The Casanova Performance

There is nothing more difficult than to write about a spectacle that you have fallen in love with from the fifteenth minute and there is nothing easier than to confess that after such experience you are not the same any more. All this happened to me last night at the premiere of “Casanova”, now that it has appeared the theatre season for sure could go to an end and Theatre Foundation ASCEER should give the statuettes to Diana Dobreva and her team.

Yes, “Casanova” is a sensation, not because on the stage of Theatre “Salsa i Smiah” walks live pitbull and naked actresses seductively wind their bodies but because of the fact that the theatre here just happened, there is an encounter between actors and director and in some moments it is simply hypnotizing.

Unique vision, mystical music, costumes that you wish to wear yourself and Vlado Karamazoff, whose harsh and sensual timbre a la Barry White goes through your entire body and makes you think not only for theatre… and this is only a small part of the unbelievable sensation that “Casanova” brings. Compared to what we saw yesterday, all the great movies telling the story of the irresistible lover, look like flat and badly made up stories where Giacomo is just a womanizer. This is exactly what Diana Dobreva tried to escape in her performance and in most of the scenes she succeeded. She is not interested in the character in the sense of the physical but in a metaphor of the idea of love which leads to immortality. That is why her Love is golden, almost immaterial, invisible and attracts the great lover so strongly.

The sets are ascetic – everything is based on pictures, sound and unostentatious eroticism, in other words, the already known aesthetic that exists in Diana Dobreva’s first performance “Medea” and the consecutive “Macbeth”. Simple, without unnecessary movements and symbolism that inhibits audience’s attention – “pure histrionic theatre”, as the director herself defined it at the press conference before the spectacle and I would add – a project worthy for Avignon.

Vlado Karamazoff is the actor that here outjumps himself and with a hand over heart we should admit - this role brings him up to a new level in his acting career. We could say the same about Billiana Petrinska, who plays a dizzy Russian widow, that goes crazy and in her 5-minute appearance she totally transforms the stage. Jana Illieva, Simona Kostova, Dessislava Pashova and the rest of the debutants has also done a good job. Nevertheless, Marina Dodova’s costumes and Petia Dimanova’s music deserve bow to the ground or at least loud applause from the audience that stood in admiration at the premiere last night.

But speaking of Diana Dobreva all the definitions are weak, and why should she needs them, when the graduate of Theatre College “Luben Groys” created her own style in theatre directing just for a few years while the value of her spectacles is already historic. The latest, “Casanova”, has very strong emotional meaning because it is devoted to her mother – actress Elizabeth Karastoyanova, who passed away recently and the last words in the performance are the ones that the mother told her daughter before she died. With that absolute revelation the talented director proves that in art there must be pain to be truthful. See “Casanova” to feel and experience it, so you could regain your taste for good theatre.

Yana Doneva, VsekiDen.com (12/02/2009)