Meyerhold's Castings of Actresses for Male Parts

Abstract

In this article I examine Meyerhold's occasional castings of actresses for male parts in a small, but significant, number of instances from his long career as a stage director. Meyerhold cast a woman for a male part six times, five of them in tragedies. However, he did so intermittently and for different purposes, to suit highly heterogenous contexts. Three cases have particularly interesting perspectives: his 1915 production at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg of Calderon de la Barca's Spanish Baroque tragedy The Constant Prince; his 1926 co-production at the Meyerhold Theatre in Moscow of Tretyakov's activist melodrama Roar, China!; and his 1931 production at the Meyerhold Theatre of Yury Olesha's contemporary tragedy A List of Benefits. The three cases are not connected but are – each in its own way – artistic reactions to the three consecutive, dissimilar systems of government, under which Meyerhold lived and worked: the Tsarist regime, the formative first decade of the Soviet Union, and finally Stalinism. On a more basic personal level, they reflect Meyerhold's habitual preference for tragedy as a means of expression to reveal the social mechanisms exploited by oppression or released against it. In each case, casting an actress in a male part poses a maximum contrast to the oppressive system inquired into by way of metonymy.