SOURCE: Makaryk, Irena R. “Shakespeare Right and Wrong.” Theatre Journal 50, no. 2 (1998): 153-63.

[In the following review, Makaryk describes avant-garde Ukrainian director Les' Kurbas's 1924 modernistic, anti-bourgeois production of Macbeth, citing its ironic and expressionistic methods and stylized form.]

In an interview in Gambit in 1970, Edward Bond remarked that, as a society, “we use the play [King Lear] in a wrong way. And it's for that reason I would like to rewrite it so that we now have to use the play for ourselves, for our society, for our time, for our problems.”¹ For Bond, “wrong” Shakespeare is academic Shakespeare, while “right” Shakespeare is a transformed and contemporary Shakespeare. Bond's clear-cut division of approaches to Shakespeare is quintessentially modernist in its rejection of “museum” Shakespeare in favour of a reworked classic for our time. His division of approaches into right and wrong also points to the main line of argument I wish to explore in relation to one particular production: the idea of style—the central issue of modernism—as not just an interpretive and ideological tool but also a moral one. The area of my special interest is the early Soviet period.

Within the general trend of modernizing Shakespeare in the West from the 1960s on, Macbeth has been the “trademark” avant-garde play, its primitivism and anarchism being particularly attractive characteristics. These are also some of the obvious attractions of this play for the high modernist period. In 1924, the great Soviet Ukrainian director Les' Kurbas (1887-1937) conceived of a production of Macbeth in terms almost identical to those of Edward Bond. Kurbas wrote that “Our approach to Shakespeare naturally must be the approach of our day. The restoration of Shakespeare in the manners and customs of his time is formally impossible and in essence unnecessary. The whole value of the scenic embodiment of a classical work in our day lies namely in the ability to present a work in the refraction of the prism of the contemporary world view.”² For Kurbas, it was particularly important that the performance not “decline” into literature but that it remain theatre. The text should therefore remain only one of the materials at the disposal of the creative actor; it was to be a tool, not a tyrant.

A polymath, Oleksandr (Les') Zenon Stepanovych Kurbas was an actor, director, playwright, translator, pedagogue, theorist, cinematographer, musician, and costume designer. Himself an “epoch” in the Ukrainian theatre—as one of his contemporaries referred to him³—Kurbas influenced hundreds of artists involved with the theatrical and cinematographic arts. Introducing Shakespeare into Ukraine after a century of tsarist prohibitions, Kurbas prepared four plays (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear) and did preliminary work on five others (Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra), intending, eventually, to produce the whole Shakespearean canon; however, the only play which was actually staged in its entirety was Macbeth. Kurbas produced four variants of the play, the fourth of which, staged in 1924, was the most radical. Before proceeding further, it is perhaps necessary and useful to explain that I regard the avant-garde as both a radical, ground-breaking offshoot of modernism focussed on experimentation and process and, also, as the expression of a left-wing political stance aimed at the total repudiation of bourgeois culture. In Eastern Europe this repudiation meant the rejection, for the first time, of “the national character and didactic pathos of earlier literature,” as well as the erasure, as in other, Western modernist projects, of the boundaries between art forms and genres, between “high” and “low.”⁴ This double task may be seen in the work of Kurbas; thus, in his view, his 1924 production was both left and right; that is, inspired by a left-wing ideology but thoroughly “correct” in its view and use of Shakespeare.

Shortly after the première of Kurbas's Macbeth, one of the actors in the production, Vasyl' Vasyl'ko, recorded in his diary that a “bomb went off, throwing such sparks into the audience that even on the second and the third day [all of] Kyiv shouted ‘gvalt’”⁵ From the point of view of Vasyl'ko and many of the actors, as well as a good portion of the audience, Macbeth was a tremendous success, as the thundering ovations indicated. But not everyone loved the production. Those critics who detested the production accused Kurbas of “sacrilege,” “vivisection” and serious “error.”⁶ Why did this production elicit such sharply-polarized responses? In interviewing theatrical historians in 1995 in Kyiv, I was surprised to learn that even today this production has many detractors. What was it about the style which led critics then and now to categorize it in moral and religious terms as “wrong” and “blasphemous”?

