The Influence of Popular Theater

The leaders of Petrograd were so impressed by the performance that they decreed that "the stock exchange will be used this winter for the production of mystery-type spectacles."^[80] An entire series was planned, including: War against White Poland, on the steps of the Engineers' Castle; The Taking of the Bastille, in the Summer Garden; The July Days, at the Narva Gate; and the Holiday of the Defense of Petrograd, in front of St. Isaac's Cathedral.^[81]

Calmer heads and more critical minds counseled modesty. One person objected entirely to the appropriation of the noble title of mystery for the production: "I remember The Taking of Azov, a cannonade in three acts with artillery pieces, the navy, and the destruction of fortresses. . . . The producers of that show called it an extravaganza [feeriia ]. That, at least, was honest."^[82]

But, pretense aside, Mystery had been entertaining. Shklovsky, for instance, was impressed by the ability to incorporate "real" things—for example, a military parade.^[83] His was a common-sense approach that said the spectacle was wonderful—it just was not art. He proposed another performance in which two sections of Petrograd, the Vyborg and the Petrograd sides, be pitted against each other in mock battle.

Not everyone had Shklovsky's sense of humor. On May 3 Radlov and Soloviev directed an amateur production, The Fire of Prometheus, and some rather grandiose claims were made. The play was performed by Red Army dramatic circles, which led some to proclaim the "creation of a proletarian Red Army theater."^[84] Piotrovsky was even less restrained. He announced that socialist society would be "theatrocratic." The lifting of financial considerations from theater circles had returned the element of "free play" to their performances.^[85] Play would give birth to a new theater; and the theater would give birth to a new society. The theater should not be illusory, but a real thing; and there should be no spectators, just participants. Theatrical performance would lead to the creation of great festivals; and everyday life (byt ) would be remade there.^[86]

Produced in the Bolshoi Opera, The Fire of Prometheus matched the pomposity of its locale. Piotrovsky and Radlov had learned little from their earlier collaboration on The Sword of Peace . The only extant description comes from an unsympathetic critic: "The first scene features Samson and Delilah; . . . the second features the Spartacus uprising; following this is a high-society ball in a setting that suggests the court of Louis XIV, mixed up with suggestions of other styles, including the . . . foot wrappings of one of the marquises. In the final act, after the heavens have parted, an amateur pair . . . dances a sultry Argentinian death tango.^[87]

The Fire of Prometheus was a victim of its own ambitions. Amateur performances could not create both a new society and a new theater (assuming they could create either one). Konstantin Derzhavin, alluding to some of Kerzhentsev's claims, said that however wonderful "collective drama" was, it was not theater. Play is real; art is illusion.^[88] Shklovsky conceded the value of play but added "such games [igrishcha ] have always existed, but nobody has called them theater. Theatricality [artifice] is essential to the theater."^[89] Kuznetsov made perhaps the most telling observation on the limits of the form; play was a healthy sign in theater circles, but it could be of interest only to friends of the players. Such a presentation could not go beyond a limited audience.^[90]

After the failures of The Sword of Peace and The Fire of Prometheus, Radlov rethought two theses that had thwarted mass productions: first, that "a spectacle performed for the broad masses must be a 'mass' spectacle in that a tremendous number of performers take part"; and, second, that "historical events instigated by a great quantity of people (such as a revolution) should be depicted in theatrical action by another great quantity of performers."^[91]

Like other mass-spectacle directors, Radlov had reached the genre by a circuitous route. His background and education, which he shared with Piotrovsky and Soloviev, was in the ancient theater. Radlov was the son of Ernst Radlov, a renowned classicist and friend of the philosopher Soloviev; Piotrovsky was the son of another great classicist, Tadeusz Zielinski.^[92] Radlov and Soloviev also shared years of apprenticeship under Meyerhold, where they studied Zielinski's ideas about ancient Greece. They also studied the renaissance theater with Meyerhold; and in fact, Soloviev co-wrote with Meyerhold the 1913 mass production Fire based on commedia dell'arte principles. Radlov spent some time as well with Evreinov, writing prologues for the Ancient Theater's Spanish productions.

Their first postrevolutionary collaboration was at the Petrograd Theater-Studio, organized by Meyerhold; participating were, among others, Radlov, Soloviev, Piotrovsky, and Annenkov. The studio's first production, Nikolai Gumilev's Magic Tree (Derevo prevrashcheniia ), was a children's play. The production introduced what would become staples of agitational theater: stage business involving devils, acrobats, and so forth.^[93] The studio directors intended to revive the intimacy of high theater and popular culture, and they preferred writers like Calderón, Shakespeare, Molière, and styles like commedia dell'arte that addressed broad audiences. They sought a theater that, but for its size, was a splendid model for mass spectacles.

Popular mobile theater, . . . like the wandering troupes of old France and England, can serve both city and country [and] is based on genuine showmanship and healthy humor. [The troipes] will be able to give a show at any moment and any place . . . at the asking, meeting all the requirements of artistic theatricality. Easily mounted, with new actors . . . experienced in pantomime and verbal improvisation, . . . freed from an overload of psychologism, with a repertory and acting techniques close to the popular understanding, the new theater will revive collective theatrical creation. . . . We must forget about psychological subtleties and work toward scenic hyperbole and catching the spectator's eye.^[94]

The Theater-Studio was soon dissolved, and many of its staff moved on to the new Theater of Popular Comedy directed by Radlov. The Popular Comedy was one of the first Soviet agitational theaters—theaters performing topical skits with a strong political slant. The staff of the Popular Comedy included Miklashevsky and Golovanskaia; leading members of the cast were Delvary and Konstantin Gibschmann, the clown and vaudevillian who worked in Annenkov's First Distiller . "Serge" and other clowns filled many other important roles, as did prerevolutionary Meyerhold students.

