The St. Petersburg Puppet Theater - the first professional puppet theater in Russia, gave its first performance on April 12, 1919, showing "The Tale of Tsar Saltan" by A.S. Pushkin and "The Nativity Scene" by M. Kuzmin. In 1930, the Puppet Theater merged with the Petrushka Theater under the direction of Yevgeny Demmeni. Evgeny Sergeevich remained the head of the theater for 45 years, staging about 150 performances in it. After Demmeni's death in January 1969, the theater was named after this talented actor and director.
Evgeny Schwartz and Samuil Marshak wrote their first plays for the puppet theater. The country's first performances in puppets based on the works of Cervantes and Shakespeare, Molière and Swift, Pushkin and Gogol were staged here. In the 1920s, the theater team participated in the creation of the first European feature puppet film "Max and Moritz", and in 1939 the country's first television puppet film "A Schoolboy in Paradise" based on G. Sachs was created here.
At the same time, a unique collection of theatrical puppets began to form in the theater, currently numbering over 1000 author's works - puppets purchased from folk puppeteers and hand puppets of the French theater of the late 19th century, bought by Demmeny in a thrift store for his first productions.
The repertoire of the theater includes performances of different styles and genres, in which almost all known types of puppets are used: puppets, parsley, puppets on canes. The play "Gulliver in the Land of the Lilliputians" based on Jonathan Swift is especially popular. Read completely ↓
