Alexander Tairov

Alexander Yakovlevich Tairov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Я́ковлевич Таи́ров; Ukrainian: Олександр Якович Таїров; 6 July 1885 – 5 September 1950) was a leading innovator and theatre director in Russia before and during the Soviet era.In 1906 Tairov was invited by the famous Russian actress Vera Komissarzhevskaya and joined her theatre as an actor under the directorship of Vsevolod Meyerhold.With his wife, the actress Alisa Koonen,[1] he founded the Kamerny (Chamber) Theatre in 1914; it became the centre of experimental creativity for many Russian actors, artists, writers, and musicians.Tairov collaborated with such artists as Alexandra Exter, Pavel Kuznetsov, Sergei Soudeikin, Mikhail Larionov, Natalya Goncharova, Vladimir Pohl,[2] Inayat Khan[3] and others.His early productions of the Soviet era were Salome by Oscar Wilde and Adrienne Lecouvrer, which became a legendary play and ran more than 800 performances.The Chamber Theatre's tours of Europe in 1923, and of South America in 1930 were critically acclaimed as "a total victory of the famous Russian innovator and a genius of staging".Along with Tairov other prominent members were Emil Gilels, David Oistrakh, Samuil Marshak, Ilja Ehrenburg, and many other leading intellectuals in the Soviet Union.Such leading cultural figures as Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturyan, Boris Pasternak, Mikhail Zoshchenko and many others suffered from censorship and severe repression.Tairov developed what he called "Synthetic Theatre" which incorporated ballet, opera, circus, music hall, and dramatic elements.The acting school Tairov developed was to train a company of "master actors" who would excel in all of the elements of Synthetic Theatre and become the primary creators of performances.