The Theatre in Life By Nikolai Evreinov

Nikolai Evreinov ¾ 9 Summary

2013 Reprint of 1927 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Evreinov argued that the role of theatre was to ape and mimic nature. In his estimation, theatre is everything around us. He pointed out that nature is full of theatrical conventions: desert flowers mimicking the stones; mouse feigning death in order to escape a cat's claws; complicated dances of birds, etc. He viewed theatre as a universal symbol of existence. Evreinov promoted an underlying aesthetic: To make a theatre of life is the duty of every artist. ... the stage must not borrow so much from life as life borrows from the stage. The director sought to reinvigorate the theatre (and through it life itself) through the rediscovery of the origin of theatre in play. He was influenced by the philosophies of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bergson, and, like Meyerhold, the aesthetics of symbolism and the commedia dell'arte (particularly in its use of mask and spontaneity). Evreinov developed his theatrical theories in An Introduction to Monodrama (1909), The Theatre as Such (1912), The Theatre for Oneself, and Pro Scena Sua (1915). The Theatre in Life

Evreinoff's work suffers from the superluity of time - the tides which wash away at the veneer of profundity and betray the paradoxical vapidity of its depths. For though his central consideration, the ubiquity of mimesis or theatricality, remains true (in displacing the play of truth), Evreinoff only unworks his own position, betrays his own act - as, perhaps, one must. For he not only acknowledges the forebears of his thought, but even mimes them explicitly, leaving to himself nothing but what he calls the theatre for oneself.

Yet this, too, is then given back, by his own hand and in his own name, to those from whom he has taken his fragments and scraps, until he is left with naught for himself, but only the theatre of himself, the theatre of oneself. And yet Evreinoff, at least here, does not delve so far into the backstage of the theatre, into what is not shown in every act staged. He does not accord any remark to the abyssal displacement effectuated by the radical mimetism of our existence - if the theatre is not only in life, but life is in the theatre in the same instance, then do we not have here the paradoxical suspension, infinitely turning, of the tragic caesura? Is there not more than a joy in such a theatre - a joy belying at once a narcissism and a bourgeois self-importance spilling from Evreinoff's tone - not also dissimulated in this joy the unacknowledged despair or terror of the void, the groundlessness of such a life? To laugh at death is one thing - but one only laughs at death's absence, and when its impossibility strikes them, are they not truly submerged in anguish, in the agony that is our mortal role?

For joy is only one side of a doubled despair (and was it not Kierkegaard who noted that despair is the desire, qua impossible (yet nonetheless necessary), to be other than oneself?); just as the vanity or superficiality of life is its true profundity, and its depths are nothing deeper than what one can ascertain upon its surface, by its appearance. Appearances always deceive, something always remains outside appearance. Everything can never be said. And yet Evereinoff falls short of everything, short even, perhaps, of what he could have said. For what he says does not even say what it might have - said otherwise, others said it better, both before and after him (and in the strictly temporal sense, and not that of indebtedness). He remains but an actor, reciting lines, unaware of the depths which they expose, and how they expose him, denuded and superficial, upon the white of the page, beneath the white light of its stage. The Theatre in Life