Kote Marjanishvili Theatre

The building on Marjanishvili Square was erected in 1909 as a People's House — an educational centre with a hall, a library and a tea room, conceived for the working-class outskirts of what was then Tiflis. The theatre moved in in 1928, when the director Kote Marjanishvili brought his own company over from Kutaisi; the troupe has borne his name since 1933. The facade is handled in a calm classicist key: a rusticated ground floor, a row of tall arched windows, symmetrical projecting bays at the ends and a broad flight of steps across the full width of the entrance. The Marjanishvili, as it is known in the city, has always been considered a more experimental stage than the academic Rustaveli Theatre — European drama and contemporary Georgian authors were and still are staged here. After the reconstruction of the late 2000s the auditorium was fitted with new equipment, and the evening floodlighting picks out the cornice and the columns. The theatre stands away from the tourist routes of the old town, on the left bank of the Kura, in the Marjanishvili quarter.

On the map