Tairoff, Alexander
Das entfesselte Theater. Aufzeichnungen einer Regisseurs.
Potsdam, Gustav Kiepenheuer 1923.
Full Description
8vo. (8) + 112pp, photo frontispiece, 11 plates (2 colour). Publisher’s decorative boards, rebacked (front cover in red and black designed by El Lissitsky).
The views of the leading progressive Moscow theatre director Alexander Tairoff on the current state of Russian drama (acting, production, stage design, etc). Tairoff had been in the forefront of avant-garde theatre in Moscow before and during the 1914-18 war, and for this book, originally published in Russian in 1921 and here in its first foreign language edition, he explains his role in recent Moscow theatre history and expresses his support for the theories of Gordon Craig and other theatre reformers. One incidental merit of this edition is that the designer El Lissitsky was living in Berlin in 1923 and was thus available to do a characteristic front cover design for the binding (not found on the binding of the earlier Russian edition).