Throughout the first decade of its existence, Soviet theatre sought inspiration and new directions in the popular arts. In the period after the Revolution, the most innovative Russian directors and writers, by turning to the clowning and novelty acts of circus and music hall attempted a complete break with the traditions of bourgeois drama—its plotting, psychology, and domestic themes—in order to create a vital new political and propagandistic theatre with, they hoped, broad appeal to the masses.

The painter Yuri Annenkov, in his version of Tolstoy's The First Distiller at the Hermitage Theatre, Petrograd, in 1919, added clowns and variety acts, made hell into a circus, and turned the devils into acrobats. Vladimir Mayakovsky collaborated with the professional clown Vitaly Lazarenko in staging his circus scenario The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle (See T-57) at the Second State Circus in Moscow.

Vsevolod Meyerhold first considered producing Alexandr Griboyedov's Woe from Wit in 1924, the year of its centennial, but because of other demands, he dropped his plans. Then following the premiere of The Inspector General in December 1926, again faced with a serious repertory crisis, he turned to Griboyedov's comedy once more.

Meyerhold continually stressed that the classics should not be treated as museum pieces—something to admire but not touch. He believed that the only way to make these plays meaningful for a modern audience was to chip away the thick encrustation of false tradition and find new interpretations that would be closer to the genuine intent of the authors. “A play,” he wrote, “is simply the excuse for the revelation of its theme on the level at which that revelation may appear vital today.”

For his interpretation of Griboyedov's comedy, Meyerhold decided to go back to the author's earliest plan, even changing the title to Griboyedov's original and more personal Woe to Wit.

Just a few words. The theatrical program of the Proletkult does not involve the “utilization of the values of the past” or the “invention of new forms of theatre” but the abolition of the very institution of the theatre as such, replacing it with a showplace for achievements in the theatre or with an instrument for raising the standard of training of the masses in their day-to-day life. The real task of the scientific section of the Proletkult in the field of the theatre is to organize theatre studios and to work out a scientific system for raising this standard.

All the rest that is being done is “provisional”; to fulfill secondary, not basic, aims of the Proletkult. The “provisional” runs along two lines under the general heading of revolutionary content.

1. Representational-narrative theatre (static, real-life—the right wing): the Proletkult's Zori, Lena, and a series of not fully realized productions of the same type—this being the direction of the former Workers Theatre with the Central Committee of Proletkult.

On March 14, 1920, Bertolt Brecht wrote to Doris Hasenfratz (Doris Manheim) that he had just returned to Munich at midday after a fifteen-hour train ride from Berlin and had gone directly to the cabaret Charivari where the comedian Karl Valentin was playing; Brecht sat “convulsed with laughter until 11 o'clock.” Bernhard Reich, a director closely associated with Brecht during the twenties, describes the fascination Brecht had with these performances:

One always begins with the desire to write a certain kind of sentence (to put on stage a certain “kind” of gesture. That “kind” then turns out to be about that-which-becomes-your-content).

The key, however, is in this sentence (gesture) cell. Most people don't see the cell, are perceptually unable to see small enough (ephemeralization). Because their LIFE training is that to “see small” means to enter the realm where contradictions are seen to be at the root of reality—and that disturbing realization they would avoid at all costs.

The desire to write a certain kind of sentence (gesture) is akin to the desire to live—be—have the world be in a certain kind of way. (Art as a solution to what is—Musil. Through style, through smallest possible units. Bricks determine one style of architecture, stone another, etc.)

In the years 1918, 1919, and 1920, the Berlin Dada movement, mounting less than thirty productions, exerted a formidable, if indirect, influence over the development of the German theatre. This influence would later lead to the dismantling of Expressionism as the dominant theatrical force in Central Europe. Retooling the theories and performance techniques that they inherited from the Futurists and the Zurich Dadas to their own specifications, the Berlin Dadas introduced the use of pure—onomatopoetic or vowel—sound and abstract movement, improvisation, simultaneous and illogical actions, verbal and physical assault on the spectator, antiillusionist scenic design, and the incorporation of popular entertainments, such as cabaret acts and cinema, into German performance.

A number of amateur student theatres that expressed a longing for something other than drabness and conformity in art and life arose quite spontaneously in Warsaw, Cracow, and other principal Polish cities toward the end of the Stalinist period in Poland (1950-1955). They developed chiefly as a reaction against the boredom and the constraint of the official professional theatre. Of all these theatres, the group that developed in Gdansk, Bim-Bom and its later off-shoot, the Afanasjew Family Circus, was unique in its emphasis on the visual, in its combination of images from painting and sculpture with traditional forms of entertainment. Bim-Bom was essentially a nonliterary theatre that sought its inspiration both in the fine arts and in the popular arts of circus, carnival, street fair, music hall, and film. Its prime aim was to amuse. Bim-Bom was popular avant-garde.

The Bread and Puppet Theatre has often been described as a street theatre whose desire is to reach a popular audience. Often this has meant performing in streets, parks, and city ghettos, doing anti-war parades, setting up workshops in poor neighborhoods, or building puppets with children and getting them involved in the preparation of a show. However, along with these outdoor performances, they have always done indoor shows. There are obvious differences between a “chamber play” such as Fire, played in a specific area before a limited number of spectators, and a street piece like A Man Says Good-bye to His Mother: Although both plays have the same “subject” (the war in Vietnam), the first one conveys the story by the form itself—movements, sounds, colors, volumes, etc.—and it is, in a way, the spectator's job to “read” it through all the assembled elements.