Valery Fokin's new play is based on the story described in the Old Testament in the Book of Job. It is important that the Book of Job is one of the so-called teaching books, which contain life lessons and instructions. The story of Job, a righteous man who was severely tested by the one whom he faithfully served and in whom he had undivided faith, is told in the dialogues of the main character with his three friends. And each of them gives his own explanation of the reasons why his friend suffered fatal misfortunes and offers his own way out. 

Half a century later, the performance of the artistic director of the Alexandrinsky Theatre Nikita Kobelev returns to the Alexandrinsky stage one of the most important plays not only of the Russian but also of the world repertoire of the XX century.

Today, Maxim Gorky's dramaturgy turns out to be consonant with our time and free from interpretations of the Soviet era.

Nikita Kobelev's approach is characterized by close attention to the meaning of the work and the manifestation of what makes it relevant at the moment. In the director's new work, the play's characters will remain essentially the same homeless, confused people as in Gorky's play, but will be brought closer to the present day. At the same time, the authors of the performance would like to get away from the traditional reading of this play as a domestic, naturalistic play, and tell this story in figurative, conventional theatrical language.

The new performance by Nikita Kobelev, the Alexandrinsky Theatre's chief director, continues the line of works devoted to the comprehension of Russian history on the national stage. The literary basis is the original texts of correspondence between the Russian Empress Catherine the Great (1729-1796) and the French thinker, the first philosopher and writer of the Age of Enlightenment Voltaire (1694-1778). 

The correspondence between them lasted 15 years, from 1763 to 1778. The Russian reader a fairly complete corpus of texts (185 letters) for the first time became available only in 2022, with the publication of "Catherine II and Voltaire. Correspondence." Today, the epistolary conversations between the Russian autocrat and the French freethinker are a monument of the epoch, but also a testament to the characters, a novel of relations between two great people who respected and loved each other.

The mono-performance by People's Artist of Russia Nikolai Marton is based on the dramatic and poetic works of Alexander Pushkin and includes a musical divertissement.

Revolutionary show based on the play by Vsevolod Vishnevsky
Author of the performance — Viktor Ryzhakov.

An Anxious Box Keeper’s Sketch-Book - one-man performance directed by the Distinguished Artist of the Russian Federation Igor Volkov is the second piece of the Monologues at the Tsar’s Lobby cycle opened by the Monologues performance (currently named Faces and Roles) directed by the Honoured Artist of the Russian Federation Nikolai Marton and based on pieces of the classic repertoire.

Valery Fokin’s performance, dedicated to the life of legendary Saint Blessed Xenia of Saint Petersburg, the patron of the ‘world’s most malicious city’, has become one of the most notable productions within both city’s theatrical environment and in director’s career since its premiere on February 27, 2009. 

The new production of the legendary performance brings together masters and young Alexandrinsky Theatre actors.

For Nikolai Roshchin Children of the Sun was the first, but far from accidental appeal to the dramaturgy of Maxim Gorky. As to the dramaturgy of exactly classical, purified from ideological layers, from the seal of the work of the "proletarian writer".

So the very logic of creativity, perhaps unexpectedly, but led Nikolai Roshchin to this play by Gorky. The circumstances of the cholera epidemic, during which the play takes place, give the play a strange, disturbing topicality. But most importantly, Children of the Sun by Nikolai Roshchin is a modern look at the dream of an ideal and the search for happiness.

Chuk and Gek is the second performance directed by Patlasov at the New Stage. The first one is Noise based on a documentary play by Ekaterina Bondarenko.

The new performance by Patlasov is based on the Chuk and Gek novel by Arkady Gaidar, the writer’s diaries, and documented memories of those who have been prosecuted for political reasons and survived through Stalin’s camps. Those memories were documented by Andrei Sovlachkov and Alina Shklyarskaya, the playwrights of the project.

Andrei Kalinin opens for the theater the forgotten Soviet prose of the 1930s, his performance is the first stage treatment of the book by Panteleimon Romanov, whose peak of writer's popularity was in the 1920s.

