ECCENTRISM

Launched on 5 December 1921 at a public meeting in Petrograd, by Grigory Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg and Georgy Kryzhitsky with their Eccentric Theatre MANIFESTO, eccentrism asserted that ‘the performance is a rhythmical beating on the nerves’, ‘the author is an inventor-improviser’ and ‘the actor is mechanised movement’. Their vision of the Americanisation of the theatre suggested that acting should be viewed as contortion, grimace and screaming in the style of Charlie Chaplin's comic performances. Their Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS), which opened on 9 July 1922, attracted several prominent actors, directors and artists, including Sergei Yutkevich, Nikolai Evreinov and Yuri Annenkov. Its training course comprised gymnastics, mime, clowning, screen acting and acrobatics.

The FEKS’ production of Nikolai Gogol's play Marriage took place on 25 September 1922 at the Petrograd Central Arena of PROLETKULT. It featured a sequence from a Charlie Chaplin film accompanied by a mesmerising kaleidoscope of theatrical trickery, dance, clowning and acrobatics. Likewise, Kozintsev's and Trauberg's 1923 show Foreign Trade on the Eiffel Tower included a short film as part of the stage action. In December 1924 Kozintsev and Trauberg ended their theatrical careers and produced their film The Adventures of Oktyabrina.

READING

Braun, Edward (1988) Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre. London: Methuen Drama.

Drain, Richard (ed.) (2000) Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge.

Berghaus, Günter (ed.) (2000) International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.

THE EDWARDIANS

The Edwardians belong, chronologically, to the reign of Edward VII (1901–10); in common usage their period extends to 1914. This can assist the myth of an upper- and upper-middle-class idyll abruptly engulfed in the catastrophe of the First World war. In fact, the period is fraught with social and political tensions: industrial disputes, the SUFFRAGETTE MOVEMENT, a constitutional crisis in 1910 over the powers of the House of Lords and, by the summer of 1914, a possible threat of civil war over Home Rule for Ireland. (D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, written 1916, published 1921, evokes a panorama of Edwardian society under the sign of apocalypse.) Cultural movements, and the work of major writers, flow over the millennium divide.