Directed Interpretations of William Shakespeare’s Tragedy “Macbeth” in Russian Theatres of the Second Half of the 20th and Early 21st Centuries: Evolution from “Historicism” to “Modernity Diagnosis”

The article examines the key stage interpretations of W. Shakespeare’s tragedy “Macbeth” in the Russian theater, starting with the legendary production of the state Academic Maly Theater in 1955 and ending with experimental works in the 2010s. The aim of the study is to trace the transformation of director’s approaches to Shakespeare’s text and to identify their relationship with the historical, cultural, and philosophical context of the epoch. In the course of the work, a major trend in the evolution of directorial interpretations was revealed: a move from a “historicizing” approach that interprets tragedy as a socio-political allegory of the struggle against tyranny through psychologization and a shift in focus to the “tragedy of a private person” in an era of ideological vacuum to a total deconstruction of the text in a “post-dramatic” way, where Macbeth is becoming a material for the diagnosis of pathologies of modern consciousness, from the mediatization of reality and aesthetics of shock to the clinical study of alienation.