New Plays In Moscow

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 276, 11 February 1928, Page 22

New Plays In Moscow

Art Theatre Turns To Revolution

EXPRESSIONIST SCHOOL OF RUSSIAN DRAMATISTS

Among Uni dozen or more plays that were especially written for the tenth anniversary of the November Revolution, the Moscow Art Theatre’s presentation of “Armoured Train No. 14-69” stands out in brilliance of acting and execution, says a special correspondent of an American journal. The author of the play, Vsevolod Ivanov, is one of the younger Russian writers* who made his reputation by his stories of the partisan war of the Siberian peasants against the White dictator, Kolchak: and it is out of this material that the drama “Armoured Train No. 14-69” is built. One scarcely recognised the old Art Treatre, the Art Theatre of the personal drama, of Chekhov and Ostrovsky, in this roaring melodrama of recent history, where the action is frequently punctuated and interrupted by the rattle of machine-gun and rifle tire, by the whistling of trains and the shouting and tumult of revolutionary mobs. The famous actor, Vassily Katchalov, who plays an important part in “Armoured Train No. 14-69,” is a link between the old and the new; yet he somehow seems a little miscast in his role of a simple peasant who is driven into insurrection by outrages which the Whites have inflicted on his home and family. Katchalov is too complex, too sophisticated for this type; he imparts to the interpretation of the character of this patriarchal peasant, whom only accident drew into politics, somewhat too large an element of conscious heroic tragedy. Mass Scenes Good The strength of the play is distinctly not in its individual characters so much as in its mass scenes; and these are so uniformly good that it is difficult to single out any for special praise. One cannot soon forget the grim fascination of the night scene by the railroad, where the peasant guerillas wait for the coming of the hateful armoured train, with its White officers and machine-guns, which they are determined to stop. And there is even more intense dramatic quality in the episode where the little garrison of the armoured train, after holding out for three days against impossible odds, is shown on the verge of collapse. In lighter vein is the discussion of the peasants with an American soldier whom they have captured. Their first instinct is to shoot him; but happier counsels prevail and they decide to treat him kindly and win him over to their cause. The closing scene is a triumph of bold Imagination, a pageant of nationalist and working class victory. The triumphant peasants, riding on their captured armoured train, arrive in a city just as the workers, fired by the fall of a beloved leader, who has been assassinated by a Japanese spy, rise up against the local military authorities and the Japanese who are supporting them. And the play ends amid the strains of the “Internationale” with the armoured train moving off to new battles. Departure From Tradition “Armoured Train 14-69” has points both of likeness and of contrast to Mikhail Bulgakow’s “Days of the Turbins,” which was given last season and achieved very great popular success. Both these plays represent a departure from Art Theatre tradition in shifting the emphasis from thought to action, from individual character to mass movement. But Bulgakov’s work pre-eminently' reflects the mood of the classes which were defeated in the Russian Revolution; it shows the old-fashioned, comfortable Russian middle-class home breaking up under the sledge-hammer blows of social upheaval. This is the secret of its very strong appeal to the members of the old Russian educated and propertied classes, who go night after night to weep over the vanished happy life of pre-war days and to witness a sympathetic dramatic projection of the experiences through which they lived during the period of revolution and civil war. Class Drama Ivanov, on the other hand, has written a drama of the victorious classes, of the revolutionary workers and peasantry. And, although his work spares the audience nothing of the stern and terrible sights of civil war, it produces an effect not of depression, but of keen enthusiasm, which finds expression in repeated outbursts of applause during the performance; something which is quite opposed again to the traditions of the Art Theatre. Both these plays reveal most eloquently the splendid versatility and flexibility of Constantine Stanislavsky and his players. They impart tremendous vitality to a type of dramatic production that Is quite new and unfamiliar to them; they disarm the radical critics who have "been accusing the Art Theatre of excessive conservatism, of having “outlived its time,” by taking over some of the most striking methods of the expressionist school and combining them very effectively with their, own. superb, classical- art..