Korsh Theatre

History

The theatre was co-founded by the entrepreneur Fyodor Korsh and the actors Modest Pisarev and Vasily Andreyev-Burlak on the basis of the Anna Brenko's Pushkin Theatre which had gone bankrupt in 1881. In 1883 Korsh (who had received substantial financial help from the industrialist and patron of arts Alexander Bakhrushin) became its sole owner. Its earliest productions included Revizor by Nikolai Gogol, The Forest by Alexander Ostrovsky and Masquerade by Mikhail Lermontov.

The Korsh Theatre opened officially on 30 August 1885 and a year later staged its first major hit, Alexander Griboyedov's Woe from Wit. Daringly experimenting with technical stage effects, it instantly made itself a name as the most technically advanced theatre in Russia. Korsh's was the first totally electrified Moscow theatre in the days when even the Bolshoi and Maly Theatres relied mostly on gas lamps.

Initially 'cheap' comedies and vaudevilles (by Arkady Kryukovskoy, Dmitry Mansfeld and Ivan Baryshev among others) dominated the theatre's repertoire, but it was on their commercial success that the Korsh Theatre built its financial independence and started producing serious work, including plays by Henrik Ibsen, Hermann Sudermann and Edmond Rostand.

Leo Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness was premiered at Korsh's. It was this theatre that Chekhov the playwright was discovered. His play Ivanov was commissioned by Korsh personally in 1887. Later the theatre produced two more Chekhov's plays, The Bear (1888) and The Marriage (1902).

Each Friday the theatre presented a premiere. Almost invariably a half-baked production staged through three or four rehearsals, they bore the atmosphere of impovisation and attracted huge public interest regardless of the quality. The majority of such pieces were being dropped never to be returned to; some, like Charms of Love by Evtikhy Karpov or Summer Dreams by Viktor Krylov have lasted for years.

Korsh with his assistants regularly attended 'hottest' premieres at the leading European (mostly French) theatres, shorthanded the play's text sitting in the audience, translated it almost on the spot and rushed back to Moscow to stage a play which hasn't yet even been published back home. In the early 1890s it was the first to produce such popular European plays as Charley's Aunt by Brandon Thomas, M-me Sans-Gêne by Victorien Sardou, Business is Business by Octave Mirbeau, and Le Contrôleur des wagons-lits by Alexandre Bisson.

The emergence in 1898 of the serious rival in the face of the Moscow Art Theatre led by Konstantin Stanislavski, worried Korsh into inviting the stage director Nikolai Sinelnikov who brought with him several aspiring talents (among them Leonid Leonidov, Alexander Ostuzhev, Maria Tamarina-Blumental, Nikolai Radin) and staged some lauded productions, including Cyrano de Bergerac by Rostand, The Tempest by Shakespeare and Vanyushin's Children by Sergey Naydyonov. Some of them were highly successful (and Vanyushkin's Children received high praise from Stanislavski) but the theatre never succeeded in trying to regain its position as the leading force on the Russian theatrical scene.

Since 1917 the former Korsh Theatre was in the constant turmoil of reorganisations. It was known consequentially as the Union of Artists, The Third RSFSR Theatre, The Comedy Theatre (Former Korsh) and finally the Moscow Drama Theatre, before being disbanded in 1933, its director Karpov arrested and prosecuted, part of the troupe moved to the Moscow Art Theatre.

Nowadays the house on Petrovsky Lane, 3 belongs to the Theatre of Nations. It claims to follow the traditions set by its predecessor and stages occasional memorial events commemorating its history.