“The artist must be like a detector, warning society about what is taking place in people’s souls, in their subconscious.”
—Yuri Lyubimov
Halfway through rehearsals for Yuri Lyubimov’s eagerly anticipated production of Rigoletto at the Teatro Comunale in Florence, things weren’t looking so good. The Soviet director, freshly exiled from his homeland, was in the international headlines almost daily, and the press had gotten wind that his staging of the Verdi opera was rife with overt political references. The baritone singing the part of Rigoletto had walked out after refusing to wear a bowler hat and strut about the stage like Charlie Chaplin. Vehement protests were also being voiced over an array of platforms, ramps and staircases, all of which left the singers breathless, and over the mannequins of Hitler, Napoleon and other historical figures that populated the set by Stephanos Lazaridis. And the cast was up in arms over a swing from which Edita Gruberova’s Gilda was supposed to “dangle” as she sang her aria “Caro nome.”
By opening night in early May 1984, the production—Lyubimov’s 50th—had turned into a first-class scandal, with singers and conductors resigning right and left. And when boos and catcalls erupted at the end of the first performance, Lyubimov responded with some rather expressive gestures of his own directed at the audience.
For anyone familiar with Lyubimov’s style, his conflict with singers and musicians in Florence could hardly have come as a surprise. Lyubimov’s creative juices have always thrived on crisis, whether he was battling with officials at home in Moscow, or with actors and conductors abroad. As one of his friends commented in Florence, “The country changes, the city changes, the theatre changes, but the atmosphere around Lubimov remains the same.”
Only a month earlier, Lyubimov had been fired from his job as chief director of the Taganka Theatre in Moscow, and his expulsion from the Communist Party had followed soon after. These moves climaxed months of suspense during which Lyubimov had leveled some of the harshest accusations ever made in public by a Soviet citizen against the Kremlin bureaucracy. The immediate issue was the refusal to allow the director to include in the Taganka’s repertoire his production of Alive (banned since it was first staged in 1968) and his two most recent productions, Vladimir Vysotsky (a tribute to the popular Russian singer who had died in 1980) and Boris Godunov (which was closed down after three dress rehearsals in December 1982). “I am 65 years old,” Lyubimov had stated in London on the eve of his highly acclaimed production of Crime and Punishment in September 1983, “and I simply don’t have the time to wait until these government officials finally arrive at an understanding of a culture that will be worthy of my native land.”
Lyubimov’s dismissal from the Taganka brought to an abrupt end the director’s 20-year battle to realize his vision of theatre as a moral and political forum addressed to those questions he felt should be of concern to his fellow countrymen. When he took over the debt-ridden Taganka Theatre in the spring of 1964, few would have predicted that the charming 45-year-old actor-turned-director would one day become famous as the “Captain Courageous” of the Soviet theatre.
Yuri Lyubimov, who often characterizes himself as “a child of the Revolution,” was born in Yaroslavl in 1917. He grew up in Moscow, trained to become an electrician, and made an “unexpected” decision at age 17, he says, to study acting. When the Second Moscow Art Theatre Studio was closed down in 1936, he moved to the Vakhtangov Theatre School, where he completed the acting course in 1941. Upon entering the army, Lyubimov was drafted into a performing ensemble organized by Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD (Stalin’s State security agency, now the KGB). Throughout the war Lyubimov worked as a master of ceremonies in Beria’s star-studded traveling ensemble, entertaining the troops as well as providing diversion for top government officials on the home front. When the war ended, Lyubimov rejoined the Vakhtangov Theatre to become one of its leading actors. He also began a career in the movies and in the next few years acted in 19 films.
In 1962 at the Shchukin Theatre Institute where Lyubimov was teaching acting, he used students from his third-year class to stage a breakthrough production of Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan. Although Brech has been seen briefly on the Soviet stage in the ’30s, he was, as one writer put it, “nether socialistic nor realistic enough for the Stalinist era.” It was only after the Berliner Ensemble’s visit in 1957 that Brecht made his presence felt, but it remained for Lyubimov to establish the playwright as a major influence in the Soviet theatre.
