Lyubimov, Yuri Petrovich

Lyubimov, Yuri Petrovich (1917– ), outstanding Soviet director, who joined the company at the Vakhtangov Theatre after the Second World War. A production of Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan in 1962, which he staged with a group of his acting students, was so successful that he was made director of the Taganka Theatre in 1964, transforming it into a thriving centre for avant-garde productions. Although he was nominally the company's Artistic Director, it functioned in a tradition of Collective Creation that owed much to Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, and Brecht. In 1984 he was deprived of his citizenship and went into exile, living in Israel and directing plays and operas in several Western countries, including adaptations of Dostoevsky's novels Crime and Punishment and The Possessed in both England and America. (He had originally directed the former at the Taganka in 1983.) His citizenship restored in 1989, he directed at the Taganka A Feast in the Year of the Plague, based on Pushkin's writings, which he had staged at Stockholm in 1986. Later in 1989 his production of Hamlet at the Haymarket, Leicester, preceding a world tour, used the image of a vast curtain swinging across the stage which had dominated his earlier Hamlet in 1974.