gale literature research center

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Gale Literary Resources: Literature Resource Center

• Literature Resource Center

As you begin to craft responses to literature and develop thesis statements for writing assignments, use LRC to find support for your positions and fine-tune your arguments. You can search by author or name of work, and results include overviews, biographies, critical essays, and reviews.

Use the video tutorials below and this Tip Sheet to discover the many features of Literature Resource Center.

Literature Resource Center - Basic Search

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Literature Resource Center - Documents

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• Last Updated: Aug 15, 2024 12:51 PM
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Literature Resource Center - Resource Overview

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If you have questions about using Gale LibGuides or A-to-Z list import files, please feel free to reach out to Gale's Academic Outreach & Engagement team. We are happy to help you customize, copy, share and upload materials to your Institution's site.  

Browse Works

Works Pages Include:

• An overview document to provide students with background and orienting information.
• Links to related topics and works to help students extend their research journey.
• Access to results for the topic or work, providing students with quick access to literary criticism, reference material, author interviews, and more.
• A link to a selected author biography.
• A link to read the full text or an excerpt of the work (when available).

Browse Topics

Topics Pages Include:

Basic Search

Applies a proprietary algorithm to deliver the most relevant search results based on your search term(s). The algorithm varies by product and prioritizes different indexes where your search term is found to deliver the best results. These indexes include but are not limited to  Keyword ,  Title,  and  Subject .

Try executing your own basic search here!

Advanced Search

• Subject : Choose this field to search document tags and find results fully focused on your topic. Try subject if your basic search produces too many results.
• Publication Title : Use this option to find articles or documents from a particular publication like The Washington Post.
• Entire Document : Pick this field to search within the entire text of documents. This option performs a broad search for any mention of your terms, so you can find precise phrases within results, or locate articles that touch on specific concepts.
• Search Operators : Use these drop-downs to connect your search terms. AND ensures your results mention both terms. OR broadens your search to results mentioning either term. NOT excludes a term.

Person Search

Person Search Tips

• When searching by  name , type in all or part of a name. You can also enter a  variant name or pseudonym .
• To find multiple people based on shared criteria, leave the name field blank and instead enter the  More Options .
• Nationality  and  Ethnicity : Nationality refers to an author's birth or citizenship in a particular country. For individuals who were born in one country and later became citizens of another, multiple nationalities have been identified. Ethnicity is based on membership in a group that shares a common language, culture, customs, or background.
• When viewing the results list from a Person Search, click or tap  See Most Recent Updates  to view the latest news about the person.

NOTE  Person Search searches a representative list of individuals covered in this resource who match your criteria based on distinguishing characteristics such as gender and nationality when that information is available. When you are looking for additional references to a person or if Person Search is not finding the individual you are looking for, use the  search box  or  Advanced Search  and select the  Entire Document  index.

Topic Finder

Create a Topic Finder Diagram

• Topic Finder is located on the Advanced Search Page. Instructions are displayed to explain how you can visualize results and link to documents.

Use Topic Finder to Visualize Your Search Results

• You can turn your search results into a Topic Finder diagram by selecting Topic Finder from the search limiter sidebar. The diagram displays the words and subjects that are found most often in the text of your results. You can view the diagram as a  Wheel  or as  Tiles . Clicking or tapping on the diagram displays the corresponding document titles to the right.
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• Last Updated: Jun 27, 2024 6:16 PM
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Gale Literature Resource Center: Exciting New Enhancements

| By Gale Staff |

We’re excited to announce that Gale Literature Resource Center will be receiving enhancements aimed to expand classroom use for both students and instructors. Students will be able to quickly find useful content—even for those less familiar with primary sources. Instructors will find easy-to-use selections of primary source documents that can boost student engagement and classroom discussions.

About the Enhancements

What’s Being Added?

• Topic Portals: We’ll be adding portal and topic pages for Works and Literary Topics/Themes. This will provide you with comprehensive information and resources on various literary works and their associated themes.
• Browse Functionality: Our new browse functionality will make it easier for you to navigate and explore the vast collection of content available on our platform. You’ll be able to discover works, topics, and themes of interest with just a few clicks.
• Access to Original Works of Literature: We’re thrilled to offer access to original works of literature, powered by the Gale College Collection. You’ll have the opportunity to engage with a wide range of literary masterpieces and explore the rich world of literature.
• New Primary Source and Historical Document Sets: We’ll be including new sets of primary and historical documents for select Work portal pages. These collections of materials, comprising videos, audio, and textual documents, will provide valuable resources for instruction and research purposes.

What’s Being Changed?

To enhance the user experience and streamline the platform, we will be removing the following:

• Current Featured Works & Authors browse pages: We’re focusing on providing a portal experience that will better support user needs. By focusing on Works and Literary Topics/Themes, we can cater to the most-common use cases for our users. No content is being removed, and it will still be accessible via search.

These changes are designed to provide you with a more comprehensive and user-friendly platform. With over 700 portal pages, more than 160 works, over 500 literary topics and themes, access to new original works of literature, and inclusion of primary source and historical document sets, we aim to support your research, learning, and engagement with Gale Literature Resource Center .

Enhancement Release Information

This enhancement will roll out in two phases:

The July 28 release marks the beginning of these exciting enhancements, with the majority of new portals and content expected to be added in early fall. The enhancements will automatically take effect; current customers do not have to take any action.

We look forward to providing you with a robust and immersive literary resource.

Get an Inside Look at the User Research By Cara Suriyamongkol, User Experience Designer

Gale Literature Resource Center has always had a deep and wide array of valuable documents and resources for those conducting literary research—from a first-year student working on one of their first college essays to a Ph.D. candidate preparing their thesis.

But when I started on the project last year, the team had identified an opportunity to improve some of our users’ experience in Gale Literature Resource Center —mainly our undergraduates who were just starting to familiarize themselves with academic databases. This led to the start of a user-centered enhancement project that went through multiple rounds of ideation, design, research, and iteration, and lasted approximately eight months.

We started with a hypothesis that undergraduate students who were less experienced in research needed a way to scan and organize our resources to quickly find primary and historical documents associated with the literary works they’re studying and researching. This required designing at least two new types of pages for Gale Literature Resource Center , the Primary Source & Historical Documents page and the Topic portals.

As both of these pages were new, I worked on designing a variety of solutions, approaching the challenge from multiple standpoints. We were able to lean on some preexisting work from other Gale products for our Topic portals, but the Primary Source & Historical Documents page would be new from the ground up. For that, I developed at least four different solutions that generally fit into a loose spectrum—the simplest designs focused on scannable text and the ability to “jump out” to view a specific document in depth, while the more complex designs were akin to a slide deck, carefully walking students through a set of documents they would read or view one by one.

