It was shortly after this episode (and Meyerhold’s final departure from the MAT as a result) that Meyerhold published his first article, ‘The Naturalistic Theatre and the Theatre of Mood (1906), which Pitches notes ‘is as much a criticism of his old boss Stanislavski as it is a tirade against Naturalism as a style.’ (Ibid: 47).
Meyerhold continued to develop his work throughout the following twenty years, honing a tightly controlled and rhythmic physical approach to performance, drawing upon the then fashionable time and motion studies of F.W. Taylor (1856 – 1915) which he came to call ‘biomechanics’. Biomechanics placed movement at the centre of the actor’s practice. Any experience or emotion felt or conjured by the actor, Meyerhold believed,…show more content… What is striking, however, is that despite all of this, and notwithstanding some of Meyerhold’s polemical articles which were ‘often written in a deliberately argumentative style’ and occasionally ‘full of bitter feelings towards Stanislavski’ (Pitches, 2003: 44) what finally comes across is the hard-won respect the two men clearly had for each other. Stanislavski could say of a Meyerhold production (of The Mandate, in 1925): ‘Meyerhold had achieved… what I have only dreamed of’ (Leach, 1989: 116). And in his final months, in 1938, Stanislavski invited Meyerhold to work as his assistant at the Opera Theatre, possibly in a vain attempt to protect him from the dark forces of the Stalinist bureaucracy – vain in that Stanislavski died soon afterwards, and with his death it seems that any hope of Meyerhold escaping those forces died with him. He was murdered by Stalin’s agents in 1940. Stanislavski is reputed to have said of Meyerhold, shortly before his death, ‘Take care of Meyerhold. He is my only heir in the theatre – here or elsewhere.’ (Leach, 1989:
