Ismene Brown

Russians made the theatre space the most liberating imaginative device ever invented

Ismene Brown falls for Aelita, Queen of the Martians, and her three-cupped metallic bra at the V&A

You have to hand it to the Russians. They beat us into space, beat us to sexual equality, and a small display of early Soviet avant-garde theatre and film design, tucked away in the V&A’s ‘Performance’ area, proves that they beat us hollow in matters of the dressing-up box too. When you arrive (that is, if you arrive — it is a labyrinthine trek to find it) at Russian Avant-Garde Theatre, you should make straight for the little screen. It shows the amazing 1924 sci-fi film Aelita, in which an engineer living under ‘Military Communism’ builds a spaceship and flies to Mars where he falls for Aelita, Queen of Martians.

I checked when Perspex and Lurex were invented — 1934 and 1946 — and shook my head in disbelief, for the fabulous young designer, Alexandra Exter, created costumes that must therefore come from far in the future. Sci-fi meets art nouveau via constructivism. Gorgeous Aelita wears a three-cupped bra (Martians have three breasts, evidently), each cup gushing a torrent of metallic fabric. Her bodyguard, Gor, Guardian of Energy, is still more future-proof: a zigzag tears down his tubular metal body, wings of flexible glass curve around it and decorate his vizor, making Daleks look like dustbins by comparison.

2._Alexander_Rodchenko_Costume_design_for_We_1919-1920__A._A._Bakhrushin_State_Central_Theatre_Museum
Costume design for ‘We’ by Alexander Rodchenko, 1919-1920. Image: A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum

Exter is one of several amazing theatre visionaries of the 1920s whose fragile sketches and set models are assembled here, a handful from the V&A itself, but most in an unprecedented outing from the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum in Moscow. Many were saved discreetly from Soviet wastepaper bins in boxes of broken bits in dusty back cupboards. What a cliff-hanging story. But what a wasted opportunity. The 160-odd items are exhibited in gloomy light on blood-red walls and with barely readable captions at thigh-level, the direct opposite of the smack-in-your-eye performance impact they were designed to have.

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