The next step was putting the designs in front of our users. We set up a series of interviews focused on uncovering how the users would fit the different solutions into their current workflows and checked to ensure they were aligning with the users’ needs. Questions for our users included how educators or students might use these pages in or after class, if there were questions or concerns that came to mind, and we did usability testing to make sure they could find the different types of information and links on the pages.

The research portion of the project lasted three rounds and at least six months, and after each round of research—or sometimes after a single conversation—I would make changes to the designs such as wording changes, repositioning elements, or scrapping a design option if I could see it wasn’t meeting the users’ expectations or was causing users to struggle with page navigation.

Eventually we were able to narrow down the different solutions to one improved design. We presented the design to our engineering and content teams to ensure what we were designing was feasible from their standpoint, and to dig into some of the edge cases to make sure we were taking them all into consideration.

What’s exciting about the process is that each of the new pages and features we’re releasing with the new Gale Literature Resource Center enhancements were made alongside our users each step of the way. If it’s any indication, looking back I have dozens of previous designs for these projects, multiple pages of research notes, and hours of interviews and usability tests. Due to the iterative process, I was able to see an incremental increase in understanding and excitement after each round of research and design changes, which makes me confident these changes are going to delight our students, librarians and educators—and hopefully make life a little easier for them too.

Watch our webinar Literature Resource Center Enhancements to Bolster Higher Ed Research Opportunities to take a tour of the all-new browse functionality, 700+ portal pages focused on works of literature and literary topics, new primary and historical document sets, plus access to an additional 100+ original works of literature.

For more support, visit our support site or reach out to your sales rep .

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Subject Matter

Gale offers databases, primary sources, and eBooks designed to help researchers and students studying topics related to literature. Full-text articles include book reviews, scholarly publications, bibliographic references, and thorough indexing to support both full-text and keyword searches.

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Read up on the topic of literature, which is any written work, including novels, short stories, plays, poetry, biographies and autobiographies, works of history, essays, and literature criticism. Some people restrict the definition of literature to works that are considered to have artistic or intellectual value. While some tend to think of literature only in terms of printed books, literature in the 21 st century can also be read online using popular e-readers, such as the Kindle.

Literature is classified into the broad categories of fiction (literary works that are imagined stories) and nonfiction (works concerned with facts, real events, and real people). Fiction works are further divided into genres such as mysteries, science fiction, horror, fantasy, romance, Westerns, thrillers, dramas, coming-of-age stories, and historical fiction (fiction based on true events from the past). Literature is also defined based on whether it is poetry (works that express ideas and feelings by the use of distinctive style and rhythm) or prose (writings with no metrical structure).

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Literature Topics

Gale provides insights and useful resources for research supporting literature across a variety of topics. 

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Literature  resources.

Gale offers a product portfolio, including  databases , primary sources , and eBooks , designed to support education.

Gale databases  support literature research by providing full-text articles, peer-reviewed articles, and abstracts from must-read literary collections, literary publications, and literary journals.

Gale Literature Resource Center

Gale Literature Resource Center  is a research-focused, one-stop literary destination, providing students, academics, and researchers with authoritative and relevant results on demand. Students can search in publications such as the  Yale Literary Magazine , the  Walt Whitman Quarterly Review , the  Dickens Quarterly , and other literary magazines. They can also access full-text book reviews from such sources as the  New York Times Book Review .

Gale Literature Criticism

Take literature, history, and culture to the next level with the largest, most extensive compilation of literary commentary available. Access centuries of analysis with scholarly and popular commentary from broadsheets, pamphlets, diaries, encyclopedias, books, periodicals, and tens of thousands of hard-to-find essays.

Gale Literature: LitFinder

Provides access to literary works and secondary-source materials covering world literature and writers throughout history. It includes more than 150,000 full-text literary works and over 800,000 poem citations as well as short stories, speeches, and plays from both established writers and new writers. Students have access to literary magazines and other publications that highlight prose and verse as well as criticism. Users can easily target the information they’re looking for with refined search options.

Primary Sources

Gale Primary Sources provides researchers with firsthand content, including literary journals and literary publications. 

Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Children’s Literature and Childhood

Researchers can find a wealth of children’s literature texts from publishing houses around the world with  Nineteenth Century Collections Online: Children’s Literature and Childhood.  This collection documents the changing construction of childhood, the growing popularity of children’s literature, and the legal and sociological context for both. This collection opens an array of compelling subjects for research and teaching, making it a rich resource for many academic disciplines and areas of study.

The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, 1902‒2014

Since 1902, the  Times Literary Supplement  (TLS) has forged a reputation for fine writing, literary discoveries, and insightful debate. The TLS has attracted the contributions of the world’s most influential writers and critics, from T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf in the 1920s and 1930s to A. N. Wilson and Christopher Hitchens in the 1990s and 2000s. The complete run of the  TLS  from 1902 to 2014 is now available online as  The Times Literary Supplement   Historical Archive .

Nineteenth Century Collections Online: British Theatre, Music, and Literature

This collection includes receipts and archives from the Drury Lane Theatre; Royal Philharmonic Society music manuscripts; and the largely forgotten Wandering Minstrels archive, which opens a rare glimpse into the decades of Gilbert and Sullivan. The archive enables scholars to explore primary sources covering such topics as Victorian popular culture; street literature; social history; music, bloods, and penny dreadfuls; professional acting on the London stage; the Royal Literary Fund; British dramatic works; and many others.

Gale eBooks

Gale offers a variety of high-quality eBooks that can be added to a customized collection and cross-searched to pinpoint relevant content and workflow tools   that enable users to share, save, and download content.

Poetry for Students

Gale  |  2020  |  ISBN-13: 9781410388377

Each volume of  Poetry For Students  contains easily accessible and content-rich discussions of the literary and historical background of 16 works from various cultures and time periods. Each poem covered in this new resource was specially chosen by an advisory panel of teachers and librarians—experts who have helped us define the information needs of students and ensure the age-appropriateness of this reference’s content.

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Shakespearean Criticism: Excerpts from the Criticism of William Shakespeare’s Plays & Poetry, from the First Published Appraisals to Current Evaluations

Gale  |  2020  |  ISBN-13: 9781410384423

Shakespearean Criticism  provides students, educators, theatergoers, and other interested readers with valuable insights into Shakespeare’s drama and poetry. Clear, accessible introductory essays followed by carefully selected critical responses allow end users to engage with a variety of scholarly views and critical conversations about Shakespeare’s works as literature and in performance. Each entry includes a set of previously published reviews, essays, and other critical responses from sources that include scholarly books and journals, literary magazines, interviews, letters, and diaries, carefully selected to create a representative history and cross-section of critical responses. Indexes to characters and major themes help students develop paper topics and locate suitable research materials. Students and teachers at all levels of study will benefit from this series, whether they seek information for class discussion and writing assignments, new perspectives on the works, or the most noteworthy analyses of Shakespeare’s legacy.

