Kachalov Theatre

The Kachalov Theatre is one of Russia’s oldest drama theatres, its colonnaded building shaping the appearance of the southern end of Bauman Street. The company’s full name is the Kazan State Academic Russian Bolshoi Drama Theatre named after V. I. Kachalov, and it is rightly regarded as one of the leading stages of the Volga region.

The company’s history is usually traced back to 1791, when Kazan’s governor at the time, Stepan Baratayev, summoned the former court actor Vasily Bobrovsky from the capital and charged him with assembling and leading a local troupe. The theatre’s first decades were turbulent: performances stopped with the death of Catherine II in 1796, the wooden building erected in 1802 was sold and dismantled after a fire in 1815, and the next premises burned down in another major city fire in 1842. Only in 1850 did the city get its first stone theatre building, on whose stage such masters as Nikolai Miloslavsky, Maria Savina and Pelageya Strepetova performed.

The building the company occupies today was built in 1833 for the merchant Sinyakov and has been rebuilt several times since; it took on its final form by 1914, with an auditorium adapted for drama performances, operetta and film screenings alike. The auditorium seats 505 people, and the stage, 26 metres wide and 18 metres deep, is equipped with a revolving disc 14 metres in diameter. A large-scale reconstruction of the historic building was completed in the autumn of 2014, adding, alongside the main and small stages, extra rehearsal halls, production workshops and a museum wing.

A special place in the theatre’s history belongs to Vasily Kachalov: the future star of the Moscow Art Theatre began his professional career right on the Kazan stage in 1897–1900, playing more than a hundred and fifty roles over three seasons before accepting an invitation from Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and Konstantin Stanislavsky in January 1900 and leaving Kazan. In memory of this period, a decree of the USSR Council of Ministers gave the theatre Kachalov’s name in 1948, and in October 2005 a monument to him by sculptor Asiya Minulina was unveiled in the foyer-atrium — the only monument of its kind to the actor in the country.

After 1917, actors known throughout the country worked on this stage, and the theatre regularly toured dozens of major Soviet cities — from Leningrad and Novosibirsk to Vologda and Vladikavkaz — cementing its reputation as one of the country’s leading drama companies. In February 2019 the theatre opened its own museum with a collection of more than twenty thousand items — costumes, documents and personal belongings of performers from different generations. Today the Kachalov Theatre remains an active repertory stage and one of the main architectural and cultural landmarks of Kazan’s pedestrian district.