Актьорската трупа на Народния театър - поведенческа култура
The Company of the National Theatre – Culture of Behaviour

Summary/Abstract: The proposed text is an attempt to examine the company of the National Theatre as behaviour in the initial years of its formation. Its behaviour reflected or even developed certain attitudes and experience of values in the context of social development and in seeking a Bulgarian cultural identity. Such behaviour refers to the comprehension of culture as a collective phenomenon, as a system of shared meanings, symbols, ethical and moral principles, and is in a state of a continual dialectical development, interpreted and realized through everyday human experience. Socially, Bulgaria belongs to family, lineal culture and thus informing the National Theatre company, lineal attitudes are strongly represented in it. In order to be able to exist at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, the company follows behaviour that is characteristic of the Bulgarian traditional society. In it, the family is a structural element; marriage is taken for a personal fulfilment and a change of the individual social status. The seclusion of the company as a family is a process that can be clearly defined in the activity of the theatre “Osnova”. A similar process is visible in the theatre “Salza I Smiah” as well, only developing the relationships and the structure of management, aiming to enhance the effectiveness of the family activity and the ways of communication with the state, which is thought of as the father-guardian figure. But the basic, initial value that upholds and binds the family in its behaviour is survival. Theatre as art is the profound goal of the forefathers of Bulgarian theatre, but the theatre that results from their activities is not yet the true art. The perseverance for achieving the idea of the theatre, the sustainable efforts of the company to fulfil it in practice in the years of its formation, grant the company the part of a primitive unit in the chain of history of the National Theatre. Moving into a new building, the company as a family achieves the idea of home. Later, in the face of N. O. Massalitinov, the company realizes its spiritual father – a concept sought for such a long time. During Massalitinov’s time, and with him, the family experiences a peak of achieving theatre as an art. This period of the company’s life reinserts and turns some behavioral features into a tradition that marks the company as a conservative closed society tightly bound to its linear​ nature.

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