Russian Avant-Garde Theatre: War, Revolution and Design 1913-1933
V&A, London SW7
5 stars

HIDDEN in the far reaches of the V&A museum is a revelatory exhibition of Soviet theatre design by committed Bolshevik, communist and progressive artists who worked in the aftermath of WW1 and the 1917 October revolution.

This is socially engaged art, purposefully ideological in imagining the construction of a new world of social relations. When counter-revolution and “allied” intervention masterminded by Churchill threatened, the support provided for such innovation in the arts by the new Soviet state still impresses.

Entering the visually exuberant installation is exhilarating. It comprises 160 works of set design — most of which has not been seen before outside the archives of Russian museums and the V & A — shown within entirely red-surfaced spaces.

After the Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass route to the show through the retail bling and glitter of the museum shop and huge cafe, the experimental and handmade qualities of this Constructivist design has a dynamic integrity of form and content.

A large screen plays filmed sequences of the farcical French operetta Day and Night, produced in 1926 by Alexander Tairov of The Chamber Theatre in Moscow. The costume design is by the Stenberg brothers, best known for agitprop structures, their 1918 design for a railway workers’ club and their film posters.

The grainy film shows inclined ramps and stepped levels carving out the performance space for vaudevillian, crowded dance routines anticipating Busby Berkley’s 1930s Hollywood musical spectaculars.

Interestingly, the Stenbergs produced designs for plays by US playwright Eugene O’Neill, friend of John Reed, the journalist-writer of Ten Days That Shook the World. On show also are designs by film-maker Sergei Eisenstein for a George Bernard Shaw comedy and the architect Alexander Vesnin’s costume designs for GK Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.

At every turn in the maze-like display space, strong form and colour mark the relevance of this “shock of the new” for that time of international conflict and political rupture.

For our time it retains a modernity, though rooted in the “everyday” life of a period developed from craft traditions but aspiring to futuristic effect. Throughout, recordings of revolutionary anthems, including the International, aptly underscore the “theatrical” subject of the display and LED moving message-boards scroll artists’ statements around the walls.

The earliest works are Kazimir Malevich’s 1913 drawings of black forms on a white ground for cloth stage backdrops in a Futurist opera. His driving concern for the “supremacy of pure artistic feeling” misfits the collective values that prevail in this show of interdisciplinary work by artists, architects, writers and directors.

While art historians document his work fully, the little-known set designs made from 1915-18 by his contemporary Vladimir Tatlin are little known, his name being associated with one work, the unrealised towering steel monument to the Third International.

Similarly, Eisenstein is generally acknowledged as a dominant figure in 20th-century film-making but here is work he made from 1920-24 as a set and costume designer for experimental theatre companies.

The staging of Mayakovsky’s satirical play The Bed Bug, written for Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Moscow theatre and directed by him in 1929 with music by Dmitri Shostakovitch and set and costume design by Alexander Rodchenko, demanded close collaboration between these four key figures of the developing revolutionary culture.

By comparison, the visual language of later Soviet Realism is conservative, reactionary and overwhelmingly petit bourgeois in its taste for the unreality of a nostalgic past. Its promiscuous referencing of historical cultural forms —neo-classicism et al — is the stuff of post-Modernism born of late capitalism.

The work of women artists is given prominence— there are a dozen pieces by Alexandra Exter, including costumes for the Soviet sci-fi film Aelita and an exquisite, reconstructed model of Lyubov Popova’s kinetic set design for The Magnanimous Cuckold, Varvara Stepanova’s pared down, functionalist costume design and much more by women designing for all the performing arts.

Such treasures reinforce the impression that this rich display deserves more prominence, greater accessibility and a larger exhibition space.

Even so, it provides the perfect antidote to the imminent season of TV hell and celebrity-ridden theatrical “fun.”

Runs until January 25, opening times: www.vam.ac.uk. Free.