Valery Fokin

Valery Vladimirovich Fokin (Russian: Валерий Владимирович Фокин) (born February 28, 1946 in Moscow) is a Russian theatrical director and writer. He is the Artistic Director of the Alexandrinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, and the President of The Meyerhold Centre in Moscow. Fokin is decorated with four honorary Russian state awards.

Fokin was born in Moscow in 1946. After graduating from the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute in 1968, where he staged his first performance, Fokin began directing at Moscow's Sovremennik Theatre where he worked for 15 years. During the 1970s and 1980s, Fokin made a name for himself in the Russian theatrical world by directing plays at this theatre and the Yermolova Theatre. In 1971, he directed Valentin and Valentina, a play written the same year by Mikhail Roshchin. In 1973, he directed the plays An Incident with a Paginator and Twenty Minutes with an Angel at Sovremennik. Fokin also worked as a professor at the GITIS from 1975–1979 and at the Higher State Theatre School in Krakow from 1993-1994.

In 1985, Fokin took over the Moscow Theatre. His 1985 play, Speak!, was the first play in Russia to forecast that the Soviet Union would diminish and that Russia would enter a new political period, marked by Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika political and economic reforms, introduced in June 1987. In 1989, Fokin was at the centre of an actor's dispute at the Yermolova Theatre, fuelled by negative reviews of his Dostoevsky play, The Idiot. He left the theatre and Russia and put on performances in Poland and Switzerland in 1990.

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