Lyubimov chose the Brecht play, he says, “because it enabled us to express those ideas about life and the theatre that most concerned me and my students,” a principle of immediacy that was to inform all of his work in the future. The production also became his Trojan horse for bringing back into the theatre all the Meyerholdian elements of street theatre and circus that had been replaced under Stalin by the grim visage of Socialist Realism. To this mixture Lyubimov added a heavy dosage of Vakhtangov’s “fantastic realism,” creating a style of ironically playful performance that proved uniquely suited for Brecht. The young students built the world of the play as they went along, using simple props and crudely lettered boards to designate locale. Dressed in ordinary rehearsal clothes and wearing no make-up, thye moved in and out of their roles with a carefree insouciance, commenting not only on their own characters, but on each other’s as well.
By the following year when Lyubimov’s students performed the entire Brecht play as their graduation production, word had spread that it was something quite new and radically different. Soon all of Moscow was rushing to the tiny opera studio at 12a Vakhtangov Street to see what the excitement was about. The Good Woman aroused a storm of controversy. As Lyubimov recalls, “Even the workers from two large factories were summoned to court to condemn that production because it wasn’t Russian art, because Brecht was a rationalist and not suitable for a Russian theatrical school. But the workers liked the production, and so the officials couldn’t use their hands to strangle me.” Thanks to support from the artistic and intellectual constituency that was already beginning to form around Lyubimov, The Good Woman was saved. On April 23, 1964, it premiered as the opening salvo in Lyubimov’s campaign to transform the Theatre of Drama and Comedy on Taganka Square into the Soviet Union’s most avant-garde theatre.
Lyubimov turned to directing, he said in a recent interview, out of a profound dissatisfaction with the gray sameness he saw in the theatres around him, comparing it to a “shorn field, or a well-manicured English lawn.” Following in Meyerhold’s footsteps, Lyubimov stripped the stage at the Taganka to reveal the guts of the theatre. He applied the same gritty aesthetics to all his productions there. A sworn enemy of artificial scenery that tries to imitate “real life,” Lyubimov has also always been strongly against makeup on the stage. “What could be better,” he asks, “than for the spectator to see the real face of the actor, the changes in its spiritual state?”
Lyubimov talks about a theatre of synthesis. “I like,” he says, “productions with complex lighting, sound and acoustical scores and complex scores worked out for the actors.” As an actor of his once quipped, he uses “everything except makeup and the fourth wall.” Plastica is a word that frequently crops up in his conversation. By this he means the working out of a scene in space, primarily through the language of the actors’ movements. Lyubimov constructs a model of the production in his mind, carefully developing it from one rehearsal to the next. This is undoubtedly what makes it possible for him to repeat a work, as he has with his Crime and Punishment, in a wide variety of theatres from Moscow to London, Vienna, and most recently Bologna, without losing the essence of it.
Lyubimov often compares the theatre to a symphony orchestra or a ballet, and he demands of his actors the same discipline and hard work that are required of a musician or dancer. “Why must you wait for inspiration? Work and more work, and not only intuition and inspiration are essential to the actor. The art of the dramatic theatre must be just as exact as the art of the ballet.” When asked about the often-heard charge that he dictates to his actors, Lyubimov dismisses it by asking, “But how can there be art without form? That doesn’t make sense. Richter and Rostropovich are dictated to by a musical score. After all, the actor’s profession is to perform. It’s another matter that he must also be a co-creator.”
There is never any approximation in Lyubimov’s work. Each movement and gesture is precisely set by him, more often than not by demonstrating himself what he wants from the actor. Endowed with a seemingly boundless reserve of energy, Lyubimov spares neither himself nor his actors. As one of them commented in describing life at the Taganka Theatre, “For us the concept of ‘a working day’ ceased to exist. There was only a working life.” This passion for excellence was also reflected in the amazing vitality of the Taganka’s productions, even those that had been in the repertoire for 10 or 15 years. “That’s because at the beginning of every season, I carefully rehearse all of them,’ Lyubimov comments. “I add, I cut something, refining the acting score, the lighting, the acoustics, the plastics and so forth.”
