Worker's" play on the revolutionary stage: production of The Blaze by E.P. Karpov in the Mikhailovsky Theatre on April 15, 1917

This article considers the only attempt between the February and the October revolutions to stage a play on the "worker's" theme in the state theatres. In 1917, the former imperial theaters, renamed state ones, urgently needed the "revolutionary" repertoire. The press began to call for staging plays banned by the tsarist censorship. The second directors and prompters of the Alexandrinsky Theatre chose one of such works, Zarevo [The Blaze] by E.P. Karpov, for their benefit performance. The choice of the author was not accidental, for Karpov was the then manager of the troupe of the Alexandrinsky Theatre. The plot of The Blaze describing the life of a working class family and relationship between workers and a young woman, a propagandist of revolutionary ideas, seemed very relevant at that time. The premiere took place on 15 April 1917 at the Mikhailovsky Theatre, which was used as a second stage by the Aleksandrinsky's actors. Despite the fact that the public accepted the performance well, the reviewers' statement was critical enough. Karpov was blamed for the overall heaviness of the play, the routine nature of characters, the roughly naturalistic character of particular scenes. It should be noted that Karpov as a playwright formed in the era of the Peredvizhniki, and his aesthetic techniques seemed outdated to the people of the Silver Age. By tradition, the beneficiaries themselves chose the play on the day of their benefit performance, but to have it in the core repertoire the play was to have a positive review of a special body, the Theatre and Literature Committee. Members of the Petrograd branch of the Theatre and Literature Committee discussed Karpov's play on April 17. As the theatre critics, they noted numerous shortcomings of the play, including "decisive, stark naturalism". The preserved protocol of the meeting recorded fluctuations of the committee members who, on the one hand, for many years were colleagues of E.P. Karpov, on the other, were aware of the low artistic merit of The Blaze. In the original version, the protocol states that the inclusion of Karpov's play in the repertoire "is hardly desirable", but later these words were crossed out. Thus, the formal opportunity for future productions The Blaze was preserved, but its author, facing the critical stance of the reviewers and members of the Theatre and Literature Committee, refused from it himself. Thereby, the only attempt in 1917 to stage a play on the "worker's" theme in the Russian state theatres was of little success.

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