The premiere of “Klop” conquered the Moscow public

February 13, 1929 in Moscow at the Meyerhold Theater (GosTiMe) the first production of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s enchanting comedy “The Bedbug” took place.

The director was Vsevolod Meyerhold; his assistant, who helped with the work on the text, was Mayakovsky himself; graphic designers – Kukryniksy and Alexander Rodchenko; music composed by Dmitri Shostakovich.

This production was a huge success: the audience fell on the “Bedbug” in droves and laughed, the witticisms from the play dispersed in Moscow salons. Igor Ilyinsky, who played the main role – a former worker, a former party member, and now the groom Ivan Prisypkin, became a star …

“The premiere of “The Bedbug” was a great success. Mayakovsky was quite satisfied with the reception of the play by the public and did not miss almost a single performance at first. He was summoned furiously, and he went out to bow with Meyerhold whenever he was at a performance. <...> I must say that the work on the play “The Bedbug” went very quickly. The performance was staged in a little more than a month. I worked for about a month. Despite the haste and the somewhat nervous situation due to this circumstance, Mayakovsky was extremely calm and restrained. A lot of things didn’t work out for the actors. And I am among them. Meyerhold sometimes got angry, but Mayakovsky was angelically patient and behaved like a true gentleman. This seemingly sharp and even rude person in his speeches in creative communication was surprisingly gentle and patient. He never spat on the actors, never, no matter how badly they played, he never got annoyed, ”Igor Ilyinsky later recalled in his memoir book“ About Himself ”(Ilyinsky I.A., publishing house Zebra-E, 2008) .

The press also greeted the premiere of GosTiM kindly. For example, the newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” in its issue of February 27, 1929 reported:

“Again, modern speech sounds from the stage of our most advanced theater. Once again, the theater directs its brilliant skill to today’s social topics. But at the same time, Klop is not free from serious shortcomings. In The Bedbug the performance itself is much higher than Mayakovsky’s play. The theater overcomes many of the shortcomings of the play. The play has a good satirical fervor. It contains many percussive verbal characteristics and epigrams. But in general, Mayakovsky’s satire hits a small target. As a theatrical spectacle, the performance looks fun. It has a lot of funny moments. It has a spectacular freshness and healthy vivacity. The performance must be a hit with the audience. In the current, so far very pale and emaciated season, The Bedbug, with all its shortcomings, is still the best performance.

The action of both the play and the performance begins during the NEP. Ivan Prisypkin “breaks away from the class with a bang” – strives with all his might for a “beautiful life” after the labors and hardships of the Civil War. He learns newfangled dances (in particular, the foxtrot), grows sideburns, breaks off relations with his former lover – Zoya Berezkina, preferring her the daughter of a hairdresser – Elsevira Renaissance, and even changes his first and last name to the elegant “Pierre Skripkin”. At his wedding with Elsevira Davidovna, a fight breaks out, and then a fire starts. Firefighters extinguish it, but in the terrible frost, Prisypkin freezes into an ice cube that has stood in a Moscow cellar for fifty years.

Igor Ilyinsky considered the role of Prisypkin one of his most successful roles:

“Luck was in the integrity and solidity of the image. In this role, it was easy to over-comic and exaggerate it. Fortunately, this did not work out. I played it seriously and with conviction. The image turned out to be significant, satirically powerful, which was required for Mayakovsky’s dramaturgy.

Ilyinsky, in the image of Prisypkin, tried to emphasize the features of a “monumental lackey and boor”, and the author of the comedy himself helped him a lot in this:

“No matter how paradoxical it may seem, I even outwardly took for the image of Prisypkin … Mayakovsky’s manners. But to these manners, worthy and even magnificent in themselves, I added some compromising shades, somehow: I exaggerated the sweeping gait, gave a dull, cretinous expression to a monumental face, put my legs a little crookedly. This is how the contours of the still external drawing of the image of the “pompously triumphant lackey”, the tradesman and boor were created. Then it was necessary to get used to the image, not to freeze in the external drawing, to add more and more living features. Impressiveness turned into complacency; confidence in peremptory aplomb, in hopeless arrogance.

According to Vsevolod Meyerhold himself, the secret of the performance’s success was largely due to the extreme relevance of the play itself:

“Mayakovsky’s work is valuable for us mainly because, while posing the most acute problem very sharply, he does not deviate a single step from the necessary formal tasks facing the theater … When approaching such works as Mayakovsky’s piece, it is unacceptable to ignore the formal side. He gives an enchanting comedy, and it must be regarded according to the laws set by the author himself … The main purpose: to castigate the vices of today. Throwing back to 1979, Mayakovsky makes us look not at the transformation of the world, but at the same disease as in our days. We must fight shortcomings with more energy than now. In 1979, again, echoes of the same shortcomings as in 1929. It doesn’t matter if you’re 50 or 75 years old. Mayakovsky wants to show that diseases have deep roots, that long periods of time and enormous activity are needed to get rid of them ”(quoted from the book by Vasily Katanyan“ Mayakovsky. Literary Chronicle ”. State Publishing House of Fiction. Moscow, 1961).

Sergei Ishkov.

Photo from the site https://ar.culture.ru/en/subject/oblozhka-zhurnala-novyy-lef-no10-1927 and from the book by V. Katanyan “Mayakovsky. Literary Chronicle»