In staging a production, Lyubimov wastes no time sitting around a table reading and analyzing the play with his actors, a practice he learned to detest at the Vakhtangov Theatre. As his designer David Borovsky testifies, “there might be one reading and then the next day everyone is on stage. And that’s everyone, the lighting crew, the actors, the prop man…If they rehearse the production for six months, there’s six months of lighting, six months of sound.”
But no work begins on a production until Lyubimov has decided in his own mind precisely why he wants to do a particular piece, how it should be staged in terms of space, lighting, music, the character and perhaps most important of all, why it should be done at that particular time. “The theatre is an art of today [and] it is very important that the theme I choose indeed concerns spectators today,” he once wrote. “If it turns out an enormous number of people need it, if they see it ‘as their own,’ it means we have made a correct choice.”
Over the years, Lyubimov resisted the inevitable pressure to stage “politically correct” plays that he considered second-rate. He never mounted a contemporary play at the Taganka, claiming that none of them offered sufficiently rich material to feed his imagination. “Real artistic work,” he once wrote, “begins only when one can dig and re-dig a play, opening up more and more layers.” He turned often to Brecht or to the classics—Hamlet, Tartuffe, The Three Sisters. Beginning with his 1965 staging of poet Andrei Vornesensky’s Antiworlds, Lyubimov tried through rhythm, movement and words to bring poetry alive on the stage. In productions such as The Fallen and the Living (dedicated to the poets who had perished in World War II), Esenin’s Pugachev (about the leader of a peasant rebellion in 18th-century Russia), and Listen (with its five Mayakovskys revealing different facets of the poet’s life), Lyubimov developed a unique form of poetic theatre. As his theatre matured, he turned more and more to prose adaptations, confronting the realities of the Soviet value system through the novels and stories of Mozhaev, Trifonov, Abramov and other writers.
Lyubimov works so closely with his scenic designer that it is almost impossible to tell where the contribution of one ends and the other begins. All his productions are built around one or several objects that serve as multileveled symbols: an enormous woven curtain in Hamlet, giant alphabet blocks in Listen, a blood-spattered door in Crime and Punishment. “I try,” Borovsky explained in talking about his work with Lyubimov, “to find an object lying around under our feet and to translate it into a new meaning. The object is what it is, and yet it pulls along behind it a whole series of new meanings.” For example, in the Taganka’s 1974 production, Wooden Horses, a picture of rural life based on two stories by Fyodor Abramov, the harrow seen lying on the stage communicates both the feeling of the land as nourishment and as the source of these people’s tragedy. “That’s what seems to me most valuable in the theatre,” Borovsky comments, “that this body of a machine abandoned somewhere suddenly turns into something symbolic through the strength of the audience’s and the theatre’s imagination, and yet it doesn’t lose its primary nature for man.”
But lighting (which he always designs and sets himself) and music are equally important in Lyubimov’s work, and he has justifiably earned a reputation for the brilliant use of both. Lighting is likely to emanate from almost anywhere in one of his productions. It often serves as a curtain, as it did in Ten Days That Shook the World, or it may stream up through gratings in the floor, a device Lyubimov used frequently at the Taganka. He is a master at using lighting to create atmosphere, for example the murky St. Petersburg of Gogol’s stories in his The Inspector’s Recounting, or the fantasmagoria of Satan’s ball in The Master and Margarita. And in his Crime and Punishment, Lyubimov uses lighting aggressively, as a thrusting, jabbing weapon, to force upon the audience his point that Dostoevsky’s hero is, in the director’s words, “a terrorist and a murderer.”
From the very first Brecht production when three actors stepped out on the stage with guitar and accordion, all of the Taganka’s productions have been saturated with music. Most Taganka actors are accomplished singers and musicians and many compose music as well. Lyubimov also attracted some of the most talented composers in the Soviet Union during his tenure there, including Alfred Shnitke and Edison Denisov, to create musical scores for his productions, some of which were extremely complex. As a number of critics have noted, Lyubimov has often structured his work on musical forms—leitmotifs, choral refrains, solos and reprises. And his final production at the Taganka, Boris Godunov, literally grew out of music. Lyubimov says he regards it, and his production of Vladimir Vysotsky, as “attempts to create a kind of strange, contemporary opera.”