Short Story Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers

Gale  |  2020  |  ISBN-13: 9781410384737

Short Story Criticism  assembles critical responses to the writings of the world’s most renowned short fiction writers, and provides supplementary biographical context and bibliographic material to guide the reader to a greater understanding of the genre and its creators. Each of the more than 250 volumes in this series profiles approximately three to six writers of short fiction from all time periods and all parts of the world. Entries provide an introductory biographical essay; a primary bibliography; a selection of full-text or excerpted critical essays reproduced from books, magazines, literary reviews, newspapers, and scholarly journals; and sources for additional research—many entries include an author portrait. A full citation and annotation precede each of the approximately 50 essays per volume. The series currently covers more than 500 authors, and also includes numerous entries focusing on individual works and topics.

Although short fiction is also covered in other titles from the Gale Literature Criticism series,  Short Story Criticism  offers a greater focus on understanding the genre than is possible in the broader, survey-oriented entries in those series. Clear, accessible introductory essays followed by carefully selected critical responses allow end users to engage with a variety of scholarly views and conversations about writers of short fiction and their works. Students writing papers or class presentations, instructors preparing their syllabi, or anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the genre will find this a highly useful resource.

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Gale literature resource center

Provides access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of authors from every age and literary discipline. Covers novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and other writers, with in-depth coverage of the most-studied authors. Includes essays on the history of specific publishing companies.

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Gale Literature Resource Center

Gale Literature Resource Center offers literary analysis, biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods, and from around the world.

Moscow, Saint Petersburg, London: Hubert Griffith and the search for a Russian truth

Citation metadata, document controls, main content.

Censoring the Revolution

Hubert Griffith's play Red Sunday premiered at the Arts Theatre, London in June 1929 under the direction of Russian emigre Theodor Komisarjevsky. (1) Subsequently, Griffith submitted the play to the Lord Chamberlain with the express aim of performing it on the West End stage. (2) Lord Cromer rejected it, responding to vocal condemnation of the play from mainstream media--The Times criticized Red Sunday in an editorial entitled "A Dramatic Indiscretion"--and Buckingham Palace, from where the King, under pressure from exiled Russian royalists, requested it not be granted a license. (3) The general consensus claimed that Red Sunday caused unwarranted "pain to Russians in London." (4) This was primarily due to its focus on real people, particularly the deceased Russian Tsar Nicholas II, and its presentation of such a dramatic, bloody, and recent period of Russian history as "entertainment." The Times' editorial condemned Red Sunday as unnecessarily cruel:

The Times accused Griffith of neglecting his position as self-regulator of his own work. Ignoring calls to grant it a license, including "howls of protest from [George Bernard] Shaw among others," the censor deemed Red Sunday unsuitable for the mainstream stage. (6) In this regard, it can be read as part of a diverse canon of modernist work rejected by the Censor, from Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts to Oscar Wilde's Salome. (7)

Red Sunday clearly incensed the authorities. But what was it about this play that caused such outrage? Why was a play, whose initial Komisarjevsky-directed performance John Gielgud (who played the character of Bronstein/Trotsky) praised as a celebration of "continuous life and movement on the stage," so heartedly rejected from the West End? (8) Griffith provided an initial answer to this question by responding to The Times' editorial in the letters section of the same newspaper:

He counteracted the claims that he had presented an unfair account of the Tsar, distinguishing between the private tragedy of a fallen leader and his far less agreeable politics. In a sense, counteracting The Times' claims, Griffith certainly did self-censor to an extent and committed to presenting a somewhat more sympathetic figure than his leftist convictions might naturally have occasioned. It did not seem to matter; the play was censored regardless. Furthermore Griffith provocatively attacked the Censor for preventing general access to a play that enabled audience members to understand important and far-reaching world events. Proverbially biting his thumb at the Lord Chamberlain, The Times, and Buckingham Palace, Griffith published the play with "Banned by the Lord Chamberlain" emblazoned on the front cover and proceeded to write a scathing indictment of Cromers decision and the restrictions of censorship. He included this incendiary manifesto as a preface. Griffith wrote it as a detached observer, authoring it from the perspective of "a poor native of the South-Pacific island of Ping-Pang-Bong." (10) Unfortunately this infuses the preface with an unnecessary and troubling colonial under-narrative. Nevertheless it remains one of the most damning early twentieth-century denunciations of theatrical censorship.

The "poor native" apparently watched Red Sunday while visiting London on a short break away from his "dancing-girls ... dancing in the background, in arabesques that would have enchanted Gauguin." (11) The preface addresses the dual concerns of the Censor: that these events were simply too contemporaneous and painful to provide material for theater and that the play should not have presented the Tsar on the stage. The author rejects both considerations. Regarding the first, he maintains that theater should be a space where factually accurate narratives "recent or ancient" can be addressed. (12) The author responds to the characterization of the Tsar by confirming "it seems to me that, moved by pity for him, you have strained the historical sense to the utmost it will go in dignifying and excusing him." (13) Through the voice of the prefaces author, Griffith suggests that, far from producing a condemnatory portrait of a man who thought he was ordained by God, had myriad unusual spiritual beliefs, and suppressed his own population with violent ferocity, the Tsar of Red Sunday is actually sympathetically cast.

Griffith's indignation about the Censors rejection of Red Sunday centered on the issue of truthfulness, and it is this troublesome term "truth" that acts as a catalyst for this article. While Griffith wanted to unpack and challenge British opinions of Soviet Russia, he concluded that others (in this case the Lord Chamberlain, the Royal Family, and The Times) seemed committed to maintaining a widespread ignorance. Griffith confronted the prevailing attitude with his usual candor and sarcasm in the reflections of his Ping-Pang-Bong resident: "Most important of all, the British public must be maintained in its delusions, like a lunatic beyond hope of recovery, and shut away from its possibility of arriving one step nearer the truth." (14) British ignorance of Russian history and society compelled Griffith to write Red Sunday and his later play The People's Court, a rather remarkable, if somewhat romanticized, depiction of a Soviet courtroom in which the judge is not only a woman but also a peasant. Her direct knowledge of everyday peasant experience is held in sharp contrast with the hierarchical, privileged (and overwhelmingly male) English judicial system. (15) Challenging British opinions of Russia also caused him to make a number of trips to the Soviet state during the 1920s and '30s, as well as publish a collection of informative, colorful accounts of his journeys. In the preface to his imaginatively entitled 1932 Seeing Soviet Russia: An Informative Record of the Cheapest Trip in Europe, Griffith penned these words: "If I have induced any group of persons to visit the most interesting country in the world at the moment--to see for themselves rather than to sit at home and read libels about it--the purpose of the book will have been carried out." (16) Ultimately the book aimed to, first, challenge his readers' preconceptions and, second, encourage them to venture across to Russia: "what one knows before one goes to Russia is not worth knowing. In Russia one learns a new truth a minute." (17) Griffith understood truth here as something valuable, alive yet hidden until unearthed by the traveler. He wrote his other analytical book This Is Russia over ten years later when, as a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF he traveled around numerous bases sharing his experiences of Russia with servicemen eager to learn more about their new comrades. Griffith's intention seemed unwavering: "to realise the extreme of misrepresentation from all sides that Soviet Russia has suffered from at the hands of the British Press for the last twenty-five years [sic]." (18) The noticeable difference between his proclaimed searches for truth in 1932 and later in 1943 lies in Griffith's determination to discover the truth by ignoring both ends of the political spectrum; neither left- nor right-wing media, according to Griffith, committed to a truthful representation of Russian history and society. Politically left-leaning, his earlier reminiscences retain a self-acknowledged sentimentalism of "life in a romantic land." (19) And yet, even in his early work, this is superseded by the playwright's constant, committed search for a truthful depiction of Russian life; indeed his 1920s and '30s books are peppered with disappointments and disillusionments despite their celebratory, inquisitive feel.

