Dream Loops and Short-Circuited Nightmares

Post-Brechtian Tempests in Post-Communist Bulgaria

Abstract

"Dream Loops and Short-Circuited Nightmares" explores the surge of interest in The Tempest among Bulgarian theater professionals and audiences after the fall of communism. The essay analyzes the interfaces between the Bulgarian post-communist cultural condition and three experimental performances of the play, discussed here as embodying the principles of Brechtian dialectical theater. In a notable divergence from postcolonial revisionist performances of the play, the Bulgarian directors choose to have Prospero remain on the island. Theirs is, however, a local Prospero, re-figured alternatively as the modern little man who desperately needs to make peace with the ghosts of his past, as the psychotic who has severed his ties to a reality outside of himself, as the Balkan and European colonizer/colonized incapable of connecting his past and his present in a narrative that would eschew annihilation. If postcolonial re-visions of The Tempest reconstruct its plot and dramatic conflict to focus on the cultural and political agency of the Other, the post-communist Bulgarian productions redefine the metropolis as the Other. Nobody gets elevated in these re-visions of The Tempest — not aesthetically, politically, or morally. Instead, they nurture poignant curiosity for fallen idols like Prospero, as well as for the Calibans, Ariels, and Mirandas these idols have traumatized — all of them little people exiled in their own minds.