Lyubimov had wanted for a long time to stage Boris Godunov. The fact that Pushkin’s great verse drama has never been successful as a theatre piece was the kind of challenge that the director couldn’t pass up. But, Lyubimov says, “It was only when I connected it with folk music, with the style of singing of that period, that it took on a particular flavor for me and became very convincing.” Boris was developed, with the help of an ensemble of early music experts, from authentic folk songs and rituals, and included complex singing of ancient prayers, chants and laments. Denied funding for the production, Lyubimov staged it very simply as a folk performance that could be taken out on any square or street corner. The minimal props included scythes that served both as weapons and as primitive musical instruments; they sounded like bells when run against the brick wall at the back of the stage.
Perhaps Lyubimov’s greatest contribution in his 20 years at the Taganka was to create in his theatre a genuine dialogue between the stage and the auditorium. He destroyed the Stanislavskian “fourth wall” by eliminating the stage curtain and having the actors address the audience directly. Meyerhold had done that before him, but his objective in the 1920s had been to rouse his audience’s emotions—and he wasn’t above planting someone in the audience to start weeping at the proper moment to achieve that objective.
Lyubimov was after something more politically subversive in his 650-seat theatre on Taganka Square. His productions made the agitprop theatre of the 1920s seem pitifully naive in comparison. As the critic Yuri Smirnov-Nesvitsky once wrote, “Whatever story they are playing, Lyubimov’s actors come face-to-face with it. They only cite from the story, but they speak about their own generation.” When, in the closing moments of Lyubimov’s 1972 production of Yevtushenko’s Under the Skin of the Statue of Liberty, an array of American hippies began chanting, “Just three minutes of freedom, just three minutes of freedom,” the action on the stage and the realities of Soviet life became one, as it did over and over again in Lyubimov’s productions.
Lyubimov has proved a master of what the great Marxist critic George Lukács called “Aesopian language,” and he turned his audiences at the Taganka into genuine collaborators in the creative process. Over the years he presented the authorities with an almost overwhelming challenge in trying to maintain control over the contents of his productions, all of which were extremely rich in political and social references. It was one thing to demand the removal of a line of text, or a change in costume (and Lyubimov always gave plenty of cause for that), but as Lyubimov well knew, controlling gesture and intonation, and even more what was left unsaid, pushed the censorship process toward the absurd.
Lyubimov’s mane of graying hair frames a face that is mapped with the traces of a life spent in constant conflict. At times his pale blue eyes sparkle most wickedly, and just as quickly they can turn to ice when he is displeased. Lyubimov is impatient with small talk or general discussions about art. Always the consummate actor, he has a keen sense of humor, honed, no doubt, by his service as a master of ceremonies during the war. He is quick to mimic a waiter serving espresso or an opera singer having a tantrum, and his conversation is likely to be punctuated with such vignettes. When asked once what role he would like to play, his answer was, “Stalin—but in my own interpretation!” Without a sense of humor, he contends, “I would have hung myself a long time ago right there on the Taganka,” a reference not only to the theatre’s location on Taganka Square, but to the Russian word taganok (a ring on three legs where a pot is placed for cooking food) from which the name is derived.
Lyubimov also put his wit to good use in the battles he waged with authorities. “I was constantly doing all kinds of acrobatic tricks,” he remarks with a rueful laugh. But the tricks didn’t always work. The witty jabs at the obtuse management of collective farms in Mozhaev’s Alive, for example, resulted in the production being closed down in 1968. Lyubimov was still fighting to get the production back before the public at the time he was fired in March 1984. Justifiably regarded by Lyubimov as one of his best creations, it marked the beginning of his collaboration with Borovsky, whose laconic set consisted of birch poles stuck at random in the stage floor to represent the countryside and a row of office chairs on a lighting batten that lowered to become the office of the Party officials. The hero of Mozhaev’s novella about collectivization in the 1930s tries to engage in a little free enterprise in order to make ends meet, only to find himself thwarted by a despotic bureaucracy. It is a testimony to the power of theatre that this work, which has been published in many thousands of copies, should prove so subversive on the stage that when Lyubimov tried to get it passed for public viewing he was fired. “Fired for the second time,” Lyubimov clarifies. “The first was for The Fallen and the Living (in 1965). And then I wrote Brezhnev a letter and he reinstated me.”
