Allegory and metaphor: Soviet productions of Shakespeare in the post-Stalin era (William Shakespeare)

Productions of Shakespeare in the former Soviet Union continued the long Russian tradition of “Aesopian language,” that is, the polemical circumlocution of social issues by means of allegory, allusion or satire. This dissertation discusses nine such Shakespearean productions. Their directors used these productions, brilliant artistic creations in their own right, in order to critique the government of the USSR, while exploring social issues that might ordinarily be forbidden by those in power. Nikolai Okhlopkov's Hamlet at the Moscow Mayakovsky Theatre (1954) visually allegorized the prison of Denmark into the “iron curtain” of Stalinist Russia. Konstantin Zubov's Macbeth at the Moscow Maly Theatre (1955) dealt with the responsibility of a leader to his people and, conversely, the role of a people when the leader has been compromised. Three productions of Richard III—the social satire of Rachia Kaplanian and Mikhail Ulyanov at the Moscow Vakhtangov Theatre (1976), Vassily Kushitashvili's depiction of an inveterate villain at the Georgian Marjanishvili Theatre (1957), and Robert Sturua's carnivalesque production at the Georgian Rustaveli Theatre (1979)—all allegorized Richard Gloucester as Stalin, but located the responsibility for Richard's success in different aspects of society. Georgi Tovstonogov's Henry IV at the Leningrad Bolshoi Dramatic Theatre (1969) explored the theme of the right to power and the means necessary to maintain it. Irina Anisimova-Vulf's King Lear at the Mossoviet Theatre (1958) reflected the thaw era's emphasis on the positive points of socialism, while Leonid Kheifets' King Lear at the Moscow Maly (1979), after a long era of stagnation, read Lear's whole society as complacent and diseased. Finally, Yuri Lyubimov's Hamlet at the Taganka Theatre (1971) read Hamlet's story as a song of protest against the sweeping, coercive power of the state.