First, let's consider the production:

The Macbeth which opened on 2 April, 1924⁷ presented a full-frontal attack on the illusionist theatre. Disruptions, contrasts, juxtapositions, minimalist costumes, montages of stage action, atonal music—these were to help ironize the moral tale of an ambitious man. Kurbas employed various techniques to create a cubist expressionist production,⁸ which would reflect his beliefs about audience, actor, and art work. A self-conscious creation of fragments to be re-assembled by the spectator, this production (as one of the sympathetic critics observed), intended to kill the remnants of the bourgeois theatre.⁹

While only twenty-three pages of the director's copy have survived, they reveal a consistency in their cuts; these appear to be excisions aimed at simplifying the emotional range of the play by omitting small choral scenes and, most importantly, by eliminating Macbeth's heroic concluding speech. The whole production was austere and harsh. In Vadym Meller, the artistic director, Kurbas discovered a like-minded friend and colleague who shared his artistic interests and could translate them into reality. Like Kurbas, Meller studied in the West. After a very successful first exhibition, he had been invited to show his works in the Salon d'Automne together with Picasso, Gris and Bracque.¹⁰ For the 1924 Macbeth, Meller created enormous placards (4 × 4 meters high), bright green shields of stretched canvas, on which giant modernist red block letters announced “Castle,” “Precipice” (the translator's word for “heath”), and so forth, recalling both medieval-renaissance locality boards,¹¹ and contemporary political posters. Their starkness urged the audience to creative completion: to imagining what each of these locations might be like. Their size dwarfed the actors, and diminished their usual centrality on stage, suggesting that the characters were subject to forces other than their own individual wills, to other discourses, interpretations, and frames. Raised or lowered when needed at the sound of a gong, the screens served as more than background. Lowered at the same time, they indicated the simultaneity of the action in different parts of Scotland. At other times, they moved in slow, stately rhythm to underscore the emotions of the lead actors, to emphasize tension, the dynamics of the action, or even to interfere in the action—as, for example, when they physically blocked off Macbeth's attempt to follow Banquo's ghost—represented by a searchlight beam.¹² Fragments of furniture, chairs, and a throne were, like the screens, lowered and raised when needed. The actors were often lit by the harsh light of projectors, and moved in a “restrained” way, and the whole rhythm of the production followed this general style.¹³

Like the stylized and bare stage which both suggested place and yet also mocked any such certainty, so the costumes were spare and theatrical, emphasizing the duality of the actors (as characters and as people) and of their time frame (both time present and past). Wearing either militarized garb or contemporary work clothes very like those worn by many people in the audience, the actors were distinguished from them by only a few ancillary articles: stylized bits of medieval or renaissance clothing, such as tunics and cloaks, decorated with appliques in a modernist interpretation of heraldic designs.

At the centre of this production was the “naked” actor—the major experiment in this version of Macbeth. Kurbas's challenge to the actors was to display the perfection of their technique by turning their roles “on” and “off” at will. The pure craft of acting was laid bare without the attendant “mysteries” of sustained, realistic character, illusory sets, grand costumes, extensive music, and numerous props.¹⁴ In renaissance fashion and with similar effect, actors' roles were doubled or tripled. Thus Yosyp Hirniak, for example, played Donalbain, the Murderer of Banquo, and the Doctor; each role carried over associations from the previous one, contributing to the spreading of guilt in the realm, and limiting the audience's habit of dividing the characters into goodies and baddies. The mechanism of acting itself was openly displayed: each actor came on stage at his or her own pace, sometimes greeting the audience, and assuming his role only when he was properly positioned. Similarly, after performing his part, the actor exited as “himself.” Thus, in the first scene, the witches came on stage wearing wide blue-grey trousers and red wigs. Mysterious little electrical lights flickered in their costumes and around their eyes when they uttered their prophecies. A surreal violet blue light was used to emphasize their horrible grimaces. Like priests, they held censors in their hands, thus immediately announcing the bitingly satirical thread of the interpretation. But, after this eerie scene, the screen with the word “Precipice” disappeared from sight, the violet light vanished, and the witches calmly left the stage as actresses who have done their “‘number’.”¹⁵

The sleepwalking scene was performed with the same emphasis on actor in and out of role. Liubov Hakkebush proceeded to centre stage, where she placed her candle, took off her mantle, shook her head until her long dark hair tumbled around her shoulders, and only then proceeded emotionally to “Out, damned spot!” Similarly, after Macbeth delivered his powerful soliloquy in Act I, scene vii, he seized his dagger and turned to go to kill Duncan. Taking a few steps, he resumed his identity as Ivan Mar'ianenko the actor.

