Discussion Group - Trinity Term 2023 | Readings
Discussion group: Russian Theatre in Britain, 1926: Komisarjevsky’s Chekhov season and Huntly Carter’s ‘Labour theatre’
Our discussion group this term will focus on Russian theatre in Britain in the 1920s. We return to 1926, the year of the General Strike, to see two very different versions of Russian theatre being presented to the British public. In suburban west London, Theodore Komisarjevsky was continuing his series of much-admired Chekhov productions for the Barnes Theatre. ‘That it should be possible in an out-of-the-way suburban theatre to create an illusion that we are living in a Russian provincial circle of the seventies, is, I think, something like a triumph of stage-craft’, remarked The Star’s theatre critic. In north London, on the other hand, the journalist Huntly Carter was presenting lantern lectures on Soviet acting techniques to local branches of the Independent Labour Party. The October Revolution had inspired an epidemic of theatrical activity, he told his audience: all over Russia ‘thousands of little co-operative theatrical organisations had been formed by workers, peasants, soldiers, students, who improvised plays and performed them in clubs, cellars, rooms, barns, factories, barracks’. This theatre, Carter argued, should provide the model for a workers’ theatre movement in Britain. We’ll be thinking about how these two presentations of Russian theatre both made claims to theatrical modernity that had quite different legacies for twentieth-century British theatre.
Readings
Huntly Carter, 'Preface, The New Theatre and Cinema of Soviet Russia' (London: Chapman and Dodd, 1924), pp. v-xvi
Huntly Carter, ‘Workers and the Theatre’, Sunday Worker, 15 March 1926, 6
Huntly Carter, ‘A Working-Class Revue’, Sunday Worker, 19 September 1926, 6
J. T. Grein, ‘The World of the Theatre’, Illustrated London News, 27 February 1926, 366
Desmond McCarthy, ‘Tchehov’, New Statesman, 6 March 1926, 645
For background if interested
Stuart Young, ‘Non-Chekhov Russian and Soviet Drama’, in Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ed. by Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 87-112
