The Routledge Companion to Vsevolod Meyerhold

19DECODING THE RIDDLEApplying Meyerhold’s Conception of the Director’s Explication

Bryan Brown and Olya Petrakova

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110804-28

From his earliest days as an actor with the Moscow Art Theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold had clear directorial leanings. He famously challenged Konstantin Stanislavsky’s directorial interpretations of Anton Chekhov’s plays (Meyerhold in Braun 2016: 30–8) and split from the Art Theatre in 1902 in part to pursue his own directorial vision. In doing so, Meyerhold was re-enacting his first leading role in the Art Theatre, that of Konstantin Treplev from Chekhov’s The Seagull in his passionate pursuit of a new kind of theatre. Over the next 15 years, Meyerhold was an integral player in a community of practice ...