Varna Summer International Theatre Festival

On June 1-11 of 2025 the 33rd edition of the Varna Summer International Theatre Festival was held in Bulgaria’s lovely resort city on the Black Sea.  The 20 theatrical productions offered showcased the past year in Bulgarian theatre, but included contributions from nearby Greece, Romania, Montenegro, Macedonia, and two Bulgarian productions created by British guest director Declan Donnellan.

On these productions I saw ten, including most of the festival highlights. These began with a staging of Martin McDonagh”s The Beauty Queen of Leenane, directed by Boil Banov at the Ariadna Budevska Drama Theatre in Burgas, Varna’s sister city on the Black Sea to the south.  The design by Zhabeta Ivaova was a chilling minimalist one, basically two doors, a window and a large wooden cross hanging on one of the walls.  A center stage chair, facing the audience, was often occupied by the rarely mobile Meg (Dimitrina Teneva) whose solitary dominance here suggested Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame.  Indeed, the production suggested more a kind of stylized Beckett than the rough realism of McDonagh, although Ivaylo Gandev, as the potential wooer of Meg’s daughter Maureen (Nevena Tsaneva), was nominated for the national Icarus award for best supporting actor of 2025.

This production was presented in the smaller of the two major festival venues, the second Stage, a fairly basic but functional hall created inside an historic structure behind the main theatre, and seating 264.  The city’s main theatre, named for the actor Stoyan Bacharov, seats 550 and is a much more elegant baroque horse-shoe shaped auditorium opened in 1932.

Later that first day I attended my first production in the Bacharov theatre, this one co-produced by the Drama theatre of Plovdiv, Bulgaria, and that of Veles in Northern Macedonia. This two-year project was a staging of the novel Without Blood by Alessandro Baricco, the story of a young woman whose family is killed by soldiers and who years later must choose between revenge and forgiveness.  Although the announced supertitles did not appear, the production, thanks to powerful choreography by the fifteen-member company and a stunning design by Valentin Svetozarev (nominated for the best technical achievement in the 2025 Icarus Awards), the production provided a memorable theatrical experience even without a text.  Director Diana Dobreva interpreted the work in classic Spanish idioms—with flamenco inspired movements and music, a setting suggesting a bullfighting area and in the center on an elevated platform a massive metallic statue of a bull (very similar to that on New York’s Wall Street), mounted on a turntable and caught by constantly changing colored lights as part of a deep and rich visual field.

The next production, Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, came from one of Bulgaria’s most distinguished theatres, the Aleko Konstantinov State Satirical Theatre in Sofia. This production was one of the most honored in the festival, nominated for national awards for its director (Stoyan Radev), Best Supporting Actress (Nikol Georgieva), Best Set Design (Nikola Toromanov), Best Costumes (Svila Velichkova) and Best Music (Milen Kukosharov).  Albena Pavlova, in the title role, received the National Award in 2025 for Best Leading Actress.  I found her less powerful than others I had seen in this demanding role, headed of course by Helene Weigel, but rather more human, operating through sly cunning rather than bravado, and with an attractive ironic edge. On a rear curtain, projected outlines of soldiers struggle in battle with a melee of flags and weapons from various periods well before and after the seventeenth century.  The production also strove to suggest a range of periods, with a calculated neutrality.  Probably most striking was the absence of a wagon.  Instead, a single giant tilted wheel, its axle running down to center stage, and its face decorated with a variety of numbers and astrological symbols, rotated slowly around the stage as the production continued, suggesting not so much a wagon as the inexorable repetition of the machinery of war.  The Wheel itself was much more effective than its axle, which was from time to time converted into other suggested bits of scenery—including flag poles, weapons and parts of structures. The quietness and intimacy of the scene played within the turnings of this great machine effectively suggested the contrast between the concerns of ordinary individuals and the looming shadows of the historical process.

The following day, also on the main stage, was the first production created in Bulgaria by the internationally acclaimed Romanian director Gábor Tompa, his interpretation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.   Despite Tompa’s considerable reputation, I found this production unfocused and confused.  One of the major problems was the setting.  The opening scenes, at court, were played in front of the theatre’s iron fire curtain, clearly meant in its forbidding formality to contrast with the following scenes in the Edenic forest, but in fact most of the action (most notably the wrestling match) at court actually took place out of sight in the orchestra pit, with actors constantly rushing up and down stairs into it.

