Along with Konstantin Stanislavski, Vsevelod Meyerhold was the leading theatrical innovator of the early 20th century, certainly in Russia and arguably the world. A victim of Stalin’s purges (he was shot in 1940), Meyerhold had anticipated the mid-century move away from naturalistic drama towards a theatre of performance, drawing on the tradition of circus and commedia dell’arte.
His writings might well have remained unknown in the west had not a young British linguist, Edward Braun, who has died aged 81, headed to Leningrad to track them down and publish them.
Son of Cecil Braun, a fur-trader’s clerk, and his wife Stella (nee Truscott), Ted was born in London and educated at the City of Bath boys school, but learned his Russian during national service with the RAF, where his fellow students included Michael Frayn, Alan Bennett and Dennis Potter. After a period monitoring Soviet intelligence traffic in Berlin, he won a place to study languages at St John’s College, Cambridge. For his doctorate, he spent a year in the Soviet Union researching Meyerhold’s life and work.
Ted’s publication of Meyerhold’s then virtually unknown writings in 1969 was to have a major influence on the development of non-realist theatre in the last third of the 20th century, a movement which embraced the work of Peter Brook and Théâtre de Complicité (now Complicite). In 1969, he joined Bristol University’s drama department, rising to become its head in 1985. He expanded the curriculum to cover women’s theatre and television drama; his many distinguished graduates included the broadcaster Misha Glenny and Paul Unwin, director of the Bristol Old Vic, whose board Ted was to chair from 1987 to 1992.
I got to know Ted first through reading his books and then as an academic colleague and friend. His works on Meyerhold – his translation of the writings was followed by a study of the director’s work – are definitive, and his book The Director and the Stage (1982) has sold more than 30,000 copies.
In 1971 he co-curated the theatre section of the groundbreaking Hayward Gallery exhibition Art and Revolution, and chaired the Gulbenkian inquiry into director training in 1987-89. Among his other writings were studies of Chekhov and a series of articles on dramatic treatments of the Northern Ireland troubles. He was keenly supportive of British political playwrights such as Trevor Griffiths and myself, and was an active Labour party member and campaigner.
Ted met Sarah Brooke at a New Year’s party in 1963; they married two years later. She survives him, as do their sons, Felix and Joe, and three grandchildren.
