In the period following the Bolshevik Revolution a group of directors, playwrights, actors and organisers collected around the charismatic Vsevolod Meyerhold and attempted to achieve in the theatre what Lenin and his comrades had achieved in politics: the complete overthrow of the status quo and the installation of a new, utterly different regime. It was in the practical experiments of the revolutionary theatre that Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Foregger, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor' and others produced their most telling work. They created a fusion of popular forms and intellectual preoccupations which owed as much to the circus, Commedia Dell'Arte and the theatres of the fairgrounds as to the avant-garde experiments of the Futurists and Constructivists. The rise of Stalin in the late 1920s and the accompanying imposition of state terror on all manifestations of non-conformity silenced this golden age' of modern Russian-Soviet theatre. As a consequence little has been remembered of the efforts of this idealistic and radical group or their influence on today's alternative theatre. In Revolutionary Theatre Robert Leach reveals in fascinating detail their roots, their achievements and their legacy.