Laureate of the Golden Mask, Russian National Theater Award; the Golden Soffit, the top theater award of St. Petersburg; K. Stanislavsky Theater Award; “The Seagull” theater award.

(Born 24.09. 1961)

Butusov graduated from the directing department of the St. Petersburg State Academy of Theater Arts (Professor Malochevskaya’s class) in 1996. His student directions of Gogol’s “Marriage” and “A Paradoxalist” after Fedor Dostoyevsky’s “Letters from Underground” attracted attention with their expressionist rigidity of the form and positioning of the problem: person’s vulnerability against the total violence of the world. The timid attempts of Podkolesin to gain some independence from the mocker dictator Kochkarev proved to be in vain: he opened the window with defiant dare to take a running jump out of it… for only to crawl convulsively up the rusty roof, already not a human being but a “sorry wight,” terrified to be squashed. The diploma performance “Waiting for Godot” by S. Beckett directed at the Theater in the Kryukov Canal immediately made the new director familiar to the entire theatric Petersburg. The performance was awarded for the “Best Direction” at the Christmas Parade Festival. Butusov tried to shift the situation of tragic despair through perturbing the statics, replacing the “consternation” of the Beckett’s characters with incessant moving forward – in the quest for Godot. Travel adventures often attracted the characters a lot more than the awaited meeting with Godot. Even the gloomiest episodes were turned into clownish patters, a carousel cascade of attractions. Paradoxically, but the director was coming to the same result with the author of the play: the endless trip turned into a futile running in place – from nowhere to nowhere, along a closed circle of life. The life broke into innumerous number of moments. The characters appealed to the unknown Godot, hopeless to get out of the senseless circulation and comprehend whatsoever. This performance gave birth to the creative alliance between the director and actors Michael Trukhin, Konstantin Khabensky, Michael Porechenkov, and Andrey Zibrov, along with artist Alexander Shishkin, which was continued in the performances of the Lensoveta Theater where all of them were invited by the theater’s Artistic Director V.B. Pazi. “Waiting for Godot” was shown as a Lensoveta Theater performance at the Golden Mask Festival (1999) and awarded in two nominations (“The Best Direction” and “The Critics’ Prize”). The first performance at the Lensoveta Theater became G. Buchner’s “Woyzeck” (1996).  The fragmented and unfinished drama, allowing to vary the composition voluntarily and to get rid everything unnecessary, as well as the tough expressivity of the dialogues and despair of the young author contemplating on the poor destiny of a human being subjected to the “fatality of history” suited only too well to the new experiment. The director was still interested in the fate of a person encountered unexpectedly with the rough and ruthless reality. As well as in “Godot” the director subdued the characters’ existence to the non-stop moving. But the character of the dance here was absolutely different from the “Godot” one, where the characters would forget about everything in the world “immersing” into a lezginka and experiencing feelings of fraternity and liberation in the madness of the dance. In “Woyzeck,” music coming down from somewhere above, dictated the strict hierarchy of relations. Characters were not dancing but hovering in return for their humiliation. Having indicated the genre as “tragic farce,”   the director separated the tragic world of Woyzeck with his passionate love to Maria from the farce elements of the rude carousel merrymaking. The carousel turns into a metaphor of the characters’ lives. It was not just a place of their meetings, but a place of collision of wills and of intersection of fates. “A good murder, a true murder…" – the final replica cast into the auditorium by the mocking fool Carp (K. Khabensky) referred both to the prone body of Maria and Woyzeck (M. Trukhin) himself squashed by the world of masks of the black “barrack style” carousel. The performance was distinguished with the Golden Soffit Award, the top theater award of St. Petersburg, as the best smaller stage performance of the 1996/1997 season.  A few years later, after the principal Butusov’s actors had moved to Moscow, this performance was renewed with a new cast. The next performance “A Watchman” by H. Pinter directed at the Theater in Liteiny in 1997 was also honored with a prestigious K. Stanislavsky Theater Award. Then again at the Lensoveta Theater, the scandalously popular “Caligula” by A. Camus with Konstantine Khabensky in the major role (1998) and the buffoon-farce “A Bug” by V. Mayakovsky (2000) with Michael Porechenkov were produced. In the same years, Vladislav Pazi invited Yury Butusov to teach at his course at the Theater Academy. Butusov directed “A Thief” after V. Myslivsky and “The Elder Son” by A. Vampilov as diploma performances; in the latter, the talent of Dmitry Lysenkov in the role of Sarafanov-senior was revealed for the first time. In the end of 1990s, Yury Butusov carried out production of a non-repertory project of “The Death of Tarelkin” by A. Sukhovo-Kobylin.

The next period of the director’s career was connected with Moscow where he, as it seemed then, moved for good and where he produced a number of quite successful performances, which put him into the row of the theater leaders: “Macbeth” by E. Ionesko (2002), “Richard III” and “King Lear” by W. Shakespeare at the Satiricon Theater , “Hamlet” by W. Shakespeare at the Chekhov MKhAT, “The Sunday. Super” by the Presnyakov brothers at the Oleg Tabakov Theater. In the Moscow performances staged at various theaters with different actors one and the same topic appears all the same: a person and the world evil, the inevitability of choice in the vicious circle of the uniform violence: “either you do this, or they do it to you.”

The “MAN EQUALS MAN” performance directed after the play of a classic of German theater Berthold Brecht “Mann ist mann” could be called a return of the director to St. Petersburg. He touches the topics only too actual in our days, at a war that ruthlessly destroys and derives of sense lives of each person: there cannot be a winner at war, and a man is doomed to become its victim.