Overview
Meyerhold on Theatre brings together in one volume Vsevolod Meyerhold's
most significant writings and utterances, and covers his entire career
as a director from 1902 to 1939. It contains a comprehensive selection
from all published material, unabridged and translated from the original
Russian, updated and supplemented with a critical commentary relating
Meyerhold to his period and eye-witness accounts describing all his
productions. The book is illustrated with photographs of Meyerhold's
designs and productions. Within this diverse collection of sometimes
dense, sometimes lyrical, and always fascinating writings, Meyerhold
emerges from this book as a forerunner of such directors as Brecht,
Piscator, Planchon and Brook, a relentless enemy of naturalism and a
supreme exponent of total theatre whose influence continues to be felt
throughout the theatre of today. This fourth edition features a new
introduction by Prof. Jonathan Pitches, which helps to demystify some of
the terminology Meyerhold and his associates used, and indicates the
fundamental connection between culture and politics represented in his
life and art.