The “on-off” technique proved to be extremely hard on the actors. Actress Iryna Steshenko, who played one of the witches, wrote in her memoirs of the difficulty of maintaining a balance between restraint and involvement in the role,¹⁶ while Liubov Hakkebush, who played Lady Macbeth, was admonished at rehearsals for descending into pathology and bad taste in creating the sleepwalking scene.¹⁷ Indeed, the inclination to overdo their acting segments was one of the dangers of this technique, as Kurbas reminded them; all acting, he emphasized, proceeds from thought, not emotion.¹⁸

The “on-off” principle was repeated again and again in the production, thus isolating and drawing attention to key moments in the play, as well as to the points of transition—forcing the audience and the actor to a cerebral response to the play, to a focus on the constituent parts of theatre. Every aspect of the production was placed in quotation marks, every theatrical convention was questioned, including the idea of the tragic hero. The traditionally heroic Macbeth was portrayed by Ivan Mar'ianenko (hitherto noted for his tragic roles) as a common, unimaginative soldier, dressed in contemporary clothes, including sloppy puttees. This Macbeth combined simplicity of character with single-minded cruelty; his doubts were not indicative of a conscience, but were rather a revelation of his fearfulness, a fearfulness revealed right after the regicide, when he threw himself at his wife with the very same knife he used to murder the king. Duncan was presented as a drunken fool, whose death at first seemed, if not deserved, then at least not completely reprehensible. Both Macbeth and his wife counted on the fact that most of Scotland would not discover their crimes, and the knowing rest would keep silent out of fear. (The resemblance to Stalin's future institutionalization of terror, and the population's fearful, silent compliance seems uncanny in the whole interpretation.)

Lady Macbeth was more austere than her husband. Not a romantic young beauty, but a mature woman without passion for her husband—who seemed, rather, to annoy her with his fearfulness—Lady Macbeth was ugly and sharp-featured, in love only with power and herself. When Macbeth left to kill Duncan, she followed him, comfortably holding the dagger like a practiced killer.¹⁹ The Macbeths were understood as products of their time—a Scottish Middle Ages which Kurbas interpreted as inherently and instinctually spiritually hollow and cruel.

The only moment which contained a remnant of traditional tragedy was the sleepwalking scene. Dressed in white, Hakkebush seems Ophelia-like in photos taken of this scene. While in the rest of the production she was constumed in restrictive, unattractive clothing (a dark, shapeless three-quarter length robe over a white shift, pleated at the bottom, vaguely recalling a Ukrainian peasant's costume), and a severe headpiece (a white kerchief held in place by a metal band), in this scene, she wore only the long white shift over which cascaded her long, unfettered hair. Robbed of the dignity of her usual severity, she was subject to the hallucination of an imminent assassination on herself.²⁰ The consequences of her past cruelty were apparent in the stark contrast to previous scenes. Here, she was palpably terror-stricken by her inability to achieve real power or to control events.²¹ That this was not a scene of pathos is suggested by the response of the drama critic I. Turkel'taub, who faulted Hakkebush for being too mannered and her acting too “cold.”²²

Grappling towards a new relationship with the audience, Kurbas wished to break down drama into its constituent subsystems, forcing the audience both to re-examine the individual materials of the theatre and then to re-constitute them into a new whole. He employed some devices to destroy traditional audience expectations and engagement (as, for example, the “on-off” device), while others were to draw the audience in at moments when they least expected it. Thus, for example, he had the witches wired so that small electric lights lit up as they moved in their deliberately exaggerated “witchy” way. But, when it came for Banquo and Macbeth to speak to the weird sisters, the witches were lit up from behind, casting huge shadows onto the audience. The thanes spoke to these shadows and thus to the audience which, after being alienated and amused by the odd beings, now just as suddenly found itself implicated in the dark world of Macbeth.

The closest link between actor and contemporary audience was provided by major additions to the text: three intermedia and dumb shows. The Porter (played by Ambrosii Buchma), called the Fool in Kurbas's production, appeared in the intervals between the acts. During the first interval, Buchma was dressed in fool's cap and traditional fool's clothing, with exaggerated make-up, including a bulbous nose which occasionally lit up. The Porter's costume clearly linked him to the Old Vice of medieval drama, the attendant of the Devil—a connection confirmed and developed in an additional mimed sequence following Act 1 scene 3 (that is, just after Macbeth and Banquo first encounter the witches) in which cardinals cavorted on the stage and then turned into devils by the simple process of revealing their cowls on which were painted devilish faces.

