Yuri Lyubimov: Thirty Years at the Taganka Theatre

B. Beumers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9783718658855
• eBook ISBN: 9781135304447
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

A study of Yury Lyubimov's tempestuous career and his style of theatre during his thirty years at the Taganka Theatre. This work traces the development of his ideas, from his arrival at the theatre in 1964 through to his explusion in 1984, and his period of exile in the West until his return in 1989 to a much-changed Russia. Tracing Lyubimov's work play by play, the book uncovers an individual doomed to be at odds with the prevailing political and social climate of his literary contemporaries.

PART I
AGITATION IN THE 1960s: SOCIETY AS A
GENERATOR OF CHANGE

1
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A POETIC THEATRE

The history of the Taganka Theatre of Drama and Comedy is intrinsically linked to the political history of the Soviet Union. Founded in 1945, it had been one of the many theatres severely affected by the absence of high-quality dramatic writing and by the levelling in the arts under Zhdanov. It was to be the last of several theatres to profit from the Khrushchev “Thaw”, which affected cultural life first and foremost.

In his “secret speech” at the XX Party Congress of February 1956, Khrushchev had admitted to the falsification of history, and had rejected the cult of personality. However, Khrushchev's liberalism was met by a strong Stalinist opposition, as demonstrated by the violent crushing of the attempted revolution in Hungary in November 1956. Khrushchev's fight for his liberal programme against the old Stalinists was reflected in the USSR's cultural politics, repressive one day and liberal the next: in 1958 Boris Pasternak was forced to refuse the Nobel Prize, while Aleksandr Tvardovsky was reinstated as editor of the literary magazine Novyi mir.

In the theatrical season immediately following the XX Party Congress (1956/57) Mariya Knebel, a pupil of Mikhail Chekhov, was appointed Chief Artistic Director of the Central Children's Theatre in Moscow. Here she promoted the careers of Oleg Efremov (who, in the same season, organised the “Studio of Young Actors”, which later became the Sovremennik Theatre) and Anatoly Efros, who was to emerge as a leading theatre director in the 1960s. In the same season Meyerhold's pupil Valentin Pluchek was appointed Chief Artistic Director of the Satire Theatre, Moscow; and the talented, young Georgy Tovstonogov filled the same post at the Gorky Bolshoi Drama Theatre, Leningrad. A second wave of liberalism in the arts occurred at the very end of the Khrushchev era, in the 1963/64 season, when the Sovremennik was established as a theatre, and Efros was given the artistic directorship of the Theatre of the Lenin Komsomol, Moscow.

The Taganka theatre is the last child of a short period of relative liberalisation in Soviet history, opening only a few months before the Thaw came to a formal end with the forced retirement of Khrushchev in October 1964 and the beginning of the conservative politics of Brezhnev.

At this point, the Taganka theatre had just premièred its first production, The Good Person of Szechwan, in which Lyubimov reflected the hopes raised by the Khrushchev era. He used agitational elements, inviting the audience to participate actively not only in the theatre, but also in social life, in a fight against the system.

Epic theatre: The Good Person of Szechwan

Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan was produced in the Shchukin School of the Vakhtangov Theatre in 1963 with the third-year students of the course taught by Anna Orochko,¹ who had invited Lyubimov to stage a play as the diploma work of her course. The initially hostile attitude of the School and critics changed completely once the positive review by Konstantin Simonov had appeared in the Party organ Pravda.² Thanks to the production's success, Lyubimov was established as a director; this subsequently led to his appointment as “artistic director” of the Taganka theatre.³ Lyubimov transferred The Good Person of Szechwan to the Taganka stage, where it opened on 23 April 1964, with a new cast, including several actors from the Shchukin School production.⁴

The very fact that a Brecht play was produced in that place and at that time is remarkable and deserves comment. There had been few productions of Brecht's plays in the Soviet Union, partly because of the presumed incompatibility of the Stanislavsky method prevailing in Soviet theatre with Brecht's theory of epic theatre. Brecht had, up to that point, been known in the USSR mainly for his theoretical works on theatre, and only a few plays had been staged in the Soviet Union before Lyubimov's production.⁵ The only live contact for Soviet audiences with Brecht occurred during a tour of the Soviet Union by the Berliner Ensemble in 1957. Surprisingly, Lyubimov had missed those performances,⁶ and hence had not seen Brecht's work prior to his own production of The Good Person of Szechwan, so that any influence by Brecht must be attributed to theoretical rather than practical sources.

Lyubimov was the first Soviet director to attempt to apply the theories of epic theatre to a Brecht play. Reviewing the production, many Soviet critics expressed amazement at the fact that the actors were so young; they had viewed the production as “merely” the diploma work of a class in drama school. They were then forced to recognise that these actors trained by Lyubimov had bypassed the “classic” Russian actor's training and were thus fitter to put into practice his own stage theory.

The Good Person of Szechwan is about three Gods who descend to earth and search in the region of Szechwan for a good person who will give them a justification for not changing the world. They believe they have found that person in Shen Teh, a prostitute, who has offered them shelter for the night. They pay her, since she has no money, and she buys a tobacco shop, where not only friends seek shelter, but where all the poor come to ask for alms, and where Shen Teh herself is put under constant pressure from the house-owner. Unable to be good to everybody without ruining herself, she creates a fictional stepbrother, Shui Ta, who says “no” where she would have been incapable of doing so. He rescues her shop, saves her from a marriage with Sun, who was only interested in her money, and protects her unborn baby by opening a tobacco factory which creates financial security for the child. He is then accused of having killed Shen Teh, and the Gods—who are the judges in his/her trial—finally drive Shui Ta to giving up his disguise. The Gods insist, however, that they have found a good person and take off on a cloud, leaving everything as it is—and Shen Teh in despair.

