Cast aside disbelief: you will make me happy. – in Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont
On play as a worldview, a path to empathy and reaching out for the Other. Play as a space to discover the beauty of difference. Play as a language of imagination and an invitation to liberation from mental rigidity.
Angela: Did acting find you or vice versa? Have you ever dreamt of another profession as a child?
George: No, never. That’s very funny. When I was 5 or 6 years old I had a bunch of records of stories that my father and I recorded on cassette tapes. I even remember the 90-minute cassette tapes fit exactly. One side of the cassette tape would fit one whole record, both sides, and we recorded them that way so I didn’t have to flip records, I was still a small child anyway. I used to play them and I knew all songs by heart. I still remember the songs from the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Pippi Longstocking. I used to perform them for the kids at school and sing the songs. My kindergarten teacher would say, “Gogo, the kid who knows a lot.” Horrible! Imagine what an annoying child I must have been! Then I said, “I’m going to be an actor!” My mother and father said, “No, no, we don’t have connections at VITIZ. Our family is pretty much wrecked by the Communists, so the likelihood of you getting accepted there is not very high.” I said I didn’t care and that I was going to become an actor. Luckily the Berlin Wall decided to come down. I was generally inquisitive and took part in a lot of clubs – history, chemistry, photography, you name it. However, with the certainty that I would become an actor. Then I studied at the tailoring technical high school because it just happened. I never learned how to sew, but at all the celebrations at school, I would go out and recite. Whatever I did, I did it with the clear knowledge and intention that I wanted to be an actor.
Angela: Does acting rely more on instinct and talent or it could be learned through education and work?
George: Instincts and talent are useful, but being diligent and working accordingly is more important. I’ve seen talented people fail much more often out of laziness, complexes, or hubris than people who don’t have much talent but work hard. Moreover, just on the practical side – preparing a character, playing, developing it throughout the play, simply working. It’s interesting and it’s better. So instincts and talent are welcome. Wonderful! They’re important. But it’s an absurdity to rely entirely on them.
Angela: How do you prepare for the characters you play? What does the preliminary preparation consist of?
George: The first time I heard I was about to play Bernarda Alba… There was an announcement in the theatre that Diana Dobreva would stage The House of Bernarda Alba. I saw the breakdown with no specific roles, only ladies and I were involved. And I remembered that there is a character who doesn’t appear, but one of the sisters marries him, the other falls in love with him, and so on. I told myself that maybe Diana would want a male presence, though. At the first rehearsal, Diana assigned who gets to read what, and she gave me Bernarda Alba. I read that part to the ladies referring to them as my daughters. They called me, “Mommy!” It was funny.
At the second rehearsal, Diana shuffled the girls’ roles and gave me Bernarda once again. On the third one too. I asked what was going on and Diana said, “Didn’t you understand? You’re going to play the mother.”
That literally made my legs buckle, because it’s not just playing a woman. In ‘Allo ‘Allo! I wear a dress, but the character is a complete idiot. In Freddie Mercury’s Last Secret, I play the great ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev. No problem – I’ve watched him in interviews and that’s how I prepared the part. He’s very distant to me as a personality. He was a homosexual, star, prima donna. The preparation was more psychological for me, because I think it’s very important to get rid of the complex that people might decide that I’m homosexual myself and also not to make a mockery of him, meaning not to overact with unnecessary gestures. Although as a professional decision I started the play with a higher intensity, so that at the end of the performance when Freddie told him he had AIDS, there was very little of that glamour left.
Whereas in The House of Bernarda Alba it suddenly turned out that I was going to play one of the most difficult female characters in playwriting. A role in which I have watched Angelica Houston, Glenn Close, Tsvetana Maneva. This performance should be extremely serious. The House of Bernarda Alba is a play for which the fascists shot Lorca. The play is about a very wicked mother who doesn’t let her daughters out of the house, not even opening the windows, never showing their faces anywhere. Just like Franco did with Spain. The mother in that sense is the dictatorship that closes the country to everyone.
I considered all sorts of options for this character. First I knew that if I started talking in a thin voice it would get ridiculous and would not work at all. The main thing is that there is a very big tragedy going on with one of her daughters, and she is obsessed with what people are going to say. That means the only thought in your head about everything you do is what people might say. It means that she lives according to the perceptions of others. I started walking around the Women’s Market and looking at the older women standing there, their faces… I saw one of them sitting so slightly hunched over with her arms in front of her. I really liked that posture, or at least it served as a starting point. She was so hunched over like she’s ready to jump up for a fight.
Then I wondered about my voice. It was very important how I spoke. Because I am a man. When you’re a woman, even if you have the thickest voice in the world, it’s still a feminine voice. I am a man, even if I have the thinnest voice in the world, still, it sounds masculine.
