The Guilty One

A bitter comedy of manners in which the director skillfully confronts actors and audiences with the question – are we or is time "the guilty one" – and invites everyone on a journey to themselves with the charm of the old high life of Sofia, with a breath of love and theatricality, with the truth that we are all inclined to tell others only what we cannot hide. "The Guilty One" is a play in which the characters often repeat: "Times were like that." They pronounce it as an explanation, justification, exoneration... This attempt to shift responsibility for our own compromises onto time is actually not a bad role with its conveniences that we play before ourselves. Only no time is guilty enough to make us completely innocent. Dimitar Dimov writes "The Guilty One" in an era bent over by guilts. Among its many monstrous distortions belongs one that we seem to have forgotten most easily: the hypocritical unquestioningness with which we deny or overlook the unpredictable power of feelings. The characters in this story bump into fears, limitations, illusions and clichés from the end of the fifties. "The Guilty One" is a strange, very lonely play in Bulgarian dramaturgy, notes Yury Dachev. With the inexplicability of the attraction between the characters, with inevitable catastrophes, with unspoken revelations. But our continuing misunderstanding regarding the division of guilt: our own and the other – that of time, makes this text alive and contemporary.