The ending is open: in the song which forms the epilogue to the play, all the actors address the audience with a plea to help create “a good ending” and thereby establish a kind of solidarity with the audience. The audience is asked to participate actively in the ideas developed during the course of the play, and to decide how goodness may be found.

Lyubimov's production took place on a virtually bare stage (Figure 1). The set was limited to an orange wall at the back, while the sides of the stage were decorated with a poster of Brecht and a placard with a tree and the words “street theatre” (both painted by the designer Boris Blank). This set embodied Brecht's idea that theatre should be drawn from everyday occurrences presented on stage by actors aware that they are only showing what has happened to somebody else. The props consisted of only chairs and tables. A critic noted that this might originally have been due to financial constraints, which forced the collective to resort to the furniture of their lecture theatres (hence the absence of shelves for the Tobacconist);⁷ but this minimal use of props has subsequently been maintained on the professional Taganka stage for more than twenty years.

The audience was not only faced with the two permanent side placards, “Brecht” and “Street Theatre”, but the location of the action was also indicated by means of placards (“Judge”, “Cheap Restaurant”, “Tobacconist”, “Carpets”, etc). Special use was made of the Brecht placard at the side: it was lit by a spotlight between episodes. A placard saying “scene change” was used for episodes which involved a change of set, so that actor and audience should be aware of being in the theatre, as Brecht stipulated: “If the theatre scene follows the street scene, then the theatre no longer hides that it is theatre”.⁸

At the side of the stage, a slight elevation served as a catwalk for the actors to present themselves and enhanced the demonstrative element in their performances. A key element for the actor to alienate himself from the character he represents (Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, or alienation effect) is the actor's direct address to the audience, requesting analysis of his actions. This indeed happened in the production; even more frequently, the passages an actor was supposed to address to the audience were taken up by the musicians, who sang them.

The musicians played a very important role. Although Brecht intended that songs should be used, Lyubimov's use of song in this production went beyond the dramatist's original intentions. The musicians accompanied individual scenes and acts, endowing them with rhythm and thereby with a unity of form. A striking example was the scene at the tobacco factory, where the workers sat on stools, with backs to the audience, and clapped their hands rhythmically to the song, indicating the monotony of their work, and thus taking rhythm beyond its usual, purely formal function. Other examples were the rhythmical beating by the police of the boy who has stolen bread, which was performed in dance-like movements; and the movement of Sun abandoning Shen Teh while awaiting Shui Ta on the wedding day. Music invariably accompanied exits and entrances as well as changes of scene.

In addition, Lyubimov replaced many verbal passages entirely by mime. Wang's despair at not finding a night shelter for the Gods was expressed by his repeated running against the wall; Shu Fu's declaration of love to Shen Teh was presented in the form of a dance. Mime could also accompany words, for example when Shen Teh is talking to Sun; Shin's imitation of Shu Fu's restlessness; or Shen Teh's mime with her unborn baby son, where movement and gesture gave meaning to her words.

Exits and entrances were choreographed in a disciplined, military manner, often describing rectangular movements on stage, thus precluding any illusion of an accidental or naturalistic occurrence. An excellent example was in the first scene, where more and more “relatives” came to seek shelter in Shen Teh's shop, or the exit of the wedding guests.

Lyubimov developed particular techniques for ridiculing certain characters. Inna Ulyanova, who played the house-owner, employed a series of ironic gestures to define her role. She tried to use her female charms on Shui Ta by pulling up her skirt when seated on the table, and by indicating her silhouette when referring to her “business affairs” (delovye otnosheniya) with him. The manners of the old woman (the carpet seller's wife) were ridiculed by gesture: she was led off stage by the end of her kerchief, or would need a touch on her shoulder when she stumbled over words and kept repeating them. The family of eight was referred to as sheep when they “baa” with the pronunciation of “smile” (uliba-a-a-isya).

But most important was the satirical portrayal of the Gods. They appeared as bureaucrats in suits; they had milk delivered to them on a cloud lowered from above; they could not remember their prayers without the help of a printed copy; they were cowardly and submissive: they “froze” when Shen Teh told them to do so; they played cards and got black eyes when involved in arguments. The Gods are preservers of a power which refuses to perceive and accept the needs of those subject to it, which refuses to face up to the necessity of changing the existing order. Since these Gods neither see nor act, the individual must take action to bring about change; the individual not in isolation,—like Shen Teh, who failed, —but together with society as a whole. An individual like Shen Teh may be good, but she is isolated in her fight; this isolation forces her to produce an alter ego, Shui Ta, if she wants to survive. In order to prevent the individual from revealing and using his alter ego, he must be supported—not attacked—by others, and the representatives of the system must not demand of an individual that he carry the burden of society, as the Gods demand of Shen Teh.

There was a strong element of social and political agitation in the play, and Lyubimov's production underlined that aspect. The whole of society would need to fight for good if anything was to be achieved; if society does fight, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Contemporary Theatre Studies
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Agitation in the 1960s: Society as a Generator of Change
• Part II The Tragic Dimension of the 1970s: the Individual and Society
• Part III The 1980s in the West
• Part IV Musical Visions for the 1990s
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Appendices
• Select Bibliography
• Index