Meyerhold on Theatre

Description

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.

Edward Braun is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Bristol. He edited the pioneering English-language selection from Meyerhold's writings, Meyerhold on Theatre, in 1969, and in 1979 published his major critical assessment, The Theatre of Meyerhold. His The Director & the Stage was first published in 1982. Jonathan Pitches is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Director of Research in the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at Leeds University. He is the author and/or editor of four books, three of which relate to actor training and is the founding co-editor of the Routledge journal, Theatre Dance and Performance Training.

Meyerhold on Theatre is an important, many-faceted book. Meyerhold was a great director - the greatest in my experience as a playgoer . . . Braun has rendered the field of theatre knowledge an invaluable service. -- Harold Clurman * The Nation * It is rare that books can capture the spirit in which productions happen, but Edward Braun's anthology . . . does transmit not only the swiftly changing contexts in which Meyerhold worked, but the still-relevant impulses which his work embodied, and which have sown the seeds of so much that the modern theatre still grapples with. * Times Literary Supplement * ... This fourth edition of a seminal work compiled by Edward Braun will present as good and wide a portrait of the great man as anyone could wish for. * British Theatre Guide *