Yevgeny Vakhtangov

Итак, мы начинаем
С нашей песенкой простой
Через пять минут Китаем
Станет наш помост пустой
Мы все здесь в этой сказке
Ваши слуги и друзья
Среди нас четыре маски
Это Я! Я! Я!...и Я!!!!

A simple song we’ll now perform,
And soon, in just five minutes,
You’ll see our empty stage transform,
And you will China visit,
Your humble servants we will be,
And friends, if that’s your wish.
Among us four masks you will see.
It’s me! Me! Me!...and Me!!!!

Such was the beginning of the Vakhtangov stage production of Princess Turandot. To the accompaniment of a marvelous musical score, the actors then proceeded to unfurl colorful fabric by tossing it back and forth, and soon the stage truly was transformed.

What a strange and extraordinary life was lived by Yevgeny Vakhtangov. In 1903, at the age of 20, he came from Vladikavkaz, the current capital of North Ossetia, to study at Moscow University. He was interested in a career in the natural sciences, but he changed his mind and transferred to the School of Law. Then it turned out that the amateur acting he was doing in various theater groups was not so amateur after all. The scientist turned law student was neither. His true calling was to be an actor, and he was a remarkable one.

Soon he was giving brilliant performances on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater, where he managed to stand out amidst a company that included some of Russia’s most legendary actors. Before long Vakhtangov began to produce his own plays in one of the theater’s studios. It soon became clear that something odd was going on. This devoted disciple of Stanislavski, this adherent of dramatic realism, was actually following a different path. Vakhtangov was straying from the Stanislavski system, from the “theater of experience.”

Vakhtangov was moving toward something completely new. He began staging productions like Chekhov’s grotesque The Wedding, and Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolic and mystical The Miracle of St. Anthony. While the Moscow Art Theater was renowned for its treatment of “ordinary life,” with its problems, conversations, and the behavior of “ordinary” people, for Vakhtangov, theater was whimsy, fantasy, and improvisation.

Furthermore, this man, whose main gift to Russian culture was fanciful, joyous fairytales, possessed a profoundly tragic sensibility. He staged the gloomy dramas of Ibsen and Strindberg. He brought to life disturbed, half-mad characters. And his relationships with the actors that worked under him were stormy and tortured.

Vakhtangov spent the final years of his short life battling serious illness, which is probably why his thoughts turned increasingly to the attainment of happiness through suffering and to the entryways into eternity offered by mysticism. Given this attraction to mysticism, it is not surprising that, in addition to Carlo Gozzi’s playful fantasy, Vakhtangov’s legacy includes the somber Dybbuk, produced by the Jewish Habima troupe. Habima staged its productions in Hebrew, and this play by the Jewish playwright Ansky (Shloyme Zavni Rappoport, whose pseudonym was sometimes spelled An-sky), which was written in Yiddish, was specially translated into Hebrew – despite the fact that hardly any theatergoers in Moscow understood the ancient Biblical language.

For Vakhtangov, the fact that most of the audience would not understand the words being spoken on stage was not only not a disadvantage, it offered a unique opportunity. He had long dreamed of producing a play in which the words would not be understood, but the essence of what was transpiring on stage would. This is what happened. This mystical story, based on Hasidic legends about how the soul of a dying man passed into the body of his beloved and did not want to leave her, was a plot that held extraordinary fascination for Vakhtangov. It was attractive as a story of love, death, and life after death, but also as a vehicle for entirely new theatrical forms. The director joined his actors in singing Hasidic chants, incorporated bizarre Hasidic dances, and immersed himself in medieval mysticism.

It was important that Vakhtangov was dealing with no ordinary theater company. The young actors who comprised the Habima troupe were almost amateurs, and unlike the actors of the Moscow Art Theater studios, they never questioned what the great director asked them to do. This was both a weakness and an extraordinary strength. Like the dybbuk, Vakhtangov penetrated his actors with his powers, and they were transformed. The inexperienced troupe managed to put on such a performance that the audience truly did not need to understand the words. All of Moscow saw The Dybbuk, and later, after Vakhtangov’s death and Habima’s departure from Russia, it was seen by the whole world. And all the world understood it.

At the same time that Vakhtangov was bringing to life the dark and passionate world of The Dybbuk, he was also creating the frolicsome and lighthearted fairytale world of Princess Turandot. This was the story of a capricious princess who forced the prince seeking her hand in marriage to solve riddles, and although the prince was putting his life on the line, the audience knew that they could expect a happy ending. Here, the vivacious energy of Commedia dell’arte reigned supreme, along with this genre’s stock characters: Truffaldino Tartaglia, and Brighella (no one was expected to question what they were doing in China). The emperor and his ministers nodded their heads as if they were bobblehead dolls, and the cast constantly reminded the audience that they were actors, that they were masks, that they were play-acting, pretending, representing.

How could the world of The Dybbuk and the world of Turandot have coexisted in Vakhtangov’s soul? How could he have been capable of working on both productions at the same time? Indeed, how could he work at all while in the grip of stomach cancer, wracked by chronic pain? How was it possible in Moscow of the early 1920s, during the hungry, cold, gloomy years that followed the revolution, to stage either a mystical play about love with a plot that takes one of its characters beyond his physical existence, or a facetious fairytale contemplation of the essence of art?

Vakhtangov was 39 when he presided over his last rehearsal of Turandot, sitting in a cold theater bundled in a fur coat, his head wrapped in a wet towel. How must he have felt as he urged his actors to express ever more joyous energy, to give themselves over to the ecstasy of the theatrical element, all the while knowing that he would soon be dead?

All we have of these two plays from the early twentieth century are recollections and photographs. Vakhtangov’s Princess Turandot was revived twice: in the 1960s and the 1990s. The sixties production was triumphant; the nineties revival less so, but, all told, Vakhtangov’s Turandot survived almost a century, and it is entirely possible that it will again come back to life.

The fate of The Dybbuk is even more remarkable. In the twenties and thirties, when Habima was making a triumphant worldwide tour, the troupe achieved incredible renown. In Israel, the play ran continuously until the 1960s. The great actress Hanna Rovina played the leading female role for decades. No other actress could compare, and Habima’s directors persuaded Rovina to continue acting the role of 18-year-old Leah’le into her sixties and even seventies.

Toward the end, there was little left of the erstwhile greatness of the Vakhtangov production, and the actors breathed a sign of relief when the play was removed from their repertoire. But Vakhtangov’s two great masterpieces were remembered far longer than many other plays of the twentieth century, because they lived such a long, albeit difficult, life. The productions themselves became legendary.

Today, Russia’s main theatrical award is called the “Crystal Turandot.” What better symbol could there be of the greatness and fragility of theatrical art than a captivating fairytale created by a dying genius amidst suffering and brutality?