“Cheerful, carefree, beautiful life”: The Trouble with Staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Early Soviet Theater

Abstract:This article re-examines the scholarly assumption that the theater of early Soviet Russia saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an ideologically unobjectionable and unproblematic play. Tracing how Russian productions of Dream were reviewed from 1919 throughout the 1920s, the first section of this article examines comments on the play’s potential usefulness for building a proletarian theater and concerns about the interpretative challenges it posed. The second section moves to address the expectations for Shakespearean comedy as a genre in the 1930s, framed by Shakespeare’s new position as a cult writer within the cultural policy of socialist realism, and shows that Dream was interpreted as a humanist vision of an idyllic, egalitarian, and conflict-free future. Finally, the article analyzes the 1941 production at the Central Red Army Theater in Moscow, focusing on the director’s assistant’s rehearsal notes, which were eventually published as an essay. Both the initial notes and their final, published version reveal Soviet theater practitioners’ battle with the recalcitrant play-text as they attempted to force the play into alignment with its official interpretation. By charting how staging Dream challenged early Soviet Russia’s idealized vision of Shakespearean comedy and, by extension, of Shakespeare as a proto-socialist playwright, this article proposes that, when translated into performance, this comedy proved no less ideologically insidious and destabilizing than did Hamlet.