ALMOST the only piece of scenery in Yuri Lyubimov’s production of “Hamlet”, in rep at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow from 1971, was an immense black roughly woven curtain bunched with dangling threads. It moved back, forth and sideways of its own accord, sometimes enfolding the actors, sometimes smothering them. And it made a special beeline for Hamlet himself, stalking and attacking him, so that he was forced either to avoid it, placate it, or fight it off.The curtain made a good metaphor for Mr Lyubimov’s career. As director of the Taganka from 1964 onwards he rebelled against the “boring gibberish” of Soviet social realism, stages cluttered with beds, chairs and samovars, and the stultifying clichés, as he called them, of Stanislavsky’s method acting. His own stages were stripped bare, perhaps to a sheet and a brick wall. His props were as few as possible: in his “Boris Godunov” two chairs, a crozier, a plank and a bucket (quite enough for a coronation), and in his “Crime and Punishment” just a moving door, symbolising the hero/murderer Raskolnikov’s dream of overstepping the bounds. The pace was hectic, episodic and cinematic in Eisenstein’s style, heavily...
from The Economist: Obituary http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21627550-yuri-lyubimov-revolutioniser-russian-theatre-died-october-5th-aged-97-fighting?fsrc=rss|obi
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