6Performing Communism, or, What if we Took Meyerhold’s Politics Seriously?
A good hundred years after the Russian Revolution, as a spectre of ‘socialism’ again stirs emotions even in the United States (Richardson 2020), I wish to tackle the theme of communism1 in Meyerhold’s ‘revolutionary’ period in the 1920s. Not exactly negating the theatre-historical commonplace that he was one of the artists eaten by the system he fed, I do see in its early phase a ‘glimpse of a radically different world’ (Faulkner 2017: 1) and wish to address how some of its aspects were performed in Meyerhold’s theatre – the idea being that we take the politics seriously, even if the man himself might have been somewhat ...
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