Robert Leach is a prize-winning poet, theatre director, and academic. He has been Reader in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, and Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the Edinburgh University. Leach has acted professionally in Britain and the U.S.A., and directed plays in Russia as well as in Britain. His production of I Want a Baby by Sergei Tretyakov at the Teatr u Nikitkikh Vorot in Moscow in 1990 was the Russian premiere of this 1920s play which was banned in the Communist Soviet Union for decades.
Leach has also written extensively about the theatre. Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre (University of Exeter Press) was shortlisted for the Theatre Book of the Year in 2006. Other books on Meyerhold and Russian theatre include: Vsevolod Meyerhold (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Revolutionary Theatre (Routledge, 1994), A History of Russian Theatre (with Victor Borovsky, Cambridge University Press, 1999), Stanislavsky and Meyerhold (Peter Lang, 2003), Russian Futurist Theatre: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2018) and Sergei Tretyakov: I Want a Baby and Other Plays (edited and translated, with Stephen Holland, Glagoslav Publications, 2019).