Yuri Lyubimov obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/oct/05/yuri-lyubimov

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The great Russian theatre director Yuri Lyubimov, who has died aged 97, was both a living history of his country's theatre and one of its most radical exponents. His Taganka theatre, which he opened in Moscow on Shakespeare's birthday in 1964, was the city's most popular theatre, founded with his drama students, and a focus of artistic rebellion in a repressive cultural climate.

The authorities first allowed the Taganka to travel abroad in 1976 – I saw it at an international festival in Belgrade – but Lyubimov was always fighting for survival. Shortly after visiting Britain for the first time, in 1983, and directing a sensational version of Crime and Punishment at the Lyric, Hammersmith, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship. For most of that decade he worked abroad, in America, and in Europe's opera houses, before being reinstated at the Taganka in 1989 during the period of perestroika.

But he continued to struggle with other factions in the Taganka and when, three years ago, the actors refused to work unless they received some wages, Lyubimov paid them from his own pocket and promptly resigned. "I've had enough of this disgrace, these humiliations, this lack of desire to work, this desire just for money," he said. His last production, in 2013, was an acclaimed version of Borodin's Prince Igor at the Bolshoi.

Like so many Russian directors, he drenched his productions in highly charged music, adapted many Soviet classics, loved Shakespeare and incorporated the teachings and styles – realistic and expressionist – of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold. But he created a sensual plasticity of staging that was all his own. Crime and Punishment, for instance, was all about a door, which characters walked through, laid down on, collaborated with, died under. The door was the key.

This poetic, metaphorical daring was anathema, perhaps, to British actors, but Michael Pennington still gave an extraordinary performance as the murderer Raskolnikov at the Lyric, and other actors bravely testing their mettle against an alien theatre culture included Paola Dionisotti, Sheila Reid and Bill Paterson. Lyubimov was generously acclaimed and awarded the 1983 Evening Standard best director prize.

Two years later, in a co-production at the Almeida, in Islington, north London, with Giorgio Strehler's Théâtre de l'Europe in Paris, he directed another Dostoevsky blockbuster, The Possessed, stunningly designed by Stefanos Lazaridis in a black-box forest of elastic material through which faces popped and bodies slid, as a small provincial town reeled from the intrusion of a bunch of crazed anarchists. Reproducing his Taganka style was more successful this time – the superb cast was led by Nigel Terry as Stavrogin, with Clive Merrison, Harriet Walter and Michael Feast conspicuous – and there was a great Alfred Schnittke score of skitterings and whinings.

Lyubimov, the middle of three children, was born in Yaroslavl, north-east of Moscow, the son of a grocery merchant, Pyotr Zakharovich Lyubimov, and a teacher, Anna Alexandrovna. His paternal antecedents were peasants, his maternal ones Gypsies. When the family fled from "collectivisation" – the appropriation by the state of agricultural land – both parents were arrested (and later released) in Moscow in 1922. Yuri studied at the Institute for Energy and, in 1934, joined the Second Moscow Art theatre of Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov. During this period, Lyubimov met Meyerhold and befriended both the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the playwright Nikolai Erdman.

Lyubimov graduated from the Vakhtangov theatre in 1940 as an actor and director and was drafted into the Red Army, serving in the NKVD (the government commissariat of the secret service) as a comedian and announcer for the NKVD choir and dance ensemble. He won a state prize in 1953, and in 1963, the year he started teaching, staged a daring adaptation of Brecht's Good Woman of Szechuan that pleased audiences as much as it shocked the establishment. The following year, he formed the Taganka with the leading actors Vladimir Vysotsky, the notable poet and subversive balladeer (whose funeral in 1980 was attended by a million people on the streets), and Alla Demidova.

Vysotsky led that Taganka company to Belgrade in 1976 as an unforgettable Hamlet. The set was a huge arras that moved, sweeping through and rearranging the actors like a ship of state; Elsinore's walls really did have ears, and Vysotsky was the angriest, most sullen and disgusted Hamlet I've seen. The other Taganka plays were John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World, the tale of the Bolshevik revolution done as a circus and clown show, with shadow play, agitprop and revolutionary songs; and a quiet, poetic tear-jerker, Here the Dawns are Quiet, about a Russian female patrol group coming to grief in the second world war.

Along with Piotr Fomenko and Lev Dodin, Lyubimov was the most admired Russian director of the late 20th century. He was hugely influential both at home and abroad. The British director Peter Brook, who also attended that Belgrade festival – the company was awarded the grand prix by the jury – was impressed, and Robert Sturua at the Rustaveli theatre in Tbilisi, Georgia, was a devotee.

A bullish, handsome and muscular man with clear blue eyes and a mane of white hair, Lyubimov was uncompromising in his beliefs and his working methods. And he never spoke any English, but communicated exactly what he expected from his British actors with his presence, his eyebrows, his volatility – and a couple of translators.

His more recent work included an appearance as Stalin in his own production of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's autobiographical play, Sharashka, in 1998, a renewal of his own Dr Zhivago in 2001, and a new version of Goethe's Faust at the Taganka in 2002.

During the first phase of his Moscow career, he lived for 15 years with the actor Lyudmila Tselikonskaya (she died in 1992), and he was married from 1978 to the Hungarian theatre critic Katalin Koncz. She, and their son, Peter, survive him.

• Yuri Petrovich Lyubimov, theatre director and actor, born 30 September 1917; died 5 October 2014