I remember Leonard Cohen’s album You Want it Darker was out at the time. I was humming along to it, trying to get my voice down. The place where there’s no timbre but a slight hum. I have to warm up my voice every time before a performance.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if Bernarda is a man or a woman. She’s a huge evil that emerges, it goes well beyond gender. Audience-wise, the best case is if in the first few minutes people are impressed that the mother is played by a man, and by the fifth minute they get used to that thought and don’t bother with it. Though not to put it modestly – it worked.
I have many books on psychology, I bought one with all sorts of psychological disorders. It was a lot of in-depth research to figure out the character’s motivations.The biggest compliment I got for this part was from David Hieroham, who said that for the first time he didn’t have any quibbles.
The interesting thing about Bernarda is that she never looks anyone in the eye when she speaks. I don’t look anybody in the eye until the last scene. I only smile twice and both times are horrific.
Angela: It’s interesting how acting develops emotional intelligence. It allows a connection to the Otherness without judgment.
George: An understanding mostly. In the TV series The Devil’s Throat, I play a very demanding character who beats his wife and ties her up in the basement. When the director and I were talking, we decided that this character is much more violent than the killer himself because the killer has a twisted idea, yet his actions are motivated, whereas the wife abuser is just a sadist. I had a line like, “This is my wife, I’m going to do whatever I want with her.” I tried to find a way to say it convincingly and seriously because I find that unthinkable myself. But then again, I’m playing a character who genuinely believes in that. I tried not to judge him, to make him more convincing and not a caricature. Leaving space for the audience to judge him on their own perceptions and moral values. I want to play the characters as they are and honestly believe in what they believe. Characters like this usually see themselves as saviors, saving the world from something – from the pretty women who don’t pay attention to us, to the very bad school teachers. The world needs to be cleaned up and I am the savior. Getting into somebody’s logic is very interesting. The more atypical, the more interesting.
Angela: Let’s talk about cinema. In your opinion, is there a disconnection between contemporary visual spectacles for example superhero movies, and the craft of acting?
George: It depends. Joaquin Phoenix played a great role in Joker. I think he was a genius embodiment of the psychopath. They’re all romantics, they want the purest love, and if you accidentally hurt it, you have to get a lesson, a punishment. The Marvel movies are visually spectacular, but I prefer the DC Universe ones. I really liked Robert Pattison’s role in Batman, they make more psychologically deep characters.
Angela: Is there a difference between acting for theatre and acting for cinema?
Georgе: The difference between the two is immense, purely methodologically-wise. In our theatre there are 100 seats, in the National Theatre there are 6-700 seats, and everybody in the audience has to hear everything, has to understand the characters’ intentions, and has to see everything. The gestures are wide. In cinema, the camera can shoot even just your eyes, in the close-up. The facial expressions have to be minimal, there are microphones, and you can’t talk in the same way as you do in the theatre. In the theatre you have to think about the audience all the time, not to turn your back… The stage is not a place where you go out to be seen how beautiful you are, this is very boring for me. You have to speak and breathe properly. Still, my great love remains cinema!
Angela: You’re also into photography. What does it give you as an experience?
George: I started taking pictures with my phone, and then friends gave me an old Praktika, fully manual. It’s very useful to learn to shoot on film. You get used to thinking before you shoot. With digital cameras, I’ll snap 3-400 pictures and still get 2-3 decent-looking ones. When I start rehearsals on a new play or shooting a film my brain completely shuts down and I need something to bring me back to the physical reality. So, at times like this, I set off around Sofia knowing that I’m not going to take a genius photo or one with any high artistic qualities. I enjoy photographing people, especially if I can pull out something new for the person to see in the photo. We know ourselves quite poorly and I think photography helps. I get excited every time I press the button. Everything I do is an attempt to explore, find inspiration, and grounding.
Angela: And cycling?
George: I told myself I would get a cheap bike to go to the theatre. I found myself riding more and more. I was choosing the longest route to each place to ride longer. My bike cost as much as a decent car. I’m not sure in which respect the bike is more useful to me – mentally or physically. The physical aspect is clear. I like to do everything on my own. There is a feeling that after climbing a mountain, e.g. riding up Mt. Vitosha, my body wants to stop a thousand times, and my brain starts to trick me. I think to myself that all I have to do is turn the handlebars to go back, let go of the momentum, and in fifteen minutes I’ll be home. But when you go on and get to the top, the feeling is extraordinary. As well as the mountain, you’ve beaten your wits, and that gives you a new sense of self. Sometimes I ride for 10-12 hours. This is a time in which I don’t utter a word. When we’re on tour with the theatre I always ride my bike to wherever we go, my colleagues are already used to me not traveling with them.
Plays with George Zlatarev can be seen at: https://theatrevazrajdane.bg/
