Strangers in a strange land, the hulking peasant and frail professor are most unlikely partners.
Kalin Vrachanski is in the role of a political exile from "there," wanted by the repressive Regime for reasons he hints at.
Asen Blatechki plays an illiterate peasant who has left village and family to make money "here."
It is New Year's Eve…
Melpomene’s Theatre “Emigrants” is the play Kalin Vrachanski and Asen Blatachki had been playing in front of Bulgarian emigrants for a few years now and their success is a living proof that Mrozek’s play, written in 1973 still reflects in the hearts of the emigrants today.
After a very successful tour in US and Canada, Kalin and Asen toured New Zealand and Australia having similar success in Brisbane, Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne.
“Emigrants” is a dark comedy about two people who have no friends, nowhere to go and one of them even can't speak the language at all.
What can they do but exchange memories, suspicions, their past, their dreams, their frustrations, their fears and their fragile hopes?
And so they do, very effectively and very movingly, over an hour-and-a half without an intermission, hardly able to move within the grubby confines of their windowless and claustrophobic cellar.
Physical emigrants they may be, but they are nonetheless prisoners: not only incarcerated in a society that is at best indifferent and at worst hostile, but of the perceptions they have brought with them.
Polish playwright Mrozek wrote the play having in mind the Soviet emigrants in Paris at the time and through them, about emigrants everywhere.
The spectators here in Australia all agreed that even though “Emigrants” is 46 years old it hasn’t lost its actuality and finds those tender spots in the minds of today’s emigrants.
After the last show in Melbourne of their Australian tour, Asen Blatechki and Kalin Vrachanski gave an exclusive interview for the Bulgarian program on SBS radio.
