RUSKÝ SALÁT / RUSSIAN SALAD

Benjamin Kuras

Genre: comedy
Cast: 6 men, 3 women

A detective comedy that takes place in a director’s booth of a Russian section at BBC radio studio in 1984. One of the Russian presenters dies of a stroke in the middle of broadcasting. While all the editors are overtaken by panic, a cool-blooded English director is trying to keep the broadcasting running by using recorded programmes. The doctor claims that the death has been caused by poison given to the man a few hours ago and inspector Goldberg from Scotland Yard starts investigating a murder. While being interrogated, the editors are revealing their bizarre emigrants’ stories and even more bizarre character descriptions including slandering. Meanwhile, inspector Goldberg has learned from the British counter-intelligence that the murdered presenter was a secret KGB agent and his colleague, a popular DJ, a Mossad agent. Goldberg is making up theories about a war of the two counter-intelligence services within the editorial team but in the end he finds out that the murder had far more prosaic reasons.

  The play is available also in English translation.