Театърът на Явор Гърдев и текстът за театър
Javor Gardev’s Theatre and Theatre Text

Summary/Abstract: This article deals with Javor Gardev’s theatre aesthetic and the role of dramatic text in it. The director is a leading figure in contemporary Bulgarian theatre landscape. Among the main characteristics of his bold, strongly focused on the present-day society’s burning issues theatre is his special approach to the literary material and its presence in creating a performance. Javor Gardev still retains his interest in extreme, from the vantage point of the addressed problems and the language used, modern classical and post-modern dramatic texts, declared in his earliest productions, broadening it to include contemporary authors and becoming a consistent discoverer of a new dramaturgy. In Javor Gardev’s directorial strategy clear preference is given to a direct onstage exposition of the chosen theme of the dramatic work primarily through its impactful visual representation in the imagery of the space solution. The key role of the stage space has become the hallmarkof his theatre. The paper traces the transformations of the complicated symbiosis between the dramatic text and the visual image of the performance over the last three decades (from Javor Gardev’s debut productions of the first half of the 1990s to the present day) in some of his emblematic works such as Bastard based on King John by Shakespeare and Friedrich Durenmatt and Adso of Montier-en-Der (2000); Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2004); Caligula by Albert Camus (2009); Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2012); The Observers. A Hypothesis of the Hereafter by Konstantin Iliev (2015) and Portrayals of the Unknown based on his own text (2021).

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