Taïrov, Alexander Yakovlevich

Taïrov, Alexander Yakovlevich (1885–1950), Soviet director, who after some experience with Meyerhold in St Petersburg joined Gaideburov's Mobile Theatre in 1908. Five years later, while working for Mardzhanov, he met his future wife Alisa Koonen (1889–1974), and together they opened the Kamerny Theatre in 1914. The first productions there, which included Wilde's Salome, showed clearly Taïrov's preoccupation with new spatial possibilities in staging, and the Cubist-influenced designs of his scenic artists perfectly matched his intentions. In common with Meyerhold he was antipathetic to naturalism, but unlike him held the importance of the actor to be fundamental, demanding from his company all-round ability, including virtuoso pantomimic and acrobatic techniques. The position of his wife helped to emphasize the place of the actor in his productions, and almost every one of them became as much a medium for her remarkable talents as for his own experiments. Combining great beauty with exceptional plasticity of movement, she was outstanding as Adrienne Lecouvreur in Scribe's play, as Juliet, Racine's Phèdre, and Shaw's St Joan.

The 1917 Revolution led to the abandonment of Taïrov's aesthetic excesses and to a sharpening of his social consciousness, as reflected in his productions, much influenced by Expressionism, of Ostrovsky's The Storm in 1924 and of three plays by O'Neill—The Hairy Ape and Desire under the Elms in 1926 and All God's Chillun Got Wings in 1929. In the late 1920s Taïrov was severely criticized for his Formalism and for his choice of plays, which included Bulgakov's The Red Island. He replied to his critics by staging in 1934 Vishnevsky's An Optimistic Tragedy, now considered one of the finest products of Socialist Realism. This was followed in 1938 by a dramatization of Flaubert's novel Madame Bovary with Alisa Koonen. Although Taïrov's theatre was put by the authorities under the control of a committee he was not dismissed, as Meyerhold had been in similar circumstances, but continued to work until a year before his death.