Discovering the Truth: Britain, Russia, and Theatrical Travels

Britain's cultural relationship with Russia is a long and fruitful one. During the early to mid-twentieth century, British artists' perceptions of Russia differed depending on the political situation--a pre-Revolutionary love of folk tales and aesthetics, a wartime sense of patriotic affiliation, a postwar celebration of the socialist state, or concerned reticence about the excesses of Stalinism. Russia seemed to provide inspiration for a range of creative people who thought that England was rather staid and lacking aesthetic innovation. (20)

Many British theater-makers travelled to Russia in order to experience the revolution in theatrical style. This was a diverse grouping, exhibiting different views on the political and aesthetic characteristics of post-1918 Russian society. However they all attempted to unearth the truth about the culture, politics, and geography of a land that had experienced the turmoil of despotic Tsarism, weak leadership (from the Duma to the Provisional Government), an unimaginably horrific World War on the East Front, subsequent famine, and the rise of a Communist Revolution that claimed to transform every facet of Russian society and lead a proletariat that would ultimately destroy the hierarchical structures of class altogether. Many published their recollections. Tim Youngs's proclamation "modernism is built on travel" is indeed worked out in the range and quantity of extant travelogues. (21) Among these travelers was theater critic Huntly Carter, who made a number of journeys between 1921 and 1938. His impression of Soviet theater remained inextricably connected with the political changes in Russia:

Carter predicted the transformation of fantastical utopic visions into practical, lived realities. He rejoiced in the work of Vsevolod Meyerhold, a practitioner he termed "the greatest living creative and interpretive producer." (23) Carter's hopeful proclamations about the Russian stage intrigued a number of practitioners, including Irish playwright Sean O'Casey who wrote personally to Carter in 1926 to request his latest volume of reflections. (24)

Another admirer of Carter's books was London theater producer Basil Dean, who wrote to Carter in 1930 also requesting one of his books about Russian theater. (25) Like Carter, Dean also travelled to Russia, embarking in January 1926 for a month. While Dean could not unequivocally admire Meyerhold as Carter did, rejecting (rather unfairly) what he saw as the Russian's focus on politics rather than aesthetics, many other Russian practitioners captured his imagination, among them Constantin Stanislavsky and director of the Kamerny Theatre Alexander Tairov. (26) If Carter enjoyed the kinetic sets and disciplined, gymnastic movements of Meyerhold's 1922 version of The Magnanimous Cuckold, "the increasing use of the drama to express the struggle between the exponents of the old and new idea of the Machine--that is, the idea of the Machine as Master and as Slave, as Destroyer and as Constructor," Dean preferred the less polemic stage while nevertheless retaining a certain qualified admiration for Meyerhold's innovations. (27) Indeed, preempting Griffith's later celebrations of Russian theater, Dean advocated a search for truth that rejected presuppositions (particularly those sparked by political bias) in favor of an open-mindedness that could benefit the British stage:

Another traveler, far more vehement in her rejection of Meyerholdian constructivism, was journalist and playwright Cicely Hamilton. Like Griffith, Hamilton remained acutely aware of the inherent difficulties in writing a book about Russia in a British context, for even if the writer can remain detached, "they must make up their minds that the public they write for is largely an emotional and therefore an unreasoning public." (29) While she praised the Children's Theatre and the Mariinsky Theatre (Leningrad), she remained resolutely unimpressed with Meyerhold and his ilk, glad that what she saw as the fanaticism of former years had abated by the time she made her 1934 trip to Russia. With typical caustic wit she commented, "when it comes to singing and dancing and acting, one man is not as good as another." (30)

Other British travelers revered the revolutionary theater in Russia, whether the constructivist sets of Meyerhold or the experiments of the agitprop companies that travelled across the new Soviet state with polemic, declamatory sketches interspersed with music and disciplined movement. (31) The British Workers' Theatre Movement (WTM), under the leadership of figures like Tom Thomas and Charlie Mann, retained a particular admiration for Russian revolutionary theater, which they regarded as the pinnacle of politically engaged performance, "a leading force in building up socialism, while even capitalist observers are compelled to admit the great artistic achievements of the theatres and cinemas of the Soviet working class." (32) WTM plays like Their Theatre and Ours (1932) and Meerut (1933) certainly exhibit the agitational style of the Russian political theaters, using declamation and disciplined movement in order to break through the bias of establishment media outlets. These plays create a sense of solidarity and inform audiences about sociopolitical issues: unemployment, capitalist exploitation, and the ongoing aspiration for worldwide Communist revolution. In May 1933 members of the WTM travelled to Russia for the Moscow Olympiad. It was not a wholly successful visit, with the judges reflecting that "the performance of the two groups show the English groups have concretely understood their political tasks. But as a result of their political underestimation of the artistic elements, they are unable to fully carry them out." (33) The WTM performed their distinctly agitprop work while the Russian theater was turning to socialist realism. Their performance, therefore, was seen as rather passe and immature. The trip certainly contributed to the eventual demise of the WTM, with leaders unable to fully determine the right artistic approach.

Herbert Marshall, a British performer and director who trained at the Higher Film Institute in Moscow in the 1930s, witnessed agitprop happenings from TRAM (the Theatre of Young Workers), suggesting that the enthusiastic performers "even tried to interpret the principles of dialectical materialism through the productions." (34) Marshall would later act as director of the British theatrical collective Unity Theatre (which took on the mantle from the ailing WTM) where he produced a version of Nikolai Pogodin's Aristocrats (193 7). (35) This began a "long association, involving seventeen productions, between Unity and Soviet theatre." (36) In 1938 Unity invited Hubert Griffith to give a lecture as part of their Sunday theater workshop series. (37)

This list is merely a sample of various journeys undertaken by British theater practitioners throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. There remains little to unite the travelers, separated by class, objective, and politics. Yet in each case, the catalyst for making this still difficult journey--Basil Dean's designer George Harris claimed that travelling by train to Russia was as comfortable as "sleeping on the larder shelf"--was to discover the truth by actually visiting. (38) While, it must be acknowledged, many of these trips were orchestrated and/or organized by the Soviet authorities, the travelers' intentions remained to challenge assumptions about Soviet society and culture at home.

