Featuring interviews with Professor Boika Sokolova and Dr Mark Love-Smith
Written by Layla Wilson, York St John University Literature Student & YISF Work Placement
York International Shakespeare Festival 2025 has officially begun with its inaugural performance, The Murder of Gonzago by Nedyalko Yordanov. This play is a spin-off of the meta-theatrical play within Shakespeare’s Hamlet, even featuring characters such as Ophelia, Polonius, and Horatio. Ileana Alexander Orlich writes, “Yordanov’s title, which is also the title of the play within the play in Hamlet, leaves no doubt about its kinship to the Shakespearean original as an explicit backdrop.” However, it is also identified as a play in its own right, as it follows a company of actors, yet to perform for King Claudius, each character with their personal egotisms, flaws, and inhibitions, as they navigate the world of theatre. With a heavily weighted political backdrop behind this play, there is much to be said about the view of politics in this play’s identity alongside its interaction with art and theatre.
This is the first time that the play has been performed in English translation, and much is to be said about it. Prior to the performance, I had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Boika Sokolova, as well as Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of York, Mark Love-Smith. Boika is a Shakespeare scholar currently working at the University of Notre Dame for the London Programme. She is originally from Bulgaria but has lived and worked in England for the last thirty years. Professor Sokolova has taught students to “appreciate how a text is transformed in performance.” Her expertise on this subject is particularly fascinating when focusing on the way that Mark Lovesmith directed the piece, as well as his casting of University of York Students to bring this play to life. Mark is not only a senior lecturer but also a director with previous experience in directing Shakespeare plays, with his latest being the reading of The Murder of Gonzago. Both Boika and Mark came into contact with the festival through a connection with YISF Festival Artistic Director Philip Parr, and this year, they were invited to participate in this English reading of Yordanov’s 1989 translation.
There is an element of transcendence in translation—the sense of reaching beyond borders and reading into cultures less familiar. What I found particularly intriguing was the context of the play and the political backdrop that Yordanov experienced in Bulgaria, which arguably drove his use of Hamlet for the expression of his own experience. Much of the context surrounding this play was provided by Boika Sokolova as a preceding introduction to the performance, enlightening us on the socio-political backdrop of Nedyalko Yordanov’s time. During Yordanov’s life, he experienced the restriction of a totalitarian and authoritarian Soviet government where, as Arthur Rachwald puts it, “Classical Russian imperialism {…} was on a collision course with the nationalism of East European peoples.” Also, much restriction was placed on Nedyalko Yordanov himself, as three of his plays (from 1966 to 1968) were banned by the Bulgarian government. “Yordanov’s play foregrounds the iron-fisted authority of totalitarian and despotic regimes {…} underscoring the insurrectional quality of theater in Central and Eastern Europe and its ability to subvert classical models for political aims” (Orlich). Upon conversing with Boika about this, she describes the play as a “memorial to the East European experience of oppressive politics and especially cultural politics,” particularly when thinking of “the position of the acting profession in such contexts.” She explained the beauty in that Yordanov’s personal experience was not limited to himself, but was completely resonant with a wider Eastern European audience that felt, personally, the experience that this playwright conveyed. As she puts it, “there is a general historical experience which applied to nearly three hundred million people,” and the play was of much interest, but mainly to those societies where “totalitarian experiences could be easily understood.”
Consequently, what started to become most intriguing in this discourse was how the director, Mark Love-Smith, could translate such a heavy political background and bring it to the York stage. When asking about initially receiving the text, he explained that they were “not kind of perfectly polished translations”, yet he recognised the sense of “freedom with the language of the translations and developed that to make it more speakable.” He described the rehearsal process as “low-key” due to “working with a mixture of student actors and some actors from the local York community”; however, noted the enjoyment in reading the script for the first time and finding the humour in certain places, alongside feelings of shock; however, most of all he described how easy they found it to “identify with aspects of the play.” Upon reflection of the reading, Mark elaborated on the intrigue that each individual character of the play brought to the actors, outlining that “each of them has slightly different motivations for what they’re doing. You’ve got the young sort of ambitious actor who wants to be the star and wants to get spotted and get taken into the royal entourage. You’ve got the older actor who’s a lot more worldly-wise, and looking around, he senses there’s something fishy going on here.” Boika also acknowledged the importance of the actors during the interview, saying, “It is a play which captures very well the relationships within a theatre company, which are beyond politics, just the human affairs. It’s among the actors. The ambitions, their hatreds, their attempts to overdo each other.”
This leads on to my final enquiry of this reading, which is how it resonated with a present audience as well as an English one. I think Mark defined this precisely, he speaks of a resemblance to current British affairs, and comments about “the question of who funds the arts and to what end and, there’s been quite a lot under the previous government about the arts council or funding for the BBC and things like this and how government has sort to get greater and greater control over the content in return for the funds that it provides. And this is the situation that Yordanov is talking about, it’s much more extreme and much more life-threatening, so I don’t want to make an easy kind of comparison to Arts Council cuts versus, you know, threats to people’s lives. But there’s certainly this question the play asks of… what you make art for and who gives you the power to do that.” There is a moment in this play where one of the characters expresses the fact that a particular event was “a century ago” and there is this pivotal moment where another character scrutinizes this, saying, “you think things have changed?” Although this is Yordanov’s conversation with a Bulgarian audience in 1989, this is a question that should be asked even now: if it can resonate with present-day society, have things really changed?
The importance of European readings, such as this one, has certainly become apparent. In the English translation of The Murder of Gonzago, there was a resonant and memorable line that said, “Art is Above Everything,” and I think this is what can be conveyed in performative texts, whether it’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 1980s Bulgaria, or England in 2025. The art of theatre and performance can transcend boundaries and communicate to those across the world and even across time periods.
References:
“Bulgaria – the Early Communist Era.” Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/place/Bulgaria/The-early-communist-era.
Kostova, Gergana. “Големият български поет, драматург и режисьор Недялко Йорданов отбеляза 85-ия си рожден ден «Epoch Times Bulgaria.” Epoch Times Bulgaria, 30 Jan. 2025, epochtimes.bg/golemijat-balgarski-poet-dramaturg-i-rezhisor-nedjalko-jordanov-otbeljaza-85-ija-si-rozhden-den/.
Lovesmith, Mark. “Personal Interview.” 23 April 2025
Orlich, Ileana Alexandra. “Nedyalko Yordanov’s The Murder of Gonzago: Reading Bulgaria’s Communist Political Culture through Shakespeare’s Hamlet.” Subversive Stages: Theater in Pre- and Post-Communist in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, Central European University Press, 2017, pp. 135–54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7829/j.ctt1pq33zt.10.
Rachwald, Arthur R. “Soviet-East European Relations.” Current History, vol. 88, no. 541, 1989, pp. 377–409. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45316268.
Sokolova, Boika. “Personal Interview.” 23 April 2025