Comrade Kislyakov - gloomy satire, here the agonizing reflections of the protagonist about his situation, his journey from Ippolit Grigorievich to Comrade Kislyakov through compromise and agreement unfold against the background of convex, detailed description of the epoch, Moscow of the late 1920s, rapidly changing, noisy, with a new way of life, communal life, kitchen and family squabbles and disputes about the place and purpose of the intelligentsia, about whether an individual can go against the masses.

The story of insanity gymnasium teacher of fine arts Ardalon Borisovich Peredonov became a diagnosis of the time, and its symbol. The Petty Demon completes the classic Russian prose, and its protagonist Peredonov - sinister and in some places grotesquely caricatured mixture of a dozen heroes of great Russian literature from Akaki Akakievich and Pechorin to Svidrigailov and "man in a case" Belikov. The popularity of the novel was such that the concept of "peredonovshchina" came into use.

The play Creature was written by theater critic and playwright Valery Semenovsky in 1999, on the eve of the new millennium, almost a hundred years after the novel was written.

Peredonov, on occasion and without "falling" to the great Russian literature, quoting Derzhavin, Pushkin, Dostoevsky for every outrage - as an image of our largely manipulative attitude to the Russian classics, which sometimes cover disreputable deeds and intentions.

The performance is based on the novel of F.M. Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment - the first work on the Stage of Alexandrinsky Theatre of one of the most prominent stage directors of the contemporary Eastern Europe, the artistic director of the Hungarian National Theatre, Attila Vidnyansky. 

In his interpretation of one of the most distinguished plays of the world repertoire, Nikolay Roshchin takes new scenic adaptation of the classical text, based on its contemporary direct translation. 
’Is such rigid Cyrano likely or wanted? How might the whole story have developed nowadays? This is what fascinates us in the new production of Rostand’s heroic comedy’.   

Demagogue by Hugo Erikssen (fresh graduate of Shchukin Theatre Institute and an apprentice of Rimas Tuminas) is a part of Alexandrinsky Theatre’s ‘Young directors premiere at the New Stage’ programme. A play of the same name by Kirill Fokin was an origin for the staging. 

Such an approach is perfectly fitting and justified in Demagogue: Hero’s rise and fall; fight for power and dominance, based on true historical events of Peloponnesian War; making the choice (or just an illusion of making) between democracy and dictatorship; an answer to the question ‘What rules today’s world: money or ideology?’

One part of the Fairy Tale’s Birthday performance belongs to the action, i.e. quest genre, which is very popular now, and the other one – to the multimedia reading genre combining academic acting, classic Russian folk tales, the best pieces of Russian and world culture, as well as multimedia technologies.

Continuing the themes raised in the play Today. 2016 - ..., and exploring the confrontation of global processes of personal tragedy, Honest Woman is addressed not to the genre of fiction, but to the modern political thriller, its action unfolds in our days. We are witnessing a behind-the-scenes drama in the highest echelons of power. Its proposed circumstances: pandemic, environmental crisis and terrorist threat, religious fanaticism of some, cynicism of others and idealism of the third. The clash of interests is inevitable: is humanism possible in politics today?

Andrei Kalinin’s How Blue It Is, The End of Alley… is based on the play by prominent painter, writer, theatre and film director Rezo Gabriadze, who is also the Art Director of the performance. This is Andrei Kalinin’s second production at the Alexandrinsky Theatre in Director’s chair: in 2017 he produced The Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, which is now performed at the Small Stage.

The most important goal of the performance was to create a scenic design which would accumulate the experience of the legendary Vsevolod Meyerhold’s nearly century old performance, given on the Emperor’s Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theatre in February 1917. By recreating the visual images and staging motifs of Meyerhold’s original script, reconstructing the authentic scenic design, music and rhythm to the smallest detail, the theatre offers the modern viewer a unique time-travelling opportunity.

Modern artistic and high-tech theatre methods make it possible to recreate one of the most excellent and balanced performances of the past in all its depth and beautiful detail. One of the important details was added by the unique collection of costumes and scenic props, recreated from A.Y. Golovin’s sketches for the original 1917 Masquerade performance and thus given a new life.