Hubert Griffith's Search for Truth: Red Sunday and Russian Sojourns

Griffith represented, appropriating Andrew Thacker's distinction, "not so much the flaneur ... but more the voyageur',' visiting Russia numerous times in the 1930s and '40s. (39) His best-documented journey, described in Seeing Soviet Russia, began in 1931 in London, from where he set out for Leningrad before spending a week in Moscow and a week travelling around the Provinces. Finally he returned to Moscow. His impressions of Russia are consistently engaging and visually imaginative: Leningrad is "a teeming and disorganized human ant-heap" while Moscow "overflows in fantasy and gold filigree embellishments and barbaric decor." (40) Even those most famous of tourist attractions could not escape Griffith's gilded prose. Take this description of Lenin's tomb: "In the peculiar artificial glow of red lighting that fills the place, and that reminds one of the stage-effect when Hell opens to engulf Don Giovanni, even the living, filing in front of the crystal coffin, have the air of wax-works." (41) Even in his proclaimed search for truth, Griffith captured the theatricality of the everyday, unable to switch off his eye for performance.

Unsurprisingly, Griffith's search for a truthful representation of Russian life took him to the theaters as part of what he termed, in a book of the same name, "playtime in Russia." (42) Using the cultural scene (music, dance, theater, and sport) to support his claims, Griffith attempted to break through the British assumption that the population lived in fear under the dictatorial leadership of the Bolshevik Party with little to brighten dreary days of industrial work and political polemic. His recollections, however, are by no means without an air of disappointment in long, dull propaganda plays and prohibitively expensive operas. Of all the performances he saw and documented, Red Poppy, the first Soviet ballet, is perhaps the most well known. Written by Reinhold Gliere, the ballet (originally created in 1927) celebrated the new Russian state as an emblem of progress and freedom. Griffith, however, remained unimpressed: "after a not bad first act, its Communistic and Revolutionary propaganda (the Red Poppy being the symbol of revolt), seemed to be its only purpose and life [sic]." (43) He also attended a comedy entitled Our Youth with his American friend, writer, and fellow sojourner Maurice Hindus, which, again, Griffith found uninspiring. However, he did marvel at the audiences hushed observation of a kissing scene, an event that, he presumed, would have incited giggles from a British audience! (44)

He also pointed to moments of theatrical joy, namely his visit to the circus where he sarcastically suggested "two thousand slaves of Communism were roaring with laughter at clowns falling off bicycles." (45) Despite his dismay at the polemicism of much Russian theater, Griffith recounted a train-carriage conversation with a group of Russian theater devotees:

Griffith includes this recollection in his memoir despite disagreeing with what he determined as the Russian predilection for political didacticism over aesthetic quality. It is a single example of Griffith's concern with accurate and measured presentation of Russian culture.

Ultimately, all of Griffith's descriptions represent his unwavering search for that truthful exposition of Russian life and culture:

I have no intention of disregarding the natural bias that Griffith (or indeed any traveler) necessarily has. However, in this era when the events of Soviet history divided the British population along the lines Griffith alludes to in the above quotation, his balanced approach remains a rather remarkable testimony to his commitment to accuracy and truthfulness.

Red Sunday, I claim, represents a theatrical, performance-based version of this wider objective to challenge British assumptions about Soviet Russia. It is an overtly political play, engaged with complex political issues and intent on exposing power struggles and hegemonic systems, on narrating an accurate version of Russian history from all sides of the political divide. Griffith acknowledged these aims in his response to Lord Cromer's decision, saying "it had come up against a certain side of British susceptibility. The truth--or even part of the truth--must not be told on stage." (48) If his subsequent journeys to Russia represent a searching curiosity, his earlier 1929 play amounts to a preliminary theatrical outworking of this impulse. "Truth" remains a complex, unfathomable term for philosophers. However, it continues to trouble theater-makers too. It seems an impossible goal, not least because the theater relies on fictional constructs and storytelling even in its most mimetic of incarnations.

Steve Nicholson concludes that Griffith's "writing suffers from the strait-jacket of naturalism," and, while he acknowledges Red Sundays implicit "urge to build up a drama through montage," by and large his admiration for Griffith's project is tempered by the playwright's refusal to break free of naturalism's confines. (49) Nicholson's analysis is undoubtedly correct; Griffith's desire to comprehend and present an accurate version of Russian history might well have sat better (aesthetically, if not with the critics who were confused enough by his stylistic experiments) in a more radical format. Yet, in using naturalism, Griffith was nevertheless aligning himself with a theatrical structure beloved of playwrights searching for truthful representation: as that seminal figure of naturalism, Emile Zola, wrote in his introduction to Therese Raquin, "it is time to produce works of truth." (50)

The concept of "truth" in naturalism can be understood in two major (sometimes intertwining) ways: the internal and the external. Zola advocated a naturalism that fully presented real social conditions on the stage where credible, everyday characters populated recognizable factories, streets, and drawing rooms: "naturalistic thinkers are telling us the truth does not need clothing; it can walk naked." (51) Constantin Stanislavsky, founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, rejected the external verisimilitude of naturalism, even claiming that "we are not concerned with the actual naturalistic existence of what surrounds us on the stage, the reality of the material world." (52) Stanislavsky's version of "truth" centers on accurate portrayal of role, on tapping into authentic emotions. He concludes, "a role which is built on truth will grow, whereas one built on stereotype will shrivel." (53) Undoubtedly naturalism in its external and internal guises retains a vital and influential place in the history of experimental theater, acting, I suggest, as a starting point in an avant-garde performance movement that would often reject naturalism's conventions. Indeed, while Bertolt Brecht's comment "telling the truth seems increasingly urgent" is reminiscent of Zola's earlier proclamation, his methods rejected the perceived "straitjackets" of naturalism. (54) The concept of "truth" unites these three diverse figures, transforming the theater from a space of fictionalized constructs into a potentially transformative and accurate representation of life outside the theater walls.

Red Sunday is structured in three acts following naturalistic patterns: the first situated in pre-war Russia from 1906 to 1914, the second focusing on 1916, and the last narrating the events during and after the Revolution up to the shooting of Lenin. Trotsky's final lament--"who is going to save our Revolution now ...?"--concludes the play with concern for the future. (55) The bleak ending reflects its naturalistic credentials; it mirrors the conclusion of plays like Ibsen's Ghosts, Strindberg's Miss Julie, and Hauptmann's The Weavers.

