“If we look back to out entire history, Soviet and post-Soviet, it seems like a huge grave and blood bath. An eternal dialogue between victims and executioners.” These are words of the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich who collects stories and traces out the emotional narrative of Soviet and post-Soviet time in her works by carefully constructed collage of interviews with witnesses. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her novel “Second-hand Time” (2013) called “a symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet union and the emergence of a new Russia”. The novel was followed by a wave of stage adaptations in former Eastern Bloc countries and the director Ivan Dobchev made his one, titled “The Bright Future of the Flea Market”. The performance gives flesh and voice to the collective character of the so-called homo sovieticus who comes to life on stage amidst a heap of old objects, remnants of the promised “bright future”.
True to the principle of Theatre Laboratory “Sfumato” Ivan Dobchev has made the staging by way of an extensive creative workshop bringing together actors of different generations.
“The Bright Future of the Flea Market” is a performance that addresses the ability of empathy. It is a powerful gesture of the pursuit for revealing the truth about a contradictory time in history and about the impenetrable aspects of human nature.