ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
It is unsurprising, then, that only a handful of Proletkult plays retain a place
within theatre history. One of them is Sergei Eisenstein’s production of Sergei
Tretyakov’s Gas Masks (1923), performed on four nights in March and April
1924. The play recounts the heroic struggle of Soviet workers to fix a gas leak
without the assistance of protective garments or masks, and was staged inside
the Moscow Gas Works on the outskirts of the city. Despite the vivid and highly
innovative use of site specificity – the audience was seated on wooden benches
in a cleared area of the factory surrounded by turbines, steel tanks, catwalks,
revolving machinery and the smell of gas – the play had numerous problems.
Tretyakov’s plot was predictable (a radical journalist leads the gas workers to
fix the leak and save the factory), and it proved difficult to draw an audience to
the outskirts of the city, while the gas factory’s own staff considered the
performance to be a nuisance. 55 Even so, Jay Leyda reports that although the
play was crude and the acting untutored and rhetorical, when the men facing
death went down the shaft to save the factory, ‘the minutes were tense with an
Sergei Tretyakov’s Gas Masks, produced by Sergei Eisenstein, Moscow Gas Works, 1924
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