One of Russia's foremost theatre directors, Valery Fokin graduated from the Shchukin School at the Vakhtangov theatre in Moscow. At the Sovremennik and Yermolova theatres, of which he was the artistic director, he staged a wide repertoire that included contemporary writers (Mikhail Roshchin, Aleksandr Vampilov, Viktor Rozov), Soviet classics (Gorky), Russian classics (Gogol, Dostoevsky), and, from the international arena, Nabokov and Albee. He taught at the renowned school GITIS from 1975 to 1979 and in Krakow and Tokyo in 1993 and 1994. He has increasingly directed abroad, including Poland, Hungary, France, Germany, Japan, and Korea. In this article Maria Shevtsova focuses on his most recent productions at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre, where he has become a St Petersburg director while maintaining his professional links at the Meyerhold Centre in Moscow, which he founded in 1991 – aptly, since it is with Meyerhold that Fokin's name is most closely connected. Maria Shevtsova is co-editor of New Theatre Quarterly and author of Dodin and the Maly Drama Theatre: Process to Performance (Routledge, 2004).