“PETER THE FIRST”

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 968, 10 May 1930, Page 29

“PETER THE FIRST”

Modern Russian Play of Demoniac Tsar SOVIET CRITIC’S ATTACK “Peter the First.” by Aleksei Tolstoy. deserves to rank as the outstanding modern play ot what has been, on the whole, a drab theatrical season, writes a London dramatic critic from Moscow. In depicting the tragedy of this greatest personality among the Tsars. Tolstoy has worked out a theme which is as old as Greek drama: the strong man struggling in vain against stronger elemental circumstances. Such an interpretation of Peter's career is historically plausible and dramatically convincing. In fact, although the costumes, the words and ideas are those of Russia two centuries ago, “Peter the First” produces a stronger impression of reality than certain contemporary plays in which the characters are clad in workers’ blouses and discuss the five-year-plan of national development, simply because the latter, in their effort to promote propagandist preconceptions, at times seem to lose contact with psychological probability. The play is brilliantly staged and acted by the cast of the Second Art Theatre, one of several lusty offshoots of the parent tree, the Moscow Art Theatre. Vivid Scenes In scenes of striking vividness the spectator is shown the forces, often blind and dumb, but collectively very powerful, against which Peter’s demonic will-power beats in his effort to remake Russia from top to bottom. The peasant, crushed under the weight of taxes and military requisitions, catches up his axe and takes to the woods to join the first roving gang of bandits. A boyar, or old-fashioned

i Russian noble, mutters mutinously because his beard has been clipped at j the will of the imperious Tsar. A I boyar’s wife almost falls into hysterics j because of a rumoured edict that all | the Tsar’s subjects would have to j clean their teeth. The hungry serfs, dragged by force to the swamps of the Xeva to build St. Petersburg, work- ! ing hard under the masterful eye of i Peter, raise a revolt and kill their foreman as soon as his back is turned, being spurred on by a priest who assures them that the Tsar is really anti-Christ. Most terrible among the scenes, perhaps, is the one in which Peter's courtiers approach the bedside of the Tsarevitch Alekesei, whom they have tortured almost to death at the ruthless Tsar's orders and. with nauseating hypocrisy, ask his forgiveness. Impressive, and historically quite accurate, is the shrunken sacrilegious parody of the ritual of the Russian church, carried out under Peter's direction, perhaps as a new means of strengthening liis conviction that ho was a genuine superman, subject to no control, human or divine. The climax of the tragedy is reached when Peter discovers that his trusted counsellors have aril been guilty of gross and habitual corruption. Then this half-savage despot, this man of blood and iron, becomes an object of genuine sympathy when lie cries out in agony: “For whom, then, have 1 worked all my life and even killed my own son? For whom?” And one is prepared for the last scene, when a storm carries away Peter's greatest object of pride, his fleet, and the Tsar, apprehending his own imminent death and realising that his reforms are built on sand, pronounces the prophetic words: “Soon comes the end.” Is It “Counter-Revolutionary?” It is the practice of Soviet dramatic critics to refer in supercilious terms to all new plays which do not somehow promote the success of the fiveyear plan. “Peter the First,” however, elicited an unusually strong out-

j burst from Mr. I. Bachelis, the r - j viewer of "Komsotnolskava Pravda. ' j organ of the Union of Communist , Youth, who denounces the play as de- ' finitely “counter-revolutionary.” “Is it really Peter who dies?” he ask.-. “Doesn't the whole conception of the play in which no false historicity can cover and mask the bourgeois parallels which are known to us—doesn’t this whole conception represent the base demonstration of the cowardly but impudent class enemy?” Mr. Bachelis calls on the theatre to cease producing it “if it really ; honestly desires to work for the benei fit of the proletarian revolution.” i There is unquestionably a strong external analogy between the period of Peter the Great and the present era of the Soviet five-year plan. Both were epochs of great and sweeping change, carried out by ruthless willpower in the face of conservative opposition with varied roots. In both periods the grandiose character of tinnew building, which was projected and carried out siands in sharp contras;, with the material deprivations which the people were obliged to endure dm ing the process. But historical analogies are a trap for the un.warv. and the differences between Russia in 1720 and the Soviet Union in 1930 are so numerous am! profound that only a very reckless prophet would venture to base predictions regarding the future of presentday Russia ou the fate which overtook Peter's reforms. James Hughes, last in New Zealand with the “Rose Marie” company, playing the role of Sergeant Malone, died in Sydney recently. Mr. Hughes was well known In the theatrical profession. He had the part of Drakon in J. C. Williamson's production, “The Hawk,” which opened in the Theatre Royal. Sydney, recently. Although or. the point of collapse during one performance. Mr. Hughes refused to retire and played his role until the curtain fell.