The internationally acclaimed theatre director Mark Weil founded the Soviet Union’s first independent theatre, in Uzbekistan, in 1976.

The Ilkhom theatre, heir to the cosmopolitan traditions of Tashkent, the fourth-largest city in the Soviet Union, gave hope of artistic revival during the repression of the 1980s and then in the dark times accompanying Uzbekistan’s independence. Despite the brutality of Uzbekistan’s current regime, Ilkhom retains its artistic integrity and independence, along with a love of experimentation.

Weil was a champion of free speech and through his theatre group promoted creativity and innovation. He remained in the country while others left, fearing their safety, and eventually fell prey to its indiscriminate violence – he was fatally stabbed by unknown assailants late one evening on his way home from rehearsals.

Mark Yakovlevich Weil was born in 1952 in Tashkent. His parents, Ukrainian Jews, had arrived there in the late 1930s. His father was a soldier, and his mother had studied at the Theatre Institute, Kiev.

After Stalin’s death in 1953 Tashkent quickly reasserted itself as a hub of creative activity. In his boyhood Weil remembered the city’s streets, parks and stadiums thronging with life and freedom rediscovered. His mother worked in the Tashkent Pioneer Palace, and while she worked he would sit in the neighbouring puppet theatre. It was there he discovered his love of the theatre.

Tashkent’s Theatrical Institute was founded by actors and directors exiled from Moscow in 1948. These exiles, who had studied under such masters as Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov, Radlov and Meyerhold, were to be Weil’s teachers. He later spent some time in Moscow, as a theatre student, graduating as a theatre and TV director, but Tashkent was his professional base as well as his home.

In 1976 Weil and other graduates of the Tashkent Institute of Theatre and the Arts formed the Ilkhom theatre group – ilkhom means “inspiration” in Uzbek. It started as a kind of experimental improvisational theatre group, but quickly coalesced into a theatre of substance and tradition. It was as important for the generation of the 1970s as the Taganka theatre in Moscow had been for that of the 1960s and the Sovremennik theatre, also in Moscow, for the 1950s. It was the end of the Brezhnev era, and stagnation had prompted a kind of frantic frustration with the governing ideology and approved aesthetic. Ilkhom’s repertoire contained new authors, writers not passed by the party censor.

This anomalously independent theatre group made its first tour to Moscow in 1983. Audiences and actors loved it, but the Party panicked and brought the full weight of the ideological machine to bear, ordering that Ilkhom perform only plays approved by the censor. Weil later said in interviews that it was then that he said his first farewell to the theatre. But it survived, and the theatre, whenever it performed, day or night, would play to a packed auditorium.

Then came perestroika, and everything in the Soviet art scene changed. Dissident theatre which relied solely on its political dissidence quickly became redundant, and many theatres collapsed. Ilkhom survived because of its dedication to theatre, to the purity of form, its artistic integrity and love of experimentation.

In the 1990s independent Uzbekistan became increasingly violent as President Karimov’s state terrorism and then Islamic fundamentalism tore the new state apart. Weil said that the Ilkhom theatre was saved by its international tours. It performed in more than 20 countries, including Germany, Austria, the US and the UK, appearing to acclaim at the Barbican in 2006.

Weil spent part of his time in Seattle, where his family now lives, but by the mid-1990s it was clear to him that Ilkhom was a Tashkent phenomenon, which would not survive in exile. He loved the city, and knew that its fate was partly in his hands. He knew that Ilkhom had a duty to remain, even though it would have been safer to leave.

He founded a new theatre school, and applications swelled in response to the state outlawing Russian in its own theatrical institutions. This breathed new life into Ilkhom. The theatre continued to stage a wide variety of productions, from Edward Albee to Aeschylus, and it continued to be met with enthusiasm and respect in its foreign tours.

In recent interviews Weil would talk, as ever, about his love of Tashkent, and even when pessimistic, he would say that it was only a matter of time before Tashkent revived as an artistic centre. Ilkhom was a beacon of hope in the darkness of Karimov’s regime.

To the end he remained dedicated to theatre as an independent art beyond and above politics or the state. Hamid Ismailov, an Uzbek author whose book The Railway is banned in Uzbekistan, recalled how Weil enthusiastically said he would stage it even though it was banned. “For him, there were no taboos. He would find a way to do what he wanted to do. He allowed me to speak out for the first time in my life. He was the last of his generation of intellectuals who had inherited that rich tradition of Tashkent as cosmopolitan cultural centre.”

Weil is survived by his wife, Tatyana, and two daughters.

Mark Weil, theatre director, was born on January 25, 1952. He died on September 7, 2007 aged 55