Yury Butusov left us on 9 August 2025, ripped away by a ferocious undercurrent of the Black Sea off the Bulgarian coast. He had plunged in with the relief of knowing that his and his family’s circumstances were finally turning in their favour; that their itinerant life might be coming to an end; that the possibility of fully resuming his work as a director was now within reach, not as a matter of incidental invitation but as steadfast work. It now looked as if he would have a decent period of continuous work, with ensemble actors, to which his uncommon energies and abilities had bound him for decades in Russia. Here he had won fame and glory, which spread internationally. He gathered up six awards for Best Director at the high-level and highly competitive national award theatre festival, the Golden Mask, established in 1994. His first Mask victory was for Waiting for Godot (1999) when he was still a student at the Theatre Academy in St Petersburg. This early recognition was unheard of for institutions promoting professional theatre.

Appointed in 2018 as Chief Director of Moscow’s flagship Vakhtangov Theatre, Yury resigned in 2022 from its security, prestige, and abundant resources to uphold his anti-war position, enflamed by the war in Ukraine. His convictions had openly sustained several of his productions at the Pushkin Theatre in Moscow but were unusually aggressive in Cabaret Brecht (2014) at the Lensoviet Theatre of St Petersburg, where he was Artistic Director from 2011. Whether his productions were glowingly received or caused dissent, as was certainly the case of Cabaret Brecht, he left behind him an extraordinary achievement whose artistry was as profound as its embodiments were audacious, stretching actors well beyond what they at first thought they could do; and, while challenging its makers, his productions cumulatively generated new, utterly devoted spectators, particularly among the young. This youth recognized in the worlds of Butusov’s work, which it was discovering open-eyed, something of its own iconoclasm, willpower, existential search, and burning desire for freedom of action.

Butusov had decided to exchange all this bounty for the anonymity and hardships of emigration and exile. He had not compromised his moral integrity and worldview, but he had no networks abroad to help shelter his family nor the requisite languages to facilitate navigating foreign terrain. A few directorial opportunities arose, notably in Lithuania, where, with a strong company in Vilnius, he staged Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 2023. Tom Stoppard’s play had interested Butusov in the past, but in 2023 it seemed to him fully synchronized with our fearfully hazardous times. When I saw this production in 2024 at the enterprising Les Gémaux, Scène Nationale, on the outskirts of Paris, I was not so much struck by its contemporaneity as by its downplaying of the verve and buoyancy that had made Butusov productions so totally thrilling. Even Butusov’s hallmark musicality seemed low-key, given that his ear for coordination between the most disparate musical idioms was impeccable: here he had combined Ben Frost (‘Stomp’) and The Sweet (‘The Man with the Golden Arm’) with Max Richter and Arvo Pärt. Most likely, the dip of his hallmark strengths reflected the day-to-day difficulties he had been experiencing. Life had begun to improve by the summer of 2025, bringing with it greater hope for the future, when – just then, precisely – the mighty sea destroyed him. This can only be called a terrible tragedy.

Yury lived his life as a process of becoming, exactly as he lived his theatre, exploring all possibilities with his actors as to how they could bring their role into being– veritably create it rather than interpret it; and create it through doing it in the moment as these moments came, then waxed and waned, and then reappeared differently on the next day of explorations/rehearsals, and then on to the next, and the next. He spoke of his interest in his own as well as his actors’ attitudes, and so of their relations to texts and to each other. The idea of imaginative fluidity inherent in this approach indicates why he did not think in terms of études, which he saw as the means for ascertaining a role and fixing it. Instead, he conceived of the whole creative process as ceaseless trying-out (proby) from which a ‘role’ emerges organically, opening out an actor rather than materializing a part. Butusov, director, needed to see and to be clear about how one actor’s shaping related to other shapings and how they ‘played’ together.

Butusov had not entirely embraced the principle of études but nor did he conceive of creativity – the very essence, for him, of theatre – as improvisation. He saw improvisation, in its commonly accepted practice, as merely a surface, aleatory method – a kind of exercise in pragmatism. His far more intricate approach asked actors to draw from their gut, from deep within their very being. It was a matter of visceral engagement, palpable in such vastly different works as his elegant Measure for Measure (2010) and his rapturous, now iconic The Seagull (2012), or the exquisitely crafted Flight (2015) or chameleon Hamlet (2019). For all the performance energy of such productions, Butusov’s emphasis on inner drive is not about making Shakespeare’s, Chekhov’s, or Bulgakov’s text disappear but about how played variations of text draw attention to the calibre of playing rather than to whether playing is truthful to an idea or view outside the creative process itself.

The Seagull, made with actors of the Satirikon (Moscow), with whom he was close, is probably Butusov’s salient example (followed by his second King Lear at the Vakhtangov in 2021) of his multi-art-fusion style of bringing a production together so that, although multilayered and, fundamentally, constructed as a montage or even as teatralnost, in Meyerhold’s conception of the term, it is still cohesive; further, that although wild in appearance, it is still coherent. Something of a turning point in his entire repertoire (in which, nevertheless, various turning points can be identified), The Seagull highlights the sheer joy of creativity.

Joyousness reaches its climax as the production ends with Butusov, supple and light, dancing superbly to blasting pop-rock, a microphone moving in his hand. At one point, like an ecstatic rock star, he climbs the fragile papered walls that were used in various ways throughout the performance. Sparkling small pebbles, released from the flies, tumble down profusely on to the stage. The audience, already roaring, roars louder in what amounts to Butusov’s absolute celebration of the theatre. In one huge curve of action, he appropriated the play’s two central themes, art and love, connecting them inseparably. Within this action also lies his avowal, stated more than once during public discussions of his work, that he could not be without the theatre. His collaborators and students would agree, not least the last at GITIS, the celebrated school of acting and directing in Moscow, with whom he worked online while abroad. But nor could he be without his deeply loved wife and children; they, most tragically, will have to be without him.