Photo by Radina Galabova

Advertised on Facebook as "the weirdest and shortest play ever to be produced at AUBG," Siyka Doneva's second production this semester was "Play" by Samuel Beckett, following a "A Doll's House" from the previous week. The event gathered AUBG students at Mladejki Dom on April 22-23 for a 30-minute performance.

The play tells the story of two women (senior Zarif Bakirova and junior Mariya Manolova) and a man (first-year student Victor Jubirca) who form a love triangle between a husband and his wife and mistress. The three characters remain static, trapped in what appears to be their graves, with their faces covered in white and their hands and fee t bound in chains. In the original version of the play, actors are supposed to be placed in big urns. However, they were wrapped in a kind of wire fence in the AUBG version. This alteration was due to insufficient funds, Doneva said.

None of the characters appears to acknowledge the existence of the other two. They are engaged in monologues of short sentences, throughout which they tell the story of their romantic experience. The monologues were accompanied by short footage with scenes revealing the relationships between the three characters. This was done in order to make the play easier to understand, Doneva said.

The actors were convincing with their emotional performance. The beginning and ending of the play were quite memorable with the characters reciting their own lines all at once and thus producing a chaotic unintelligible mixture of words. Although it was short, the play was successful with its odd, mysterious, and at times even sinister tone. The audience seemed accepting of such genre of theater as they granted the actors with a strong ovation at the end.

"This is the weirdest and the shortest play I've ever done in my life," Doneva said. "That is why I love it." Doneva decided to do the play at AUBG after she saw it at "Beckett on Film," a festival in Sofia honoring the writer's birth-date centenary in 2006.  

"It was certainly something new," sophomore Valentina Tsvetanova said. She added she was surprised by how well the actors recreated the emotions of their characters.

"The play was short but amusing," first-year student Javkhlan Tumurchudur said.

Comments

M

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Please note, Zarif Bakirova is a senior, not a junior.

Monday 27 April 2009, 20:02

Donika

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Thank you for your correction. We will attend to it shortly.

Saturday 02 May 2009, 04:59

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