The premiere of Agota Kristof’s absurdist play is this evening at the "Ivan Radoev" Drama and Puppet Theatre - Pleven

The "Ivan Radoev" Drama and Puppet Theatre – Pleven is in a pre-launch fever for its next premiere – the performance „John and Joe“, based on the play by the Hungarian-Swiss writer Agota Kristof. The premiere performances are this evening – right on the 8 March holiday, and on 22 March on the theatre’s „Pan Buryanin“ Chamber Stage. The director is the young and very talented Tsveti Penyashki – a graduate of Prof. Zheni Pashova and Assoc. Prof. Petar Pashov in the specialty „Directing for Puppet Theatre“ at NATFIZ. The set and costumes are designed by Yasmin Mandelli, and the music is by Milen Apostolov. The cast features the actors Dimitar Zhivkov-Zhivaka, Tigran Torosyan, Maria Rushanova and Ivan-Aleksandar Doychev.

The actor Dimitar Zhivkov-Zhivaka shared some details about the project especially for „Sega“ as early as the end of last year. He recounted that he and Tigran Torosyan, with whom he shares the lead roles, have dreamed of this almost absurdist, „Waiting for Godot“-type text since their student days. Mitko and Tigarcheto are long-time friends: Torosyan took part in Zhivkov’s directorial debut „A Game for Grown Men“. Zhivaka imagines their partnership as that between Malin Krastev and Ivaylo Hristov in McDonagh’s „The Lonesome West“, or between Gerasim Georgiev-Gero and Valyo Tanev in „Schweik“. It works best with friends, he is convinced.

Staged all over the world, „John and Joe“ is one of those plays that, through the means of the comic and the tragic, turn a pair of actors into a beloved duo. 

„John and Joe“ is a minimalist absurdist play in which two characters, John and Joe, sit at a table in a café and carry on a strange, seemingly disjointed, repetitive dialogue, full of comic misunderstandings and absurd twists. With simple means and few words the actors manage to convey the fragility of human relationships and the elusive nature of happiness. The play is at once funny and sad, confronting the viewer with questions of friendship, fate, chance and the inevitability of life’s cycles, the theatre reveals.

According to the theatre’s dramaturg, Gergana Pirozova, Agota Kristof’s play deals with the little person, and through a „non-standard, almost absurd dialogue we fall into the abyss and the fate of that person who believes that nothing more awaits him. But it turns out that this is not so, that life is a much more interesting undertaking“. This will also be seen in the performance, which begins in an innocent and somewhat funny way, only to reach great existential discoveries, Pirozova shared at a press conference, as quoted by BTA.

„When I first read the play and thought about it, I was struck by how the little person is portrayed, with his small dreams which, for him, however, are big“, says director Tsveti Penyashki. According to him, what lies beneath the surface of the text is every person’s striving for firmer foundations in life, „to have a little island that gives you security, that is your screen against the tornado that spins us about throughout life“, he notes. 

The text is extremely actor-driven and could not have worked without such big-hearted and dedicated actors, the director is convinced.

The set designer of the performance, Yasmin Mandelli, stresses that her task was not to get in the way of the acting, but to support it. „The set is extremely abstract and at the same time very rich in possibilities. In it I have interwoven the stylistics of op-art and the colour contrasts that I believe support this wandering between the real and the imaginary“, Mandelli points out.

In 1956 Agota Kristof left Hungary at just 21 and fled to Switzerland, where she remained until the end of her life. Better known for her novels, translated into more than 15 languages, she wrote entirely in French. She also established herself as an author of theatrical texts, writing in 1972 the absurdist miniature „John and Joe“, originally conceived as a radio play. In Bulgaria it was published in „Panorama“ magazine.

Agota Kristof’s theatre develops along the line of comedy, which at a certain moment falls into bitterness and sorrow. In her texts one can easily find influences of Beckett, Ionesco and even Cioran, but at their core the social and the political stand out. Her characters John and Joe carry on a dialogue which we can be sure is probably happening for at least the hundredth time, or perhaps the first – none of us will ever be quite sure which is true. They are clownishly laconic, poetic and touching. The paradoxical situations reveal themes such as poverty, friendship and loneliness, and in a Chaplinesque way Joe’s question arises: „How is it that some people have money? Lots of money. Constantly. They spend it and still have it. Always“...

Sega newspaper, Irina Gigova