The Preposterous Postness of Being: The Case of a Recent Bulgarian Adaptation of The Tempest

It has been acknowledged that following the political changes of 1989, The Tempest has noticeably engaged the interest of Bulgarian theater directors and audiences. The present article continues this discussion by exploring Stefan Moskov's Bad Weather Makes a Good Story - an adaptation (rather a complete rewriting) of The Tempest. In Moskov's characteristic style the production dismantles and derides all familiar structures, jumbles registers, and drives the audience to the very verge of absurdity. Francis Drake defeats the Spanish Armada and becomes famous. People lose interest in theater and sail off to explore new territories. To avenge himself Shakespeare invents an island (he discovers it before Drake) and populates it with strange creatures and happenings. The characters are ordinary people from the street (an allusion to Moskov's well-known Pythonesque comic TV programme The Street) who stop by a theatre poster advertising The Tempest and enter their own version of the play. The Bard appears on the stage hidden behind a cliché mask nervously inquiring "Who am I, he, she or they?" and scolding the actors for their deviations from his text. Then, his mother turns up to scold him and call him home for supper. In a word: Moskov's Bad Weather  is an extreme example of art tempestuously liberating itself from all constraints - a preposterous post-Shakespeare which holds a mirror up to the curious case of contemporary Bulgarians who have eventually found themselves washed out upon a post-colonial, post-communist, postmodern, post-structural, post-ideological, post-rational, post-literate, post-et-cetera bank and shoal of time.