The exhibition From Utopia to Theatre explores the ‘constructivist’ period in the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, one of the major reformers of 20th-century theatre. It presents five of his productions staged between 1922 and 1924: The Magnificent Cuckold, The Death of Tarelkin, The Earth in Turmoil, D. E. and The Forest, which remained in the Meyerhold Theatre's repertoire until its closure in 1938. These productions most vividly reflect the principles of the new approach to the actor’s performance, the use of set design, and audience interaction.

Meyerhold never ceased experimenting and was in constant search of a new theatrical language. The director viewed his creative revolutionary task as ‘undressing’ the theatre, ridding it of past embellishments, fakeness and excess decoration, in order to focus the audience’s attention on the actor’s performance. Captivated by the main idea of his time, Vsevolod Meyerhold developed both the theoretical and practical foundations of constructivism in theatre. He introduced a set of techniques, including biomechanics, which not only continued his exploration of theatre but also extended beyond the stage, becoming part of the life and living of the new man.

During this period, Meyerhold began collaborating with the innovators of the Russian avant-garde, the artists Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova. Together with them, he invented transforming furniture, prozodezhda (‘work clothes’), and stripped the stage bare, showing the audience a brick backdrop and the backstage for the first time. Later, he took the theatre beyond its walls, using movable ‘off-stage’ sets that could be moved around the city, enabling performances to be held in squares and parks across Moscow.

The exhibition is organised into two sections – external and internal. The external section focuses on the performances themselves, while the internal section is dedicated to biomechanics, the actor training technique that Meyerhold introduced for the first time in his work with his students.

The exhibition includes reconstructions and costume sketches, paintings, drawings, photographs of stages, performances, and structures, as well as technical drawings, negatives of hand-made titles, and posters. A key part of the exhibition is the ‘archive’, which showcases documents that reveal how theatre performances were preserved and recorded in the absence of filming equipment, and how the audience’s reactions could influence the course of performances.

Among the reconstructions created by the centre specifically for the exhibition are props from the play The Magnificent Cuckold, a model of the set for The Earth in Turmoil, and the central set element – the ‘roads’ – for The Forest.

The exhibition features over 270 items. In addition to works from the Bakhrushin State Theatre Museum, which include sketches by Lyubov Popova for the sets of The Magnificent Cuckold, original puppets in Popova’s prozodezhda, and costume sketches by Varvara Stepanova for the play The Death of Tarelkin, the exhibition also showcases works from the Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, the St. Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Musical Art, the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, the Museum of the Moscow Art Theatre, the Garage Museum, the House of Culture GES-2, the Cinema Museum, the Kovalenko Krasnodar Regional Art Museum, and the Collection of I. and T. Manasherov.

Curator: Anna Ildatova, theatre historian, curator of the theatre programme at the V-A-C Foundation and the House of Culture GES-2.
Academic consultant: Vadim Scherbakov, art historian, PhD, Head of the Sector for the Study and Publication of Vsevolod Meyerhold's Legacy at the State Institute of Art History, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Voprosy Teatra. Proscaenium.
Exhibition architecture: Anastasia Yudina, theatre artist
Graphic design: Non-Objective