The Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold

3MEYERHOLD IN THE 1930SLanguage, Text, Performance

Anna Muza

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110804-6

Writing about Meyerhold’s staging of Molière’s Don Juan in 1910, the artist and esthete Alexandre Benois quipped that a deaf member of the audience could have fully enjoyed the spectacular production while a blind person would have left the theatre in bewilderment, unable to make out and follow the text (in Pesochinskii 1997: 209). Both before and after the revolution of 1917, whether during the years of Meyerhold’s Symbolist leanings, experiments with commedia dell’arte, or Biomechanics– Meyerhold’s theatre was synonymous with visual inventiveness, elaborate mises-en-scène, and stunning rhythmic coordination rather than verbal performance. The caustic ...