‘He probably likes running the theatre a lot’
On 2 September, the Moscow Art Theatre held a meeting between the theatre’s management and the artists. Russian Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova greeted the troupe in a video address, and then the theatre’s artistic director Konstantin Khabensky took the stage. “A theatre is a living organism. We are not obligated to comment on events, but we must feel the situation, feel the audience’s state of mind, feel why they are coming to us,” he said. “Because of this, we had to abandon some of the plays announced in December–January of last season. I think it would be simply wrong and inhumane to take on new material for the Art Theatre that would somehow make ironic remarks, crack jokes, or have its own interpretation of the topics connected to some kind of military activity and the human tragedies related to it. There is enough of this in the media field already.”