Buchma as Porter performed clownish tricks, acrobatic jumps and dance-steps, after which he always spoke with individual members of the audience. In her memoirs, fellow actor Natalia Pylypenko compared Buchma to a rubber ball, which flew across the stage, seemingly weightless and unpredictable, at one time flying up to the ceiling, at another descending by the trap door and shooting up again.²³ Buchma made seemingly impromptu speeches on contemporary political and social issues (such as the deposition of the Tsar, the League of Nations, various religious superstitions, even backstage theatrical disputes)—these were Kurbas's analogy to Shakespeare's references to the Jesuits' equivocations. Every day, the director insisted, the jokes and references had to be changed. The actor Stepan Bodnarchuk was responsible for transforming items in the morning newspaper into couplets by nightfall. In this, as in other elements of the theatricality of the production, Kurbas was consciously reaching back to the rich, old medieval and renaissance traditions of the audience-actor relationships. In permitting the Fool some creative freedom, Kurbas was also consciously drawing upon English fools like Will Kempe renowned for his impromptu conversations with the audience and his extempore comic remarks. Buchma shared with Kempe the lively combination of acrobatics, wit and physical clowning.

In the fourth act, during the intermedia referred to as “Haymaking,” Buchma entered as a Peasant, reaping energetically as he went and singing a harvest song. Here, from the scenes of bloody-mindedness, Kurbas moved the audience in a Shakespearean manner to consider the apparently undisturbed (or compliant) common man. Rather than any sentimental or folkloric association, the simplicity of the peasant's task both contrasted with the violent, over-the-top actions of the main characters, but also connected them. For, of course, the Reaper was also the Grim Reaper, mowing down “the rays of light, [and] extinguishing them with his broad sweeps.”²⁴ Fatigued by the work, he would then approach members of the audience sitting on bleachers in front of him and take cigarettes from them; thus he connected the main plot and the intermedia to reality itself.

The Fool's third and last appearance occurred in the final moments of the play, when Macduff comes out carrying the head of Macbeth. Still wearing his Fool's makeup—the mocking, grinning face—Buchma came in costumed as a bishop, in gold tiara and white soutane. He then crowned Malcolm to the solemn music of an organ ironized by the delicate sounds of the piccolo and the rougher harmonium. Just as he did so, a new pretender approached, killed the kneeling Malcolm, and took the crown. Without pause, the bishop once again intoned the same words, “There is no power, but from God.” As the new king began to rise, a new pretender murdered him, and the ritual was repeated once again.²⁵

The mixture of burlesque, acrobatics, buffonery, and Grand Guignol—linked to Futurism and Dadaism of the West—was intended to focus attention on and interrogate the material and form of the theatre most radically by employing a world classic—hence a text regarded with some piety. While in some quarters the production was acclaimed as a “great triumph” and a work of genius,²⁶ in others, it was simply “a scandal.”²⁷ The Kyivan audience, which had recently endured a Macbeth-like period of rapid and bloody exchanges of power (eleven between 1917 and 1920), was forced to exercise a very renaissance type of activity. This “history” play induced the spectators simultaneously to apprehend Ukraine, Shakespeare's England, and Macbeth's Scotland. Shakespeare was their contemporary. Was he also their prophet? Whom was the production satirizing? Whom was it destroying? How were the issues of conscience, power, loyalty, treason, silent complicity, and destruction of innocence supposed to be interpreted in 1924 with the recently (21 January 1924) dead Lenin, and with the backroom power struggles which ensued? How could it be that the bloodiness and ineffectualness of the Tsar (Duncan) was, in the end, indistinguishable from the Soviet power that took his place (the Macbeths and the Malcolms of the world)? Where was the morality of the new regime? Was it possible that regicide was neither romantic nor heroic, and that evil was simply banal, repeatable, and unconnected to ideology?