The authors of the performance refer to the biography and legend of Vsevolod Meyerhold. The literary basis is documentary evidence, memoirs and fiction. Among the actors next to Meyerhold - Stanislavsky, Nemirovich-Danchenko, Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Yesenin, Chaliapin, Bulgakov and other equally famous contemporaries. The life of the great stage reformer from birth to tragic death, his theatrical quest - all these are the subjects of "Meyerhold's Cabaret. Meyerhold. The story of changing times - from the Silver Age to the Revolution and the formation of Soviet power, fateful turns of fate and even the struggle of heroes with terrible villains is told with the use of masks, puppets and eccentric numbers. This is a documentary tale in the free and daring genre of cabaret - this is how the creators themselves define the genre of their performance.

The play is timed to the 150th anniversary of the birth of the great director and theater reformer Vsevolod Meyerhold. The text of the production is based on the transcript of the general meeting of the staff of GosTIM (Meyerhold’s State theatre) in December 1937, following the article of P. M. Kerzhentsev "Stranger’s Theater", published in the newspaper "Pravda".

Real dialogues of almost a century ago, it would seem, should immerse us in the theater documentary, testimonial. But in the dense fabric of everyday, acutely characteristic theater, Valery Fokin masterfully wove scenes of memories and fantasies of Meyerhold himself. Thanks to this, the conflict ceases to be domestic, but rises to generalizations, touching upon eternal questions: the relationship between the artist and society, the possibility of compromise between creative necessity and human justice, the measure of the artist's responsibility to himself and to those who followed him....

Theodoros Terzopoulos is a world-famous Greek-born theatre director, one of the leading European masters and an inventor of a unique acting method. His staging of Bertolt Brecht’s great play at Alexandrinsky Theatre’s Main Stage is the third appearance at our Theatre: the first was a premiere of Sophokles’ Oedipus Rex in 2006, which opened International Alexandrinsky Theatre Festival; second – a repertoire staging of Endgame by Samuel Beckett’s play of the same name.

My Being an Actor is a one-man performance by the Honoured Artist of Russia Vladimir Lisetsky. It continues the Monologues at the Tsar’s Lobby cycle.

At the center of the novel is the story of Nana, a Parisian courtesan. At her feet threw fortunes, reputations and even lives, sparkled on the theatrical stage, being an expensive kept woman, she dies in a hotel room, having contracted smallpox from her son, abandoned by her former lovers.

One should not expect Zholdak's performance to follow the plot logic of Zola's novel. The director, who has repeatedly stated and demonstrated his indifference to the text as such in his works, reveals a different logic, one that is not narrative at all. His literary basis becomes the starting point for theatrical dreams, fantasies and provocations that explore the depths of the human psyche.

One Eight Eight One - this production by Valery Fokin, Artistic Director of the Alexandrinsky Theater, opened the new 267th season of the theater and the XIII International Alexandrinsky Theater Festival.

Created in collaboration with theater artist Alexei Tregubov and musician Vyacheslav Butusov, this production captures only a few days of Russian history, which were marked by the end of the reign of Alexander II and the ascension to the throne of Alexander III. But it was those few days of 1881 that shook the whole of Russia and, as a result, determined for a long time the vectors of its social and political development.

In his performance Nikolai Roshchin, while retaining the plot of one of the most famous plays in the world repertoire, significantly reinterprets it. The basis of this performance is not an immutable literary monument, but a Shakespearean story read by a man of the XXI century and told in the language of modern theater.

The plot of Othello unfolds against the backdrop of the Venetian-Turkish war of the late 16th century. In Nikolai Roshchin's performance each of the main characters of the story gets the right to present his truth. In the play will sound version of Othello himself, Iago's version, Desdemona's version ...

The Process is the second play staged at the Alexandrinsky Theater by one of the leaders of the modern European stage, artistic director of the Hungarian National Theater (Nemzeti Szinház) Attila Vidnyansky. The first was a production based on F. M. Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment (2016). A performance of detailed reflection of the world of the novel and psychological polyphony of images. The leading theme of the performance was the loss of God, the influence of atheism, the plunge into chaos. Already here the presence and the onset of absurdity was revealed and emphasized scenographically (scenography - Maria Tregubova, Alexei Tregubov). Dostoevsky also manifested himself as a forerunner of Kafka in a world that had split apart and was not coming together into a unified whole.

