Moscow’s theatre community on Wednesday buried two of its bright young talents, swept away when Chechen separatists stormed centre stage last week and turned a light-hearted song-and-dance musical into a tragedy.
Kristina Kurbatova (14) and Arseny Kurilenko (13) two of the many child actors performing in the hit show ”Nord Ost”, were laid to rest in Moscow’s Vagankovskoye cemetery, having died from the effects of a powerful gas used in the operation to rescue them.
Surviving members of the cast and production team, the young actors’ families and friends, and scores of their classmates turned out for the funeral, with 500 people packed into the cemetery’s tiny church and as many standing under a fine drizzle outside.
Arseny had made his first professional performance only a few days earlier. Kristina was a veteran of several months’ standing.
Both had been granted a start to their careers their school friends could only dream of, appearing nightly in the show that has played to packed houses since it opened just over a year ago.
They played members of a band of ”besprizorny”, the abandoned children who roamed Russia during the civil war that followed the 1917 revolution.
With the rest of the child actors and members of the audience, they had been separated off from the adult hostages and were seated in the theatre balcony on the morning of Saturday’s attack, a group of three with a friend, another notable young talent, 14-year-old Alexandra Rozovskaya, sitting between them.
In the grim lottery of death that followed when Russian special forces introduced an incapacitating gas into the theatre to overcome the hostage-takers, Kristina and Arseny lost their lives.
Alexandra survived. Seventeen members of the theatre cast and production staff are believed to have died in the three-day hostage crisis, including seven members of the orchestra.
At least 119 of the estimated 800 hostages died, with further deaths feared as 230 people, including six children, fight for their lives in hospital.
Standing motionless outside the church, holding a rain-spattered framed photograph of Kristina, one of her classmates, 14-year-old Masha, stared ahead of her as she intoned, as if stunned: ”Kristina was the most talented. She would probably have become a great
actress.”
Mikhail Mingayev, who had been teaching Arseny song and dance for the past two years, remembered a ”bright talent, who will leave an excellent memory.”
The young actor was ”a real gentleman,” he said, using the English word. Since the hostage crisis began on Wednesday last week, Moscow’s theatre world, a tight-knit community, has been observing the trouper’s adage that the show must go on, with performances continuing almost everywhere even as the tragedy unfolded. Mark Rozovsky, artistic director at the 150-seat playhouse U Nikitskikh Vorot, maintained the theatre’s programme even though his daughter Alexandra was among the hostages and one of his actors
was Arseny’s father.
He did however cancel a performance Sunday after it emerged that Arseny had died.
Georgy Vasilyev, the writer-producer of ”Nord-Ost”, said on Tuesday the musical would resume its run as soon as possible, but not at its original venue on Dubrovka street, which is now ”bloodied and
cursed.”
”Nord Ost” (Northeast) is based on a popular 1947 novel, Venyamin Kaverin’s Stalin-prize winning ”Dva Kapitana” (Two Captains), and depicts a swathe of Soviet history — with more than a dash of nostalgia — from the revolutionary period to the end of World War II. – Sapa-AFP