Terry Grimley reports on how an Englishman in Moscow put a new spin on a Russian classic

On a warm and sunny day in Moscow earlier this spring, before Britain had emerged from its winter cocoon, Declan Donnellan was holding court in an upstairs room at the offices of the Russian Theater Federation.

The night before his production of Pushkin's Boris Godunov, first staged at the Moscow Arts Theater last year, had opened at the Moscow Theater Olympics, an international festival combining 15 visiting international productions with around 25 Russian ones.

A busy day of interviews with French and British press was due to end with an audience, together with other directors represented in the festival, with President Putin.

Boris Godunov, which is now touring Britain and which opens at Warwick Arts Centre tomorrow night, is Donnellan's second project with Russian actors. The Winter's Tale, with the Maly Theater of St. Petersburg, was seen at the Arts Centre two years ago, but this time he was able to form his own company by selecting the cream of Moscow's actors.

"I always wanted to come to Russia, and now I need to come," he told me. "I love being here and feel very much at home. The theater is very strong and vital here. There's just so much theater, and above all the audiences are very discerning and demanding – and there's a lot of them!"

So fears about the death of theater following the collapse of Communism have proved unfounded?

"Like all the other Eastern European countries, there was a dip in the early '90s when it was thought the need for theater would collapse. But I remember that when times were really hard all the bars and restaurants were empty but the theaters were full. It's like going to the cinema for our parents in the '40s and '50s – people just go to the theater. Of course, there is a lot of terrible work that happens, and there are a lot of horrible things about Russia."

Donnellan's first experience of Russia came when he toured with his own company, Cheek by Jowl. This was when he first made contact with the Maly Theater.

"When I worked with the Maly I knew all the actors because Cheek by Jowl had toured together with them for many years, always staying in the same hotels. When I came to Moscow they said they would take the very best actors from all the theaters. In this room I met lots of these very well-known actors, who amazingly accepted small parts and came out of their companies to do these performances. I don't particularly understand their fame because it goes back for years and years, but for example, Yevgeny Mironov, the actor playing the young man Grigory, he's incredibly famous, he's a big film star. Whereas Irina Grineva (who plays Marina, Grigory's future wife) is a discovery, of which I'm very proud."

Reputations aside, the actors were cast in the usual way, through auditions and Donnellan watching them in other plays. However, one story I heard in Moscow was that Grineva was only promoted to a top-grade dressing room after the reviews came out.

But why Boris Godunov? The title is likely to make British audiences think first of the opera, Mussorgsky's musical version having travelled better, for obvious reasons, than the play on which it is based.

Directly inspired by Shakespeare's histories, Pushkin's play tells the story of a turbulent period in Russian history. The Czar Boris, a contemporary of James I of England (who made him a present of a carriage) is challenged by a young monk, Grigory, masquerading as Dmitry, the son of Ivan the Terrible believed by some to have been murdered in childhood by Boris.

It is a panoramic play with a Shakespearean range of settings, from court to low taverns. Performed in a single sweep without an interval, Donnellan's production has all the hallmarks of his seamless theatrical style. It bowled over some Russian critics while irritating at least one by allegedly glossing over its Russian depths in order to conform to a preconceived Western style.

In fact, as Donnellan revealed, it is a play he has been wanting to direct for a very long time.

"I read it first in the 1980s," he said. "It's a very expensive play to do, for various reasons. Last year I did Le Cid at the Avignon Festival and they asked me what I would like to do next. I said Boris Godunov with Russian actors, so the French put money into it to make it happen. It became a co-production between France, the UK and Russia, but it was incredibly difficult and it was touch-and-go for a long time to make sure all the actors were available at the right time.

"I just love the play. I think it's so contemporary – about the nature of power, the nature of power in Russia, the strange mystery that people seem to have no power and yet rulers have to get the approval of the people. As we were rehearsing, all the rows about Putin and the television stations arose. As Oscar Wilde said, life always imitates art. It's not like Boris is Putin, it doesn't get to that level, but the situations are very, very similar – demigods trying to take power."

When I saw the play in Moscow I had just read an English translation, but audiences at the Arts Centre this week will be able to read a simultaneous translation on subtitles.

"What British audiences will get most from it is the acting," Donnellan said. "The play is a wonderful play about identity, and it has one of the greatest scenes ever written in the fountain scene. It's about the nature of truth. In a way Grigory is the son of Ivan the Terrible because he wants to be and people believe him."

Although he draws parallels with Oedipus and Hamlet in the play's central concern with identity, Donnellan points to the lightness of the actual writing.

"I remember touring Webster and after nine months I began to find the play really oppressive because there's no air in it. Even in Lear there's some air, but in Pushkin there's a lot of air. A very difficult thing for us to understand is the meaning of Pushkin to Russians. He writes very simple stories for children and fantastically cynical and bitter stories like The Queen of Spades. He's not like Shakespeare – he penetrates Russian life much more. It's as if he is Shakespeare, Dickens and A.A. Milne all in one. He was one of the first to write in Russian, because at that time it was thought more elegant to write in French. He dominates the language."

In the autumn Donnellan will be in New York to direct a new play by Angels in America author Tony Kushner. "Then I said I would go to Australia and do a project," he said. Not bad for someone who once described to me the lonely hours on windswept railway platforms, after unsuccessful job interviews, when he was trying to change career from barrister to fledgling theater director.

But he added: "I really must do something in England. I miss England and working with English actors. We want to re-create Cheek by Jowl. We only ever put it on ice."