"Resurrection" is Nikita Kobelev's first premiere at the Alexandrinsky Theater in the status of chief director. Tolstoy's last novel "Resurrection" (the writer worked on it intermittently from 1889 to 1899) It was first staged in Alexandrinka, in January 2024 the premiere took place on the New Vs. Meyerhold Stage, in May of the same year the play was transferred to the Main Stage. The stage adaptation, on which Nikita Kobelev is worked together with playwright Dmitry Bogoslavsky, includes motifs and individual scenes from other works of the classic, including the novels "Kreutzer Sonata" and "Father Sergius" and the unfinished story "Notes of a Madman". However, Tolstoy himself at the initial stage of work on the novel, thought about "to combine in it all his ideas," among others, mentioning these works. Nikita Kobelev's approach to classical texts is characterized by close attention to the meaning of the work, the director is not looking for an illustrative, but a meaningful correspondence to the author's thoughts and ideas. For Kobelev, the actual sound of the text is always important, the way it resonates with the audience here and now. In Tolstoy's novel, which recreates a broad panorama of Russian life at the end of the 19th century, the director is primarily interested in the private story of the protagonist Dmitry Nekhludov.

The performance Ruslan and Lyudmila is based on the poem of the same name by Alexander Pushkin and is primarily addressed to children over 12 years old and their parents.
Ruslan and Lyudmila is the first work on the Main Stage of the Alexandrinsky Theater by the young director Anton Okoneshnikov, well known in the field of creative search and experimentation in theater, including theater for children. Ruslan and Lyudmila is already the second performance staged by the director on Pushkin's fairy tale story on the big stage, after The Tale of Tsar Saltan (Theatre of Young Audience TYA named by A.A. Bryantsev ).
Director Anton Okoneshnikov conceived the play Ruslan and Lyudmila as a fascinating and bright multimedia adventure for school-age children and their parents.
So, Lyudmila, the daughter of Prince Vladimir, is kidnapped from her wedding bed by an unknown force. Ruslan and his three rivals go in search of her...

Schweik. The Comeback is a new production by Alexandrinsky Theatre's Artistic Director Valery Fokin, based on a play by Tatiana Rakhmanova. The play, in turn, is inspired by Jaroslav Hasek’s world-popular satirical novel The fateful adventures of the good soldier Schweik during the World War.

The mono-performance by honored artist of Russia Semyon Sytnik is based on documentary material. During the Siege of Leningrad Alexandrinsky Theater became a home that saved many lives. More than 200 people lived here. Among them were the employees of the theater, for various reasons did not leave for evacuation - 39 actors, stage and workshop workers. The sieged life of the theater was led by Nikolai Vladimirovich Levitsky, an artist, a former officer of the tsarist army, a man of impeccable honesty and sense of duty.

On the basis of his surviving records, documents from the archives of the Alexandrinsky Theatre and the Musical Comedy Theatre, memoirs of Nikolai Konstantinovich Cherkasov and his wife Nina Nikolayevna Cherkasova, Vera Arkadyevna Michurina-Samoylova, documentary evidence about the siege of Leningrad, the authors of the performance create a siege diary that could have been kept by Nikolai Vladimirovich Levitsky. This is a true story about the tragic time, about life in the theater, which became a dormitory and bomb shelter.

The years of Stalin’s power and his personality are among Russian history’s most tough, tragic and grievous issues, still breaking the Russian society up. However, every tragedy has its roots and that is what theatrical art seeks. Stalin. The Genesis is a story of spiritual and moral transformation of young revolutionary Joseph Jughashvili into totalitarian ruler, a story of how human dies and tyrant is born.

The literary basis of Andrei Kalinin's play is a free stage composition (authors — Andrei Kalinin and Hugo Erikssen) based on modernist prose of the early 20th century, as well as on other, most unexpected sources.
The protagonist of the play - the man from Dublin - is in a situation of both physical and mental escape from the surrounding reality. But escapism for him is not an end in itself; his obsession with the desire to comprehend the Truth is what pushes him to escape from everyday reality. There is no reference to a specific place of action in the text; the man from Dublin here means rather an outsider, a person not from here (it is appropriate to recall the hero of Camus's "The Outsider"), who is uncomfortable where and when he is. There are no references to a specific time of action - we are facing a parable, eccentric and grotesque in some places, absurdist in some places, once with elements of melodrama (the hero, of course, has a beloved one), and, of course, tragic in its general tone, because the very possibility of metaphysical escape is in question.

