Blue Pencil Wanted

M. Lunacharsky, who as Commissar of Education is also Supreme Lord of Theatreland in All the Russias, is a playwright. Last week his Hertzog (Duke) was produced at the People's Theatre in Moscow. That was not all. At the Little Theatre in Moscow Julius Caesar, a play by a lesser author named William Shakespeare, was also produced.

The Bolshevik critics attacked both authors from a purely Marxian viewpoint, but were harsher to Lunacharsky than to Shakespeare. They thought Shakespeare's play was capable of "'proletarian" interpretation, though as produced in Moscow, gave a "disgusting, vulgar, ignorant, bloodthirsty" effect.

Referring to the great Bolshevik playwright, a critic contended that the author explains in the preface the intended inner revolutionary meanings of the play. But how wide is the gulf between Lunacharsky, as a prefacial explainer, and Lunacharsky as a dramatist. The play is based on sex and mysticism--religious mysticism at that.

"It is a fine dramatic picture, artistically conceived, realistically executed. But we ask whether there is not yet a third Lunacharsky addition to the prefacial exponent and the dramatist-- Lunacharsky the Bolshevik Commissioner of Education and head of the censorship--and whether the latter doesn't think this production of our national proletarian theatre needs a heavy dose of blue pencil."