Russia’s top theater director dies at 97
Print Edition
YURI Lyubimov, a director who dominated Russian theater for half a century, has died at age 97, after being admitted to a Moscow hospital last week with heart failure.
Lyubimov founded and headed Moscow’s Taganka Theater for 50 years, winning renown for his hugely visual and inventive shows, and influencing a new generation in post-Soviet Russia.
“Yuri Lyubimov has died at the age of 97,” Botkinskaya Hospital said in a statement.
President Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences, saying “it was hard to overestimate the role of Yuri Lyubimov in the development of contemporary Russian theater,” his spokesman Dmitry Peskov told RIA Novosti.
Born before the 1917 revolution, Lyubimov began directing avant-garde theater productions in the 1960s.
He worked with some of the greatest luminaries in Soviet and Russian culture, including director Vsevolod Meyerhold who was executed in the Soviet purges, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, and writer Boris Pasternak.
He founded the Taganka Theater where he directed dozens of productions of plays and stage versions of Russian novels that drew worldwide recognition. The theater was seen as a beacon of truth-telling and resistance to Soviet-era orthodoxies, but ran into major trouble with the authorities, who banned several of its productions.
Then, in 1984, Lyubimov was stripped of his Soviet citizenship after giving an interview to Britain’s The Times newspaper while putting on a play in London where he spoke out against Soviet culture policies. For half a decade Lyubimov lived in exile, putting on theater and opera productions in Europe and the United States.
But with the onset of perestroika, Lyubimov returned to Moscow in triumph in 1988 and quit the Taganka Theater in 2011 after leading it for half a century.
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