The Forest of Arden (designed by Maria Riu) was far more elaborate but equally odd.  It was not actually a forest, but a space containing a few trees and shrubs, scattered pieces of elegant furniture, a long ramp to the left, down which characters would sometimes rather incongruously slide, and, most notably, two large pieces of two storey scaffolding, empty except for open curtains on the upper level, faintly suggesting a  fairground booth under construction, but rarely used in the actual action.  The impression was not so much a forest retreat as a marginal suburban plot that vagrants have occupied.

The costumes were similarly casual—loose and floppy, with a distinctly nineteenth century peasant feel, mostly rugged and earth colored but with occasional touches of brighter or richer accents.  The various secondary characters--peasants, shepherds, refugees, and clowns, were visually so similar that distinguishing among them was almost impossible (costumes also by Riu). Motley garb was nowhere to be seen, though it remained in the projected text, which as is often the case with subtitles, created its own problems (the translation was by Valery Petrov).  My favorite example came in “Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind,” which unlike the other songs in the production, was sung in heavily accented English.  The familiar chorus: “Heigh-ho, the holly, this life is so jolly” was enthusiastically rendered as “Heigh-ho, the holy, this life is so joly,” which I assumed was the result of a Rumanian accent until I checked the English supertitles and found that that version was in fact the official text of the production!

The comedy of errors continued into a highly confused ending.  After the traditional dance, Rosalind’s final speech was cut and instead Jacques appeared for the first time on the upper level of the upstage scaffolding, opening the curtains there to suggest (for the first time) a miniature stage, to recite the “Seven Ages of Man” speech.  He then closed the curtains, and the production concluded with a choric non-Shakespearian song extolling domestic bliss in homes where wife and husbands were attentive to their duties.  I thought it might have been meant as ironic, but it did not seem so.

Happily, the rather disappointing As You Like It was followed that same evening by the production that many, myself included, considered the outstanding work at the festival.  This was The Ploughman and Death, based on a late medieval German prose work and directed by one of Eastern Europe’s most significant directors, Romania’s Silviu Purcărete. My first exposure to Purcărete’s work was his stunning Les Danaides, presented at the Lincoln Center Festival in 1997 and featuring choruses of fifty suitcase bearing men and women.  Huge choric productions like this have become a particular specialty of the Romanian director, but The Ploughman and Death moves in quite the opposite direction, moving with the aid of modern technology, from films to holograms, into the mental world of the single protagonist, Călin Chirilă.  The protagonist’s extended dialogue with Death here becomes an internal combat between the living actor, surrounded by a few real-world anchors—a refrigerator, a large and ominous wardrobe upstage center, a worktable with a typewriter—and his infernal double, a constantly shifting visual image of himself, inhabiting a virtual and constantly changing universe which covers the bare walls of the protagonist’s room.  The fluidity between the two worlds is constantly shifting, and although the Ploughman retains his living form and Death remains a constantly shifting figure entrapped in his virtual universe, the two worlds constantly and almost imperceptibly flow into each other, with doors, physical objects, and strange humanoid figures slipping casually from one world to another.  The production gives the impression of a vivid dream, to which the director’s ingenious designer, Dragos Buhagier and composer Vasile Sor both make important contributions.

The first of two productions the following day took place in a different venue, the attic space of the City Art Gallery, a large open, informal raftered area, which provided a most suitable location for 96%, a documentary performance with no setting other than the tables, chairs, microphones and digital devices of the archivist/presenters, with behind them a wall covered with papers representing their research and occasionally used for projected images.  The production deals with a dark and largely unknown piece of modern European history and has unusual international origins.  Its co-sponsor is the German based Foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ), created in 2000 by the German Bundestag to recall, honor, and when possible, offer compensation for those persecuted under National Socialism.  In 2014 this foundation provided funding to the National Theatre of Northern Greece, the Berlin Schaubühne and La Joven Theatre in Madrid to jointly develop and present a documentary theatre piece concerning the 50,000 Jews deported from Thessaloniki to the notorious deathcamp of Auschwitz during the Second World War, which resulted in the extermination of 96% of that city’s Jewish population.  

