Daily Journal:

The scandal is clear. There has been internal confrontation in the theater for a long time. Most recently, it spilled out during a meeting in the theater dedicated to the possible transition to an autonomous method of management. The theater employees always have the feeling that Lyubimov wants to privatize the theater. No one can really explain what this will look like, but the tension in this regard is growing. The situation is very difficult, the tension is also due to the fact that Yuri Petrovich’s wife and son work in the theater, everything is aggravated by the fact that they talk rather unpleasantly with the artists. I have heard many times that Katalin allows herself to be harsh. Yuri Petrovich also never minced words, but out of love for him, the artists take this more calmly, and his wife is a stranger to them. Artists constantly make claims that they are underpaid. Now they say that all the tours they go on are actually fee-based and the receiving party pays fees, and Yuri Petrovich says that the tours are image tours, that is, without fees. The actors say this has been happening for quite some time. It is difficult to check this without papers. Lyubimov, of course, in turn accuses the artists of being lazy, that they are very inert, that instead of rehearsing and playing normally, they constantly star in TV series - like, in fact, all the artists in Moscow - and do not warn him about this, they perform their duties poorly. In almost all dysfunctional theaters, the director and the troupe present similar complaints to each other. The peculiarity of the Taganka Theater is that Lyubimov really created the image that the theater now has. Otherwise, the conflict is absolutely the same as everywhere else: a difficult troupe, the unsatisfactory financial situation of the theater, mutual reproaches.

If Yuri Petrovich really leaves - although one cannot be one hundred percent sure of this, he has said more than once that he is leaving - we will get another unfortunate, abandoned theater that is not in the best condition, the director of which will be invited, as I already wrote, drama club of the rubber factory. The Stanislavsky Theater has just replaced director Alexander Galibin, against whom one can have any complaints, with director Valery Belyakovich - one cannot say that he is the most prominent director, although his Studio Theater in the South-West 25 years ago thundered and now continues to exist, and he sometimes stages performances at the Doronin Moscow Art Theater. From this it follows quite clearly that sane directors who have some kind of reputation and are at the same time capable and ready to lead an abandoned troupe, which is not in the best shape and is very conflicted, have run out. There were few of them before, but now there are none at all. It is necessary to make some fundamentally new decision: for example, to appoint a very young person. But the Department of Culture is obviously in a state of complete confusion. He can neither insist on his own, that is, leave the director in the theater and not follow the lead of the artists, nor resolve a confrontation of the opposite kind - the conflict in the Mayakovsky Theater was resolved, but only by removing the director. Our theatrical life is very unregulated and not at all similar to the Western one. It is difficult to appeal to Western experience. There, if a person created a theater, then it is his private theater. The Briton Declan Donnellan, who often stages in Moscow, has his own theater that he created. When he stages abroad, the theater either does not work, or his productions are shown somewhere, but there is a management that deals with all such issues. We have a stationary theater owned by the state, which must pay salaries, pay for utilities, and at the same time it is assigned to one person, because this person once created it. So is this his theater or not his? If this is a state theater, it might be worth adopting the rotation system common in the West so that directors change. Lyubimov is no longer a young man, and the actors may want something different. We still haven’t gotten rid of the Soviet theater system. Theaters cannot do anything with old artists hired 30 years ago; according to the contract, they can only recruit new ones. A gigantic ballast is formed; in our theaters the troupes consist of hundreds of people. This tangle of unresolved problems began to make itself felt a long time ago, but has only become noticeable now thanks to several scandals.