The premiere of Hamlet at the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow on May 19, 1932, marked Nikolai Akimov's debut as a director. A talented Leningrad artist, the young Akimov had already attracted considerable attention in theatrical circles with his unconventional setting for Tartuffe in 1929, featuring the unscrewed joints of an enormous exhaust pipe, and his striking design in 1931 for Schiller's Intrigue and Love, which made use of a huge, shiny silver disk set on stage at a sharp angle to suggest the top of large sphere.

With his production of Hamlet, Akimov was determined to sweep away once and for all the pall of gloomy symbolism cast by earlier interpretations. His most immediate targets were the 1911 Gordon Craig production and the one at the Second Moscow Art Theatre in 1924, with Mikhail Chekhov both directing and playing the title role. “A sickly degenerate,” is the way Aklmov dismissed Chekhov's Hamlet.