“Have you been to the Theatre on Chekhov Street?” was a question often heard in Moscow in the mid-seventies whenever people interested in theatre got together. Actually, to call it a “theatre” was something of an exaggeration. What it really amounted to was a room in one of those old communal apartments still left in the center of town, the kind that has a shared kitchen and bathroom, and sometimes as many as a half dozen doorbells outside the door. The brainchild of Igor Vasilyev, a young actor and director at the Moscow Art Theatre, the Chekhov Street group operated on and off for about seven years. (To my knowledge they have since disbanded, though not for the first time.)

In recent years, theatre groups such as Vasilyev's have been springing up like proverbial mushrooms after an autumn rain, especially in theatre-starved Moscow and Leningrad.