Boris Nikitin, born in Basel and the son of Ukrainian-Slovakian-French-Jewish immigrants, directs in the international independent scene and at German-language municipal theatres. He is the artistic director of the biennial Basel Festival for Documentary and Propagandistic Arts It’s The Real Thing.
As an author, director and essayist, Nikitin has been exploring the representation and production of identity and reality since 2007. The plays seek the boundary between illusion theatre and performance, between documentary, propaganda and fake, e.g. F for Fake, after Orson Welles (2008), Imitation of Life (2009, at FIT in 2014), How to win friends & influence people (2013). In the process, they sometimes completely resolve the contradiction between offensive dilettantism and artistic virtuosity, between concept and grand theatrical gesture. Time and again, the plays are rewritings of classical material, as in Woyzeck (2007), Der zerbrochne Krug (2010) or Hamlet (2016, at FIT in 2017 – read more and watch the after-show talk).
“Like few others, Boris Nikitin is currently leading theatre to a critical point,” writes the German professional journal Theater heute. Recently, Nikitin has increasingly been dealing with the relationship between art and illness. In Essay on Dying(2019, at FIT the same year – read more and watch the after-show talk) Nikitin deals with his own biography for the first time. The focus is on the history of his father’s struggle with ALS with that of his own coming out as a gay man. A performance about the gaze of others, overcoming the limits of shame, and the utopia that vulnerability is not a lack of being human, but rather a revolutionary ability.
In 2017, Nikitin was awarded the J.M.R. Lenz – Dramatist Prize of the City of Jena for his complete works. In 2020, he received the Swiss Theatre Award.
His play Essay on Dying was selected for the Swiss Theatertreffen in 2021. His play First Season. 20 Years Big Brother was selected for the Mülheim Theatre Days as one of the seven best German-language plays of 2021. With The Last Reality Show (2023) at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Nikitin had his first exhibition in a museum context.
< photo Matthias Willi
@ FIT
Magda Toffler, or an Essay on Silence
2025 Edition
03.10 – 12.10
Essay on Dying
2019 Edition
24.09 – 06.10
Hamlet
2017 Edition
28.09 – 08.10
Imitation of Life
2014 Edition
16.10 – 20.10
