeed be made; Chekhov had understood that as clearly as he understood most things. And casting of his play for that evening seems an act of prophecy, for choice must still be made today: in distinctions between work of Stanislavsky and work of Meyerhold definition of a modern theater is be found. Some of those distinctions are historical: triumph of Moscow Art Theater and Stanislavsky's Method was not in what it began, but in what it ended. It was end of nineteenth century, not beginning of twentieth. It was a triumph of culmination, not of innovation. Yet it was a triumph; Art Theater endures this day, and its influence has been powerful, especially in America. It is familiar. Meyerhold and his theater were obliterated. Upon what basis, then, can we make a reasoned choice? How can we distinguish, so late, Meyerhold's new forms? It is difficult; we must speculate over what has vanished irretrievably. But others have speculated before us, one in particular, all day long, after seeing Meyerhold's production of Griboedov's play Woe Wit in Moscow on evening of March 25, 1928.