Nikolai Kolyada cooked borscht from lecho for the audience

Anna Karenina and Rodion Raskolnikov become waiters at the Kolyada Theatre.

Anna Karenina, Rodion Raskolnikov, Baroness Shtral from Lermontov’s Masquerade serve borscht to the audience at the Kolyada Theater to Dmitri Shostakovich’s waltz. Almost the entire troupe is involved in the performance called “Soup Theatre”. Since 2004, artistic director Nikolai Kolyada has been cooking borscht, and Galina Volchek became the culprit of these feasts. The only pity is that not in front of the public is preparing an unusual, as it turned out, dish.

Once Kolyada went to the premiere of a performance based on his play “Slingshot” in Stockholm. Upon learning of this, the artistic director of Sovremennik Galina Volchek advised him to go to the theater there, where soup is prepared and fed to the audience. So he did, and after a while he organized something similar in Yekaterinburg. The idea of ​​soup in public is not new: I once had a chance to dine with Hanna Schigulla at the Friborg Film Festival in Switzerland for a special event whose beauty was in the common action. True, Fassbinder’s muse did not cook herself, but everyone present had the opportunity to sit at the same table with her in the tiny old station building. Film director Ali Khamraev was cooking pilaf right in front of our eyes in White Stolby near Moscow, and using the example of its ingredients, he explained to students how to make a movie.

In Yekaterinburg, Nikolai Kolyada began by cooking borscht at home, bringing it in pots to the theater to be eaten by the public. In Moscow, he also prepared soup in advance, in a room provided for the duration of the tour. So the most interesting thing – the cooking process – we did not see. On the eve of the performance, late in the evening, the actress of the Kolyada Theater Tamara Zimina dropped in on the artistic director: she tried the soup, highly appreciated the culinary talents of her director. So the audience will love it. But it is difficult to judge the quality of borscht – it didn’t get it: the audience, having eaten a portion, asked for more. The borsch was served with salted mushrooms, which Kolyada’s sister sent from Kazakhstan. And the grandmother of one of the actors, who lives in Turgenev’s places, sent lecho from Bezhin Lug – it was sent to a pot with borscht.

Spectators took up tables in the foyer. The artists served them soup, and Nikolai Kolyada entertained them with stories, showed a video about the life of the theater in Yekaterinburg, introduced the artists, recalled how Hamlet was played nine times in the Parisian Odeon. The theater has not been in Moscow for three years. During this time, replenished with new actors, many of whom have never been to the capital. “They are young, village, from Uralmash, for the first time in Moscow, someone flew in an airplane for the first time,” said Kolyada. For example, Bogdan Smolyanitsky is from Semipalatinsk, has been working at the Kolyada Theater since 2021, and at the same time as the commandant of the theater institute’s dormitory. He is in Moscow for the first time and, like Kolyada, in an apron brings borscht and tea to the audience.

Nikita Rybkin, who plays Vronsky in Anna Karenina, Ostap in Taras Bulba, Caligula in the play of the same name, appears after the feast in the half-hour interlude Zhikharka. He is very good and temperamental in the guise of a bunny, lives strictly according to Stanislavsky – there are no small roles for him. In a fairy tale performance composed by Nikolai Kolyada, a culinary theme develops for dessert: ladle spoons and painted pots are used. A fox, a bunny, a cat, other forest people talk about questions of life: “You have to worry about life, otherwise how will it go?”

You can go to the “Sup-theatre” more than once, since the taste of borscht depends on whether the grandmother sent lecho or not, and the interludes change, they are treated not to “Zhikharka”. Yes, and new conversations every time. Kolyada is happy:

– In Yekaterinburg, they don’t accept it that way. They clap a little during one bow, there is not enough applause for the second. And in Moscow they bring meat pies, cakes, gifts as a token of gratitude, feed the artists, love them in a way that they don’t know how to at home.