Kurbas's intention—to problematize all the elements of theatre (the classic, plot, role, character, hero, time, space, acting, prop, costume)—was, as I have already mentioned, an attempt to re-conceive the whole notion of theatre. In his view, this was the only right way of going about the task of creating a new Soviet Ukrainian culture. Whether one considers him a naive convert to the new order or an aesthetic idealist, Kurbas believed that the struggle had to be, could only be, the struggle to reinvent all systems; and this aim could only be achieved by constant experimentation. The avant-garde style was intended to make audiences think critically and to unite them in analytical thought through their complicity in the action. Devices which broke down the conventional barrier between stage and audience, actor and character, were, in Kurbas's logic, rupture on behalf of a new communion. But this harmony could only be achieved by the special cooperation of the audience which had to fill in the hermeneutical gaps. It required then, not a suspension of disbelief, but a very special and shared belief—a belief in the possibility of forms emptied of traditional associations and codes in order that they be recreated and filled with something entirely new.

Contemporary critics and spectators unsympathetic to modernism focussed on the discontinuity and unpredictability of the production. They found it cold, exclusionary, elitist. Even with his pre-production articles, puffs, and his brief statement of purpose before the curtain, Kurbas was not entirely successful at creating the kind of new audience-actor relationship he intended. The vociferous polemic launched in the press (which lasted over two months) was in part a debate about the modernist style and its relationship to the notion of the classic. Kurbas was accused of “blasphemy” in his treatment of Shakespeare, of completely annulling a theatrical classic, of presenting a “cold” and unfeeling production,²⁸ of showing life as it shouldn't be, instead of how it should.²⁹ Shakespeare in his hands, according to the critics, was simply Mr. Wrong.

But what was “right” Shakespeare? In an article castigating the production, Iakiv Savchenko defined the “correct” tradition of staging Shakespeare as, first of all, a realistic recreation of Elizabethan theatre; secondly, as a tradition of strong actors playing in a heroic-romantic style; and, lastly, as a production which centers all the attention on the main characters.³⁰ “Right” Shakespeare, then, appeared to be very close to old traditions and conventions of the commercial theatre. Savchenko's prescriptions suggest the unity between audience and stage of a simple garden variety based on the idea of the stage as representing reality or, more accurately, a heightened reality. The idea of style as potentially wrong or right seemed to rest on the bedrock of a particular understanding of community and, further, on the strength of the social fabric. Considering itself under ideological siege from within and from without (not having yet recovered from world war, civil war and revolution), the “right-thinking” Bolshevik polemicists of the Soviet Union in 1924 had little tolerance for a notion of theatre (or art) that was not unifying or celebratory of great deeds. Ironically, in a country in which God was proclaimed dead, only moral and religious terms could be found to convey the depth of their condemnation of modernist Shakespeare.

Curiously (from Kurbas's point of view), his peers also attacked his Macbeth for being too bourgeois, for taking the “bourgeois aesthetic” to its “absurd” conclusion by not reflecting objective reality but only hinting at it, by presenting a system of signs, marks and ideas instead of concrete reality; and, finally, for creating overly abstract forms.³¹ Art for art's sake—the principle which really was under attack here—was a movement that did not strike deep roots in the East, where art had always generally been approached from an ethical (religious or social) perspective.³² The critics' offensives were, in part, a reflex regression to ethical models of criticism developed over the past two centuries (and perhaps most notoriously found in Tolstoy's critique of Shakespeare). The traditional, ethical approach to the arts also fed naturally into the new political terminology of error, heresy and deviation.

The Futurist Mykhail Semenko correctly pinpointed the cultural crisis of his time as a crisis of theory.³³ With little thought given to the part culture would play in the Revolution, its leaders had no consistent cultural policy, let alone a theory. Lenin's only interest in culture, for example, was exhibited by his insistence that cities be plastered with slogans and that statues be erected to revolutionary leaders. The latter in particular evoked the most conservative of tsarist and neoclassical cultural habits. The avant-garde was appalled. But this conservatism or regression was of a piece with other kinds of turnings-back. For the Commissar of the Enlightenment, Anatolii Luncharsky, as for Lenin, the classics were national property and thus to be tampered with at peril. Lunacharsky's slogan, “new content in old forms”—must have given the modernists pause in their belief in a new order, as must have the critic Turkel'taub's slogan, “Backwards in art and culture.”

In the 1920s, the rhetoric of morality—modernism was wrong and destructive (Kurbas called it “cheap demagoguery”³⁴)—soon drowned out intellectual debate. The unpredictability of modernism and its apparently cyclical view of history could hardly co-exist for long within a new, official master narrative: the story of “scientific,” inexorable progress toward a new paradise on earth. In such a narrative, in which the answers were already known, what point could experimentation possibly serve? Among the first to welcome the Revolution, the avant-garde had few allies. Dismissive of the old ethnographic school, of the bourgeois and much of the intelligentsia, the Ukrainian avant-garde worked itself into a political corner from which, by the 1930s, there was little possibility of escape.

