Meyerhold, Vsevolod

Meyerhold, Vsevolod (1874-1940), innovative Russian theatre director of the 1920s and 1930s, whose work inspired many revolutionary artists and film-makers of his era. He was born in Penza, Russia.

While a member of the Moscow Art Theatre of Konstantin Stanislavski at the turn of the century, Meyerhold rebelled against Stanislavski's techniques of imitative emotion on the stage and realistic drama. Declaring that theatre should be something different from everyday reality, Meyerhold began his search for an alternative or abstract scenic art. In 1905 he headed his own studio that promoted Symbolist plays, where the actors moved like stylized puppets under the authoritarian controls of the director. Over the next decade, he experimented with improvisational, comic, and conventional forms of theatre, such as commedia dell'arte and Peking Opera.

By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Meyerhold was considered the leading avant-garde director in Russia. He worked with constructivist painters and artists and created dynamic acting areas filled with abstract scaffoldings, ladders, isolated platforms, and mobile screens. His young actors were rigorously trained in a system of mental and physical exercises called biomechanics. Based on Meyerhold's earlier work in Asian theatre and circus, biomechanics gave the performers a sense of emotional and bodily control not seen before on the modern stage. The precise physical and mechanical movements of Meyerhold's actors on the Constructivist sets startled and delighted Soviet audiences.

Although Meyerhold directed propaganda and comic plays by Vladimir Mayakovsky and other Soviet writers in the 1920s and 1930s, his most celebrated productions were eccentric and radical restagings of Russian and European classics, such as The Inspector General, by Nikolay Gogol. Beginning in 1932 the Stalinist regime insisted on a militant programme of Socialist Realism in the arts, ending all forms of avant-garde innovation. Unable to conform to the new state directives, Meyerhold found himself under constant attack. In 1936 he lost his theatre and four years later, after months of imprisonment and torture, he was secretly executed by the Soviet internal police.

See Theatre Production.