Phillip Bergson

"It's the pictures that got small" snarled Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. But that small screen in the corner of rooms around the world screening Game of Thrones ensures a mercurial,internationality for any actor cast in the fan-fascinating series.As Loboda in Series 5, the brilliant Bulgarian actor Zachary Bacharov, a lofty Leo,shaven-headed but with a winning smile, has probably been seen by more viewers around the world, that have ever bought tickets for his acclaimed stage productions back home or for the fine performances he gave in award-winning features from his homeland such as Zift (don't ask me to translate the title- it is mostly set in a prison, draw your own conclusions),or even for the smaller roles he graced in international or American-financed movies such as The Way Back.But at least he had a near full-house and enthusiastic ovations for his West End  stage debut, underground in the Leicester Square Theatre,on 21st May 2018, in the one-man play Chamkoria,which was premiered as an activity of the Sofia Gallery in London, mirroring the current Presidency of the Council of the European Union, which fell to Bulgaria earlier than planned due to some peculiar Referendum result in the not-so-United Kingdom a couple of summers ago.

The play which begins mostly in comic mode is set entirely on a rickety bus sometime in 1928 and our man plays its driver, conjuring up for the delighted audience the various passengers, intrigues,and general political and other matters pertinent for the regular trip from Sofia to the mountain resort of Chamkoria. The 90-minute play was performed  as a spectacular feat-of-memory monogue by Baharov in the original Bulgarian with fluent English translations (surtitles is the term now) easily visible on TV monitors around the theatre.Able to change emotions as swifltly as changing the gears on his "bus", the actor held the audience spellbound throughout.Clearly the strengths of fine performances in contemporary Bulgarian feature films owe much to the formal stage training and regular theatrical performances of even younger performers from the country,who are deservedly beginning to be noticed abroad in co-productions or in foreign films and TV made in their own Nu Boyana and UFO Studios in Sofia.In pre-Communist times the theatre was always prized,maybe even a little privileged, and it is encouraging to see that it feeds into newer arenas of the thespian arts today, whether on large or small screens,or in live performances on stage

Phillip Bergson                                    www.bcilondon.co.uk

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