Khovanshchina, Wooden Horses, Shakespeare in Love. Works by famous stage designers

Design, along with director’s work and acting, is the hallmark of the production. A stage designer studies the characters and the setting of the play very carefully, and then selects the best stage sets.

We will tell you about outstanding designers who worked with the best theaters in Moscow.

Sergey Barkhin

Sergey Barkhin, People's Artist of Russia, multiple winner of the Golden Mask award, who designed productions of Moscow’s most famous theaters for about 50 years, was born in 1938 into a family of architects. His father, Mikhail Barkhin, developed the project for the Vsevolod Meyerhold Theater together with Sergey Vakhtangov, and his mother, Elena Novikova, taught architecture and was the author of the monograph entitled The Interior of Public Buildings. Sergey Barkhin graduated from the Moscow Institute of Architecture in 1962, and made his debut as a stage designer in 1967, creating scenery for the play The Ballad of the Sad Café at the Sovremennik Theater.

Barkhin worked with several Moscow directors: he designed The Seagull and The Members of Narodnaya Volya by Oleg Efremov at the Sovremennik Theater, Tartuffe by Yury Lyubimov at the Taganka Theater, The Rose Tattoo at the Maxim Gorky Moscow Art Academic Theater and The Tsar's Hunt by Roman Viktyuk at the Mossovet Theater, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  by Valeriya Fokina at the Sovremennik Theater.

In 1988–1990, Sergey Barkhin was the chief artist of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theater, where he designed the stage plays The Pirate, Romeo and Juliet and Boris Godunov. Between 1995 and 2000, he held the post of chief artist of the Bolshoi Theater.

In the 1980s, Sergey Barkhin started a creative collaboration with directors Kama Ginkas and Henrietta Yanovskaya, which lasted for some 40 years, almost until the end of the artist’s life. They worked together on the stage plays Hedda Gabler, Heart of a Dog, The Nightingale, Ivanov and Others, Jacques Offenbach, Love and Tra-La-La, The Storm and many others.

Zinovy Margolin and Maksim Obrezkov

A winner of numerous awards, including Golden Sofit and Golden Mask, Zinovy ​​Margolin worked as the chief artist of the Belarusian State Youth Theater and the Saint Petersburg Opera Theater, collaborated with the Bolshoi Theater, the Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater, the Moscow Chekhov Art Theater, the Mariinsky Theater and many other institutions.

In collaboration with Zinovy Margolin, Evgeny Pisarev staged 11 plays, four of which are currently on at the Moscow Pushkin Drama Theater:

The Marriage of Figaro (2014), Shakespeare in Love (2018), False Confessions (2020), and Zoyka's Apartment (2023).

Honored Artist of Russia Maksim Obrezkov went to university in Tbilisi and then studied scenography in the Graduate School of the Russian Institute of Theater Arts (GITIS) in the department of Professor Sergey Barkhin. The artist has created scenery and costumes for more than 100 productions in Russia, Germany, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Switzerland, Greece and other countries.

At the Pushkin Theater, Maksim Obrezkov worked on the design of eight plays, two of which were directed by the theater’s art director, Evgeny Pisarev (Madame Rubinstein and the anticipated premiere of the 75th anniversary season, Bad or Good).

David Borovsky

The time of collaboration between director Yury Lyubimov and artist David Borovsky is the golden age of the famous Taganka Theater. The iconic productions Mother, The Dawns Here Are Quiet, Hamlet, The Master and Margarita and many others became symbols of the post-avant-garde theater era, and David Borovsky was its chief artist.

“The artist and the director should work together and understand each other. “Ideally, their ideas are so intertwined that it is unclear who advocates whose interests,” said Borovsky. Their perfect collaboration lasted for three decades.

The stage play Wooden Horses became one of the iconic productions of the Taganka Theater. Lyubimov was working on the production based on Fyodor Abramov’s story Pelageya, comparable in depth to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Matryona’s House, and the director was interested both in the literary content and in the connection between the content and actors’ skills. When planning the plot, Yury Lyubimov was inspired by another book by Abramov and created a story about three generations of village women.

Wooden Horses tells readers about peasant life, and David Borovsky said that he had created scenery inspired by a unique item. That summer, when work was underway on the production, he went to a village in the south. Walking through the field, the artist found an old harrow stuck in the ground. According to David Borovsky, he saw a powerful and complex meaning of this peasant tool, instantly coming up with a tragic scene featuring one of the heroines. It took the artist a few minutes to think of other details.

Half a century later, Yury Lyubimov’s canonical production returned to the stage interpreted by Svetlana Zemlyakova to mark the 60th anniversary of the Taganka Theater. She touched on the iconic work and rethought the content based on the texts that Lyubimov used but saw it in a new light. Symbolically, David Borovsky’s son, Aleksandr, the current artist of the Taganka Theater, worked on the production as well as his granddaughter Mariya Borovskaya, a costume designer.

The next run of the play Wooden Horses will take place on December 30.

Vladimir Arefyev

People's Artist of Russia, Holder of the Order of Honor Vladimir Arefyev collaborates with the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theater, the Moscow Operetta Theater and the Moscow Academic Theater of Vladimir Mayakovsky.

Vladimir Arefyev designed more than 30 plays on the stage of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theater, and he was also the author of the sketch for the theater’s main curtain and one of the authors of the color scheme after the theater reconstruction, which took place in 2003–2006.

In 1994, Vladimir Arefyev worked on Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Ernani directed by Aleksandr Titel, which brought the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theater its first Golden Mask award. Vladimir Arefyev won the same award in the Design Work in a Music Theater category for his scenery for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Cosi Fan Tutte in 2007. It takes place not in a luxurious Italian palace, as the opera scenario suggests, but in a post-World War II military hospital hidden in a thicket of bamboo on the bank of a river.

In 2015, the artist created a pared-down stage design for Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina, which won the Moscow Literature and Art Prize, and later the Golden Mask (2016) award in the Best Opera Show category. In the same year, Aleksandr Titel and Vladimir Arefyev staged Luigi Cherubini’s Médée. It takes place on a deserted seashore in the post-war era: the stage space is occupied by huge concrete structures (tetrapods), which shift their position in each act. The opera was not staged at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Moscow Academic Music Theater for a year because its scenery required restoration. For several months, artists worked to recreate its texture, and in the 106th season, the public once again saw Luigi Cherubini’s masterpiece. The stage play won the Golden Mask award in the Best Director and Best Actress (Hibla Gerzmava) categories.

In 2024, Vladimir Arefyev received the Crystal Turandot theater award for the best stage design in the play The Forest staged at the Moscow Academic Theater of Vladimir Mayakovsky.