Radlov, like Blok and Meyerhold, Mayakovsky and Annenkov, believed that the new theater would evolve from forms of popular theater, such as the commedia dell'arte or the circus, that bordered on play. Precedents were the theater of Shakespeare, in which the clown Will Kemp played a leading role, and the comedies of Molière, which were influenced by Italian fairground comedies.^[95] Radlov's was not a theater of excessive sobriety, as symbolist dramas had been, nor was it a theater given to psychology. Action, not the word, was the medium of expression. It was a compromise between Evreinov's pure theatricality and Meyerhold's conventional theatricality.

In the People's House that had once featured melodramas and ex-

travaganzas, that had seen melodramas banished by Lunacharsky and Andreeva, that had hosted Vinogradov's The Overthrow of the Autocracy, Radlov orchestrated the triumphal return of melodrama and the Pinkerton genre. Radlov gave popular forms a new function appropriate to revolutionary Russia: agitation. Popular Comedy performances were mobile, funny, coarse, and topical. They were based on rough scenarios that could accommodate a variety of outside material and employed a troupe of exceptionally skilled players, who were equipped to handle any contingency. If Lord Curzon made the headlines, he would wind up in the next day's skit.

Festivals, which encouraged give-and-take between actors and spectators, were particularly suited to Radlov's style. On May Day 1920, the troupe broke up into five groups and toured the city on tram platforms, giving short performances at each stop. The scenarios were written by Radlov. His group performed a skit, The Partition of Russia; another performed the Magical Accordion and The Good Men of Versailles (Capitalist Intrigues ); Soloviev and Piotrovsky directed other groups; and a Popular Comedy troupe under Vladimir Voinov (trained as a scenario writer in the Cinizelli Circus) performed a skit entitled Blockade .^[96] Also shown that day was The Monkey-Informer , based on another Radlov scenario, which adapted the ancient concealed-identity plot to the purposes of anticapitalist propaganda. The traditional commedia figure Pantaloon was replaced by J. P. Morgan, who introduced himself to the audience in the manner expected of fairground buffoons:

In Vienna, New York, and Rome,
They esteem my full pocket.
They esteem my loud name.
I am the famous Morgan.^[97]

The lead player was the monkey Jimmy, whose efforts to foil the capitalists took him over the heads of the audience on a high wire.

Radlov was disingenuous when he claimed that popular conventions had been adapted smoothly to new purposes. Rather, he performed adeptly a task performed ineptly by his predecessors: he integrated the play element of popular spectacles—for example, clowning or acrobatics—into a unified dramatic style. As noted by his colleague Derzhavin, Radlov accomplished this integration in three ways: the acting of actors and circus performers was reduced to a common denominator (a single style); the circus numbers were woven into the

action; and a harmonic pattern was created from tricks specific to the circus.^[98]

The key was fusing the time structures of play and drama. The Bolshevik notion of history was inherently dramatic. Like drama, it featured an ordered progression of events through time, which fit into a pattern of cause and effect. Dramatic time is continuous; the clock set in the first act winds down to an inevitable conclusion. Action is divided into episodes, and the principle by which they are strung together conveys much of the meaning. A diversion of dramatic action is a breach of its structure.

The depiction of protracted historical developments like revolution stretched fairground theater. There, time was closer to the inconsistent, expandable time of play. Play is action generated not by the inevitability of its resolution, like drama, but by a set of rules. These rules can generate new actions eternally and are not defined in time. Typically, most games need arbitrary limits, either a set amount of points or a timespan. Popular theater, particulary Radlov's beloved commedia dell'arte, used a scenario more often than a text. The scenario was a short series of events: an initial situation, an intrigue to fuel the action, and a resolution. Around these events speech and action (for example, acrobatic escapes from jealous husbands) were improvised. The structure was flexible; its events were only required stopping points along a circuitous and varied route.

Radlov saw flexibility as opportunity; if time in popular theater could be stopped, then current events could be worked in at the juncture. Scenarios were used by the Popular Comedy as a format to introduce current events. The popular audience was already accustomed to dramatic stops and starts, and never rebelled against the introduction of propaganda; and the comic acting of the clowns was ideal for satirizing enemies. Radlov coupled these elements with conventions he uncovered in his experiments with renaissance theater that facilitated "continuous action . . . founded on the subtle use of contrast."^[99] These conventions offered great latitude in moving between local and universal, ephemeral and eternal themes.

Radlov's hybrid theater was a powerful vehicle for propaganda, and it was a good show. Its greatest merit was the respect for and consideration of the spectator. Deistvo, the model for previous mass spectacles, invited spectators to participate but discouraged their autonomy. There was only one outcome, one meaning, one possible audience. Theater as

play had little pretense to meaning, yet it gave spectators the illusion of an active experience. Genres like the detective story allowed several potential resolutions for each performance. Convention dictated a certain outcome—the crook is caught—but this ending was more like the time limit of a game than the death of a tragic hero: it was not an inevitable conclusion giving meaning to the action but a way to draw it to a close. The twisting, not the closure, of a plot was the purpose of popular theater because it created the feeling of suspense. Suspense was not really the result of an unknown conclusion; the outcome was highly conventionalized. Rather suspense was a way for the spectator seated outside the play and aware of its conventions to experience the action as if it were open-ended.