The 1920s debate concerning Macbeth usefully points out many of the broader difficulties with modernist Shakespeare and the modernist project—at least in Ukraine. While modernism provides freedom in opening up space and, especially, time, and attempts simultaneously to distance and to draw in, often only its discontinuities and ruptures are immediately evident. By contrast, the mimetic approach to the theatre, although only a convention and without objective validity is, as Benjamin Bennett astutely pointed out, a “communal initiative”: “if the realistic begins by being discredited, if it is recognized from the outset as mere convention, then the conscious decision to accept that convention is undoubtedly communicative, shared with others, a communal process.” What is crucial, then, continues Bennett, “is not meaning, but style as the token of an ethical decision repeatedly taken in the theater.”³⁵

Conservative, academic or commercial theatre with its apparently easy acceptance of “ordinary reality” thus functions in a seemingly harmonious manner; it provides a readily identifiable common ground for actor and audience. Such a desire for clearly-defined and understood concepts of communion was most obviously found in the first years of the Revolution. Thus, Nikolai Evreinov's staging of The Storming of the Winter Palace on the third anniversary of the October Revolution with at least 8,000 participants and 100,000 spectators (whose participation, observes Lars Kleberg, “was merely a question of degree rather than kind”³⁶) was both an expression of this conflation of life and art and a harbinger of things to come. Inspired by the artistic precedents created during the French Revolution and by the ideas of Richard Wagner and Romain Rolland, such huge spectacles, mass festivals and glorifications of revolutionary leaders, it is true, did not last very long. But that does not mean that the desire for such “realism” and the communion which underlied it disappeared; rather, it found a less obvious outlet in the theatre's return to “realism” as the officially approved approach to art in the Soviet Union.

Rather than foreground the audience-actor connection, Kurbas's modernist productions presumed that the audience wished to co-create a new ground for interpretation and communion while creating a semiotic earthquake where nothing remained stable or certain. Modernism optimistically endowed the audience with the desire to work while at play, to think critically and to question in an individual way in order to achieve a long-term project of a new community. Thus, for many Ukrainian modernists, it was commonplace to think of the theatre as the church of literature, the best expression of collective ceremonial thinking.³⁷ Here, we may see that the modernists themselves reverted to religious and, in other cases, to moral terms. For both camps, this emotion-laden terminology revealed the deeply-engrained belief in the monumentality and potency of the classic for our culture.

Yet modernism was also deeply skeptical of its communicative tools and signifying practices, as the interrogations of Kurbas showed. Using rhetoric while also drawing attention to its manipulations, modernism had enormous political and subversive force³⁸—a fact which goes some way to explaining both Hitler's and Stalin's detestation of it.

Modernism's idealistic conception of the audience and its occlusion of the psychology of viewing—the perhaps overwhelming need for harmony, what we really like in mimesis—doomed Ukrainian modernist productions to a specialized or special audience. It is perhaps not surprising, after all, that, in 1995, Ukrainian theatrical historians remained uncomfortable with what one critic called Kurbas's “fireworks,” his “whimsies,”³⁹ his too intellectual, too contemporary production.⁴⁰ Tired of political interpretations of plays and anxious to rejoin the European community, Ukrainian theatrical artists and critics seem, at the moment, happiest with a psychological realism.

Notes

1. Harold Hobson, Jane Howell, Irving Wardle, John Calder, “A Discussion with Edward Bond,” Gambit 17.5 (1970): 24.

2. “Do postanovky ‘Makbeta’ v 4 maisterni M.O.B. (rozmova z Kurbasom),” Bil'shovyk (Kyiv) 1 April 1924: n.p. All translations are mine.

3. Kh. Tokar, “Desiat' let ‘Bereziliia,’” Teatr i dramaturgiia (Moscow) 4 (1933): 61.

4. Endre Bojtar, East European Avant-Garde Literature, trans. Pal Varnai (Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1992), 37-38.

5. Vasyl' Vasyl'ko, Shchodennyk [unpublished diary], vol. 5, 1 January 1923 to 14 May 1924, MS 10369, State Museum of Theatrical Arts and Cinema (Kyiv).

