Театърът на Източна Европа – театър, който променя живота
The Life-Changing Theatre of Eastern Europe

Summary/Abstract: The text is a foreword of the book “20 Ground-Breaking Directors of Eastern Europe: 30 Years After the Fall of the Iron Curtain”, edited by Kalina Stefanova and Marvin Carlson, published by Palgrave Macmillan, an imprint of Springer Nature, in 2021. The book is also published in Spanish, by ADE, and in Chinese, by China Theatre Press, in 2024. The text is an introduction to the life-changing theatre of Eastern Europe with a host of examples from unforgettable productions by the directors included in the book. Among the accents are: the treatment of the classics where the focus is often not on the letter but on what enlivens it; the tendency for creation of a vertical theatre reality by some of the directors who dispense with nearly all material on stage, including to a large degree the written word; an unusual political theatre that could rather be called a politics-of-the-soul theatre; another tendency with something like a contemporary type of a Chorus-cum-main-character taking center stage – sort of a dramatic (or tragic) hero in plural. The main criteria for the choice of the 20 directors included in the book are also elaborated on. Finally, the foreword touches upon the situation of the theatre in a time of pandemics.

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