The acclaimed Russian stage director Dmitry Krymov the winner of many of Moscow’s top theatre prizes before his exile due to public criticism of the invasion of Ukraine, has spoken angrily of the impact of the war ahead of his first work with British actors. The Moscow-born director, 70, plans to use Dickens’s two stories Great Expectations and Hard Times to create a new performance.
Arriving in London this weekend for a short stay, Krymov, who is regarded by many western theatre pundits as among the best directors in the world, told the Observer he wants to link British and Russian performers and audiences, despite the divisions caused by President Vladimir Putin.
“It is because of this that we wanted to create our Dickens show,” he said, before the first of his acting workshops. The rehearsals have been set up by Margaret Cox, the writer and producer who is also the daughter of the Scottish Succession star Brian Cox, in collaboration with one of Krymov’s former students, Lucie Dawkins of Scrum Theatre in Hammersmith. “My brother, the actor Alan Cox, and I have long admired Krymov, so we have been supporting him in any way we can,” said Cox.
Krymov hopes to create more of the kind of cultural exchanges that have recently been blocked both by sanctions and bad feeling towards Russia. His anger and sorrow at leaving Moscow, where he was a key cultural figure, are now a driving force behind his work, he said, although he recognises the pitfalls of using entertainment to send out a political message. “It’s a process. Expressing your pain in artistic form is not easy at all; you just want to shout out what you think in direct, unprintable text,” he said.
His period of exile, which began when he signed a letter of protest in 2022, the day after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, has given him new energy, he suspects. “As the saying goes: ‘What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger’. So, I hope to prove with my activity now that we are in this unexpected crack in the earth’s crust, that not everything is subject to the laws of physics. In other words, I try not to fall into the abyss, but stage performances on the crack’s edge.”
That February day three years ago, Krymov had flown to the US with his wife, Inna, ready to carry on work on a production of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in Philadelphia. But on landing, friends and concerned colleagues back in Moscow warned him it would now be too dangerous to return to Russia.
In an interview with the broadcaster Voice of America, Krymov compared the threat of the invasion to that posed by the second world war. Immediately, seven of the nine different shows he had running in theatres across Moscow were shut down. His name was removed from the posters of the remaining two; they have now also been closed.
Until that point Krymov had been both critically admired and popular in Russia, famously using experimental techniques and winning many Golden Masks, the equivalent of an Olivier award or a Tony award on Broadway. He is also the child of well-known parents; a director, Anatoly Efros, born in territory now inside Ukraine, and a critic, Natalya Krymova.
Krymov, who took his mother’s name, had already been critical of Putin, signing an open protest letter after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, but he had been left to work relatively unchecked.
As an exile, he travelled first to Latvia, France and Israel, before settling in New York and setting up an actors’ workshop there. He has since argued against strict cultural boycotts, which he sees as potentially counterproductive. “The desire to destroy everything Russian on a national basis is also nationalism,” he has said.
During his stay in London this week, Krymov will answer questions after a screening of his show Все тут, or “Everyone Is Here” – based on Our Town, a classic of American theatre by Thornton Wilder – at Ciné Lumière South Kensington.
This weekend he said he was looking forward to gaining an understanding of British talent, adding that all actors who move from a film set to the stage of a theatre are moving “from Disneyland to an empty space”.
He had, he added, no clear idea of London’s theatrical style yet, although he has seen the difference between Broadway and off-Broadway shows. “In the Russian tradition, people come to the theatre in search of answers to questions that concern them, while on Broadway, people come to have a good time.”
In Russia, he said, he hoped that, despite the war, “the basic need to hear something important, something not written in the newspapers or said out loud, will still remain.”
