Kamerny Theatre

Last updated April 13, 2019

The Kamerny Theatre was a chamber theatre ^[1] in Moscow, founded in 1914 by director Alexander Tairov (1885–1950). Over the next 35 years, this small, intimate theater became "recognized as a major force in Russian theater". Considered among the better presentations staged at the theater were: Princess Brambilla (1920), Phèdre and Giroflé-Girofla (1922), Desire Under the Elms (1926), Day and Night (1926), The Negro (1929), The Beggars' Opera (1930) and Vishnevsky's An Optimistic Tragedy (1933).^[2] Tairov's primary collaborator in building the sets was Aleksandra Ekster, and these were based upon the period's constructivist style.^[3] The decor for the theatre was designed by Konstantin Medunetsky.^[4]

Chamber theatre is a method of adapting literary works to the stage using a maximal amount of the work's original text and often minimal and suggestive settings.

Moscow is the capital and most populous city of Russia, with 13.2 million residents within the city limits, 17 million within the urban area and 20 million within the metropolitan area. Moscow is one of Russia's federal cities.

Alexander Yakovlevich Tairov was one of the leading innovators of theatrical art, and one of the most enduring theatre directors in Russia, and through the Soviet era.

For three decades the theater survived the effects of the Russian Revolution by remaining unpolitical, instead adopting a post-revolutionary romantic idealism^[5] and relying heavily on classical material from the east and west. However, in 1928, the Kamerny put on Purple Island by Mikhail Bulgakov, which was a satire that openly mocked the government. As a result, Stalin labeled the Kamerny 'a real bourgeois theater'. Thereafter, the theater had need to reform their presentation.^[6] The Soviet authorities developed a deep distrust of Tairov, calling him the last representative of the "bourgeois aestheticism".^[7]

Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov was a Russian writer, medical doctor and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, published posthumously, which has been called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.

In 1937, the Realistic Theater was merged with the Kamerny.^[8] In World War II, the theater was heavily bombed during the siege of Moscow and it did not re-open until December 25, 1943.^[7] The last production staged at the Kamerny was The Seagull by Anton Chekhov in 1946. The same year the Soviet communist party "condemned all formalism and experimentation in literature and the arts".^[1] The Kamerny was closed in 1949 as a result of the Zhdanov Doctrine.^[8]

World War II, also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. The major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China. It included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, and the only use of nuclear weapons in war.

The Battle of Moscow was a military campaign that consisted of two periods of strategically significant fighting on a 600 km (370 mi) sector of the Eastern Front during World War II. It took place between October 1941 and January 1942. The Soviet defensive effort frustrated Hitler's attack on Moscow, the capital and largest city of the Soviet Union. Moscow was one of the primary military and political objectives for Axis forces in their invasion of the Soviet Union.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer, who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre. Chekhov practiced as a medical doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."

Related Research Articles

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, primarily known as Maxim Gorky, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method, and a political activist. He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Around fifteen years before success as a writer, he frequently changed jobs and roamed across the Russian Empire; these experiences would later influence his writing. Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl (1899), The Song of the Stormy Petrel (1901), My Childhood (1913–1914), Mother (1906), Summerfolk (1904) and Children of the Sun (1905). He had an association with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later mention them in his memoirs.

The Seagull is a play by Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov, written in 1895 and first produced in 1896. The Seagull is generally considered to be the first of his four major plays. It dramatises the romantic and artistic conflicts between four characters: the famous middlebrow story writer Boris Trigorin, the ingenue Nina, the fading actress Irina Arkadina, and her son the symbolist playwright Konstantin Tréplev.

Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold was a Russian and Soviet theatre director, actor and theatrical producer. His provocative experiments dealing with physical being and symbolism in an unconventional theatre setting made him one of the seminal forces in modern international theatre. During the Great Purge, Meyerhold was arrested, tortured and executed in February 1940.

Lev Chernyi was a Russian individualist anarchist theorist, activist and poet, and a leading figure of the Third Russian Revolution. In 1917, Chernyi was released from his political imprisonment by the Imperial Russian regime, and swiftly became one of the leading figures in Russian anarchism. After strongly denouncing the new Bolshevik government in various anarchist publications and joining several underground resistance movements, Chernyi was arrested by the Cheka on a charge of counterfeiting and in 1921 was executed without trial.

Yevgeny Bagrationovich Vakhtangov was a Russian-Armenian actor and theatre director who founded the Vakhtangov Theatre. He was a friend and mentor of Michael Chekhov.

The Moscow Art Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow. It was founded in 1898 by the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas that were Russia's dominant form of theatre at the time. The theatre, the first to regularly put on shows implementing Stanislavski's system, proved hugely influential in the acting world and in the development of modern American theatre and drama.

Nachalo was a Russian Marxist monthly magazine published in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1899.

Konstantine "Kote" Marjanishvili, also known by the Russified name Konstantin Aleksandrovich Mardzhanov, was a Georgian theater director regarded as an important contributor to the pre- and post-revolutionary evolution of Georgian, Russian and Soviet stages. One of the most prestigious and professional of Georgia’s directors, he was particularly famous for his lavish and massive theater shows.

