84-year-old theater star Liya Akhedzhakova banished from stage, together with D. L. Coburn’s ‘The Gin Game’

Liya Akhedzhakova, the 84-year-old star of Russian film and theater, told Novaya Gazeta that Moscow’s Sovremennik theater, where she had worked for nearly half-a-century, has decided to remove its production of D. L. Coburn’s “The Gin Game” from the repertoire.

Akhedzhakova’s role in the “The Gin Game” was her final role at Sovremennik. The celebrated actor told the independent outlet Podyom:

The manager warned me that I wouldn’t be in the repertoire anymore, because of the demands of some angry people who are writing letters to him, and that the [municipal] Department of Culture has confirmed that I should be removed from the company repertoire. I’m sitting here and crying. I know very well who is writing all this, who is organizing this, and there’s nothing I can do.

The February 13, February 28, and March 29 performances of “The Gin Game” have already been canceled. Akhedzhakova doesn’t expect to be invited by another theater company, since all Moscow theaters are answerable to the city’s Department of Culture.

Liya Akhedzhakova joined the Sovremennik troupe in 1977. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she condemned the war and called on other Russians to be equally vocal in protesting it.