Titan of Russian theatre for half-century, Yuri Lyubimov dies at 97

MOSCOW: Yuri Lyubimov, a director who dominated Russian theatre for half a century, has died at 97, after being admitted to hospital last week with heart failure.

Lyubimov founded and headed Moscow's Taganka Theatre for 50 years, winning worldwide renown for his hugely visual and inventive shows, and influencing a new generation in post-Soviet Russia.

"Yuri Lyubimov has died at the age of 97," Moscow's Botkinskaya hospital said in a statement to TASS news agency.

President Vladimir Putin expressed his condolences, saying "it was hard to overestimate the role of Yuri Lyubimov in the development of contemporary Russian theatre," his spokesman Dmitry Peskov told RIA Novosti.

Born before the 1917 revolution, Lyubimov began directing avant-garde theatre productions in the 1960s.

He worked with some of the greatest luminaries in Soviet and Russian culture including director Vsevolod Meyerhold who was executed in the Soviet purges, the composer Dmitry Shostakovich, writer Boris Pasternak and the actor Vladimir Vysotsky.

He founded the Taganka Theatre where he directed dozens of productions of plays and stage versions of Russian novels that dazzled the Soviet public and drew worldwide recognition.

The theatre became seen as a beacon of truth-telling and resistance to Soviet-era orthodoxies, but ran into major trouble with the authorities, who banned several of its productions.

Then, in 1984, Lyubimov was stripped of his Soviet citizenship after giving an interview to Britain's The Times newspaper while putting on a play in London where he spoke out against Soviet culture policies.

For half a decade Lyubimov lived in exile, putting on theatre and opera productions in Europe and the United States. His name was famously removed from all programmes and posters at the Taganka Theatre.

But with the onset of perestroika, Lyubimov returned to Moscow in triumph in 1988 and retained his near mythical status after the collapse of the Soviet Union, still putting on new productions in his 90s.

In 2011 he quit the Taganka Theatre after leading it for half a century, following an ugly fall-out with the troupe which he accused of being lazy and only interested in money.

He continued to work, directing his first-ever production at the Bolshoi Theatre in 2013, a boldly pared-down version of Borodin's opera "Prince Igor".