The Documentary

Tatiana Frolova wasn’t born to be a theatre director. She grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s in a cut-off part of a closed country, the Soviet Far East. She was a shy, nervous girl brought up by a silent mother in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, the bleak “City of the Dawn” built on Stalin’s orders in the early 1930s and celebrated officially as a Communist “hero-project.” But in 1985, aged 24, as the first glimmerings of glasnost appeared, Tatyana founded the Soviet Union’s first independent theatre since 1927 – known as KnAM - in Komsomolsk. It was tiny – with only 26 seats. But it tried to push back the boundaries of what could be discussed, building new plays around the memories and experiences of local people. They dealt with fear and violence transmitted from generation to generation. The theatre survived for 37 years despite the narrowing of possibilities for free speech under Vladimir Putin. But when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began last year, Tatiana realised she and her actors had to leave. Now, they’re tour