Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater edited by Susan Tumarkin Goodman
Yale University Press, £35
ART and theatre – often seemingly occupying different worlds – were brilliantly brought together in the early years of the Russian revolution, creating work that was dramatically and visually inventive. It also attracted a popular rather than a specialist audience. While today it is not possible to see the actual performances and the degree to which design and acting worked together, this beautifully illustrated book, of little known material, gives a powerful sense of the sheer visual and theatrical spectacle as artists investigated new ways of telling tales.
The 30 year period from 1919 was marked by great innovation as well as tensions and contradictions. Its fervent creativity offered Russian Jews new opportunities for looking at their own history, at folklore and mythology as well as the rapidly changing political scene in an atmosphere of freedom and experiment. While it ended in tragedy, for more than two decades it celebrated a new openness for Jewish cultural expression.
The murder of the gifted actor Soloman Mikhoels in 1948 by Stalin’s secret police signalled the death knell of Jewish theatre in the Soviet Union. The ultimate clash between the political aspirations of the Soviet regime and the art and culture created during the first – and most experimental – decade following the revolution is vividly evoked by the singed edges of costume designs for the play God of Vengeance, burnt in 1953.
It left a great legacy. The two theatres – the Hebrew-language Habima and GOSET, the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre – became catalysts for modernist experiment, revolutionary acting methods and design. If some of the stylized make-up today seems exaggerated, it was deeply felt, part of a radical approach that was more concerned with ideas than portraying everyday life.
With great artists such as Marc Chagall involved, the fearless young painter decorated the entire interior of one of the theatres with semi-abstract composition that combined narrative with fantasy. His departure for Paris in 1922 was a great loss, but others took his place. Designers such as the brilliant Natan Altman created sets but, equally tellingly, bold costumes that in their use of abstract line reflected contemporary movements such as cubism. A set design for a synagogue interior for The Dybbuk mixes odd perspectives and overlapping planes to combine realism with fantasy.
While few theatres today, state funded or not, are concerned with the level of expressionist presentations that attractive popular support, they could fruitfully study Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater as a natural confluence of art, performance and creativity in which all had equal roles.
Emmanuel Cooper
