Few artists have left as great a mark on twentieth-century theatre as has the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold. With ample justification, he has been called the Picasso of the modern theatre. Like that great painter, Meyerhold was a visionary, a ceaseless experimenter with new forms and techniques, the leader of an aesthetic revolution.
Meyerhold's productions were an encyclopedia of theatrical history, incorporating everything from circus tricks to highly stylized elements of the Kabuki theatre. In the twenties and thirties, Meyerhold's theatre became a mecca for those seeking new theatrical ideas. There was hardly a figure of importance in the theatre at that time who did not come to Moscow to see his work. And many, including Brecht, stayed on to study.
Unlike Stanislavsky, Meyerhold was not a theoretician. He left behind no large body of theoretical writings summing up his many years of experience in the theatre. What do remain and must take the place of both Meyerhold's theoretical wr
