Last night, before today's International Theater Day - March 27, the great Bulgarian actress Maria Stefanova stated in the program "Outside the Game" on BNT that the theater is a place where people go for spiritual sharing, I quote from memory.

Unfortunately, however, on the eve of the holiday and the solemn ceremony of the "Icarus" awards, we must admit that there have been divisions, quarrels, intrigues and misunderstandings in the home temple of Melpomene for months.

Maria Stefanova

Maria Stefanova is one of the city's ladies of the theater and fully deserved tonight she will be presented with the statuette for Honor and Dignity in her profession.

However, that doesn't mean her road here has been easy and smooth, nothing like that.

She is one of the major artists who suffered from the first revolutionary upheavals, when party creatures once again stepped on the NT with their muddy boots and hastily retired and released almost the entire troupe of actors loved by the audience - giants such as Tanya Masalitinova, Slavka Slavova, Georgi Georgiev-Gets , Maria Stefanova /then only 55 years old!/, Violeta Bakhchevanova, Violeta Gindeva... The director of the theater at that time was Vasil Stefanov, former head of the "Repertoire" department in the Central Committee of the BKP.

Then the forcibly evicted with "stars in their hair and tears in their eyes" vacated the stage that had been revered by them for decades, packed their modest suitcases, went to villages and palanquins and played dozens more productions all over Bulgaria.

People continued to love them /unlike the politicians/ and to fill the salons.

The new private theater "Barbukov", founded in 2013-2014, gave them a hand.

Then, when some directors sobered up from the revolutionary intoxication, they were returned to their stages, but ... the insult and the nasty feeling remained.

To this day, Maria Stefanova speaks with sadness and pain about this stage of her life.

A large part of her colleagues from that time have already left for the settlements of the Heavenly Theater...

Whether today's people have drawn conclusions from what happened years ago - both the susceptible among the actors and the politicians who extended their dirty hands to the theater, you can take stock yourself, given what is happening there.

The great theater director Koko Azarian, may his memory be bright, said during his lifetime that "The theater is a place for humanization."

Will it continue to be?!

We, the spectators in the last row, hope so and will continue to support our people on stage.

Happy holiday to all who make us dream, think, live spiritually, preserve cultural values!

Samiha Ayub

Finally, I will end with the message from the Egyptian actress Samiha Ayoub for World Theater Day, published by our "Union of Artists in Bulgaria":

"To all my fellow theater artists and professionals around the world,

I am sending you a message on World Theater Day, and as happy as I am today to be able to address everyone, I feel with every part of me the burden that we, theater and non-theatre artists from all fields of art, carry.

All that today's world is, torn apart by the devastation of wars, natural disasters and conflicts, has devastating effects not only on our material world, but also on our spiritual world.

I write to you while I feel that we are isolated islands in the middle of the ocean, or ships on a misty horizon without direction, and yet they sail on, hoping to reach a safe harbor that will shelter them after their long wanderings.

We have never been more closely connected to each other than we are today, but at the same time we have never been more separated.

Therein lies the dramatic paradox that the modern world forces upon us.

The conflicts and tensions that we are witnessing today have exceeded the limits of logical perception and distanced us from the essence of living together.

Theater, in its original essence, is a purely human act based on life.

In the words of Stanislavski: "Never enter the theater with mud on your shoes."

Keep dust and dirt out.

Leave your little worries, pettiness, petty difficulties with your outerwear—all the things that ruin your life and distract you from your art—at the door.”

What we do in the world of theater as playwrights, directors, actors, set designers, poets, musicians, choreographers and technicians, all of us without exception, participate in creating a life that did not exist before we stepped on the stage.

This life deserves our care, our hands and our good heart to sympathize with it, reason and will to continue to survive.

I am not exaggerating when I say that what we do on stage is the act of life itself and creating it out of nothing.

It is we who give life its magnificence.

We are the ones who embody it.

We are the ones who make it alive and meaningful.

We are the ones who use the light of art to confront the darkness of ignorance and extremism.

For this we put effort, time, sweat, tears, blood and nerves, everything we have to do to achieve this lofty message, defending the values ​​of goodness and beauty, and sincerely believing that life is worth living.

I speak to you today not just to talk or even to celebrate the theatre, on its world day.

Rather, I want to invite you to stand together, all of us, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, to cry out loud and let our words awaken the conscience of the world.

And to help the viewers, everyone, to reject this disgusting image of brutality, racism, bloody conflicts, one-sided thinking and extremism.

Get out of the swamp of wars and bloody conflicts and leave the muddy shoes at the stage door.

It is our mission, the actors, the directors, the playwrights, the bearers of the torch of enlightenment, to be at the forefront of the opposition to all that is ugly, bloody and inhuman.

We, and no one else, have the ability to propagate life.

actors

International Theater Day

Maria Stefanova