Platonov is the name in English given to an early, untitled play in four acts written by Anton Chekhov in 1878. It was the first large-scale drama by Chekhov, written specifically for Maria Yermolova, rising star of Maly Theatre. Yermolova rejected the play and it was not published until 1923.

Maria Fyodorovna Andreyeva was the stage name of Maria Fyodorovna Yurkovskaya, a Russian/Soviet actress and Bolshevik administrator.

The Moscow Art Theatre production of The Seagull in 1898, directed by Konstantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, was a crucial milestone for the fledgling theatre company that has been described as "one of the greatest events in the history of Russian theatre and one of the greatest new developments in the history of world drama." It was the first production in Moscow of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, though the play had been performed with only moderate success in St. Petersburg two years earlier. Nemirovich, who was a friend of Chekhov's, overcame the writer's refusal to allow the play to appear in Moscow after its earlier lacklustre reception and convinced Stanislavski to direct the play for their innovative and newly founded Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). The production opened on 29 December [O.S. 17 December] 1898. The MAT's success was due to the fidelity of its delicate representation of everyday life, its intimate, ensemble playing, and the resonance of its mood of despondent uncertainty with the psychological disposition of the Russian intelligentsia of the time. To commemorate this historic production, which gave the MAT its sense of identity, the company to this day bears the seagull as its emblem.

Naturalism (theatre) movement in European drama and theatre

Naturalism is a movement in European drama and theatre that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theatre that attempts to create an illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies. Interest in naturalism especially flourished with the French playwrights of the time, but the most successful example is Strindberg's play Miss Julie, which was written with the intention to abide by both his own particular version of naturalism, and also the version described by the French novelist and literary theoretician, Émile Zola.

Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man is a five-act comedy by Aleksandr Ostrovsky. The play offers a satirical treatment of bigotry and charts the rise of a double-dealer who manipulates other people's vanities. It is Ostrovsky's best-known comedy in the West.

Theatre studies is the study of theatrical performance in relation to its literary, physical, psycho-biological, sociological, and historical contexts. It is an interdisciplinary field which also encompasses the study of theatrical aesthetics and semiotics. A late 20th century development in the area has been the ethnographic theory of theatre, pioneered by the Russian scholar Larisa Ivleva (1944–1995) who studied the influence of folk culture on the development of Russian theatre.

The Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre is a theatre company in Moscow created in 1950 on the base of Alexander Tairov's Chamber Theatre, which was founded in 1914 and shut down in 1949 for ideological reasons. The theatre is based in the Russian capital's centre, at Tverskoy Boulevard, 23.

Maria Osipovna (Iosifovna) Knebel was a Russian theatre practitioner. Having trained with Konstantin Stanislavski, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and Michael Chekhov, her work integrated the approaches and emphases of all three, with a particular focus on Stanislavski's technique of "active analysis" in the rehearsal of plays. She worked as a character actor, a theatre director, and a teacher. Her students included the actor Oleg Yefremov, the playwright Victor Rozov, and the directors Anatoly Vasiliev and Adolf Shapiro. In 1958, she was named a People's Artist of the RSFSR.

Eccentrism was an avant-garde artistic movement in the Soviet Union active during the 1920s. In the early 1920s it was a movement in theatre associated with the factory of the eccentric actor, which rejected traditional theatrical acting in favor of a modern and physical performance incorporating shocking stunts, derived from the circus and other popular entertainment. A school of eccentrist cinema emerged from the theatre group in the later 20s. Sergei Eisenstein was briefly associated with the movement.

A. A. Bakhrushin state Central Theatre Museum is a theatre special museum in Moscow based in 1894 famous Russian merchant, and philanthropist Alexey Bakhrushin.

References

1 2 Roose-Evans, James (1989). "Taïrov and the Synthetic Theater". Experimental theatre: from Stanislavsky to Peter Brook. Performance studies (4th ed.). Psychology Press. pp. 31–34. ISBN 0-415-00963-4.
↑ Mitter, Shomit; Shevtsova, Maria (2005). "Alexander Tairov (1885–1950)". Fifty key theatre directors. Fifty Key Thinkers Series. Psychology Press. p. 37. ISBN 0-415-18732-X.
↑ Banham, Martin (1995). The Cambridge guide to theatre (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 1099. ISBN 0-521-43437-8.
↑ Smith, Bernard. (1998) Modernism's History: A Study in Twentieth Century Art and Ideas. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 170. ISBN 0300073925,
↑ White, Christine (2009). Directors & Designers. Intellect Books. p. 124. ISBN 1-84150-289-8.
↑ Leach, Robert; Borovsky, Victor (1999). A history of Russian theatre. Cambridge University Press. p. 333. ISBN 0-521-43220-0.
1 2 Senelick, Laurence (2000). The Chekhov theatre: a century of the plays in performance. Cambridge University Press. p. 196. ISBN 0-521-78395-X.
1 2 Cornwell, Neil; Christian, Nicole (1998). "Post-Revolutionary Russian Theater". Reference guide to Russian literature. Taylor & Francis. p. 46. ISBN 1884964109.

Kamerny Theatre

Related Research Articles

References

Further reading