The Soviet Theater by Laurence Senelick

Author:Laurence Senelick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

Golubovsky, Bol’shie malen’kie teatry, 177.

Okhlopkov’s name as an innovative director first echoed throughout all Moscow at the Realistic Theater in 1932. It was his first theatrical love. So what if the building was absurdly small. (It didn’t even satisfy Sergey Obraztsov,94 who accepted the building for his puppets after the Realistic Theater closed.) But in it theatrical passions seethed, authority was overthrown, new forms were sought, critical lances were crossed, productions sprang up and were trampled down. Okhlopkov was called a naturalist, an eclectic, a formalist, an esthete, a primitive … But the spectators increasingly loved this theater. It seemed as if the director had set himself insoluble problems: how to figure out how the Iron Flood can flow through here, the whole Cossack village in Running Start can be squeezed in? But all this was accomplished, despite the negativity of the critics, the distrust of the authorities. A theater cannot exist without failures, flops, mediocrity. Okhlopkov had them too. Nevertheless I more than once heard from Nikolay Pavlovich nostalgic reminiscences about the difficult but happy days of his theatrical youth, the boisterous, brimming hopes.

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RUNNING START (Razbeg), V. P. Stavsky’s play about class war in a village during the process of collectivization, opened on March 30, 1932. Inspired by a mass action he had staged in Irkutsk as his first theatrical effort, Okhlopkov bent every effort to bring the spectators into the action. Yakov Shtoffer’s95 “environmental design” fragmented the stage and flooded it with light and color. While it granted the “revolutionary” nature of the concept, Okhlopkov was severely attacked by the critical establishment for abandoning ideological realism in favor of entertainment and theatricality.

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