Chapter 2 Fourth World Theatre Festival

The Festival opened in Moscow on September 1st 1936, with a week of performances and events followed by four more days in Leningrad. Six hundred people travelled from all over the world when travel to Russia was only just starting, when no new hotels had been built and the old ones were overcrowded. Strangers had to share rooms and people roved about the packed dining-room of the Metropole searching for tables and waited hours for their food.

The revolution was still young and the energies and resources of the country were being directed into, and used for, industrial development and public works with housing, clothing and services ignored yet, the arts, which in the west in any comparable situation, would have been regarded as superfluous luxuries, were considered of supreme importance and raised to the same level as science and technology and pursued with the same vigour and efficiency.

There was no entertainments 'industry' supplying what the public is supposed to want and creating a second culture of an inferior and often pernicious kind. One standard and one only prevailed, the highest, creating a truly national theatre based on the enthusiasm of the masses and which was an integral part of the country's life.

New post-revolutionary dramas were added to the repertoires of the famous old theatres - the Bolshoi, the Moscow Arts and the Maly - while some forty new ones had already been built in Moscow, with hundreds more under construction throughout the Union.

As well as the great professional theatres, classical and revolutionary, and those of the national minorities and the childrens' theatres, there was a vast amateur or folk theatre, represented by companies displaying immense talent, competence and range.

As Henri Lenormand, the French playwright said at the time, 'Moscow is the Promised Land for Art'

Some foreigners, on the other hand, maintained that all this was imposed or just 'circuses'. These critics did not appreciate that art was being recognised, perhaps for the first time in modern history, as one of the basic components of life, to be drawn out from the centre of every individual and set collectively at the centre of the world.

This explains the scale and force of the explosion while the quality was perhaps due to the fact that the artistic sensibilities of the Russian people had been suppressed but not debased, as everywhere else.

Again, without understanding, the critics condemned the new drama for its tendentiousness and infantilism. The plays inevitably reflected the great upsurge while, at the same time were undoubtedly being used as essential instruments of the revolution

They were educational plays, using heroic themes to mobilise the workers for the great construction tasks and to inculcate in them an understanding of the revolution, the new morality, new social patterns and ideal personal relationships, all stemming direct from the Tolstoyan concept of art as a moral force - as a messianic activity.

I also found them naïve and boring. But if 'literary men were being enlisted in the campaign against drunkenness, illiteracy and wrecking…for spring sowing, the building of canals…and expected to portray 'models of labour heroes' …works of art saturated with the heroic struggles of the world proletariat, the victory of socialism and reflecting the wisdom of the Party' and this meant that the great creative writers were being censored and silenced and made to wait, I accepted that this was the price that had to be paid for the creation of the New Man and the New Society. And waiting was not a new experience for the artist, here or anywhere else.

Every day, from early morning until late at night, there were performances, visits back-stage and to rehearsals and theatre schools, meetings, discussions, receptions and excursions. It was my real baptism in the waters of the theatre and the total immersion transfigured me then and has graced me ever since.

On September 8th, I wrote to my mother from Moscow.

'At last I sit down to write to you - the first moment I have had after an exhausting but marvellous week, including an 'affaire du coeur'! Today, the 600 have gone back to Leningrad where the Festival finishes & I stay peacefully here. My news is most exciting'
'On the morning of my arrival, I went straight into the dining-room for breakfast & plumped down beside a pleasant looking girl, an American, & we talked at once She seemed to know everyone & was telling me how she could help me when, at the same instant, an artistic looking man passed our table, spotted me & sat down at the next & began to stare. 'That is Shaveitch' she said, 'the great conductor. Would you like to meet him?' and finishing her breakfast, she got up, introduced him & went, leaving him sitting with me!
'We talked like old friends, then went for a walk, then lunched together, then met again after the theatre & talked half the night! It is because of him that I have broken away from the Festival tour & am staying on here.
'He is Russian but an American citizen & his life is spent touring the world conducting concerts & grand opera. He is in Russia now, not only for a series of concerts but to launch an original scheme of his own - the substitution of recorded music for live orchestra so that full scale opera can be taken to every isolated & barren corner of the world - with only a conductor & singers.. England & America rejected it because of the cost but Russia has accepted it.