The conceiver, director and head researcher of the project was an artist ideally suited for it.  Prodromos Tsirikoris was born to Greek immigrant parents in the German city of Wupperthal, known to the theatre world as the base of Pina Bausch.  Developing an interest in the theatre, Tsirikoris, somewhat surprisingly, did not remain in Germany to study, but returned to his parent’s homeland, graduating in drama from Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, which would become the subject city of 96%.  Since 2009 he has worked primarily in Athens, but has maintained close contacts to the German theatre, working as an actor for Dimiter Gotscheff and most significantly as as assistant director and researcher for Berlin-based Rimini Protokoll, whose politically engaged and reality-based techniques are strongly reflected in 96%.

A more tradition documentary performance on this subject might have concentrated on the program itself, the machinery is deportation and the experiences of its victim, but Tsirikoris has decided to present a much broader picture, what he calls an archaeology of the dispossession, including following the material history of the possessions and properties left behind by the dispossessed. And perhaps most strikingly the fate of the hundreds of memorial tombstones removed when the Jewish cemetery was obliterated.  The narrative runs right up to the present, reproducing arguments among the actors on the production about what materials should be included and how to present them, along with photographs of former Jewish tombstones now to be seen among the courtyard paving of the new National theatre.   The scope of the material presented including the original persecutions in the ghetto, the deportations to concentration camps, the redistribution of Jewish properties, the attempted obliteration of this cultural memory and the search for physical traces that still remain tends to overwhelm the spectator with so many sources of attention, but the production overall succeeds in its goal of restoring to public consciousness a long-suppressed memory which must not be forgotten.

Later that evening, Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People was presented on the Second Stage, a production from the Small City Theatre on the Channel, one of the four municipal theatres in Sofia.  The director, Chris Sharkov, is one of the nation’s leading young directors, with a special interest in Ibsen.  Judging from this single production, I am not convinced that this interest is a healthy one.  Many changes, large and small, were made to the original and rarely for the better.   On the generally positive side Sharkov and his designer, Nikola Toromanov have set the work in the present, stressing the mediatization within the play.  This is immediately demonstrated by a radical change in the opening of the play, which in Ibsen is a domestic dinner scene in Stockmann’s home which moves into the conflict of the play when Stockmann reveals his discover that the baths are infected.

Neither the domesticity nor the conflict appears in the opening of Shakov’s production.  The scene is a modern television studio where a promotional program about the town’s new baths is being presented.  A female announcer in front f a large, handsome poster of woods and mountains, is making the presentation. Above the Studio, a row of television scenes repeats motives of elegant natural scenes—lakes, mountain and woods.  These screens will continue to provide this visual accent for most of the rest of the evening, as the stage below moves to other locations.

As a part of de-emphasizing the domestic side of the play, Shakov has eliminated Stoackmann’s sons and combined his wife and daughter into a single character: the wife (Martina Teodora).  I have seen this experiment before and never thought it works, with either Petra or her mother kept as the survivor.  The problem is that the two characters have clearly separate lives and most importantly attitudes toward Stockmann.  Petra, a liberal schoolteacher and translator, cheers him on in his iconoclasm, while his wife does not oppose him, but tries to restrain his excesses.  Even with careful rewriting, a single character seems confused and inconsistent.  Usually the daughter is kept, but Sharkov has kept the wife, but also kept the budding romance between this character and editor Billing.

Thus, we have a rather passionate scene in the editorial office between Billing and Stockmann’s wife, introducing a question of adultery which does not appear in the original play and has no relation to the action either there or in this adaptation.  Of course, Sharkov could have simply cut the scene, which basically concerns Petra’s refusal to translate an English essay for Billing’s paper, which is not really essential to the main action.  Sharkov however, clearly leaves it in because it gives him an opportunity to emphasize a change in the message of the play.  In the original, Petra objects to the (unidentified) story because it concerns a Panglossian benevolent deity protecting religious people.  Sharkov changes this to a specific modern text, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.  He has explained that this accords with his interpretation of the message of the play—that truth has ceased to exist in the modern media-controlled society.  

Certainly, this is one possible reading of the play, along with many others, including a warning about environmental policies, a study of messianic enthusiasm, a critique of modern capitalism, and a disturbing analysis of the ideals of liberal democracy.  Without denying the significance of Shakov’s argument within the play, his view is clearly a reductive one.  Nowhere is this more clear than in his closing scene, in which like the opening one, he moves from the domestic scene of Ibsen’s original back to the TV studio of the opening, although now it is not a female promoter but Dr. Stockman himself standing in front of the promotional poster for the Baths and announcing, in a closing speech, that he was mistaken about the infection at the Baths, that they are perfectly safe and healthy, and will be a continuing source of pride (and revenue) for the community.  So much for Ibsen.

