Based on Homer's Iliad
Director: Ani Vaseva
Actor: Leonid Yovchev
Consultant: Boyan Manchev
Graphic design: Katrin Metodiev
A poem of force, according to Simone Weil, for centuries the Iliad has continued to fascinate readers, scholars, and artists with its strange, disturbing intertwining of seemingly life-affirming, yet bloodthirsty energy, the heroism of despicable characters and the indiscriminate malice of merciless gods, boundless violence and cruelty, and the incongruous irresponsibility and childishness of the world of heroes. Succumbing to the charm of the archetype of superhero stories, we are ready to draw into the dizzying whirlpool of the Iliad all those tempted by the borderlands between air, earth and underworld.
What is the Iliad? An epic of the unforgettable ones, a satire of pettiness, a landscape of cruelty with no horizon of escape? Once unleashed, violence refuses to end. It will not stop until it has swept everything away, until it has burned everything to the ground, until it has gnawed everything down to its roots and foundations. The theater of war is not (only) a stage for heroism and self-sacrifice; it is also a stage for pettiness, meanness, and cowardice, which are incompatible with the tragedy. Incompatible and yet coexisting with it. But since the Iliad is not just a military epic, but also a poetic territory of fantasy, a space where everyone encountered may be a monster or a god, metamorphoses and miracles persist amid the battles.
The Iliad is a fundamental work of world literature. It is an epic poem about the forces that govern the fate of humanity, an encyclopedia of the mythological world, but also an anthology of human passions. For millennia, the Iliad has remained a text that resonates in the present world. The work represents historical and cultural value not only with its enduring contemporaneity, but also with its poetic techniques, subject of unrelenting and dramatically intense research interest.
The Iliad is part of Metheor's long-term project Proteids. In our creative interpretation, proteids are metamorphic forces, similar to Proteus, the ancient Greek deity intrinsically linked to metamorphosis. The name synthesises our theatrical and literary experience of working with that which has no form and is in constant change. This is, first and foremost, theatre itself – always changing, never the same even in repetition. This is also our approach to the selected literary texts. We transform them into theater not (only) by translating them from one language to another (from written to spoken, from literary to theatrical), but by transforming them on stage, taking advantage of their potential, incorporating parallel texts and metatexts, analyses and later versions, as well as our own understanding of the world of the work. The result is a text-in-change, a text-theater, a protean text, a theatrical performance that comments on theater itself as what it essentially is—action, change.
The beginning of what was then called Let's Play Literature, before we renamed the series to Proteids, was laid in 2021, with Gogol's The Nose and The Overcoat. The driving force behind the series was the desire to overcome the barrier between the great works of classical literature and their new readers, due mainly to the obsolescence of language and the difficulty for younger readers to penetrate the world of the work. But during those five years—years in which we created performances in the same series based on Ovid's Metamorphoses, Goethe's Faust, and Homer's Iliad—the result far exceeded our intentions. In the process of researching and creating the performances, we discovered that we were no longer working to facilitate access, but to follow our desire for a new kind of encounter with literature and theater, to reveal the hidden, to play with imagination and matter, to share our excitement about this miraculous encounter between literature and theater, in which everything is as much turned towards eternity as it is fleeting.
The Iliad is funded by the Sofia Municipality's "Culture" program and is produced by Metheor in partnership with Goethe-Institut Bulgaria.