Practitioner Focus: Vsevolod Meyerhold

Director and practitioner Vsevolod Meyerhold was born in Penza, Russia in 1874 and died in 1940 in Moscow, one of the many thousands of artists to fall victim to Stalin's death purges. He is best known for the landmark production of Gogol's Government Inspector (1926) and for his devising of the actor training system: biomechanics.

Meyerhold began his career under Stanislavsky at the turn of the twentieth century. Although he split from his mentor after just a few years and advocated a much more stylised and theatrical kind of theatre, he remained indebted to Stanislavsky, and was described by him as his ‘sole heir in the theatre’. Meyerhold borrowed from lots of different kinds of theatre, including the commedia dell’arte, futurism, symbolism and later in his career, in partnership with designers Stepanova and Popova, the revolutionary movement of constructivism. Often described as a dictator-director, Meyerhold was in fact a brilliant collaborator, working with musicians, set designers, and movement practitioners to produce his unmistakable style of theatre.