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

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.