Educative role of provincial theaters of the "thaw" period (on the example of Chelyabinsk)

This article deals with one of the leading functions of the theater (from Antiquity to the present day), which is the educational function. The authors of the article show that during the Khrushchev’s thaw (as in the entire Soviet period), the theater was assigned a special role in educating a new person - a worker, a communist, a patriot, ideologically loyal to the ideas of the party. The purpose of this article is to study the educational role of provincial theaters during the thaw period. Publications on the theatre theme in the provincial socio-political newspaper Chelyabinskii Rabochii for the period from 1953 to 1963, as well as official documents and visual materials and the educational work of provincial theaters on the example of the city of Chelyabinsk are presented. The analysis of the studied materials reveals that theatres educated the audience in three directions: through the repertoire policy (the production of plays was agreed with the party committees), through the image of the main character on the stage, and the image of the enemy. The analysis of the sources identified the main forms of the theater's work to fulfill the educational function directly at the meetings with the audience, through the patronage of theaters with the amateur factory and other theaters, meetings of actors with workers and collective farmers, meetings with pioneers, conferences. The study of the materials of the periodical press brings us to the conclusion that the educational mission of the theater was national, the regional specifics in this work are practically not traced. The system of working with the audience, built in the study period, was the same, both for the capital and for the provincial theater. Despite the dominance of ideological tasks over artistic ones, the theater managed to maintain its main mission that is the education of aesthetic taste and cultural enrichment of a person.