The concept of "benefit": what does this word mean?

This concept is well known to all inveterate theater-goers. Many fans of talent actors like to come to their benefit, what 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 we are considering is of French origin. It means "income" or "profit".

What is the reason for this?

The explanation is very simple. The fact is that similar performances were arranged in theaters of Europe in order to support the well-known actor financially. Most of the box office went to the beneficiary himself.

If we ask ourselves what is the benefit and when this tradition arose, we learn that the first such performance was played in France in the middle of the 18th century.

The success of such events was quite wide, so these performances attracted the attention of other theater keepers and the actors themselves.

Russian Benefit

As for our Fatherland, the tradition of actors to give a benefit (what is this kind of performance, we already knew) arose inour country at the very end of the 18th century. It was an unspoken way of supporting actors, musicians and playwrights, not only known, but also the poor.

In the system of the Imperial Theaters of Russia, these performances were given regularly. The beneficiary has the opportunity to independently choose the play for the production and even his own role in it.

Some famous actors took this opportunity to put on stage plays of young, but promising, in their opinion, the authors.

A special gift to recognize such talents wasactor Mikhail Semenovich Shchepkin, who played at the benefit performances in Nikolai Gogol's plays. The same flair was in the case of the artist of the Maly Theater Prov Mikhailovich Sadovsky, who was pleased to play the plays of A. N. Ostrovsky at the benefit performances.

Therefore, the actors loved the benefit, that such an action could bring them - they knew: and the material benefit, and good role.

However, already at the beginning of the 20th century, this type of performances was banned in the Imperial Theaters.

Current state of the problem

With the arrival of the Bolsheviks, the Russian theaterart was forced to obey the rules of the new time. By a decree of 1925, all such performances were banned, and the theaters themselves were nationalized.

So that old good benefit would die, thatthis is what some old-timers would remember. But gradually interest in benefit-performances began to revive. They turned into jubilee performances. Only to call them have become different: the author's evening of an actor, a jubilee performance and so on. Today this tradition is also in great demand.