The St. Petersburg policemen believed that a woman was going to jump from nearly five meters high in the city center to make a suicide in front of several dozens of spectators and were very fast to save her and took to a police station. To their surprise, the woman didn’t need to be saved at all as her acting was part of a street theatrical show.
St. Petersburg, Russia, 14 January 2017, somewhere in the middle of the day. The corner of the Nevsky avenue and Dumskaya street, the very center of the city, a tourist hot spot. The Gostiny dvor building, a balcony overlooking the corner of the avenue and the street.
This balcony is on the picture above.
A woman starts crying about her life and says she is going to jump from the balcony to kill herself. A crowd is looking from under. And the crowd is getting larger and larger as the show is attracting more and more spectators from passers-by. It’s Saturday and the main thoroughfare of the city, after all.
The show is lasting just a minute and half when the police suddenly intervenes. They grab the woman to prevent making an alleged suicide attempt.
What the policemen don’t know is that nearly 30 persons in the crowd below had bought tickets for the show as it is a performance of the St. Petersburg Teatr.doc, an establishment known for its street shows that regularly take place throughout the city. The attempts to explain don’t succeed, and the actress and producer are detained and being taken to a police station.
When all the details were cleared up at the police station, the police took both detainees back to the scene and apologized. The show went on and ended up successfully as planned.
The name of the spectacle is «Implicit influences».
The head of the theater, Mikhail Ugarov, wrote in his Twitter account: «This is an absolute spectacle. Everybody gets involved no matter they want it or not».
Well, St. Petersburg has been enjoying a status of «the cultural capital of Russia» filled with museums, galleries and theatres, and the story is good to confirm it one more time:) It’s no surprise that strolling through the streets of the St. Petersburg’s downtown in mid-January you come across a live theatrical show which people take for real.