“The performance comes into being when everyone involved in it – characters, performers and spectators – assumes their role as creators of an illusory reality, which, however, proves to be our only means of authentic experience,” says director Galin Stoev in an interview with Zhaklin Dobreva about ‘Illusions’, based on the play by Ivan Vyrypaev and part of the festival’s international selection.

You have staged works by Ivan Vyrypaev more than once, both in Bulgaria and on various European stages. What keeps drawing you back to his plays?

Ivan Vyrypaev continues to create exciting texts that constantly challenge, test and invite us to rethink established theatrical conventions. There is something provocative in his writing, but also something deeply intimate and close to each of us. His plays sound experimental, yet at the same time they are somehow grounded in a classical theatrical tradition, and that is part of their strength.

Illusions speaks about love, but also about the images we inevitably create of the other person, who always remains not entirely accessible. Is illusion perhaps an inseparable part of love?

I am not an expert on the subject, but following the logic of the text, I can say that it is a kind of exercise in constructing illusory experiences, both for the characters in the play and for the spectators during the performance. The performance comes into being when everyone involved in it – characters, performers and spectators – assumes their role as creators of an illusory reality, which, however, proves to be our only means of authentic experience.

In Illusions, the characters face the end of their lives with the feeling that some of their most enduring ideas about love, intimacy and their own life journey are beginning to waver. How did you search for a theatrical language for this reckoning?

What is interesting about the play is that it presents two elderly couples, who are nevertheless narrated, performed and analysed by very young actors. This automatically cancels out any everyday, domestic dimension and leads us into a state of free play and interpretation. Within that, we must then discover a sense of humour that makes the events being narrated universal. In this way, the audience begins to experience the stories as their own personal histories.

The performance was created with your new Company SPUNK where you work  with young actors who are still establishing themselves. What did this encounter with them give you, especially in relation to  a text that speaks about memory, love and taking stock of one’s life?

Young actors carry a kind of unrestrained energy that is highly infectious and very pleasant to share when it is channelled in the right direction. When young performers tell the memories of characters who have already grown old, they do not relive them – they reinvent them. This completely reverses the perspective of the narrative, as well as the perspective of the spectator’s gaze.

What would you like the audience to take away from their encounter with Illusions – greater doubt toward their own ideas of love, more tenderness toward human vulnerability, or perhaps the sense that truth is never one and only?

In Ivan’s plays, the spectator is often an active participant, because what happens on stage requires them not simply to observe, but constantly to make choices, to agree, to resist, to become an accomplice or a judge of the stage action and of the characters’ decisions. What the author creates is the possibility of a personal experience for each spectator, depending on their own strategy of watching. This play, too, carries the potential of a journey inward, which every spectator is free to undertake while watching the performance.

What does this visit to Bulgaria with your new company, founded in Toulouse, and this encounter with the Bulgarian audience mean to you?

It is important for me to remain part of the Bulgarian cultural context as well, and above all to build bridges between different cultural attitudes and models of thinking and making theatre. I believe that such encounters broaden the field of perception both for the local audience and for the participants in the performance. The encounter with what is different and unfamiliar should always nourish our curiosity and serve as an antidote to isolation and to the complexes that give rise to xenophobia, fear and hatred. Culture, and theatre in particular, are among the forces that help us remain human, even in inhuman times.

Illusions on 9 June at 6:00 PM at the Drama Theatre – Main Stage.