Both the Title and Subtitle of J. Douglas Clayton's Very Informative and Wide
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J. Douglas Clayton. Pierrot in Petrograd: The Commedia dell'arte/Balagan in Twentieth-Century Russian Theatre and Drama. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993. xviii, 369 pp. $49.95 Cdn. Both the title and subtitle of J. Douglas Clayton's very informative and wide-ranging account of the commedia dell'arte and popular theatrical motifs during one of the most colorful and richly creative periods in Russian culture are somewhat misleading, for his discussion ends with Bulgakov's h9atiere (1936) and makes no mention of later commedialbalagan texts, such as Li- udmilia Petrushevskaia's Columbine's AparPmer2t (1981), to name just one. Although the em- phasis of the book is ostensibly on Pierrot, it is the Harlequin who figures more prominently in Clayton's study, and his motley patchwork costume is reflected in the book's multi-faceted composition. The concern of the Prologue is an examination of commedia dell'arte within the traditional context of "high culture," which in Russia was, in Clayton's view, primarily a literary, poetic and intellectual phenomenon, rather than a sociological one. Clayton considers commedia as a se - ries of interconnected developments which encompass revivals of interest in the eighteenth century, the Pierrotic tradition of nineteenth-century French literature, the texts of Carlo Gozzi, Ludwig Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, the commedia images of jaques Callot, and the Russian Petrushka theater, as well as the Russian modernists' interest in the masked ball or masquerade, the circus, and the clown. Clayton traces the roots of the modernist commedia dell'arte to French romanticism and the Theatre des Funambules, and to the Russian balagan, which was associated with native popular street theater. Chapter 1 treats the concept commedia dell'arte, a prominent feature of Russian modernist theatrical and literary culture, as essentially a wide literary or artistic myth. Clayton outlines the main features of commedia and its history and tries to recreate the image of commedia as the Russian modernists envisaged it. Chapter 2 examines the crisis in the Russian theater at the turn of the century and the need for "a readjustment of the relationships between four basic elements of the theatrical perfor- mance: the actors, the author, the director, and the audience" (p. 51). The com media, with its masks, the actors' acrobatic skills, grotesque gestures and colorful costumes, is viewed as a means of creating a new theater. What is most important is that "in cnmmedia dell'arte two types of theatrical sign - the real and the conventional, presentation and representation - could coexist in a uniquely theatrical space" (p. 52). Clayton considers the Russian avant-garde commedia dell'arte, the theater of convention (usfovnyi teatr), in terms of Meierkhol'd's seminal article "Balagan" ("Fairground Booth"), which posits a new theatrical genre "in which the border between the real sign (e.g., the actor's body) and the conventional one (the character he or she is playing) is foregrounded" (p. 58), while the unity of the viewer's perspective is shattered. in the first two decades of the twentieth century the commedia's revival in Russian theater meant creating a new kind of theater, one which in- corporated the native Russian popular theaters of the fairgrounds and the streets. Chapter 3 focuses on how the modern transformation of the clown Pierrot, which had be- gun with Jean Gaspard Debureau in the 1830s in France, is enacted in Meierkhol'd's 1903 staging of Franz von Schonthan's The Acrobats. There, the image of the clown is both unrealistic and theatrically expressive, and this is also the effect of his 1906 staging of Blok's "play about play-acting" (p. 80), Balaganchik. Productions of commedia inspired plays on the Russian stage are discussed in detail in the remainder of this chapter. Chapter 4 traces the productions of the theatrical avant-garde after the 1917 revolution and discovers echoes of commedia incorporated in them as a theoretical model. Chapter 5 treats the commedia delJ'arte forms in Russia in the early twentieth century as an interaction of different layers of Russian life and focuses on the Petrushka play and its transfor- mation after the revolution. The breaking of the barrier between the audience and actors by the repartee in Petrushka plays became one of the familiar elements in modernist theater and litera- ture. In Clayton's opinion the Russian commedia/balagan plays were non-literary and, unlike the plays of the Russian symbolists, they were meant to be acted. These plays were also subversive and polemical in intent, and they asserted the primacy of art over life while subverting conven- tional theatrical expectations. Petrushka performances, Blok's Balaganchik, Guro's The Beggar Harlequin, Evreinov's A Merry Death and Todays's Colombine, and Kuzmin's The Venetian Mad- caps are discussed in detail. Clayton asserts that the play-texts, ballets, and poems which if- corporate the harlequinade were inspired by the myth of Pierrot found in nineteenth-century French poetry. These texts (the French) colored the readings by Russian writers of the balagan versions of Petrushka and harlequinades. Chapter 6 deals with "the golden age of the balagan as a dramatic genre" (p. 159), from af- ter the revolution until the early 1930s. Clayton reflects on the question of perspective in the theater and gives synopses of Maiakovskii's, Lunts's, Zamiatin's, Kharms's, Vvedenskii's, and Bulgakov's plays. Bulgakov's Moliere, or the Cabal of Hypocrites (1936) is considered to be "the last Russian play to emerge from the encounter of Russian dramatic art with the commedia tradition...." (p. 204). Chapter 7 focuses on the influence of cornme�a dell'arte on Eisenshtein's theories of the- ater and film. The difference between the tradition of commedia dell'arte and Eisenshtein's film lies in the role of the director whose authority becomes dominant; the actor-centered comme- dia tradition, by contrast, allowed the actor to express himself/herself freely through irnprovisa- tion. Clayton's discussion of perspective, as a kind of narrative point of view which is modified for the theater, and his treatment of the question of performer and spectator in Eisenstein's work, rely upon the notions Boris Uspenskii elaborated in The Semiotic of the Russian Icon and A Poetics of Composition. Chapter 8 relates in part the role of commedia dell'arte to the question of the theatrical iza- tion of revolution: "The balagan in the theater mirrored, as it were, the ba/agan on the streets of revolutionary Petrograd" (p. 235). Six Russian playlets in the comrnedia dell'arte genre are translated in the Appendix. The illustrations, unfortunately only in black and white, are well cho- sen. There are some curious errors like giving the title of a cycle of poems by Blok (p. 11) is "A realibus ad realiora," and stating that Guro (p. 148) wrote ".accompanying music" for her play The Beggar 1-larlequin. The music was written by Guro's husband Mikhail Matiushin (1861- 1934), a painter, musician, and important figure in the Russian avant-garde. It could also have been mentioned that Guro's plays were staged only privately, in 1920, 1921 and 1922 by Matiushin. Her plays were used by Matiushin and his students as experiments in the techniques of avant-garde theater in which they applied their theories of different art forms to bring to- gether sound, volume, space, and the word. However, none of this detracts from Clayton's very useful and informative book. The tracing of the tradition of commedia dell'arte helps to make persuasive Clayton's em- phatic claim that the Russian avant-garde's rediscovery of the commedia dell'arte, with its use of improvisation and theatrical gesture, provided fruitful inspiration to the talents of .