People's Theater

People's Theater (Narodnyi teatr). A theater established in Kyiv in August 1918 as the State People's Theater under the artistic directorship of Panas Saksahansky. The People's Theater concentrated on moving away from the traditional ethnographic to the Western European repertoire. It also staged Ivan Karpenko-Kary's historical plays, Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller's Die Räuber, and K. Gutzkow's Uriel Acosta. In early 1919 Soviet authorities ordered the theater to cease its activities. Its main cast continued to work as the touring People's Theater with Saksahansky (see Touring theaters). Other members joined the Shevchenko First Theater of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic; some of them eventually became the nucleus of the Zankovetska Theater.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]