On the occasion of a 1975 attempt to get Alive before the public, representatives from the agricultural establishment showed up to take part in the post-performance evaluation of the production. As one writer quipped, “It was like inviting all the mayors in Russia to judge Gogol’s The Inspector General.” Although some of those present spoke eloquently about the need for the younger generation to know the truth about collectivization in the 1930s, the opinion that prevailed was, “Even if it’s true, it mustn’t be shown!” And so once again the production was banned.
Lyubimov’s production of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita which opened in April 1977 marked a turning point for him and his theatre. When he couldn’t get funding for staging the novel, Lyubimov, undaunted, did it “outside the plan,” calling on the theatre company to donate its services. For the decor, he used a collage of props from his earlier works, “all my most treasured objects, which I put together and gave to Bulgakov as a gift.” They included the swinging pendulum from The Rush Hour and the huge curtain from Hamlet, both of which became extremely forceful images in the production. The curtain, a dark menacing presence, constantly swept across the stage, moving the action at a feverish pace back and forth between Moscow in the 1920s and Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion.
Bulgakov’s plot interweaves a visit by the Devil to Moscow with the fate of the Master, who is committed to a psychiatric hospital when his novel about the crucifixion of Jesus is rejected by the censor. It seemed made for Lyubimov and his production of it clearly marked the summit of his career at the Taganka. The almost four-hour performance treated audiences to a whirlwind of carnival effects and titillating scenes such as Margarita, nude from the waist up (her back to the audience), sitting on the swinging pendulum as she witnesses Satan’s ball. The production was rich in contemporary references, and lines such as, “Manuscripts don’t burn,” and “No documents—no man,” evoked audible responses from the auditorium. Although it was passed for public viewing, The Master and Margarita’s enormous popularity didn’t sit well in official circles, and when an article appeared in Pravda attacking it, there were some who speculated that Lyubimov’s days might be numbered.
Elena Bonner (Andrei Sakharov’s wife) once called the Taganka “the perfect theatre for the Moscow intelligentsia because it doled out the truth in small doses, never big enough to cause trouble.” But as the years went by, the doses of truth Lyubimov served up on the Taganka stage became too potent for the official establishment, sometimes even too strong for his own followers. While The Master and Margarita enjoyed an unprecedented success with audiences, other plays did not. The Taganka’s 1978 reworking of Gogol’s major works in The Inspector’s Recounting was perhaps too radical for an audience unschooled in Freudian psychology—or perhaps the parallels Lyubimov drew with their own situation proved too uncomfortable for audiences, particularly the second half, which is set in an asylum and combines Gogol’s Diary of a Madman with the writer’s own mental disintegration and gruesome death. The finale is a nightmarish scene in which the hero of Diary cries out, “No, I have no strength left. I can’t stand it anymore,” as he is grabbed and pushed through a hole in the floor. “My God! What are they doing to me! They pour cold water on my head!” The cries fade to a mere gurgle, and then silence This was vintage Lyubimov rage turned into art, including the curtain call at the premiere performances, where the actor came out led by two psychiatric ward attendants.