By and large, such somber endings are avoided in early twentieth-century political theater. Indeed many plays from a distinctly left-wing tradition purposely end on a positive note: the singing of the Internationale or the suggestion that the working-class characters have begun to lead the Revolution. For example, WTM's play Their Theatre and Ours (1932), written to promote the movements planned attendance at the Moscow Olympiad, concludes with the resolutely upbeat "The old worlds crashing / Let's help to smash it, / And build a workers' world instead." (56) There are similarities in objective; Griffith wanted to experience real Russia rather than accepting British stereotypes and the performers of Their Theatre and Ours determined to "see the victories of the Soviet working people in the building up of socialism." (57) For both Griffith and the WTM performers, the desire to actually visit Soviet Russia, challenging hearsay by personally experiencing the country, became paramount. And yet, the profound difference in the concluding scenes marks Red Sunday as distinct from Their Theatre and Ours. While the WTM remained vocal in their support for the Soviet state, Griffith risked dramatic anticlimax by attempting to conclude in a more open-ended (and arguably even-handed) way. Indeed, the uncompromisingly bleak conclusions of naturalism led Georg Lukacs to argue for the benefits of socialist realism, a form that looked distinctly like naturalism--linear narrative, recognizable characters, focus on real life--and yet incorporated a "historical optimism." (58) Lukacs is careful to disassociate this concept from bourgeois "happy endings." However, socialist realism in a sense followed the same trajectory as agitprop in concluding cheerfully, thereby posing a challenge to intractable naturalistic realism.

Characters in naturalism always resemble (or at least attempt to resemble) recognizable figures from everyday life. However, Griffith pushed this convention further and inevitably suffered at the hands of the Censor because of it. He populated his play with real people from Russian history: the inspiring Lenin, the initially ignorant yet passionate Trotsky, the frighteningly amoral Rasputin, the oblivious Tsar and Tsarina. A photograph from the 1929 production illustrates the play's commitment to visual accuracy, with Trotsky, Lenin, and Trotsky's Wife sitting around a table discussing potential revolutionary methods. The resemblances are uncanny and Komisarjevsky clearly aimed for mimetic reproductions of his central characters. (59)

Despite this focus on actual figures from Russian history, one of the play's overwhelming failures is its distinct lack of political analysis; despite Griffith's self-proclaimed search for truth, Red Sunday strangely avoids any real political debate or discussion of ideology. Perhaps in his commitment to naturalism and creating story Griffith steered clear of political exposition. Yet there are exceptions. The final scene before the attempted assassination focuses on Lenin and Trotsky discussing current policy. "Pure Communism has failed," Lenin maintains, and NEP marks "a return to Capitalism." (60) While they part on good terms, with Lenin concluding "I have made a nation--in chaos--but it was chaos before--and out of my chaos there's a chance that a new nation may arise--in time. Wait. Wait ... Only wait ...," one cannot escape the lingering disappointment of unrealized revolutionary potential. (61) Griffith's search after truthful analysis of Russian history, albeit through the creative form of theater, did not permit him to write a play with a more conclusive yet fabricated endpoint.

Naturalism was primarily concerned with the contemporaneous everyday: suffragette experience in Elizabeth Robin's Votes for Women or industrial tensions in John Galsworthy's Strife. Red Sunday's contemporary focus troubled the Lord Chamberlain, an issue addressed by the Ping-Pang-Bong commentator in the preface:

Cromer rejected Red Sunday on the basis that the events it focused on lingered in the minds of those affected. The Russian Revolution continued to affect world politics and remained an ongoing, ever-changing set of circumstances. Consequently, for the Censor, it was impossible and unethical to stage them. Griffith counteracted this claim by maintaining that the dramatic transformation of 1917 was less a shocking interruption than a moment in a progressive genealogy. In the play, this sense of history appears in the narrative, moving from period to period. However, historical perspectives remain central in single scenes too. As an example, act 3, scene 2 is set at a post-Revolution celebration in the Marie Theatre, Saint Petersburg. The major speaker is Vera Figner, a real revolutionary figure who returned to Russia in 1915 after many years in exile. Furthering Griffith's search for a truthful depiction of Russian experience, Figner's speech addresses Russian history: "It is of these only that I would speak, then. These nameless and forgotten thousands, who died long ago--when hope was still far off--to give us a little of what we have got to-day." (63) Indeed, for Figner, history confirmed the legitimacy of the Revolution, for "when thousands of people, separated, spread over many years, all drive independently towards the same idea--then it's a madness that looks too much like common-sense." (64)

This scene does not merely illustrate Griffith's fascination with history; it also begins to challenge the conventions of naturalism. The scene set in the Marie Theatre acts as an interruptive vignette. The stage directions provide a sense of the subsequent sequence:

This scene connects Red Sunday with a range of other works that experimented with a meta-theatrical "play-within-a-play" motif, from William Shakespeare's Hamlet to Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, both mentioned by Lionel Abel in his influential Metatheatre (1966). It is also reminiscent of Meyerhold's The Government Inspector (1926), in which the final scene is played on a stripped back stage, emptied of all the earlier props and furniture. Jonathan Pitches suggests that this clearing of the stage to reveal the usually hidden structures underneath represented "the emptiness of Tsarist Russia underlined in a deft theatrical coup." (66) While I cannot make a direct connection, the parallel here is an illuminating one.

In this moment of interruption at the Marie Theatre, existing as it does outside of the main linear narrative, Griffith makes a more overtly political statement than at any other stage in the play. The quasi-agitprop figure of The Orator addresses the crowd, opening that bastion of Tsarist aristocracy, the Imperial Theatre, to "guests who have paid with all that was best in their lives." (67) With the speech from Figner and the democratic unlocking of a previously inaccessible space, this theatricalized interruption to the naturalist narrative confirms the benefits of the Revolution. Griffith was not alone in his inclusion of a mass political gathering scene in an otherwise ostensibly naturalistic play. Elizabeth Robins's 1907 Votes for Women provides a case in point, with act 2 opening at the foot of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, London. The entire act is a Votes for Women rally, complete with stirring speakers, banners, a raised platform, and vocal hecklers. The Court Theatre's version of the play situated the large crowd with their backs to the audience, thereby implicating each audience member in the event, transforming them (whether willing or not) into the mob. (68) What do these plays have in common? Both seem committed to a truthful rendering of a political situation coupled with an evident bias towards the speaker(s). And both illustrate that naturalism is far more artistically variable than might initially be imagined.

