Vakhtangov Theatre

Vakhtangov Theatre, Moscow, Moscow Art Theatre's Third Studio founded in 1921 under the direction of the Soviet actor and director Eugene Vakhtangov (1883–1922), who joined the MAT as an actor in 1911. During his short career he made the widest possible use of theatre forms including an unsurpassed use of the grotesque. Under his dynamic leadership the studio began to break away from the parent theatre, staging two of his best productions—Maeterlinck's Le Miracle de Saint Antoine in 1921 and Gozzi's Turandot in 1922. In 1926 it was officially given its present name, and many important Soviet directors worked there, among them Meyerhold, Popov, Zavadsky, and Akimov, whose somewhat unorthodox production of Hamlet in 1932, with music by Shostakovich, caused controversy and drew the public's attention to the company. The first two parts of Gorky's uncompleted trilogy, Yegor Bulychov and Others (1932) and Dostigayev and Others (1933), were first seen at the Vakhtangov. Okhlopkov worked there, and several of Pogodin's plays were first seen at this theatre. After the Second World War the Vakhtangov again produced a number of new Soviet plays, including Arbuzov's City at Dawn (1957), It Happened in Irkutsk, and The Twelfth Hour (both 1959). The high artistic standards of its founder were sustained by Reuben Simonov from 1939 until his death in 1968, and maintained under his son Yevgenyi who succeeded him. An adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina was staged to mark Vakhtangov's centenary in 1983. In 1987 the theatre staged Mikhail Shatrov's The Peace of Brest-Litovsk, banned for 20 years because it showed the Bolsheviks’ internal arguments about signing the peace treaty with Germany in 1917; the production was staged in London in 1989.