Russia could hardly be said to have entered the 20th Century with all flags flying. Indeed, all was not as gold as the glitter of her domes. A scant five years later she became embroiled in a bloody civil war, and while that insurrection was put down and relative calm ensued for the next decade, it should have been clear to any sensitive observer that the old order was on the brink of collapse, that horrendous violence was seething just beneath the surface.

All the more astonishing is it, then, that those years can be—and frequently are—referred to as Russia's “silver age” of arts and letters.

On the 20th of April 1922, having rehearsed with a scratch cast of actors for less than a week, Meyerhold mounted a production (his fifth version) of Ibsen's “Nora” (A Doll's House). The performance took place at the Actors’ Theatre in Moscow (formerly the “Nezlobin”) and the set consisted of old Nezlobin flats with their painted surfaces reversed, arranged in a fairly indiscriminate manner against the back and side walls of the stage.

A few days after this, on the 25th of April, this time with a fully trained cast of actors from his own Workshop, Meyerhold staged a production of the Belgian dramatist Fernand Crommelynck's lyric farce in three acts, The Magnificent Cuckold (Le Cocu Magnifique) with Constructivist decor by Liubov Popova.

In many ways, the theatre of the Blue Blouse (Sinaiaia Bluza) was typical of Russian performance in the post-Revolutionary period. Using whatever materials were available, it attempted to create a new type of performance. Overtly political, it employed avantgarde as well as popular techniques. Energetically (and successfully) striving to reach a mass audience, it was created by both theatrical specialists and previously untrained personnel. Socially, if not artistically, Blue Blouse could almost be considered a “movement”: At its height, it probably involved more than 100,000 people. Before it was officially disbanded in 1928, the Blue Blouse had achieved an international reputation and was being emulated in other countries. Today it is almost forgotten.

The best known of Mayakovsky's plays are Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy (1913), Mystery-Bouffe (the second version, 1921), The Bedbug (1928-29), and The Bathhouse (1930). These works appeared in 1968 in a book entitled The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky. However, between 1920 and 1930 Mayakovsky wrote several other dramatic texts. Among these are And What If?… May First Daydreams in a Bourgeois Armchair, A Small Play About Priests Who Do Not Understand What Is Meant by the Holiday, How Some People Spend Time Celebrating Holidays (all three of these playlets were written in 1920 for May Day), The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle (written in 1920 for the circus), Yesterday's Exploit (playlet, 1921), Radio October (1926), and Moscow Is Burning (written in 1930 for the circus).

The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle, a circus scenario, was written in the Fall of 1920 during Mayakovsky's work at Window ROSTA. It is possible to establish almost the exact date from the text. The line stating that Pilsudski, the Polish Champion, “doesn't want to fight anymore” refers to the armistice at the Polish front concluded on Oct 20, 1920. In the last lines, the Referee urges spectators to join the Red Army in the fight against Wrangel; the Red Army defeated Wrangel on Nov. 15, 1920. Thus, “The Championship” must have been written between Oct. 20 and Nov. 15, 1920.

The propaganda themes and characters from “Championship” are also present in other works written by Mayakovsky in the Fall of 1920. The title, The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle, is a line in the poem “150,000,000” written in 1919-20.

In January, 1930, the Soviet Central Agency of State Circuses asked the poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky to write the text for a circus pantomime to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 1905 Revolution. Natalya Briukhanenko, a friend of Mayakovsky and a secretary in the “Klubnyi Repertuar” publishing house that contracted to publish Moscow Is Burning three weeks before the poet's death, left the following recollection: “All the possibilities of the circus were to be exploited: trapezes, water, etc…. Mayakovsky liked the idea. The circus technique, stadium, mass show, all this encouraged him to work….” [Wiktor Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, The Orion Press, New York, 1970, p. 512.]

“1905 or Moscow Is Burning was an entirely new phenomenon in the field of circus pantomime. It was a sharp political satire developed in motion-picture style in separate sequences.

Few artists have managed to play a leading role in the avant-garde for half a century without taking their share of barbs and innuendos. This holds particularly true for a director working within the sensitive, politicized milieu of Soviet theatre, and Nikolai Okhlopkov is no exception. His colleagues tended to regard him as a dangerous anomaly, someone who, like Kafka's Odradek, does no apparent harm to anyone, but whose mere survival is almost painful.

Western theatregoers are highly suspicious of anyone working in a political theatre that upholds the Establishment. Soviet reviewers, both those who support Okhlopkov and those who deplore his “social irresponsibility,” are obliged to discuss one major question: does his theatre reflect the essence of life in an evolving socialist society? Further complications arise from the fact that any director subsidized by the state is continually called upon to affirm the expectations of both spectator and sponsor.

My trip to Moscow in 1934 was a present from Sidney Kingsley, whose play, Men in White, I directed. He wanted to give me something because the play was such a success, and he asked my wife of that time, Paula Miller, what would be the best thing to give me. She said a trip to Russia.

For me, it was an unusual opportunity. I had seen the Moscow Art Theatre in New York in 1923 and 1924. This was the beginning of my engagement with the practical problem of creative acting. I'd read a great deal, but until I met the people from the Moscow Art Theatre, some of whom remained in New York to open a laboratory theatre, I had little actual awareness of the training methods used at the Moscow Art Theatre.

When I watched some acting classes in Moscow in 1969, it soon became apparent that my conception of the Stanislavsky System (based on books and on the work in some New York studios) had little bearing on what I was actually seeing. This was a refreshing experience. I had reached a point in my own work at which I could no longer accept, at least without considerable modification, some of Stanislavsky's pet theories. I was agreeably surprised to find that the ideas I most objected to were either largely ignored in practice or interpreted in a way that I could agree with, and that the actual way of work was one I could admire and learn from.

The following account by Rima Shore of Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty is based on her viewing of the performance in Moscow on January 7, 1973. The production was directed by Yuri Lyubimov. The small Dramatic Theatre on Taganka Square, where the performance was staged, was founded in 1946. A. K. Plotnikov, the Theatre's first director, retired in 1964 and was succeeded by Lyubimov, who at that time was teaching in the studio attached to the Vakhtangov Theatre.

The production of Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty has raised some debate in the European and American press. As part of this introduction we are reprinting excerpts from an article that appeared in the news columns of The New York Times and Yevtushenko's reply, which appeared in the Letters to the Editor section of that same newspaper.