I Want a Baby and Other Plays

When Sergei Tretyakovs ground-breaking play I Want a Baby was banned by Stalins censor in 1927 it was a signal that the radical and innovative theatre of the early Soviet years was to be brought to an end. A glittering unblinking exploration of the realities of post-revolutionary Soviet life I Want a Baby marks a high point in modernist experimental drama.Tretyakovs plays are notable for their formal originality and their revolutionary content. The World Upside Down which was staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold in 1923 concerns a failed agrarian revolution. A Wise Man originally directed by the great film director and Tretyakovs friend Sergei Eisenstein is a clown show set in the Paris of the émigré White Russians. Are You Listening Moscow?! and Gas Masks are agit-melodramas fierce fast-moving and edgy. And Roar China!dramatises an actual incident in the Wests oppression of China when a British gunboat captain threatened to blow the city of Wanxien to bits. Roar China! was translated into many languages and produced in cities across the world. The nerve this play touched may be gauged from the fact that it was staged in Yiddish translation in the Czestochowa concentration camp by Jewish prisoners during World War II.These plays are not only stirring in their themes they are also hugely significant in their construction. Tretyakovs early plays led directly to Eisensteins highly influential theory of the montage of attractions while later his ideas were crucial in the formation of Bertolt Brechts theory of epic theatre. The reason why is evident in his plays now collected and published for the first time.Translated by Robert Leach and Stephen HollandIntroduction and translations of The World Upside Down A Wise Man Are you Listening Moscow?! Gas Masks and I Want a Baby (second version): Robert LeachTranslations of Roar China! and I Want a Baby (first version): Stephen HollandPublishers Maxim Hodak & Max Mendor