Twelfth night of 1917 and the Moscow art theatre

Resumo

On 15 September, 1917, in a letter to Nemirovich-Danchenko, Stanislavsky renounced the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre: I cannot think about any other roles, because I will never be able to do anything, at least in the Moscow Art Theatre. Maybe in some other area or some other place I will be able to rise. Of course I do not mean in other theatres, but in the studios. Othello — free!...1 After the tragedy Stanislavsky had endured with Selo Stepanchikovo, he threw himself into Studio work. He started rehearsing Twelfth Night, a play he had put on at the Society of Art and Literature in 1897. The Studio production of Twelfth Night was played on 25 December 1917, two months to the day after the Revolution. A few months later, Nikolai Efros published a book about the First Studio. It was dedicated to The Cricket on the Hearth but the words Efros used to describe the atmosphere in which Dickens’s production had opened were equally suitable for Twelfth Night: ‘You remember what sort of days those were?