At the Tolstoy festival, which opened on Friday at the estate of Leo Tolstoy in the Tula region, a downpour nearly disrupted the second screening of War and Peace. A thousand spectators came to the performance of the Vakhtangov Theater in Yasnaya Polyana. And everything went well until the old Prince Bolkonsky, performed by Yevgeny Knyazev, raised his hand to heaven, depicting the final chord of Chopin’s composition. And for some reason, at that very moment, the black sky opened up and poured a downpour. There is no need to look for special mysticism in this – the forecast in the morning was disappointing. But the symbolic gesture suggested certain thoughts.
The first to react were technicians who rushed to the stage to turn off the sub-sound so that there was no short circuit. Rimas Tuminas’ assistant Eldar Tramov, who is now alone, in fact, is responsible for conducting the performance, crawled half-bent along the front row, passing transparent raincoats to the audience. Volunteers also tried to provide spectators with raincoats. The first act ended, the rows turned into continuous puddles.
After the first intermission, when the artists entered the second act, the audience greeted them with shouts of bravo, because the artists did not deceive the hopes of the public, they did not leave the stage, like soldiers on the battlefield. And the audience, too, almost all remained in their places. And was it worth it to travel so far in order to abandon the performance that they wanted to attend because of the rain?