Eisenstein's theatrical background played an important role in the development of his montage theories.  Even at an early age, he was transfixed by the stage.

When he was 11, Eisenstein experienced the circus for the very first time, and it was from this moment that his love of theatre began.

Having studied the 'anti-illusionist' theatre of the commedia dell'arte, he began, in 1916, to frequent Evreinov's Vaudeville Theatre.  Influenced by the work of the great director and actor Vsevolod Meyerhold, Eisenstein made his first theatre set designs and wrote his first plays in the Autumn of 1917.

However, his first practical experience in theatre came in 1919 when he worked as a director, designer and actor at the Communist Club of Vozhega.

As he continued to design sets and costumes for such plays as Averchenko's The Double, he was transferred to the First Proletkult Workers' Theatre where he was appointed head of design.  At the Workers' theatre Eisenstein was involved in designing such productions as Tolstoy's The First Distiller, Moliere's Tartuffe and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
 

It was in April 1921 that Eisenstein, having been appointed to Collegium of the Proletkult Theatre, first met Meyerhold.  He observed the rehearsals for Meyerhold's second production of Mystery Bouffe and, in September, enrolled at the State Higher Theatre Directors' Workshop (GVYRM).  In 1922, he assisted Meyerhold in his production of Tarelkin's Death.  However, by 1923, Eisenstein had turned his attention to cinema and, in his production of the play Enough Simplicity, he included his first film, Gloumov's Diary, as an insert. This coalescence of theatre and film was reflected in his essay, 'The Montage of Attractions' which appeared in Lef in 1923.

Fig1.  Eisenstein and  fellow students at Meyerhold's Directors' Workshop.

It was here that Eisenstein first publicly and indirectly introduced the premise of dialectical montage by describing his experiences on the theatrical stage:

Theatre's basic material derives from the audience: the moulding of the audience in a desired direction (or mood) is the task of every utilitarian theatre (agitation, advertising, health, education, etc.).  The instrument of this process consists of all the parts that constitute the apparatus of theatre because, despite their differences, they all lead to one thing - which their presence legitimates - to their common quality of attraction.(30)

Even here, at such an early stage in his career and having made no major feature films, Eisenstein appeared to be describing dialectical montage.  The instruments he describes above take the form in cinema of shots which, when they collide, function to mould the audience emotionally.  As he goes on to suggest:

An attraction (in our diagnosis of theatre) is any aggressive moment in theatre, i.e. any element of it that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator in their proper order within the whole.  These shocks provide the only opportunity of perceiving the ideological aspect of what is being shown, the final ideological conclusion.

Another aspect of revolutionary Soviet theatre which clearly influenced Eisenstein's montage, was its cubist and futurist art principles.  Although he did not specifically equate his montage with such a 'Western' term as cubism Eisenstein, in accordance with the cubist aesthetic, believed that the best pieces of montage were those which are incomplete. In figure 2, we find a prime example of this cubist/futurist design working in theatre.  Meyerhold's model for The Bathhouse, with its conflicting vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines and its sparse, industrial aesthetic parallels quite sharply with many of the shots (with their conflicts of scales, lines, etc.) found in Eisenstein's films (the urban landscape of Strike with its scaffold structures and platforms is clearly influenced by Meyerhold's set designs) .

Fig 2. A model for Meyerhold's production of Mayakovsky's The Bathhouse.

Indeed, Meyerhold's system of actor training, 'Biomechanics' (opposing Stanislavsky's naturalistic methods) was widely used in revolutionary theatre and greatly influenced Eisenstein's theories of montage. In many of Meyerhold's productions, some of which Eisenstein assisted on, actors would acquiesce with one another so that, as in the montage of attractions, for every positive action there would be a negative.  Indeed, in certain plays, Meyerhold would place detonators under the seats of unwitting performers.  The blasts would send them hurtling into the air and thus, like Eisenstein's montage, generate shock within a surprised audience.

Fig 3. The anti-naturalist 'biomechanics' system of acting.