All avid theatergoers this concept is well known. Many fans of talented actors like to come to their benefit, what such an event means, any of such people will tell you.
We will try to consider this concept in more detail.
History of the phenomenon
The word considered by us is of French origin. It refers to “income” or “benefit”.
What is the reason for this?
The explanation is very simple. The fact is that such performances were arranged in theaters of Europe in order to financially support the famous actor. Most of the box office went to the beneficiary himself.
If we ask ourselves what benefit means and when this tradition arose, we will find out that the first such performance was played in France in the mid-18th century.
The success from such events was quite wide, so these productions attracted the attention of other theater owners and the actors themselves.
Russian benefit
As for our Fatherland, the tradition of actors to give a benefit (what is this type of performance, we already knew) arose in our country at the very end of the 18th century. It was an unspoken way of supporting actors, musicians and playwrights, not only famous but also distressed.
In the system of the Imperial Theaters of Russia, these performances began to be given regularly. The beneficiary has the opportunity to independently choose a play for staging and even his own role in it.
Some well-known actors used this opportunity to stage plays by young, but promising, in their opinion, authors.
A special gift to recognize such talents was from the actor Mikhail Semyonovich Shchepkin, who played the performances in the plays of N.V. Gogol. The artist of the Maly Theater, Prov Mikhailovich Sadovsky, had the same intuition, who gladly performed plays by A. N. Ostrovsky at the performances.
Therefore, the actors loved the benefit, that such an action could bring them - they knew: both material benefits and a good role.
However, at the beginning of the 20th century in the Imperial theaters this type of performances was banned.
The current state of the problem
With the advent of the Bolsheviks, Russian theater was forced to submit to the rules of the new era. By a decree of 1925, all such performances were banned, and the theaters themselves were nationalized.
So this good old benefit would die, what is it - some old-timers would remember. But gradually interest in the benefits began to revive. They turned into anniversary performances. They only began to call them differently: the author’s evening of such and such an actor, an anniversary performance, and so on. Today, this tradition is also in great demand.