Mark Weil

Mark Yakovlevich Weil (Vayl) was born on 25 January 1952 in Tashkent, in a military family. His parents had come to Uzbekistan in the late 1930s, and his mother had studied at the theatre institute in Kyiv. He graduated from the directing department of the Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute.

In 1976, together with a group of the institute's graduates, Weil founded Ilkhom, the first independent theatre in the USSR. The company began with Maskharabaz-76, a show in the spirit of street theatre. A 1982 tour to Moscow, on the small stage of the Mossovet Theatre, made the theatre widely known.

The productions Weil directed include Ragtime for Clowns and Clomadeus (the perestroika years), Gozzi's Happy Beggars (1992), Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat (1995), White White Black Stork, drawn from the writings of Abdulla Qodiriy (1998), and, after Pushkin, A Free Novel (1999) and Imitations of the Quran (2002), then Pomegranate Zikr and Flights of Mashrab (2006). The theatre appeared at festivals in Europe, the United States and Japan.

He also directed in Moscow at the Mossovet Theatre (Twelfth Night, The Ladies' War), in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and in the United States, including Seattle and California. He made several television films; his last major work, the documentary End of the Century. Tashkent, was shown at international festivals.

In 1995 Weil opened the School of Dramatic Art at Ilkhom and lectured at other drama schools and universities in several countries. In 2005 he headed the Laboratory of Young Directors of Central Asia and Kazakhstan, for which he received the Aktsiya prize of the Russian Presidential Council for Culture and Arts in 2006. In 1989 he was given the title Honoured Art Worker of the Uzbek SSR.

On the evening of 6 September 2007, after the last rehearsal of Aeschylus' Oresteia, Weil was stabbed in the entrance of his Tashkent home and died of his wounds; the premiere took place on the scheduled day, 7 September. On 17 February 2010 three men were convicted of the crime; they linked the attack to the production Imitations of the Quran. His ashes were sent to Seattle, where his family lives.

The theatre is now officially called the Mark Weil Ilkhom Theatre, and since 2007 the Ilkhom Prize has also carried his name.