Большой драматический театр имени Г. А. Товстоногова

This guide to the Bolshoi Drama Theater in Saint Petersburg opens in 1956, when the house on the Fontanka embankment was dying, thin audiences and a tired repertoire, until a director named Georgy Tovstonogov arrived and rebuilt the company almost from scratch. It follows his ruthless methods, his staging of Dostoevsky when Dostoevsky was barely tolerated on Soviet stages, and the company of actors he assembled, among them Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Kirill Lavrov and Alisa Freindlich. The guide also reaches back to the building's own earlier life, raised in the 1870s for Count Apraksin and once graced by Sarah Bernhardt and Isadora Duncan, long before it belonged to Soviet drama at all.