Petre Otskheli

Marjanishvili's stage designer, shot at thirty

1907–1937

Petre Otskheli (1907-1937) was born in Kutaisi, into a well-known family of Kutaisi Catholics. In 1914 the family moved to Moscow, where his father opened a factory of Caucasian cloth; the children were sent to a French school, and their mother took them to the theatre, where the small Petre sketched the plays he had seen. In 1920 the Otskhelis returned to Georgia and settled in Kutaisi. In 1927 and 1928 he studied at the Tbilisi Academy of Arts, and in that same 1927 he designed his first production, Lunacharsky's The Incendiaries at the Tbilisi Workers' Theatre.

In 1928 Kote Marjanishvili called him to the theatre in Kutaisi, and almost everything he did afterwards was done beside that director: Shalva Dadiani's Into the Very Heart, Gutzkow's Uriel Acosta in 1929, Shelley's The Cenci and Kaladze's Khatije in 1930, Pogodin's Poem of the Axe in 1931, Othello in 1933. In 1931 Marjanishvili staged Ibsen's The Master Builder at the Korsh Theatre in Moscow and brought Otskheli in to design it; in the 1936/37 season he worked at the Maly Theatre in Moscow, where Schiller's Intrigue and Love and Gusev's Glory came out. In 1937 his sketches took the first prize in the competition for a staging of Rigoletto announced by Stanislavsky. In all he worked in the theatre for nine seasons.

On the twenty-first of September 1937 Otskheli was arrested. He was sentenced to death as a member of a «counter-revolutionary, Trotskyist, nationalist organisation» and shot on the second of December of the same year; he was thirty. In 1939, at the London exhibition of theatre designers, his sketches were given the large gold medal, by then posthumously. The art historian Ketevan Kintsurashvili counts him the founder of the Georgian school of stage design: a constructivist working at a level that does not age.