The reputation of the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg has been growing steadily in this country and elsewhere – ironically, since the economic problems of its native Russia have made touring as much a matter of economic necessity as of cultural cross-fertilization. In the following article, Maria Shevtsova offers a detailed explication of four of the Maly's most notable productions under its present director, Lev Dodin – Aleksandr Galin's Stars in the Morning Sky, appropriately one of the final offerings within the ambit of the former Soviet Union; Brothers and Sisters, a view of a Russia in ‘perpetual motion’ in the immediate post-war years which has come to be regarded as the company's ‘signature piece’; a transposition onto the stage of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, The Devils; and – following briefer studies of Gaudeamus and Claustrophobia – a revival of The Cherry Orchard which, like so much of Dodin's work, offers a bleak vision of disintegration as Chekhov's portrayal of a crumbling society at the turn of the last century comes full circle to reflect our own fin de siecle. Maria Shevtsova is Professor of Contemporary Performance and Theatre Studies at the University of Lancaster, and has published on a wide range of subjects including the work of Peter Brook, Ariane Mnouchkine, Patrice Chereau, and Robert Wilson, having also contributed a three-part study of ‘The Sociology of Theatre’ to NTQ17–19 (1989). Her most recent full-length work is Theatre and Cultural Interaction (1993).