It was my first Russian winter, and my first trip to the theatre. Glittering ballerinas twirled and pirouetted to the music of long-dead aristocrats, and outside the snow swirled, covering up giant potholes and dead tramps alike. The curtain fell. I began to clap merrily, but the faint pattering of my palms petered out into silence.
I looked around in sudden fear. Silence reigned. Then, I witnessed Russia’s own, semi-legendary approach to audience appreciation. As one Russian, the audience began to clap. Slowly, and in time. It was so quiet in between that you could hear the rustle of sleeves as the palms were brought together in a sinister, pulsing genuflection towards an empty stage.
Russia has given a lot to theatre. Chekhov’s depressing plays, for instance. Absurdity, courtesy of Gogol, though he didn’t have monopoly over the genre; during Stalin’s rule, absurdity mixed with blind fear if one ventured out to a play he’d enjoyed. Everyone was afraid to be the first to stop approving, a greater crime than what had already landed many in the gulag, so nobody stopped clapping before the Leader had left the room, which could take up to fifteen minutes. People’s hands swelled up. Old people collapsed from exhaustion in the aisles.
Nowadays, it’s a bit more fun. People wear their finest fur coats and old ladies dye their hair specially. However, the highlight is the interval, when everyone rushes to the buffet to eat red caviar and drink sweet champagne against the cold outside. Groups of friends sit around Formica tables from circa 1976, stiffly formal in their best suits and sequinned dresses.
As a nation, the Russians are ridiculously cultured. I once overheard a group of friends on a drunken night out in a provincial town stumble out into the street, fall over a set of tram tracks, but instead of shouting ‘It’s so fucking cold!’, one quoted a line from The Master and Margarita whilst lying prone in the path of an oncoming tram: ‘Alas, Berlioz, Anoushka has already spilled the oil!’.
Schoolchildren grow up reading the tales of Pushkin, hauntingly evocative of Russia, rather than infantile international mush about dogs called Spot. These ties to literature bring people back to plays as to old friends, having seen the world around them change as socialism died away and capitalism grew like a weed, while the works of their great playwrights remained familiar.
Going to the theatre is a way of connecting with their rich literary past, and perhaps, understanding the mysterious Russian Soul.
