Premiere of "Oleanna" by David Mamet, 22 May 2025, at 19:00
„Oleanna“ by David Mamet is the premiere title in the programme of the "Ivan Radoev" Drama and Puppet Theatre in Pleven.
The play is based on a specific legal case that became known in the USA in 1991, director Nadya Pancheva told BTA. It concerns the court case of Anita Hill against Clarence Thomas. Hill is a lawyer, and Thomas had been nominated as a judge on the Supreme Court. Anita sued Thomas on charges of sexual harassment. In a modern context this is the beginning of the Me Too wave, Pancheva noted. This case became very famous in the USA, it was broadcast on television, society reacted, and opinions were divided – defenders of the male and of the female points of view.
According to Pancheva, Mamet, as a good playwright who senses the pulse of the times, rewrites this story by creating the play „Oleanna“, transferring the case in a non-literal way to the situation between a professor and a student. It tells of a professor who is about to be granted tenure, and the student enters into a situation with him, and the tenure in question begins to be called into doubt as to whether it will happen. This strings the play together situationally.
My choice of this play was prompted by my interest in such themes, in which there are different positions and points of view, Pancheva stressed. She staged the play four years ago at the theatre in Kazanlak. One of the roles was again played by the actress Teona Dimova, whom the audience will now also see on the stage of the Pleven theatre.
I do not have the feeling that we worked on this text at all four years ago, because now it is solved differently, said Teona Dimova. The most interesting thing for me is that this performance is communicative with the audience, which we are about to explore, she added.
This is a hybrid form of theatre between the psychological, classical dramatic theatre that we all know, and a kind of documentary quality and interactivity with the audience. In Western theatre, in the good sense of the term, this has been happening for quite a few years, directorially, and it is pulling the Western cultural world in a very meaningful and interesting direction, said the actor Delyan Iliev.
According to him, it is good that „Oleanna“ is being staged on a Pleven stage, since the city has many young people – pupils and students. There is a need for the younger audience not just to return to the theatre, but to want to come here, and I hope that it is precisely with „Oleanna“ that we will spark this interest, the actor added.
The set and costumes are by Ilina Grozeva, and the music for the performance is by Yavor Namliev. The premiere performance is this evening on the main stage.
BTA correspondent in Pleven, Elina Kyurkchieva