"The actor who is all for the non-orthodox approach and wild, crazy, extreme acting, meets the director who is willing to play his violin."
Dimitar Staikov
"24 chasa"
26 Feb. ‘02

"Lilia Abadjieva once again has proved that the stage adaptation of classical texts could bring the works closer to contemporary audiences. "Notes" by Dostoyevsky is reborn on stage as a collage, as grotesque pantomime and repetitive signs, which concentrate what’s central to the work. The metaphysical contained within is grounded on sound empirical bonds and rational sustainability which allows the text to reach the audience. Vassil Abadjiev’s design is a perfect game of lights and shadows in an aesthetically composed space. The musical environment is created by the director herself and includes avant-garde pieces such as Pink Floyd’s Umagumma, and is so impressing that at times the music does it all."
Antoaneta Baeva
"Dnevnik"
27 Feb. ‘02

"Fintzi Senior is indeed demonical in his spiritual ups and downs."
Albena Atanassova
"Standart"
28 Feb. ‘02

"To Itzhak Finzi the underground is the strange pleasure in a suspicious dead end, in the venom of unsatisfied cravings… A performance both maddening and exciting."
Stella Nedeva
"Duma"
4 March ‘02
Notes from the Underground
by F. M. Dostoyevsky

stage adaptation and director Lilia Abadjieva
set & costume design Vassil Abadjiev
music environment Lilia Abadjieva
premiere 27 February 2002
"The experience of this theatre event is not so much in listening to the words as in the references and first-hand experience of th primal emotions. That is why it is not so much the words that I remember but the lively body of Finzi, the leaps of the elderly constitution of his character and the roaming amidst walls constantly appearing from out of the blue. The aquarium is both the boundless abyss of the mind and the closed box of the being. It is where the metaphysical beloved (auto-citation of Lilly Abadjieva from her earlier "The Wedding") might appear in inhuman dimensions of a virtual fantasy. And dreams are the actual existence… The divine premonition of suffering and its to an extent inherent presence within any human being created by the Lord has been theatricalized almost literally with the demonstration of the Lord's gaze. The documentary lens of the camera follows each movement of the character and shamelessly exposes him in his own personal space. The lack of any privacy and the ignoration of the intimate seem to be a somewhat cynical game played by Bod, who teaches Man his hardest lesson - of self-respect and awareness of one's own significance. In this performance there are more questions in the end than there were in the beginning. This means that the answers are in each of us. And to seek for them means to suffer."
Maria Kassimova
"Kapital"
9 March '02
CAST
Itzhak Finzi
Kalina Stancheva

LILLIA ABADJIEVA

"I would have never started on "Notes from the Underground" if Itzhak Finzi hadn’t accepted to perform. He is the one and only who gives the text unexpected meanings. He is the one and only capable of expressing the ambiguity of Dostoyevsky’s attitude to suffering."
"Standart", 28 Feb. ‘02