ABSTRACT
Reader! Don’t bother reading this introduction, go straight to Active Analysis, turn over these futile couple of pages … No, wait, hear me out. It was so long ago, so very long ago it was: the year 1968 in the Soviet Union, just like in your country, was a turning point. Our country was finished with ‘the Thaw’, and ‘the Stagnation’ was coming, a period that we looked back on with nostalgia during Perestroika. So, it was then, in 1968, that I took entrance exams to get into GITIS, 1 but instead of Anatoly Efros’s course – he had just been shown the door for his production of Three Sisters – I applied to study under Andrei Popov, an actor – playful, gentle, remarkable – just as he was in everyday life. That is when the Chair of the Directing Department, Maria Osipovna Knebel, assessed me, an entrant, in my Directing oral. ‘Why do you want to be in theatre?’, ‘What’s theatre to you?’. ‘It’s my whole life’, I showed off, and, shame-faced, noted to myself – a direct hit to her heart.
