Andrei Mironov Russian Antreprisa Theatre

On the Petrograd Side, in a distinctive building on Leo Tolstoy Square, works a theatre named in honour of the actor Andrei Mironov and built on the principle of antreprisa (a privately run touring company) — the first non-state dramatic stage to appear in Leningrad at the end of the 1980s. It combined the contract-based principle of working with actors, the flexibility of an antreprisa, and the repertory traditions of the Russian stage.

The theatre was founded on 1 November 1988 by the actor and impresario Rudolf Furmanov, who remained its artistic director for more than thirty-two years. The theatre was named in honour of Andrei Mironov, who had died the year before, with the consent of his mother, the actress Maria Mironova. Symbolically, part of the building the theatre later moved into had been acquired, before the revolution, by the actor's grandfather, Semyon Menaker. The premises were granted to the company by an order of the city government on 3 April 1995, and the ceremonial opening of the permanent stage took place on 17 October 1996 with the participation of Mikhail Ulyanov, Yuri Yakovlev, Vasily Lanovoy and other well-known actors; the ribbon was cut by the eighty-five-year-old Maria Mironova.

The company settled in the so-called House with Towers — an apartment building of the entrepreneur Karl Rosenstein, built in 1913–15 by the architects Rosenstein and Fyodor Belogrud. The building's appearance, reminiscent of a medieval castle, combines motifs of Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Gothic style and has long been recognised as a monument of federal significance; during construction an earlier five-storey house was incorporated into the complex, its Romanesque-style windows preserved on the courtyard side.

The theatre's financial model is built on self-sufficiency with occasional state support and help from sponsors, including one-off subsidies from the city's committee for culture. The logo, showing a die from which a drop of blood is falling, was designed by the artist Yuri Solovei as a reference to Alexander Blok's play The Puppet Show (Balaganchik). For its productions and performances, the theatre has repeatedly received the city's top theatre award, the Golden Sofit, and since 2010 the theatre has administered the Russian National Acting Prize "Figaro," named after Andrei Mironov, whose laureates have included Oleg Basilashvili, Vasily Lanovoy and other masters of the stage.

On the building's second floor is a theatre museum with more than one and a half thousand photographs and posters devoted to Russian actors of the twentieth century, while the ground floor houses the memorial "Andrei Mironov Room," with personal belongings and a piano. The theatre's auditorium seats two hundred and ten.

Today this St Petersburg antreprisa-style theatre remains a notable feature of the city's cultural life — a rare example of a successfully operating non-state repertory stage, preserving the memory of one of the most beloved actors of the Soviet era.