The first offering the following day moved to another Varna venue, the State Puppet Theatre, located in an elegant small venue in the city center, opened in 1952.  Although Stefano Massini’s A Stubborn Woman premiered in Madrid in 2017, it was not produced in Eastern Europe until 2025, in a production in Sofia which was revived at the Varna Festival.  Reworked as Anna the Incorrigible, this work is another docudrama, but very different from 96% except in its evocation of moral outrage.  It is set in another era when this region suffered under foreign totalitarianism, now not from the Nazis, but later, under the Soviets. The repression documented here involves not an entire population, but a single courageous journalist, though the reaction of the oppression is the same—the silencing, if necessary through murder, of the opposition.

Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist was murdered in the elevator of her Moscow building in 2006 after years of reports condemning the disintegration of civil liberties under Putin in general and the folly and cruelty of the war in Chechia. Massimo traces her continuing struggles in the face of official condemnation and actual physical violence, by combing materials from her personal writings, her journalisms and bridging material.  The text is basically in the form of a monologue but can utilize various voices. Three actresses presented it in New York, and the Sofia version, directed by Nadya Pancheva makes it basically a solo performance, by Nevena Kaludova, a leading actress of the Sofia theatre, who performance as a quiet, seemingly ordinary middle-ages woman with extraordinary courage won her an Icarus nomination for best actress in a leading role.  Another nomination for fest set design went to Yasmin Mandelli, for his remarkable metal abstract structure which filled the rear of the stage with the fallen Ozymanias-like head of a former dictator.  The relevance of the production to recent Bulgarian history was unmistakable, given that the production premiere in Sofia the same week that Sofia’s monumental statue of Stalin was toppled.

Later that evening on the main stage a new work by Montenegro’s leading playwright, Alesandar Radunovič.  This was Pillar of Salt, referring to the Biblical story of Lot’s wife, for which the noted Bulgarian director Javor Gardev was invited to create a production celebrating the 140th anniversary of the founding of the Montenegran Royal Theatre in Cetinje.  I was fortunate enough to witness Gardev’s international success Mara/Sade in 2003, one of the most elaborate and innovative mixing of live action and video I had seen then or since.  Moreover, Gardev was working with his longtime scenographer Nikola Toromanov, so I went to this production with great anticipation.

Despite a series of powerful scenes by Gardev’s five actors, I was disappointed.  The brilliant use of technology which so impressed me in Marat/Sade was nowhere to be seen, but there were other serious problems, some of them largely beyond the control of the company.  Most important was that the Varna Festival provides no programs, even to reviewers, only a 30-page guide playbill sized guide which devotes a single page to each production. This page provides one photo, the name of the originating theatre, the time and location of the production, ticket prices, names of the director and cast (not identified by roles) and a two-paragraph introduction to the production which in most cases, as in this one contains almost no information helpful to understanding a new play in another language. The introduction to Pillar of Salt provides only the information that it is “an absurdist black comedy” which “deals with the horror of world-shaking conflicts faced by new generations, and the evil in man.”  The rest of the paragraph is devoted to retelling the Biblical story of Lot’s Wife, which in fact is of no use whatever in understanding the play.

In the theatre, the first act takes place essentially in the auditorium.  A single, largely unmoving actress stands downstage center highlighted against a black background.   Three other actors appear in the boxes above the stage to the right and left, and the fifth actor calls out his lines from the darkness at the rear of the auditorium.  Supertitles are used but they are on screens to the right and left in the same boxes used by the actors, so when the actors are standing their bodies block the screens.  Even when one or another screen is visible, it is too small to include all the translated text in both Bulgarian and English (the production being in Montenegrin). Since the Bulgarian is printed first, this meant that the first line of the Bulgarian translation could not be seen, nor the last line of the English.

Even so, the situation was simple enough that it gradually became clear.  The woman on stage was the director of some sort of mental institution, caring for patients who had attempted suicide and were at risk of further attempts.  The other four actors represented patients, and during the act their various troubles were explored by the director.  The rest of the production took place entirely on stage, which was revealed as a neutral gray box with openings on each side and along with a row of small boxes, suitable for use as chairs.   In the first scene in this new space, we see the five actors we have already met, but now involved in a dark, domestic drama.  The father is a bitter, controlling figure (a condition perhaps aggravated by one non-functioning leg and his wife (the director) of the first scene, attempts in vain to lessen his hostility toward their daughter, who has fallen in love with a young man who does not share her father’s religious fundamentalism.

