I Want a Baby and Other Plays

Sergei Tretyakov

• Publisher: Glagoslav Publications B.V. (N)
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912894321
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Guiones de cine

When Sergei Tretyakov's ground-breaking play, I Want a Baby, was banned by Stalin's censor in 1927, it was a signal that the radical and innovative theatre of the early Soviet years was to be brought to an end. A glittering, unblinking exploration of the realities of post-revolutionary Soviet life, I Want a Baby marks a high point in modernist experimental drama.

Tretyakov's plays are notable for their formal originality and their revolutionary content. The World Upside Down, which was staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold in 1923, concerns a failed agrarian revolution. A Wise Man, originally directed by the great film director and Tretyakov's friend, Sergei Eisenstein, is a clown show set in the Paris of the émigré White Russians. Are You Listening, Moscow?! and Gas Masks are 'agit-melodramas', fierce, fast-moving and edgy. And Roar, China! dramatises an actual incident in the West's oppression of China, when a British gunboat captain threatened to blow the city of Wanxien to bits. Roar, China! was translated into many languages and produced in cities across the world. The nerve this play touched may be gauged from the fact that it was staged in Yiddish translation in the Czestochowa concentration camp by Jewish prisoners during World War II.

These plays are not only stirring in their themes, they are also hugely significant in their construction. Tretyakov's early plays led directly to Eisenstein's highly influential theory of 'the montage of attractions', while later his ideas were crucial in the formation of Bertolt Brecht's theory of epic theatre. The reason why is evident in his plays, now collected and published for the first time.

I Want a Baby (Khochu Rebenka) First version, 1926

Translated by Stephen Holland

I Want a Baby: El Lissitzky at work on his stage design for the play.

Note: Stephen Holland’s earlier translation of this play was published in 1995 by the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, University of Birmingham, to whom acknowledgement is made.

Characters

Saxoulsky, amateur drama producer

Superintendent of the flat block

Undertaker

Filirinov, a self-styled poet

Dr Softer

Barbara, work colleague of Milda

Angelica, a tenant

Bob, leader of the Voluntary Organisers

Milda Grignau, a cultural-educational worker

Grinko, a building worker

Yakov Plumer, a building worker

Club Secretary

Kitty, a would-be actress

Senya, Saxoulsky’s assistant

Gripe, a tenant

Stoneturner, an inventor

‘Aunty’, a tenant

Childless female singer

Andryusha, a tenant

Ksenichka, his girl friend

Detective

Arshkin, a worker

Olympiada (Lipa), Yakov’s girl friend

Block Caretaker

Little Old Man (Temporary Corpse)

Man in a Tolstoy Blouse

Drunken Typesetter

Engineer

First, second, third, fourth and fifth fathers

Landlady

Loosha, a cleaning lady

Skivvy, Clerk, Flower Seller,

Women workers who support Milda’s nursery project

Other women and wives who turn against Milda’s revolutionary behaviour

Workers on the building site,

Old Woman

Female students in the drama group, drama group “guard of honour”, more fathers, Voluntary Organisers, visitors to the flat block, more tenants including the very nosey ones, hooligans, vigilantes, policemen, two bourgeois lady and gentlemen dancing couples, more “bohemian” dancers, a working man, a horrible woman, a little girl, other voices both on and off, gamblers, fashionable women.

The action is set in and around an overcrowded flat block in Moscow in spring, 1926. The final scene takes place four years in the future, i.e. in 1930, or perhaps in Milda’s dream.

Scene One: The Fall

A shout upstairs: ‘What are you doing? Aii!’ The sound of a heavy body falling down. More shouts: ‘An accident! – He’s fallen! – To his death!’ – a crowd comes running in and surrounds the fallen object.

ENGINEER: Eh, something’s up on the scaffolding! Quick!

WORKER: What?

ENGINEER: Who’s fallen off?

WORKER: We’re all okay.

ENGINEER: Fuf! Too close for comfort.

WOMAN’S VOICE: Valya! My little girl!

YOUNG GIRL AT THE WINDOW: Mama, I’m here. It’s not me that fell.

OLD WOMAN: There’s so many packed into this building, they’re sleeping on the window-sills.

SAXOULSKY: Didn’t someone come out of the club? Where’s the block superintendent? Comrade block superintendent!

SUPERINTENDENT: The club’s shut. Eh! Who is it there? A man or a woman?

VOICE: You can’t see. It’s a man’s hat.

WOMAN’S VOICE: It’s the typesetter – he’s keeled over, drunk. The typesetter who lives in the half-basement.

– Smashed to bits, I reckon.

– Caretaker, bring us a sprinkle of sand for the priest to bless.

UNDERTAKER: ’Oo is a relative of the deceased? Are there relatives of the deceased?

VOICE: Leave it out.

UNDERTAKER: The best hundertakers are ‘After Grave Bliss’. ’Earses, and burial wreaths made in-parlour.

VOICE: It’s enough to drive anyone to the crematorium

UNDERTAKER: Hi’ll thank you for leavin’ the crematorium out of this!

VOICE: Let the doctor through.

VOICE IN THE CROWD: He’s stirring!

(The crowd parts. Filirinov is sitting there. Dr Softer comes to him.)

SOFTER: Filirinov. You!

FILIRINOV: Me, doctor.

SOFTER: All right?

FILIRINOV: All right. Why?

SOFTER: From the sixth floor?

FILIRINOV: Well?

SOFTER: Was it you?

FILIRINOV: No. Him. (He drags out from under him a tailor’s dummy. The crowd spits expressively and disperses.)

WOMAN’S VOICE: And I thought it was a person what’d fell. But it’s just a dummy. That’s akshually not exactly earth-shatterin’.

SOFTER: So what happened?

FILIRINOV: I was agitated. I was waving my arms about. I flung myself over to the window to read this monstrous bit of paper. I don’t know. If it’s serious, then romance in this world’s finished.

SOFTER: What bit of paper?

FILIRINOV: Here. Where is it? Oh, hell. Don’t say I’ve lost it. Oh, hang on, it’s on the window-sill. Barbara! Barbara!

BARBARA (from above): What? (A piece of paper, disturbed by the movement, flutters off and flies down.)

FILIRINOV: Nothing. (He catches the paper.) Right, here we are. ‘I request the allocation of three days leave in order that I may engineer a successful conception.’ Well?

SO...