Over the past three years, many theatre professionals from Russia have had to reinvent their practice abroad, adapting it to new contexts and unfamiliar audiences. The exceptional work of young talented directors as well as their established compatriots such as Butusov, Didenko are proving just how resilient Russian theatre is today in exile.

Russian has lost many of its most talented creative thespians over the past few years, and not only individuals but also entire theatre companies have moved abroad. In the summer of 2022, the Lubimovka festival of drama in the Russian-language, which had existed for over three decades, left Moscow indefinitely and today it is thriving. It has become the go-to platform where you can discover the latest plays written and performed in Russian - regardless of where the playwrights are from. It is not an unusual case: there has been a real integration of Russian creatives into the theatrical landscapes of other countries.

How is the historical cataclysm reflected and interpreted in these Russian emigree productions? No better place to start than two highly acclaimed plays by two of Russia’s star theatre directors: ‘Gogol. The Portrait’ by Yuri Butusov (b. 1961) based on Esther Bol's play, and ‘Cremulator’ by Maxim Didenko (b. 1980) based on Belarussian author Sasha Filippenko's contemporary novel which were both staged around the same time in the West, both in the Russian language.

‘Gogol. The Portrait,’ a production at the ‘Mikhail Chekhov Theatre’ in Riga in May last year was a Butusovian multi-layered, viscous, three-act play where throughout the text remains subordinate to the visual, and the original plot of the short story ‘The Portrait’ by Nikolai Gogol (1809-1952) about an artist who is seduced by the devil – the artist finds wealth and fame but loses his talent - remains in Butusov’s production in only a suggestive, implicit form. The protagonist, a painter called Chartkov, is played not by one, but four different actors who represent various alter-egos. The Devil combines many typical Gogolian characters who poison Chartkov's soul with various temptations: there is an ever-patient androgynous, calculating official with a briefcase, a sceptical philosopher, a female seductress, and an innocent girl.

The play is set in no obvious time or place, its central message the complex fate of creative individuals in authoritarian societies, both real and fictional, including Nikolai Gogol himself who became friendly with the authorities and then fell into creative impotence. The theme of ‘artist and power’ may be timeless, but ‘Gogol. Portrait’ touches a particular nerve today: should you sacrifice your soul, convictions, and own conscience for the sake of professional recognition and support? What is the price of this sacrifice?

Compared with the baroque Butusov-Nekrošius, Maxim Didenko's one-act ‘Cremulator’ seems stark and raw for its minimalism. The play premiered in Berlin in early 2024, and then toured around major European cities, including London, Limassol, Belgrade, and Prague. The vast interior space of the St. Elisabeth-Kirche, where the production was performed at the ‘Voices festival’ in Berlin in November 2024, was turned into a stage by Alexander Barmenkov (b. 1988) designed to express something of the protagonist’s notion that: “Funerals are the last celebration before infinity.” There was a focus on geometric abstraction with pared back constructivist colours, red light columns ‘pierced’ the grey church walls from top to bottom, and three identical sections with seats for the audience surrounding the stage on three sides with four grey coffin shaped modules with black ashes and red flowers.

In this visually dramatic production, it is spectacle not narrative that reigns supreme, and minimalism also shapes the plot. In the colourful, eventful and tragic life of an aristocrat who was born in the Russian Empire and executed in the USSR there arise existential questions of our own era which materialise through the various interactions between the three main characters: the investigator, the accused, and his lover Vera. This method of constructing a dramatic visual spectacle is rooted in the tradition of the Italian futurists, in the 1920s quickly adopted by the great Russian avant-garde directors onto the Soviet stage.

I believe ‘Cremulator’s success in Europe is due to the fact that this production – a showcase of the latest aesthetic achievements of the Russian box office in the best sense of the word – is exciting audiences because of its formal, visual qualities as well as the powerful acting on stage. Additionally, the attempt to view Russian reality through the optics of first-wave emigrees resonates with the heart and soul of the significant Russian-speaking diaspora in Europe.