Konstantin Bogomolov's production based on the novel The Mother is his first work at the Alexandrinsky Theatre. The director's regular collaborators are involved in the work on the play. Production designer Larisa Lomakina (scenography and costumes), video artist Alan Mandelstam, lighting designer Ivan Vinogradov.

The novel, which became the starting point of Bogomolov's new theatrical work, was written in 1906, during the first Russian Revolution, under the impression of real events. The prototype of the young revolutionary Pavel Vlasov was Peter Zalomov, a locksmith at the Sormovsky factory, who organized one of the first May Day demonstrations in Russia in 1902.

Konstantin Bogomolov is Artistic Director of the Bronnaya Theatre, and has staged more than fifty productions in Russia and abroad.

This is not Nikolay Roshchin’s first attempt to stage a play by Gozzi. Back in 2011 he staged The Raven at the A.R.T.O. theatre, turning down the festive design characteristic of commedia dell’arte purposefully. In 2001 Nikolay Roshchin put on the play The Stag King (Russian Academic Youth Theatre, Moscow, 2001) which was recognized as one of the best Gozzi’s performances on the Russian stage. This rendering brought the director the Smoktunovsky Award and the Moscow Critics’ Association Award.

Chekhov's The Seagull is the most important dramaturgical text for the Alexandrinsky Theater. It was at the Alexandrinsky stage that the play premiered in 1896 (directed by Yevtikhiy Karpov) and has been revisited several times since, from Mikhail Darsky's production (1902) to Christian Lupa's most recent production (2007). The failure of the premiere of The Seagull was reflected by the theater at the level of scientific research - in the books "Alexandrinsky "The Seagull" and "A. P. Chekhov and the Alexandrinsky Theater at the Turn of the XIX and XX Centuries" by the theater historian and theater historian Alexander Chepurov. And in 2021 at the festival of young St. Petersburg directors in the program "Another Stage" and in the form of a performance - Chekhov Leaves the Theater, the genre of which director Vladislav Tutak defined as "an elevator ride in the footsteps of one high-profile failure".

Elena Pavlova does not reflect on the stage history of The Seagull; for her, Chekhov's text is not a professional drama about theater and literature, nor is it a costume production tied to a specific era. Pavlova, as in the case of The Cherry Orchard, "reads" Chekhov in the language of soundtrack, and the musical canvas of the play includes compositions specially created for the play by Oleg Gudachev and hits of Soviet and Russian pop music, through which the characters identify themselves and which are firmly planted in the mass consciousness and in a sense are part of the cultural code, resonating in the memory with lines, musical phrases and life events.

The performance continues the cycle of the Alexandrinsky stage coryphees "Monologues in the Tsar's Foyer". It was created in creative collaboration with the recognized master of mono-performance, People's Artist of Russia Igor Volkov.

Vertinsky. Russian Pierrot is based on musical short stories, songs of the great Russian actor, poet and chansonnier Alexander Nikolayevich Vertinsky (1889-1957). "... a poet, strangely singing his poems, all in words and images of bitter love, unlike anyone else, unprecedented, causing envy ... He was for me a phenomenon of art, the nature of which I can not determine, but which for me is nicer than others - the art of strange, fantastic" - wrote about Vertinsky Yuri Olesha. To get closer to the mystery of Russian Pierrot, to perform songs and poems of Vertinsky and together with the audience to understand how they resonate in the heart today - a longtime creative dream of the corypheus of the Alexandrinsky stage Nikolai Sergeevich Marton. Vertinsky. Russian Pierrot - more than a retrospective of comic arietas and sad songs Vertinsky. It is also a reflection on the artist's fate, in which the true tragedy of the past century resounds through the irony and mystery of talent.

Willing to live is a one-man performance by the Honoured Artist of Russia, Sergey Parshin.

This performance is based on one of the most popular works by F.M. Dostoyevsky – the Gambler.

Dostoyevsky is one of the authors that Valery Fokin’s artistic career is inextracibly connected to.