Pushkin Theatre

Pushkin Theatre, Leningrad. This theatre, renamed in 1937 in honour of Russia's greatest poet, was founded in what was then St Petersburg as the Alexandrinsky. It opened in 1824, the same year as the Maly Theatre in Moscow. It had a fine leading actor in Karatygin but no dramatists of the calibre of Gogol and Ostrovsky, and it never developed a settled policy. For many years its programmes consisted of opera and ballet, and later of patriotic melodramas, and it was not until the end of the 19th century that the first stirrings of realism were felt with the production of such plays as Strindberg's The Father. The first production of Chekhov's The Seagull in 1896 was a complete failure, the company's old-fashioned technique being inadequate to the task of conveying the subtlety of the author's characterization. Just before the October Revolution Meyerhold was working at the Alexandrinsky, his last production there being a revival of Lermontov's Masquerade. Under the guidance of Lunacharsky the theatre weathered the storms of the early 1920s, and by 1924 was ready to include Soviet plays in its repertory, one of the directors at this time being Radlov. In 1937 Meyerhold returned to produce Masquerade again, and during the Second World War the company went on tour, returning to Leningrad in 1944. Interesting landmarks during its later history were a successful production of The Seagull in 1954, in which year it also staged Hamlet, and the 1955 revival by Tovstonogov of Vishnevsky's The Optimistic Tragedy. More recent productions have included Ostrovsky's The Last Sacrifice and Shteyn's Night without Stars (both 1975). The theatre has traditionally been a stronghold of fine acting, and although the death of Cherkassov in 1966 and of several other leading actors in the early 1970s weakened the company for a time, enough good young actors remained to sustain its high standards.