MEYERHOLD'S CASTINGS OF ACTRESSES FOR MALE PARTS

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 con-texts. 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 habit-ual 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.

Automated summary

In this article, the author examines Meyerhold's occasional casting of actresses for male parts in his career as a stage director. Meyerhold cast a woman for a male part six times, with the majority being in tragedies. These instances were done for different purposes and to suit different contexts, serving as artistic reactions to the different political systems that Meyerhold experienced and reflecting his preference for tragedy as a means of expressing social mechanisms of oppression or resistance.