Yevgeny Vakhtangov

Who was Yevgeny Vakhtangov?

Yevgeny Bagrationovich Vakhtangov was a Russian actor and theatre director who founded the Vakhtangov Theatre. He was a friend and mentor of Michael Chekhov.

Vakhtangov was born to an Armenian father and a Russian mother Vladikavkaz, Northern Ossetia. He was educated at Moscow State University for a short time and then joined the Moscow Art Theatre in 1911 and rose in the ranks, so that by 1920 he was in charge of his own theatre studio. Four years after his death, the studio was named Vakhtangov Theatre in his honor.

Vakhtangov was greatly influenced both by the theatrical experiments of Vsevolod Meyerhold and the more psychological techniques of his teachers, Konstantin Stanislavski and Leopold Sulerzhitsky, and the co-founder of the MAT Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. His productions incorporated masks, music, dance, abstract costume, avant-garde sets as well as a detailed analysis of the texts of plays and the psychological motivations of its characters. His most notable production was Turandot by Carlo Gozzi, which has played at the Vakhtangov Theatre ever since 1922. Another famous production directed by Vakhtangov in the same year was S. Ansky's "The Dybbuk" with the Habimah theater troupe.