Together, for certain moments, we all manage to break away from our familiar reality in order to inhabit other spaces … Тheater gives the opportunity not only to the artists, but also to the audience to touch the metaphysical. The disembodied that we could not see or feel materially. Only our highest senses could somehow come close, albeit in part, to the knowledge of existential truths. The mythological image of Sisyphus in the play by Veselka Kuncheva is the image of meaninglessness that haunts man throughout his life and  leaves him torn by the despair of knowing, searching and at the same time not finding the answers to important questions, “Why am I here ? ”,“ What do I live for?” Just like the hero of the ancient Greek myth, we carry a burden on our shoulders all our lives. The burden are our sins, our past, our selves, to which we do not stop returning throughout our lives, our essence, woven  by the constant wandering in the labyrinth of meaning. The incessant cycle, the constant repetition of each yesterday, tires us, but not so much that we let it go and  detach ourselves, but rather cling to it even more. Man is constantly trying to find  the dark sides of all the light he believes in. Gradually, this surgical division of one thing into very small parts takes away from his soul. Nonsense fits comfortably in our minds, because we do not find the answer to everything.

The acting task here is very complex. Stoyan Doychev’s character is not a person  representing literally our time. Sisyphus is rather a philosophy about human life, about the common in the process of existing. His play is non-verbal, so he can only rely on body language, facial expressions and plastic skills. Of course, the expressiveness of the show would not be the same without the puppets of Marieta Golomehova. They enhance the drama of human destiny, express the strong emotions of rupture that the individual experiences. The performance traces a whole human life through this pushing of the stone again and again. The episodes with the little puppet arouse laughter in the viewers. It is still learning how to sigh and whistle, and the acquisition of each new skill fills it with unique pride and joy. Stoyan Doychev will fight not only with the Sisyphus ‘stone’ on the stage, but also with all the beings that are hidden in himself, in his inner world. In different scenes, the puppets surprise more and more with their individuality – sometimes they are placed on the shoulders or knees of the actor, and the separate moments of visible struggle with them are imprinted in the viewer’s mind as clear pictures; they represent complex semantic constructions, we see an accordion of human heads shrinking from inwardly. The man is like an instrument – music is born from him; vertical deboning of a human head, from which other smaller ones come out – like an egg, the person dresses his true nature in multi-layered shells to protect the living nucleus. The complexity of the acting task consists in the fact that Stoyan Doychev must be completely concentrated not only on his plastic movements and puppets, but also on the derivation of the overall meaning. He must have dialogues with himself, with his soul. The struggle with the six different cubes, which are signs of the burden we carry within us, is completely silent; there is no background sound or words, we only observe the collapse of man.

This whole puppet game is like a dance that gradually transitions from tango to sirtaki. Hristo Namliev’s music is the other important part of the show to build its overall vision. After all the scenes in which Stoyan Doychev goes through a struggle not only with himself, but also with all the obstacles around him, he continues to play his sirtaki with a smile and still in vain – a metaphor for finding the strength to live your life despite everything.

Although the play uses Albert Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus as the basis for its creation, the philosopher’s text does not appear on stage. The only words that reach us are the the director Veselka Kuncheva’s lines. They were recorded by the actor Leonid Yovchev. The verses unite the whole and convince us more and more of the sincere confession shared on the stage. They very clearly synthesize the philosophy of the whole show that happiness is in living your life, not looking for meaning.

oh, if I knew,
if I only knew,
not much,
not much at all,
I would have smashed
my life into the stone,
for to remember,
that I didn’t know
how much it hurts…

(Veselka Kuncheva, part of her text about “I, Sisyphus”)