Vladimir Shaveitch was cultured, worldly and a great musician. He was not the father-teacher I was always looking for but, after the cloistered years, he enthralled me. And soon we were lovers.

He had a wife and daughter reposing idly in some Spa on the Continent, unwilling to accompany him and face the discomforts of Russia. They were shadowy, far-away, figures and as our love grew in the stimulating atmosphere, they receded altogether.

The Metropole, which had been a fashionable hotel in Tzarist times, was now a teeming microcosm of Greater Russia. Peasants, workers and soldiers, Cossacks, Georgians, Mongolians and the inhabitants of the arctic regions who, arriving as deputies and delegates from state farms, factories and communes, bivouacked around the tables. Divesting themselves of skins, furs and leg-wrappings, they ate slowly and silently, then, gathering up their antique coverings, moved dreamily towards the fine imperial suites assigned them.

Vladimir and I watched the drama in the dining-room every night, the slow service working in admirable collusion with the native love for hours of profound conversation and in the day-time, I went with him to his recording sessions and to his meetings in the Ministry.

On September 20th I wrote to my mother:
'I am simply loving Russia. The people are so friendly. I meet painters, actors, writers & musicians - they are the aristocracy here [with the scientists]. They receive the high salaries & occupy the positions of honour. Here, brains are the only passports - money is despised. All the top theatre people have received me. I only have to say that I want to write for the stage & they are all over me. I am an artist & artists have no nationality. I get free tickets for all the theatres & half a dozen lovers at my beck & call. How different from England. V says that England is the most stoney, inartistic country in the world…At the end of the month I leave with V for Sverdlovsk in the Urals for a week of concerts…'

When left to myself, I studied the language and walked about. Beauty and Play were the lovely faces we had seen, day after day, but when the Festival was over and the prosperous foreign crowds had gone, the other faces, the human side of this high covenant appeared.

Beggars, wrapped in rags, were everywhere. People were sleeping under arches while the fortunate were herded into squalid rooms, the shops were empty, the queues stretched along the pavements and transport hardly existed. The city looked drab and grim.

But inside the theatres, Beauty & Play were as lovely as ever and, night after night, the capacity audiences signified their choice. It was the time of the purges when the city was even grimmer that it looked - the price of the choice when translated into political terms, even higher than we knew.

Then, unannounced - his wife and daughter arrived. Coolly, he introduced me and as coolly I play-acted before them. His wife was old and looked so dull, He had told me that they seldom met and then, only as friends and I supposed that boredom had brought them, in the end, to Moscow.

They both took to me and did everything to cultivate my friendship and I was forced to respond, hating the duplicity and always trying to avoid them, while Vladimir adopted a pose of casual unconcern and our alliance continued and the Sverdlovsk plan remained unchanged.

When the day came for us to leave, we slipped out of the Metropole separately and into a waiting car which took us to the station where I forgot my discomfort as we walked up the platform and into a coupe of the Trans-Siberian Express - that fabulous train.

Vladimir relaxed and embraced me and then we climbed out again and stood, excited and happy, among the other passengers, waiting for the whistle.

Suddenly, an advancing wind hit us, there was a movement of people and the next instant they were upon us, the wife screaming first at Vladimir and then at me, the daughter standing quietly watching - amused and sympathetic..

Vladimir was a monster of lust and duplicity and I a depraved English whore and the more she shouted, the more enraged she grew. I thought she was going to attack me.

The passengers collected round us, some anxious to intervene and the guard appeared. When, from sheer exhaustion, she quietened down a little, Vladimir led her aside and tried to talk to her while I, feeling that the situation was impossible, fetched my bag from the coupe, prepared to let him travel alone.

However, the next moment, the whistle blew, the passengers clambered aboard, Vladimir rushed back, picked up my bag and almost picked me up as well, the train moved - and I was on it. A figure ran crazily after it, then stopped and stood on the empty platform - looking.