Complicating its confirmed naturalistic form, Red Sunday contains a number of consciously theatrical moments that potentially connect Griffith's play to a range of more politically and aesthetically revolutionary works. For example, between two rather grander scenes in Saint Petersburg (the first focusing on the Tsar, the second on the plottings of Rasputin's eventual killers), there is a short return to Lenin and Trotsky, who languish in exile on the banks of Lake Geneva. The interlude, however, contains none of the elaborate props of the Palace. Instead "the scene can be played quite simply in front of a pair of curtains, the two figures only being illumined." (69) Here Red Sunday transforms into a symbolist vision, with the direction recalling Edward Gordon Craig's blank stage where "the artist is to speak to spectators through scene, he is not to display a large doll's house for them" or W. B. Yeats's suggestion that dance and poetry should remain the focus of the theater rather than elaborate painted backdrops, "unnecessary to my friends and to myself, for our imagination kept living by the arts can imagine a mountain covered with thorn-trees in a drawing-room without any great trouble." (70) This conversation between Lenin and Trotsky, like the previous celebration scene in the Marie Theatre, can also be imagined as a moment of agitprop simplicity. As WTM's Tom Thomas maintained, "unlike the 'theatre of illusion' it [agitprop] has no stage, no curtains, no props." (71)

So, far from being a simple naturalistic rendering of Russian history, I claim that Red Sunday straddles a theatrical divide between the art-for-art's-sake symbolist tradition and the theater-as-a-weapon agitprop mode, a theatrical format that originated on the post-Revolutionary stages in Russia. Though residing at opposite ends of the theater spectrum (symbolism embodied a sense of spirituality whereas agitprop remained resolutely materialist), both movements professed to chasing after truth on the stage. This is not to suggest that Griffiths play is wholly successful in this endeavor, for what is produced is a rather fragmented piece that never fully embraces its aesthetic options. Yet it is certainly more formally interesting than might at first be expected, and, whether read parallel to the symbolist or to the agitprop tradition, these short scenes in Geneva (there are two: act 2, scenes 1 and 3) interrupt the linear flow and inadvertently connect Red Sunday with other, more experimental theatrical tropes.

Furthermore, Rasputins murder suspends the naturalistic rules, staged as almost a gothic horror with the amoral, predatory "Mad Monk" at its center (act 2, scene 4). Candlelight, medieval crucifixes, and the murdered body of Rasputin, which (legend has it) refused to die, all create a scene that would not look out of place anywhere in the British gothic theater canon from John Webster's Vie Duchess of Malfi to Stephen Mallatratt's version of The Woman in Black. In fact the murder is predicated on a theatrical exclamation two scenes earlier when Prince Yussupov turns to his friends with the shout "Kill Claudio! Kill Claudio!" (72) The reference to Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing may initially appear to be an odd one, but Beatrice's passion for justice and need to convince Benedick of the legitimacy of murdering Claudio is not so very far removed from Yussupov's predicament in Red Sunday.

So certainly for all Red Sunday's alignment with naturalistic conventions, the linearity is nevertheless fragmented with moments of avant-garde experimentalism, incorporated to enable Griffith to present a more "truthful" representation of Russian history. Despite these interruptions, Red Sundays naturalism remains, at least in its script form, its defining stylistic characteristic. However, Russian director Theodor Komisarjevky's participation casts some further doubt on this easy demarcation:

While there is little specific evidence to suggest how Komisarjevsky directed Red Stage, he wrote the above words in 1929, the same year as he presented Griffith's play. No doubt, in accordance with his proclamations in his 1929 book, the staging was relatively simple, the sections in front of the curtains required no props, and the whole piece resembled a musical score with tonal fluctuations, tempo changes, and imaginative responses to script. (74) But movement too became a key characteristic of Komisarjevsky's theater: "Exercises of this sort are essential for the development of rhythmical sensibility, which will enable the actor's bodily movements to work in simultaneous co-operation with his mind so that his physique may become a sensitive 'barometer' of his feelings." (75) Komisarjevsky's description takes us back to Russia, seemingly tapping into the emotion-led system of Stanislavsky and, perhaps, the more gymnastic, commedia-dell'arte-inflected movement techniques of a practitioner like Meyerhold. Much of this reflection of Komisarjevsky's contribution relies on conjecture and supposition, yet his aesthetic reading of Red Sunday must have transformed the play.

Conclusion: Breaking through British Ignorance

Toward the end of Seeing Soviet Russia, Griffith accuses "we will not as a nation, learn facts about Russia because we have been trained not to want to learn facts about Russia." (76) In all his writing (his reflections on his trips, his discussions of culture, and Red Sunday) exists a consistent attempt to break through British assumptions about Russia from the left and the right. The Times' review ignored Griffith's stated intentions, preferring to presume that the playwright "saw a good melodramatic theme and he used it according to his abilities." (77) The newspaper was misplaced in its accusation; for all his natural bias and undoubted theatricalized vision, Griffith's ongoing commitment to transnational exchange remains the defining force behind all his work. In a sense Griffith reflects the ardent proclamations of his contemporary, George Bernard Shaw, another figure whose work can be often understood as interrupted naturalism: "I created nothing; I invented nothing; I imagined nothing; I perverted nothing; I simply discovered drama in real life." (78)

Claire Warden

University of Lincoln

(1) Hubert Griffith was a theater critic for the Daily Chronicle, the Observer, the Manchester Guardian, and the Evening Standard. He was also a playwright, translator (including of Alexander Afinogenev's Distant Point, which was successfully staged at various London venues), and, later, a lecturer of Russian culture for the RAF.

(2) Red Sunday was not Griffith's only play. He also wrote Tunnel Trench (1924), The Tender Passion (1926), and The People's Court (1933), as well as a critical collection of essays entitled Iconoclastes: Or the Future of Shakespeare (1928). In the thirties he wrote Seeing Soviet Russia and Playtime in Russia, two travel books which described his perceptions of Soviet Russian theater. His later written work was almost exclusively devoted to his knowledge of Russia and keen desire to share it, with such volumes as RAF in Russia (1942) and This is Russia (1943).

(3) Steve Nicholson, "Censoring Revolution: the Lord Chamberlain and the Soviet Union," New Theatre Quarterly 8 (November 1992): 305-312 (308).

(4) Quoted in Nicholson, "Censoring Revolution," 308.

(5) "A Dramatic Indiscretion," The Times, July 1, 1929, 15.

(6) Jean Chothia, English Drama of the Early Modern Period, 1890-1940 (London: Longman, 1996), 93.

(7) See Helen Freshwater, Theatre Censorship in Britain: Silencing, Censure and Suppression (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), and Dominic Shellard and Steve Nicholson, The Lord Chamberlain Regrets...: A History of British Theatre Censorship (London: British Library, 2004).

(8) V. E. Borovsky, A Triptych of the Russian Theatre: The Komissarzhevskys (London: Hurst, 2001), 349.

(9) Hubert Griffith, "A Dramatic Indiscretion: To the Editor of The Times',' The Times, July 3, 1929, 17.