The staging in 1980 of Trifonov’s The House on the Embankment was even more politically explicit, and that the play ever reached the public was a surprise to many—in fact, it raised speculation as to whether permission wasn’t granted in order to facilitate Lyubimov’s removal as head of the theatre. The theme of Trifonov’s novel is betrayal during the Stalinist purges of the ’30s. The play’s central character, Glebov, is confronted by himself as a youth who in order to advance his career failed to stand up for his favorite professor who fell into political disfavor. Borovsky’s set consisted of the skeleton of a huge 1930s apartment house whose stairways and elevator shafts are visible through the transparent wall separating the auditorium from the stage. As both “mirror and memory,” it was a perfect metaphor for the wall of silence separating the past from the present that Lyubimov set out to penetrate. “You must explore your own history,” the director said when asked in an interview why he had chosen this work, “if you want to remain a great nation.”
By the late ’70s, a significant change had taken place in the composition of the audiences that were flocking to see Lyubimov’s productions. But Lyubimov fought a losing battle to overcome it. He observed in 1980, “I am helpless. According to the rules, 50 percent of the tickets were supposed to go to the theatre box office. And I arranged for tickets to be sold right before the performance so that they wouldn’t get into the hands of speculators. But they [the government] took so many for themselves: there was the Central Committee, the Ministries, Intourist, the Moscow Soviet, the Supreme Soviet. So that very few of the poor spectators who waited all night got in. It was very unfortunate, and the actors were very upset too.”
Lyubimov knew this had a chilling effect on the performances. Yet he was optimistic about his own and his theatre’s future when Yuri Andropov took over as head of the government following Leonid Brezhnev’s death in November 1982. He had first met the former head of the KGB back in the 1960s, and he believed that Andropov had interceded on his behalf more than once. How correct Lyubimov was in this assessment is difficult to say. One thing becomes more and more clear with the passage of time, however: The decision to remove Lubimov was made well before Andropov’s death in February 1984. As Lyubimov commented rather sadly, “They settled all their accounts with me for the past 20 years.”
In July 1984, while still abroad, Lyubimov was stripped of his Soviet citizenship for “engaging in activities hostile to the State and damaging the prestige of the U.S.S.R.” Maintaining that he is “an exile, not an immigrant,” Lyubimov continues to believe that his real audience is in the Soviet Union. As he observed in one interview, “There’s not just a need for food in the Soviet Union, there’s a spiritual hunger.” Meanwhile the director has more than enough work awaiting him in the West as invitations to stage both dramatic works and operas have poured in from theatres all over Europe, as well as from America and Japan.
Lyubimov mounted his fourth and fifth productions of Crime and Punishment last October in Vienna and in Bologna in December. His production of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, a work he has long dreamed of staging, premiered at the Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris on Feb. 16. After a week’s performances it moved on to the Almeida Theatre in London where it was scheduled to open on March 21. Next on Lyubimov’s schedule is a staged version of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion to be produced in May by La Scala in Milan. He has been offered theatres in Bobigny, a suburb northwest of Paris, and in Bologna where he signed a two-year contract as theatre director at the new Teatro Arena del Sole. Lyubimov will make his American debut in the 1986-87 season at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., where he has accepted an invitation to direct a Dostoyevsky adaptation.
Lyubimov has a vision of theatre not merely as an aesthetic experience but as a political and spiritual force, and in his 20 years at the Taganka he never compromised in his efforts to achieve it. He was, as one writer recently noted, “the theatrical conscience of his nation.” This is what has drawn him to Dostoevsky in recent years, sharing with the great 19th-century novelist a concern for the lack of spirituality in the world. “And not only in Russia,” Lyubimov commented. “I believe that for Russia there is still hope.” He has always spoken to his audiences about serious matters, and never moreso than in his last productions at the Taganka. One of his actors once said proudly, “We never had to feel ashamed in front of an audience.” In fact, the wonder isn’t that he was fired after almost 20 years as head of the Taganka Theatre, but that he survived as long as he did. In the end, his theatrical vision cost Yuri Lyubimov not only his theatre, but his citizenship as well.
Alma Law, a veteran of more than 25 trips to the Soviet Union since 1973, has written and lectured extensively on 20th-century Soviet theatre and culture. She recently translated Theatre in the Time of Nero and Seneca for its staging at the Cocteau Repertory Theatre in New York, and is completing a book on contemporary Soviet theatre. She is on the graduate faculty of City University of New York.
