Author(s): Nikolay Yordanov / Language(s): Bulgarian
Issue: 1/2016
Repertoire choices are a time machine of a kind, making actual texts from the past and in the process, making current images, stylistics, and language registers. This paper seeks to answer as to which of the historical layers were revived by Bulgarian theatres’ repertoires after 1989. The anthropological interest in the remote past and in the primitive authentic culture gave birth to memorable Bulgarian stagings. It was a strong trend, and typical too, of the auteur director’s theatre, especially of the 1990s. The interest in the Bulgarian classics and playwrights such as Vazov, Strashimirov, Todorov, Yavorov, Yovkov persisted. Some of the productions based on plays by these playwrights discovered more universal intuitions, contained in their plays, bringing them out of the readings closed within the regional/national contexts. Of the period of Socialist Realism survived the plays that have been composed outside the ideological clichés: these by Radichkov, the children’s plays by Valeri Petrov, some of the dramatic works by K. Iliev, B. Papazov, St. Stratiev, St. Tsanev. The basic line discernible in the repertoire choices of plays from the shelves in the virtual library of Bulgarian dramatic works was that of opting for texts highlighting Bulgarian identity. All the plays, The Outcasts after Ivan Vazov, Yovkov’s Albema, Radichkov’s Lazarus Up a Tree and Nirvana by K. Iliev, though so different from one another, were interpreted in the same vein. They were used to reconstruct the lost story of Bulgarian community.
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