Ivan Dobtchev / Margarita Mladenova Teatro Sfumato/Margarita Mladenova/Ivan Dobchev
August Strindberg Trilogy

Strindberg à Damas

[Theatre] As for Strindberg à Damas (The Road to Damascus), it tells the story of a well-known writer wandering in Damascus. The latter embodies an imaginary point of no return and the artist is portrayed as a visionary.

  This is a play for the time, for hard creative achievement of the truth, until the penetration. A play for the future play. Striving to the unrealized, to the dream, to the absolute. Inexplicable. Beyond the visible, beyond the possible. In Damascus.  Damascus is a metaphor – a crucial point, a place where another life begins, where you become another - reverse of the late, of the familiar, of the common… Damascus is the unimaginable. The unsmotherable creation longing of transformation.

This play is cue to the big Strindberg’s text The Way to Damascus. The excitation from that text has imagined this trip in Strindberg’s dreams, twilling the documents, the real evidences and presumptions that are started from the biography of the writer. Hypothesises on his crises, his human, his excessively human's ordeal of the spirit, his stretch beyond limits to the reality from which sometimes the return is impossible.

That is today’s play. He is away from the pretentiousness of the biographic roman. Together with George Tenev, we built our own touches in, our own experience as well and the respect to the personality of the biggest Scandinavian writer - the audacious seeker for the human August Strindberg for sure.

Ivan Dobchev