I loved him even more. All that I was and had I wanted to give him now. At once laughing and crying I embraced him and the unstoppable journey began. In a special. Niche at the end of our carriage stood a samovar, guarded and burnished by a priestess, an old peasant woman who soon brought us our first cups of tea. We unpacked and settled down in our comfortable and well-appointed little home, the murmur of wheels and the tender vibrations like quick-acting tranquillisers.

Like a serpent moving over the surface of the world, hour after hour it thrust its way across the steppe, through great seas of forest, occasional clearings and an occasional settlement - through mile upon mile of unpeopled emptiness.

After two days we reached Perm where Dzerzinska joined the train with her accompanist, having given some recitals on the way. She was the prima donna from the Bolshoi with whom Vladimir was to perform. A large and beautiful Wagnerian woman of pre-revolution days and French culture.

Early the next morning we reached Sverdlovsk. The coming of the two celebrated artistes had been publicised for months and the time of their arrival notified, but when we stepped out into the night, no one was there to meet them and when the train went on, we were left standing in space and Stygian quietness.

The two men went in search of a telephone and returned to say that droshkys were being sent to fetch us. When they came at last, we separated and drove one behind the other along a rough country road and then through dark, unpaved deserted lanes between old wooden houses, to the hotel. It was newly built and the pride of the town, the driver told us, as he reined in his horses.

We were received by the fawning manager and asked to wait a minute or two before going up to our rooms.

After five minutes, Dzerzinska sent her accompanist to find out what was causing the delay. He returned with the manager, grovelling now, who begged us to wait - just a little longer.

'I am rehearsing this afternoon and I have to have some sleep. To receive me like this is disgraceful…scandalous…you ought to be corrected…the Peoples' Committee out to be corrected…the Provincial Council ought to be…

He ran and did not return and the accompanist went out and in and an hour passed. Then, lifting her great body off her chair, she strode out of the room shouting as she went, at everyone and at no one and then came back, raging still. And another hour went by.

Then the word came. Everything was ready. We climbed the stairs - the lift was not working yet - walked along a bleak corridor and into our respective rooms where a stark scene lay before us..

Two old iron bedsteads, a small round table and two hard chairs completed the furnishings while on each bed was a straw mattress, a brown rag and what seemed like a pillow of stones.

Vladimir showed no surprise and I said nothing. I opened my travelling bag and took out my towel and soap and went into the bathroom and turned on the bath tap. No water came. I tried the basin, then pulled the lavatory plug then, looking behind and beneath, saw that the pipes were not connected to the fittings. There was nothing that we could do except take to our straw couches.

As soon as I woke I opened the door and saw that a woman was now presiding over the samovar on the landing. She promised to find a bucket which we could place under the drain and to keep us supplied with tiny jugs of hot water, always on the boil for the tea. She told us that our rooms were empty when we arrived and that while we were waiting they were searching the town for furniture..

Meeting in the dining-room for breakfast - it had the appearance of a works canteen or soldiers' barrack room - we all sat down on a bench at one of the communal tables strewn with coarse uncleared china standing in pools of spilt tea.. After some coffee of an obscure substance and a dish of an uneatable texture were served, Dzerzinzka announced that in future she would take all her meals at the Artists Club - and Vladimir applauded the idea. And silently, I did too..

Sverdlovsk, where in a cellar the Tzar and his family were shot, was now a fast-growing industrial town producing the armaments for the coming war, out of reach of any invading army. And when the great factories were built and the workers brought in and a new town was grafted on to the old one, the culture of the capital came, too. The new spiritual centres were the theatre and the concert hall and it was there that we walked after that unspeakable breakfast.

The members of the local symphony orchestra came forward smiling and took their places on the platform and the rehearsal began. I sat at the back listening and within me, here in the middle of Asia, loving and being loved, my own art leapt and called. It was not my golden thread that I saw now but the white light of my task.

Afterwards, we went to the Artists Club. The dining-room was crowded and we squeezed in where we could and the talk was rich and noisy but when the food came - it was as bad as the hotel. We ate caviar, black bread and Caucasian grapes, washed down with vodka, every day - and nothing else.

