Comparative Drama

In his legendary 1922 “fantasy-infused” (63) commedia dell’arte-inspired production of Carlo Gozzi’s Princess Turandot, Russian director Evgeny Vakhtangov, long resistant to the juggernaut of realism spreading across European theatres and inspired in part by Konstantin Stanislavski’s work at the Moscow Art Theatre, pointedly banished realism in his innovative theatricalization of Gozzi’s play. As Vakhtangov’s most emblematic production, and also his last, it was aimed to fully break free of the hold of realism. The production was a triumph, but, in a sense, merely a culmination of two decades of avant-garde experimentation by Vakhtangov and others turning toward an overtly theatrical “circusization” (132) of the Russian-Soviet stage. Like Vakhtangov, three particular directors, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Alexander Tairov, and Sergei Eisenstein, looked to dramatic and literary classics of the pre-modern stage for source material that might serve the liberating experimentation they boldly hoped would provide what they viewed as a necessary opposing pole to the rising tide of realism.

Among those sources, works by German Romantic fabulist E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) attracted Meyerhold, Tairov, and Eisenstein. In her engrossing, impressively researched, and highly readable study, The Director’s Prism: E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Russian Theatrical Avant-Garde, Dassia N. Posner digs into the Hoffmannesque productions of these directors, and those who followed their lead, to remind readers that more than a century of the historical influence of Stanislavski, particularly within acting training in America, obscured a fuller understanding that Stanislavski was only one point of reference and that the vast [End Page 146] diversity of the Russian stage offered varied inspirations. The directors Posner examines sought to maintain the seriousness of purpose inherent in realism, while liberating modern stage artists to imagine new worlds through the use of audacious fantasy supplied by works like Hoffmann’s.

With Claudia Orenstein and John Bell, Posner scholarship includes co-editing The Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (2015), but in The Director’s Prism, she asserts her voice fully, proving herself a peer of Lawrence Senelick, Spencer Golub, Julia Listengarten, Sharon Marie Carnicke, and the late Edward Braun, all of whom have within their writings restored neglected aspects of Russian-Soviet theatre. Meyerhold, who was murdered in prison by Stalin’s thugs in 1940, has received considerable scholarly attention since the 1970s and Eisenstein’s cinematic work has long been an area of study by film historians, but Tairov, among other Russian theatricalists, is less known. Posner delves into the Hoffmannesque work of Meyerhold and Eisenstein while illuminating the productions of the comparatively unstudied Tairov, offering penetrating analysis of the accomplishments of all three figures, and particularly their productions inspired by Hoffmann’s grotesque tales.

Curiously, the Prussian-born Hoffmann has inspired considerable scholarship as a literary figure, but relatively little can be found on his theatrical influence. Despite a varied career as a composer, music critic, and jurist, Hoffmann’s most distinct stage legacy was inspired by his 1816 story Nussknacker und Mausekönig (Nutcracker and Mouse King), a dark and psychologically complex socio-critical work best remembered as the basis for Tchaikovsky’s beloved two-act ballet The Nutcracker (1892), a perennial holiday favorite. Only in Werner Mausolf ’s E. T. A. Hoffmanns stellung zu drama and theater (University of Michigan, 1920) and, more recently, Christopher R. Clason’s E. T. A. Hoffmann: Transgressive Romanticism (Romantic Configurations: Studies in Literature and Culture 1780–1850) (Liverpool University Press, 2018) have Hoffmann’s theatrical inspirations received much critical attention. However, Posner makes a persuasive argument that the innovations of Russia’s key theatricalists were significantly enhanced by Hoffmann’s gothic tales to create a movement that destroyed the slavish use of fourth-wall realism. At the same time appeals to a subjective aesthetic emphasizing the role of emotion in...