6. Numerous reviews and memoirs attest to this view. A representative view is la[kiv] S[avchenko]'s “Shakespir dybom,” Bil'shovyk (Kyiv), No. 76 (974) 4 April 1924: 6.

7. Although various scholars cite the opening of the play as 1 April 1924, in fact, according to Vasyl' Vasyl'ko's diary, it did not open until 2 April, because the costumes were not ready. On 2 April, even as the performance was proceeding, the costumes were still being completed.

8. Benjamin Bennett, Theatre as Problem: Modern Drama and Its Place in Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 33.

9. Vasyl' Desniak, “‘Berezil’,” Hlobus (Kyiv) 5 (1925): 116.

10. Meller is the father of constructivism on the Ukrainian stage and was responsible for some of Kurbas's most inventive, original stage designs. He turned to stage design after his paintings were destroyed during World War I; his theatrical début took place in 1918. See V. Kucherenko, Vadym Meller, 1884-1962 (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1975) for a beautiful catalogue of his surviving works.

11. Virlana Tkacz argues that these may have been influenced by silent movies. See Virlana Tkacz, “Les [sic] Kurbas's Use of Film Language in his Stage Productions of Jimmie Higgins and Macbeth,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 36.1 (March, 1990): 59-76. Also see Iona Shevchenko, Suchasnyi ukrains'kyi teatr (Kharkiv: Derzhavne vydavnytstvo Ukrainy, 1929), 83, who argues that the notion of peretvorennia is linked to methods of cinematographic montage. He cites Eisenstein and his notion of “an attraction” in this relation.

12. See Khanan Shmain's description, “Rezhyser, pedahoh, uchenyi,” in Les' Kurbas: spohady suchasnykiv, ed. Vasyl' Vasyl'ko (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1969), 137-42.

13. Yosyp Hirniak, Spomyny (New York: Suchasnist', 1982), 196-97.

14. Hirniak noted that the work of Viktor Shklovskyi was widely read by the members of Berezil'. Interview with Hirniak 10 August 1982 (New York), cited by Virlana Tkacz, “Les [sic] Kurbas and the Creation of a Ukrainian Avant-Garde Theatre,” M.A. thesis, Columbia University, 1983, 65. Kurbas's practical use of “estrangement” techniques occurs first in this production of Macbeth, and, as Tkacz notes, predates Brecht's use by at almost ten years (Tkacz, M.A. thesis 68).

15. Konstantin Rudnitsky, Russian and Soviet Theatre: Tradition and the Avant-Garde, trans. Roxane Permar (New York: Thames and Hudson), 112.

16. Iryna Steshenko, “Pro navchytelia moho i druha,” in Les' Kurbas: spohady suchasnykiv, ed. Vasyl'ko, 170.

17. Iryna Avdieva, “Pro naikrashchu liudyny, iaku ia znala v iunats'ki roky,” in Les' Kurbas: spohady suchasnykiv, ed. Vasyl'ko, 153.

18. Polina Samiilenko, Nezabutni dni horin' (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1970), 64.

19. Natalia Kuziakina, “Ledi Makbet ta inshi,” Vitchyzna (Kyiv) 3 (1969): 193.

20. So, at least, my examination of the photos in the archival collection of the State Museum of Theatrical Art and Cinema seemed to me. In one, Hakkebush faces the viewer in a close-up which shows her heavily-made up eyes, and her whole face shrinking in terror from something. In the second photo, looking beautiful and innocent, she carries a light in front of her in her outstretched hand. This is the only photo extant which I have examined which shows her in an upright posture, her head back, her long hair streaming behind her. In other photos from the earlier parts of the play, she is never upright, always stylized in her movements, and usually hunched over, whether reading the letter from Macbeth, walking with him, or responding to his rage (probably after the murder of Duncan). In the sleepwalking photos, she is also shown sitting or, more accurately, reclining. Had I not known that these were photos taken of Lady Macbeth, I would certainly have thought that they were photos of Ophelia. The stage imagery of femininity—the white colour of her shift, the loose hair, the feminine and less stylized gestures—suggest this.

21. On the three Lady Macbeths of the Soviet Ukrainian stage, all played by Liubov Hakkebush, see Iurii Smolych, Pro teatr (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 1977), 155-66, and Natalia Kuziakina, “Ledi Makbet ta inshi,” Vitchyzna (Kyiv) 3 (1969): 190-98.