The next evening every seat in the hall was booked and over-booked for the first performance. I helped Dzerzinska dress, for there were no professional dressers and when the moment came, saw them both on to the platform and then slipped out into the auditorium. Vladimir mounted the rostrum and Dzerzinska sat down in front of the players. I sat on the floor in one of the aisles among a thousand Russian workers and their worker wives.

In the interval, I hurried back-stage and first helped Vladimir change his shirt - he was always wringing wet when he came from the rostrum - then ran to Dzerzinska. At the end, the great strong crown rose and clapped and went on clapping and called them back and back. When they reached their dressing-rooms at last, I ran from one to the other to embrace them.

We went to the Club for supper where more cheers and applause greeted them and hugs and handshakes enfolded them. And we lingered there all night, in the hot smoky atmosphere, eating our caviar and grapes.

They gave three concerts together and Dzerzinska, two recitals and always the hall was full and the reception great. On one of our free nights, Vladimir and I went to see Tchaikovsky's 'Queen of Spades' performed by the local opera company. The production was as good as the one that we had seen in Moscow. Lenormand did not look far enough. Not just Moscow but the whole of Russia was the 'paradise for art'

When we were waiting to leave for the station, we were told that the train was full that day and would not be stopping. And the next day was the same.. If it filled up at Vladivostock, there was no chance for anyone halfway. Small planes hopped from town to town and we waited three days for one of these, worn and patched and, from our broken seats looked down as it bumped and struggled above the forests and came down into a clearing every two hours to re-fuel.

The Metropole was now a battle-ground. At first, I sat alone in a distant corner of the dining-room but his wife soon spotted me and came charging through the tables to attack me. I jumped up and ran away before she reached me and after that, lived on snacks in the café. But even then, I was always dodging her. Vladimir came to me in my room for a short time every evening and, at the end, stayed talking sadly all night.

It was the end of October. The first piercing Siberian winds were reaching Moscow and I only had my summer clothes. It was time I left . And I did not want to stay. I felt trapped now in this love and suffocated by the exotic atmosphere of the Metropole and the violent emotions which it contained and nourished

I was conscious now, that I always loved in two ways at once - as a woman and as an artist. And I could not separate them. When I loved for myself, I also loved for my task, attracting, creating and extracting the experience that I needed. Now that I had loved and lived this Russian journey through, I could stop and go, recover my freedom and use what I had gained

I travelled from Leningrad to London on a small cargo boat, carrying about half a dozen passengers. It was heavily laden, even the decks were stacked, with timber and casks of butter.

When we came through the Kiel Canal and out into the North Sea, a storm was raging and the great sheltering bay at the mouth of the Elbe was filled with shipping, waiting for it to abate. But we did not join the timid conclave. Our captain was a Soviet man and, hoisting the Hammer & Sickle, he steered his ship into the storm.

One meal was served and then the buffeting began. The kitchen closed, no fires or burners could be lit and my fellow passengers retreated to their bunks.

We were driven off our course and the short passage across the North Sea which usually takes twenty four hours, took five days. When we sailed victoriously up the Thames, all the timber had gone overboard and the ship was spread from stem to stern with butter. I never knew if the captain was made a Hero of the Soviet Union or cast into a gulag.

Throughout the voyage, standing beside the captain on the bridge, I was never frightened, only awestruck and amazed at this greatest-of-all piece of theatre and Socialist Realism.

Fifty years have passed since that journey to Russia and the great creative writers are still silenced- and in the west they are,too. In the one place there is art, pure and pervasive without freedom of thought and in the other, thought unleashed producing art which is debased, neurotic and negating - or just ignored and undelivered

Under these diverse rules and pressures, the writers wait, helpless but not hopeless, for the sun of the spirit to reappear and melt the ice which now covers the globe

However disappointing [or just unfinished] the Great Experiment and whatever the New Soviet Man is like, he cannot have lost , of been denied, the love of beauty that was in his soul and manifest in every movement and utterance of his body when I worshipped him , all those years ago.