The Popular Front: Meyerhold and Copeau

Abstract

A danger in attempting to study the theoretical writings of two practitioners in one chapter is the powerful compulsion to find thematic links which elide significant distinctions, or to read the works only for their own sake without adequate alertness to the immediate context and purpose of their penning. Yet there are significant shared contexts for Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940) and Jacques Copeau (1879–1949) which influence, and find expression in, their theoretical thinking in different ways. The first observation might be that they both participated in a rejection of the hegemony of naturalism in their respective national theatrical cultures. Their anti-naturalism was not motivated by the same aesthetic concerns that drove Craig and Appia’s work, with its atavistic homage to Wagner. This anti-naturalism considered art as an ideal realm, quite distinct from life; a place of transcendence, encouraging a different kind of illusionism to the grubby depiction of the everyday that was the alleged role of naturalism. Whilst both the practitioners under consideration here knew their Wagner and read articles by Craig, Appia and Fuchs, yet at the centre of Meyerhold and Copeau’s writing was a sense of theatre as a social art and a social act.