Mannon Uygur

Mannon Uygur (family name Majidov) was born in Tashkent on 11 October 1897. He began on the stage in 1916 as an amateur actor in the “Turon” troupe. In 1918 he staged his own comedy “The Turkestan Physician”, playing Eshimqul himself, and in 1919 he organised a professional Uzbek troupe and led it.

In 1922 he was sent to Bukhara to put theatre work in order there and taught local amateurs the basics of the stage. From 1924 to 1927 he studied in Moscow at the Uzbek drama studio attached to the Uzbek House of Education, of which he was one of the organisers; together with Cholpon he interpreted for the Russian teachers who came to it.

In 1927 twenty-four young Uzbek actors led by Uygur went back to Samarkand and formed the core of the State Uzbek Drama Troupe, later the Hamza Theatre (today the Uzbek National Academic Drama Theatre). He was its director and artistic head and never left it. In 1932 he was named People’s Artist of the Uzbek SSR.

Among the plays he staged are those by Hamza, Gʻulom Zafariy, Fitrat, Cholpon, Abdulla Qodiriy and the Azerbaijani dramatist Huseyn Javid. In 1935 he directed Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” in Cholpon’s translation, with Abror Hidoyatov in the title role; it ran for twenty-two days in a row. In 1947–1948 he staged the drama “Alisher Navoiy” by Uygun and I. Sultanov, for which he received a Stalin Prize, second class, in 1949.

Uygur paid particular attention to stage speech, trained several generations of actors and taught at the Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute. His last production was “Muqimiy” at the Muqimiy theatre in 1955. Mannon Uygur died in Tashkent on 16 October 1955 and is buried at the Chigatay cemetery.

The Surkhandarya Regional Musical Drama Theatre (since 1978) and the Tashkent Art Institute (since 1991) carry his name, as do a street and a neighbourhood in Tashkent. In 2001 he was posthumously given the Order «Buyuk xizmatlari uchun» (For Outstanding Merit).