Mayakovsky Theater

The Mayakovsky Academic Theatre on Bolshaya Nikitskaya in Moscow is a 1,067-seat dramatic theatre named after the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. It was founded in 1922 as the Theatre of the Revolution and renamed in 1954 on the 25th anniversary of the poet's death. The stage is closely tied to director Nikolai Okhlopkov, who shaped Soviet theatre here in the 1950s and 1960s with sweeping spatial productions that repeatedly turned the stalls themselves into playing area. The repertoire still mixes the Russian classics - Ostrovsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov - with guest productions from independent companies. An evening here means sitting in a neoclassical hall a few minutes from the Kremlin and watching Russian acting in the lineage of the great Soviet repertoire theatres.