After the 1917 revolution, Russian and Soviet avant-garde theatre attempted to create a new art for post-revolutionary society. This reconsideration of the Russian avant-garde theatre investigates the burgeoning new drama/theatre forms of the period. Kleberg considers assumptions made about the audience and by the audience, and seeks to determine whether discrepancies existed between the two. Offering fresh insights into the modernist period of Russian theatre, Theatre as Action provides a new typology of the stage/audience relationship in modernist Russian theatre. Constructivism of the 1920's is discussed on light of the plays of Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Treytykov. The relation of the Soviet Russian avant-garde to the aesthetics of Bertold Brecht is also examined. This original, comprehensive work is a major contribution to our understanding of the confrontation of the ideal and the reality of Soviet 1920's, revealing the Wagnerian and Symbolist utopia beneath, and its crisis. It will be of particular interest to students of literature and drama.

An imaginative tour de force, Starfall consists of three dramatic dialogues among real people in imagined settings. Anchoring each of the dialogues is the great Russian film director and theoretician Sergei Eisenstein, whose artistic theories (in all their formations and reformations) run throughout the book, illustrating the influences that affected the Soviet art world in the period between the two world wars. In The Aquarians Eisenstein meets Bertolt Brecht in the first-class compartment of a train heading from Berlin to Moscow in 1932. They spend the night discussing and arguing about everything from the use of Renaissance magic in art tosome kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, in which everything in art is connected. The Sorcerer's Apprentices takes place at a meeting held in Moscow on April 14, 1935, on the occasion of performances given during a visit by a noted Chinese actor, Mei Lan-Fang, and his troupe, the prime representatives of early twentieth-century classical Chinese theater. Conceived as a series of speeches by noted members of the Soviet theater and film circles (Eisenstein again), The Sorcerer's Apprentices contrasts the Russian theater with that of the Chinese, the German (antifascist, emigre theater of Brecht and Erwin Piscator), and even the avant-garde British drama (as represented by Gordon Craig). Ash Wednesday has Eisenstein engaged in a dialogue with Mikhail Bakhtin. They speak about German culture -- in particular Eisenstein's desire to stage Wagner's The Valkyrie, which Bakhtin appears to object to on both political and artistic grounds; the influence of astrology in Soviet literary circles; and jazz music as a symbol of pure art. Filledwith references familiar and arcane, biographical and political, steeped in literary history from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, and peppered with references to the writings of such dissimilar thinkers as Giordano Bruno, Rabelais, Goethe, and Antonin Artaud, Starfall will appeal to all readers interested in the developments of twentieth-century dramatic art.