Tragedy is simply tragedy; a comedy is never just a comedy. Tragedy may be life as it commonly is, after acquiring some artistic polish; comedy offers a new look at existence. As the great and influential Russian theatrical director Vsevolod Meyerhold said, ‘I know for a fact that what is said in jest is often more serious than what is said seriously.’
Does this paradox have any resonance for contemporary Australia where there seems so little to joke about? What can we think—really think—about Sergei Prokofiev’s dazzlingly grotesque and witty, but astutely judged, opera The Love for Three Oranges, which in January had its inaugural Australian season as the first brilliant fruit of Opera Australia’s new music director, Richard Hickox?
Its local première? More than 80 years after its initial season in Chicago? Clearly, it’s not merely in politics that we are so conservative and cautious! Consider how long it took for Meyerhold’s revolutionary approach to theatre—its philosophy and its praxis—to have any significant influence here. Well after World War II, nearly 50 years after Meyerhold’s seminal work, we were still enduring the turgid 19th-century manner, as filtered, diluted and exported by London; almost all of the changes which have vitalised our approach to theatre in the last 50 years are reflections of Meyerhold’s thinking.
He was crucial, too, in the genesis of The Love for Three Oranges. In 1914, for just that year, under the pseudonym of Dr Dapertutto (or Dr Everywhere, from a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann), he produced an intellectually polychrome magazine which he called The Love for Three Oranges. Its first number included a Russian translation of Carlo Gozzi’s play of that title, and Prokofiev took a copy with him when he went to the United States for his first concert tour in the summer of 1918.
Like many a jaded opera-goer of today, Meyerhold was weary of 19th-century melodrama and sentimental romances and he revelled in the grotesque for its capacity to achieve a deeper effect on audiences.
‘The basis of the grotesque,’ he wrote, ‘is the artist’s constant desire to switch the spectator from the plane he has just reached to another which is totally unforeseen,’ and further, ‘In its search for the supernatural, the grotesque synthesises opposites, creates a picture of the incredible, and invites the spectator to solve the riddle of the inscrutable.’ And if one person epitomised that supremely during the Sydney season, it