Questions arising from notions of ‘artist and power’ posed in the 2024 production of ‘Eisenstein’ by Julia Aug (b.1970), based on a play created specifically for the Estonian Drama Theatre by Mikhail Durnenkov, are similar to those raised in Butusov-Bol's ‘Gogol. The Portrait’. The dramaturgical device where the main character is interrogated in an NKVD cell also evokes Didenko-Filippenko's work. Performed in Estonian, in ‘Eisenstein’ the main character is not the world-famous genius of the cinema, but an NKVD officer called Savely who is assigned to monitor Eisenstein while he works on the film ‘Ivan the Terrible.’ This naive devotee to Bolshevik ideals, in the process of surveillance, becomes ‘hooked’ on Eisenstein’s personality and creativity as if on a powerful drug and eventually gets ‘burnt up’ in the punitive furnace of power.

In an interesting parallel, millennial director Ilya Moshchitsky (b. 1984), who has also integrated himself into a new environment outside Russia, also found inspiration in the personality of a famous film director who lived and worked in the country where Moshchitsky now lives - Armenia. ‘Moranal’ (To Forget) which was staged at the National Theatre in Yerevan was dedicated to Sergei Parajanov, whose centenary the cinematic world celebrated in 2024. It was a meditative production, which captivated viewers with beautiful mise-en-scènes, rough and smooth montages, the musical intonations of the voices of the actors, the whole effect like a homage to ‘The Colour of Pomegranates,’ Parajanov’s most legendary film shot in 1968 at Armenfilm Studio.

Berlin is a Mecca of sorts for thespians and a place where the most diverse and outlandish of ideas can be expressed and realised on stage and where individuals, if they are persistant enough, will evetually have their voice heard. The 2023 Berlin production ‘The Red Folder’ by Natalia Lapina, artistic director of the independent St. Petersburg City Theatre that she founded in 2016, is a true story about how a young family – the director herself, her Ukrainian husband, and their eighteen-month-old daughter – fled St. Petersburg in the spring of 2022, hurridly packing just a few of their belongings into their old car. It is a typical road movie where the main struggle is a kind of battle with their fate, where at every point in Europe they encounter good people who pull the heroic protagonists out of desperate and even dangerous situations. This work, performed in different languages, belongs to the genre of autofiction increasingly popular in the theatre not just as a literary form, and is currently still being performed at the Urban Theater in Berlin which Lapina founded in 2023.

Elsewhere, there is the participatory performance ‘Best Funeral Ever (my Russian funeral)’ by Natasha Borenko (b. 1986) and Lida Golovanova. Both studied playwriting and took part in Moscow's Lubimovka festival, with a personal fascination in social and performative forms of theatre. ‘Best Funeral Ever’ written in 2023 is the pair's first collaborative work in Berlin. The enacted funeral ritual took place in the small black box of Ballhaus Ost, where spectators were initially shocked by encountering a coffin resting on a platform with a performer (the playwright Natasha Borenko) lying inside it. Thenceforth, from inside the coffin the ‘deceased’ directed all stages of the funeral ritual, inviting someone from the audience to choose clothes for her, wash her body and discuss the shape of the coffin. Everyone spoke English at basic A1 level, so it all felt a bit like children play acting a funeral. At the end the performance suddenly turned into a theatrical production when Borenko, rising from the coffin, crosses through a circle of participants to the opposite side of the hall, decorated by artist Ksenia Peretrukhina’s (b. 1972). Bathed in a gentle light, with black platform cypresses in pots she lies down in a cosy grave after thanking the partipants in the ceremony in a short but sentimental speech. Playing funerals – “this is my way of coping with life” – as Borenko confesses to the audience at the beginning. But what hides behind this rather sweet, yet naive gesture, and behind the facade of life itself if this is what we do to cope?

While the future will judge the real scale and significance of today’s Russian emigree theatre, one cannot deny the true high professionalism of Russian creatives in theatres across the world. It is unsurprising that heavyweights of Russian directing such as Dmitry Krymov (b. 1954), Yuri Butusov, Kirill Serebrennikov, Maxim Didenko, Timofey Kulyabin (b. 1984) and famous actors Maxim Sukhanov and Chulpan Khamatova (b. 1975) have found work in exile; however, less famous but no less interesting figures continue their creative quests abroad, such as Yulia Aug, Ilya Moshchitsky, Vsevolod Lisovsky (b. 1967), as well as many others.

Although the current armed conflict is not articulated overtly in any of the productions I have mentioned, all of them speak about the present. Sometimes through the visor of history, sometimes by transforming events in their own lives or their own internal traumas into creative material for the theatre. ‘Eternal themes’ lie at the root of these very contemporary productions none of which could regrettably be performed today in Russia itself with the existing conditions of censorship in the arts.