Moscow Theater of Drama and Comedy on the Taganka

(Theater on the Taganka), a theater created from the Moscow Theater of Drama and Comedy (founded 1946); its company includes graduates of the B. V. Shchukin Theatrical School that were trained by Iu. P. Liubimov, the head of the new group.

The theater’s first production, mounted while the actors were still in school, was Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan. Using the methods of K. S. Stanislavsky, V. E. Meyerhold, B. Vakhtangov, and B. Brecht, the theater staged plays that were highly poetical, satirical, and straightforwardly publicistic. The productions included Voznesenskii’s Anti-worlds (1965), Ten Days That Shook the World (1965; based on the book by J. Reed), Listen . . . (1967; based on a work by Mayakovsky), The Mother (1969; based on Gorky’s novel), The Rush Hour (1969; based on a work by the Polish author Stawinski), Vasil’ev’s The Dawns Are Quiet Here (1971), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1971), Comrade, Believe. . . (1973; based on a work by Pushkin), and The Benefit Performance (1974; after A. N. Ostrovskii).

In 1974 the theater company included Honored Artists of the RSFSR A. S. Demidova and Z. A. Slavina and the actors V. S. Vysotskii, V. S. Zolotukhin, V. B. Smekhov, and B. A. Khmel’nitskii.