(10) Hubert Griffith, preface to Red Sunday (London: Grant Richards and Humphrey Toulmin, 1929), xviii, vii. Modernisms problematic relationship with race is well documented in books such as Laura Winkiel's Modernism, Race and Manifestos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Urmila Seshagiri's Race and the Modernist Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). On the one hand, modernist artists looked overseas for inspiration; on the other, many retained a Western-centric perspective. Couple this with new unearthings of global modernist traditions, and the scholar is faced with myriad approaches to ethnicity and race.

(11) Griffith, preface to Red Sunday, vii.

(12) Ibid., xi.

(13) Ibid., xiii-xiv.

(14) Ibid., x.

(15) Hubert Griffith, The People's Court (London: Rich and Cowan, 1933).

(16) Hubert Griffith, Seeing Soviet Russia: An Informative Record of the Cheapest Trip in Europe (London: John Lane, 1932), vii.

(17) Ibid., 177.

(18) Hubert Griffith, This is Russia (London: Hammond, 1943), 11. (Italics in original.)

(19) Griffith, Seeing Soviet Russia, 196.

(20) Rebecca Beasley, "Russia and the Invention of the Modernist Intelligentsia," in Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London: Routledge, 2005), 24.

(21) Tim Youngs, "Travelling Modernists," in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 267.

(22) Huntly Carter, The New Spirit in the European Theatre 1914-1924: A Comparative Study of the Changes Effected by War and Revolution (London: Ernst Benn, 1925), 274.

(23) Huntly Carter, A New Spirit in the Russian Theatre 1917-1928 (London: Brentano's, 1929), 47.

(24) David Krause, ed., The Letters of Sean O'Casey, Volume 1 1910-1941 (New York: MacMillan, 1975), 182.

(25) Dean's Manager to Huntly Carter, April 16, 1930, Basil Dean archive, The John Rylands Library, Manchester 1/2/345. Carter wrote a number of books on various topics from spiritualism to European theater, from cinema to Max Reinhardt.

(26) For further details see Claire Warden, "Saluting the Red Army: Basil Dean's Russian Adventures," Theatre Survey 54 (2013): 347-366.

(27) Carter, New Spirit in the European Theatre, 238.

(28) Basil Dean, "The Machine Artists: Notes on a Recent Visit to the Russian Theatre," The Sphere (August 28, 1926), 4.

(29) Cicely Hamilton, Modern Russia as Seen by an Englishwoman (New York: Dutton, 1934), v.

(30) Ibid., 80.

(31) Agitprop was a prominent international performance movement in the early years of the twentieth century, combining agitation and propaganda to create sketches and happenings that used a combination of music, disciplined movement, drama, declamation, and political protest to engage a working-class audience that, according to Marx, would eventually overthrow the bourgeoisie. For more information about agitprop in a transnational setting see particularly Richard Stourac and Kathleen McCreery, Theatre as a Weapon: Workers' Theatre in the Soviet Union, Germany and Britain, 1917-1934 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

(32) Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove, "The Basis and Development of the WTM (1932)," in Theatres of the Left, 1880-1935: Workers' Theatre Movement in Britain and America, ed. Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 100-101.

(33) "Workers' Theatre Movement Monthly Bulletin" (March 1934), Unity Theatre Archive, Victoria and Albert Theatre Archive, Blythe House, London, THM 9/6/2/1, 7.

(34) Herbert Marshall, The Pictorial History of Russian Theatre (London: Crown, 1977), 154.

(35) Colin Chambers, The Story of Unity Theatre (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 134-37. This production was not without incident, as Chambers goes on to describe, with Marshall rowing with another potential director, Nelson Illingworth.

(36) Ibid., 135.

(37) Ibid., 139.

(38) Basil Dean, The Changing Theatre, BBC Radio (December 17, 1969), 3 of 4.

(39) Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 7.

(40) Griffith, Seeing Soviet Russia, 36, 75.

(41) Ibid., 102.

(42) Hubert Griffith, ed., Playtime in Russia (London: Methuen, 1935), 2.

(43) Griffith, Seeing Soviet Russia, 77.

(44) Ibid., 154.

(45) Ibid., 144.

(46) Ibid., 157-58.

(47) Griffith, Playtime in Russia, 9.

(48) Griffith, Seeing Soviet Russia, 5.

(49) Steve Nicholson, British Theatre and the Red Peril: The Portrayal of Communism 1917-1945 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 78.

(50) Emile Zola, "Preface to Therese Raquin" in Naturalism and Symbolism in European Theatre, 1850-1918, ed. Claude Schumacher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 71.

(51) Emile Zola, "Naturalism in the Theatre," in The Theory of the Modern Stage: An Introduction to Modern Theatre and Drama, ed. Eric Bentley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 362.

(52) Constantin Stanislavsky, An Actor Prepares (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 123.

(53) Ibid., 34.

(54) Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen, 2000), 107.

(55) Griffith, Red Sunday, 89.

(56) Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove, "Their Theatre and Ours (1932)," in Samuel et al., Theatres of the Left, 1880-1935, 139.

(57) Ibid., 146.

(58) Georg Lukacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin, 1963), 121.

(59) Theodor Komisarjevsky, Myself and the Theatre (London: Heinemann, 1929), 156. So far this is the only extant photograph of the production I have found.

(60) Griffith, Red Sunday, 81, 80.

(61) Ibid., 86-87.

(62) Griffith, preface to Red Sunday, vii.

(63) Griffith, Red Sunday, 78.

(64) Ibid., 77.

(65) Ibid., 73.

(66) Jonathan Pitches, Vsevolod Meyerhold (London: Routledge, 2003), 102.

(67) Griffith, Red Sunday, 73.

(68) Elizabeth Robins, "Votes for Women (1907)," in Plays and Performance Texts by Women: 1880-1930, ed. Maggie B. Gale and Gilli Bush-Bailey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 239.

(69) Griffith, Red Sunday, 31.

(70) Edward Gordon Craig, Craig on Theatre, ed. J. Michael Walton (London: Methuen, 1983), 123; W. B. Yeats, Four Plays for Dancers (London: MacMillan, 1921), 86.

(71) Tom Thomas, "A Propertyless Theatre for the Propertyless Class (1977)," in Samuel et al., Theatres of the Left: 1880-1935, 95.

(72) Griffith, Red Sunday, 40.

(73) Komisarjevsky, Myself, 140-141.

(74) Pitches, Russians, 31.

(75) Komisarjevsky, Myself, 127.

(76) Griffith, Seeing Soviet Russia, 190.

(77) "A Dramatic Indiscretion," 15.

(78) George Bernard Shaw, "A Dramatic Realist to his Critics," in Bentley, The Theory of the Modern Stage, 194.

Warden, Claire

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Gale Document Number: GALE|A421909268

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