Meyerhold and Brecht

There is a great book by Katherine Bliss Eaton called The Theatre of Meyerhold and Brecht. It was published in the mid-eighties and details the immediate and practical connections between the work and ideas of these two great directors. Essentially it tells of the massive influence Meyerhold's work had on Brecht's own. It's no stretch or great secret to say Brecht was a "borrower." But many Brechtenites are completely ignorant of the fundamental theory and obvious connection between him and Meyerhold. Eaton's Book is one of several wonderful sources to offer insight into this.

I bring this up as prelude still to Vakhtangov and the First Studio. We have to think what came just before the First Studio and what came after. We have to realize how trends and forces of theatre prior led to the formation of the First Studio and how those trends and forces were released back into the world from the First Studio. The First Studio was that turning, that intensifying moment in time for theatre - where everything changed.

Meyerhold crosses the threshold of before and after. Brecht was an after, under Meyerhold's concepts. Before the First Studio, Stanislavsky set up an experimental studio theatre with young actors under the leadership and teaching of Meyerhold. In that studio you find the first notions of the "Making Strange" ideas later adopted by Brecht.

Grotowski too was an after, and under the influence of Vakhtangov's protege, Yuri Zavadsky, with whom he studied with in Moscow for a year. Grotowski later of course formed his Polish Laboratory Theatre (as it eventually came to be called).

These are tid-bits of information...but all roads here hopefully lead back to an eventual coherent story that tells of these connections, these ideas instigated by Stanislavsky and contained nowadays in modern theatre practice.