The latest premiere of the Sava Ognyanov Drama Theatre – Ruse brings back to the stage one of Yordan Radichkov’s landmark plays – Lazaritsa.

In Lazaritsa, Radichkov turns human existence into a trial between the earthly and the otherworldly, between the comic and the tragic, between the words through which a person tries to put the world in order and the impossibility of ever fully explaining it. Lazar is a loner, a storyteller, a witness and a participant in his own story – a figure in whom the folk man, the reluctant philosopher and the hero of the absurd meet. His speech is an attempt at survival; a way to hold together memory, fear, loneliness and the ceaseless wonder of life.

In his production, Boyan Ivanov approaches Radichkov through the living nature of theatre – through transformation, storytelling and play as ways of creating a world. Situations become slightly absurdly entangled, conversations veer in unexpected directions, and laughter appears exactly where we least expect it. Beneath the surface, however, there remains that restless Radichkovian sensation which keeps stirring and refuses to give peace. In this stage interpretation, even the sounds are born before the eyes and ears of the audience – footsteps, animals, storm, noises from the visible and invisible space. Everything happens here and now, as part of the play, as if the world itself were being assembled anew on stage.

At the centre of this stage world is Milen Dimitrov, whose performance carries the production as a monological confession, as play and as ritual. His Lazar is at once comic and tragic, roughly earthly and metaphysically solitary. Through him passes Radichkov’s distinctive ability to speak about the great questions – death, fear, meaning, the human lot – through the seemingly everyday, through jokes, paradoxes and unexpected deviations.

The production has already attracted interest beyond Bulgaria and has received invitations from two international festivals.