The appearance of the same five actors encouraged me to consider how these two acts were related.  On a realistic level, the mother as the doctor could hardly have members of her family and acquaintances making up the patients in her clinic, but if this were some kind of symbolic dream sequence, who was the dreamer and what the reality?  Was the second act in the imagination of the clinic doctor or one of the first act patients, utilizing those around them, or was the first act a reverse of this, imagined by one of the troubled family members in the second act?

The third act (out of four) finally suggested a solution.  The father appeared, still overbearing and irascible, but apparently younger, and without a bad leg.  His wife on the other hand, now seemed much more in decline, barely able to move about with a stroller.  When a third actor, who had played the daughter’s unreligious boyfriend in the previous act, now appeared as was identified as the couple’s son I finally realized that this production, referred to as “the play” in the festival literature, was in fact FOUR plays, all relating to family conflicts and fear of death.

I was thus better prepared for the final play, which in fact was the only touch of the “absurdist black comedy” promised by the festival brochure.  Four of the actors appeared in personae like their previous ones, while the fifth, bundled in an amorphous bag-like costume, entered from time to time to beat each one in turn, and finally himself, to a Punch and Judy like death.  It was a production I will long remember as the more confusing theatrical experience I have ever had, in any language.

The final two productions of the festival were closely tied together in many ways.  First, both were directed by the only Western European director represented this year, Britain’s Declan Donnellan, never seen on the Bulgarian stage.  Second, in addition to Euripides’ Medea, created for the Ivan Vazov National Theatre in Sofia, Donnellan staged another central work of the classic Greek stage, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex at the Marin Sorescu National theatre, in Craiova, Romania, then the two were presented together at the Varna Festival.

Donnellan himself referred to the two as a diptych, explaining that both classic works dealt with murder within families. Given the commonality of that theme among the Greeks, or in tragedy in general, this hardly seems a significant reason for doing these plays together—especially when Antigone or Oedipus at Colonus would have been more obvious choices.

Donnellan (and his usual stage design Wes Ormund) in fact brought the two plays together visually by staging both In the same unconventional manner—as a kind of environmental theatre, with the audience assembled standing on  the stage, with only a small circular platform as setting, and the actors moving among and often directly addressing the spectators.  There were even specific staging echoes tying the productions together, most notably an opening sequence, as the audience gathered, where one of the doomed couples danced closely together on the small circular platform, surrounded by the audience—Jason and Medea for their play, and Oedipus and Jocasta for theirs.  

For Medea the audience was led directly to the stage, but for Oedipus, they were first gathered in a neutral room elsewhere in the theatre, where a group of doctors and nurses, dressed in modern green hospital garb surrounded s suffering patient on a hospital bed.  There was dialogue in Romanian, translated in a projection on one of the walls, but the lighting was so bright that it could not be read.  I assume it was improvised, and the scene was meant to suggest the raging of the plague in Thebes, but that was never clear.  Soon however, the audience was led out of this prologue space and onto the stage, where the play proceeded like the earlier Medea.

As with most such environmental productions, I did not feel that the novelty and occasional intimacy compensate for the discomfort of standing and moving for well over an hour in each production and often not being in the right place to a particular action.  I was certainly engaged when Oedipus clearly addressed me directly, though I was also drawn out of not into the play, and later I was certainly affected when the actor, totally nude and with apparently gouged out eye sockets streaming blood down his face and chest, pushed past me on the way to the exit, but I felt rather more discomfort than tragic pain.

Like the collection of experiences at most festivals I experienced a mixed reaction—dazzled by some performances and artistic choices, puzzled or outright disapproving of others, but always fascinated by the variety and potential of the theatre, especially perhaps when it offers fresh perspectives on familiar classics.

Varna Summer is to be commended for its international commitment, although to most fully fill that commitment it needs to work on such technical matters as programs and effective supertitles, to make the works truly accessible to both nocal and international guests.  That said, I was again remark on the range and accomplishment of the theatre of southeast Europe, so rich in performance tradition and achievement and compared to other parts of the continent, so little represented the world’s international theatre festivals.