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"MORE LOOKED AT THAN LISTENED TO": SHAW ON THE PRE-REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIAN STAGE

Laurence Senelick, Tufts University

Shaw was not seen on the pre-Revolutionary Russian stage until 1905, when Arms and the Man and The Man of Destiny were produced at Aleksey Suvorin's theatre in St Petersburg. He rapidly became popular, and between 1905 and 1918 there were more than twenty-five productions of his plays on the stages of Moscow and Petersburg, both at the Imperial and the privately managed theatres. This popularity was due in part to Shaw's being seen as a representative of British "New Humor," exemplified by Jerome K. Jerome. Shaw's ideas were overshadowed by his comedy, and his paradoxes were taken to be mere ornamentation, so that his plays were staged either as farces or archaeological costume dramas. A 1910 _Caesar and Cleopatra_, directed by Fyodor Kommissarzhevsky, was attacked by Vsevolod Meyerhold as a hodgepodge of modernist theatrical devices, with no awareness of Shaw's irony. Meyerhold's own stagings of Shaw, a 1912 You Never Can Tell and a 1915 Pygmalion , were anti-illusionistic, mining the texts for the grotesque, the Chekhovian and the "theatrical." However, although Shaw continued to be played throughout World War I, it was as an amusing night out, his lessons dismissed as irrelevancies.