22. I. Turkel'taub, “Hastroli M. ‘Berezil’ Ledi Makbet,” Kul'tura i mystetstvo, Visti VUTsVK 121 (Kharkiv) 30 May 1924: 4.

23. Natalia Pylypenko, Zhyttia v teatri (New York: n.p., 1968), 15.

24. So, according to Valentyna Zabolotna, a theatrical historian and great-grand-daughter of Ambrosii Buchma, who played the Fool in this production. See V. Zabolotna, Aktors'ke mystetstvo Ukrainy (1922-1927) (Kyiv: Institut teatral'noho mystetstva im. K. Karoho, 1992), 53. Also, similar views were voiced in an interview with me in Kyiv on 12 September 1995.

25. The description of the intermedia, and of all of Kurbas's productions described here, is a composite derived from many sources including Hirniak, Spomyny; Zabolotna, Aktors'ke mystetstvo; Iurii Kosach, Dushi liuds'koi charodii (Kyiv: Veselka, 1973), 103; Ivan Kryha, “Samobutnii pedahoh,” in Les' Kurbas: spohady suchasnykiv, ed. Vasyl'ko, 190-93; Kuziakina, “Ledi Makbet ta inshi”; and her “Makbet Shekspira v postanovkakh Lesia Kurbasa” in P'esa i spektakl', ed. A. Z. Iufit (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennyi Institut teatra, muzyky i kinematografii, 1978), 50-66; and Savchenko, “Shekspir dybom,” each of whom recalls or writes about different elements of the production. The fact that both celebrators and detractors mention the final sequence, the crowning scene, is a good indication of its potency.

26. For example, Mykhailo Mohylians'kyi, “Macbeth u Berezoli,” Chervonyi shliakh (Kharkiv) 4-5 (April-May 1924): 282; and Al. G-tov, “Kul'tura i iskusstvo Makbeta u Kurbasa,” Khar'kovskii proletarii (Kharkiv) 37 (30 May 1924): 6.

27. Valerian Revutsky, in correspondence with me, letter dated 3 December 1992. The interpretation of the production as scandal is best indicated by I[akiv] S[avchenko]'s review, “Shakespir dybom.”

28. Hirniak, Spomyny, 193, 197.

29. For attacks on Kurbas, see the printed speeches from the Theatrical Discussions of 1927 and 1929 in Les' Kurbas u teatral'nii dial'nosti, v otsinkakh suchasnykiv, ed. Valerian Revutsky (Baltimore: Smoloskyp, 1989), especially 606. In one of the many defenses of Kurbas, Mykhailo Mohylians'kyi, “‘Makbet’ u Berezoli,” makes the sensible point that every production, including that of Shakespeare's company, in some way modifies the original play. Mohylians'kyi argues that it is pointless to stand on principle; rather, the attackers should simply respond to the “spring delight” of this “great artistic achievement” (6).

30. Avanti, “Vid ‘Molodoho teatru’ do ‘Berezolia,’” Literatura i mystetstvo [sic], Visti VUTSVK (X), 16 May 1924.

31. Hnat Iura, “Natsionalistychna estetyka Kurbasa,” Za markso-lenins'ku krytyku (Kyiv) 12 (December 1934): 48-61. This vicious attack appeared the same month in which Kurbas was arrested; however, it may have been written by someone else but conveniently attributed to Iura, who had often been unfavourably compared with Kurbas in the 1920s.

32. This is a point many scholars of Slavic drama have made; most recently, Lars Kleberg, Theatre as Action: Soviet Russian Avant-Garde Aesthetics, trans. Charles Rougle (Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1990), 4.

33. M. Semenko, “Mystetstvo iak kult’,” Chervonyi shliakh 3 (1924): 222-29; cited in Oleh Ilnytzkyj, “Ukrainian Futurism, 1914-1930: History, Theory and Practice,” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1983, 337.

34. Kurbas, “Z pryvodu symptomiv reaktsii” (1925), rpt. in Berezil': Les' Kurbas iz tvorchoi spadshchyny, ed. M. Labins'kyi (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1988), 244.

35. Bennett, Theatre as Problem, 26-27.

36. Kleberg, Theatre as Action, 64.

37. See Bennett, Theatre as Problem, 60-83, for a discussion of ceremony. The notion of theatre as church occurs frequently in the writings of Kurbas.

38. Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 228.

39. Zabolotna, Aktors'ke mystetstvo, 53.

40. Ibid, 53-54.