Leonce and Lena

Translation: Dimitar Gochev

Stage adaptation and direction: Rostislav Georgiev

Set and costume design: Antonia Sokolova

Original music: Yavor Namliev

Cast: Sofia Giustrova, Kaloyan Govedarski, Stefan Saraiivanov, Emona Ilieva, Ognyan Simeonov, Petar Goranov, Teodor Sofroniev

Georg Büchner (1813–1837)

Georg Büchner was a German playwright, physician, philosopher, anatomist, and revolutionary. In his short life—just 23 years—he managed to write four plays, the last of which has not survived, while the first three became masterpieces of world drama and anticipated later trends in theatre writing.

Büchner completed his doctoral dissertation while also engaging in revolutionary activities, for which he was persecuted until the end of his life. In July 1834, the pamphlet Der Hessische Landbote (“The Hessian Courier”) was published, calling on the population to revolt against the ruling authorities. He died of typhus on February 19, 1837.

Dimitar Gochev (1943–2013)

Dimitar Gochev was a theatre director born in Bulgaria and one of Germany’s leading directors from the late 20th century. At the beginning of his career, he briefly returned to Bulgaria and worked at the theatres in Ruse and Vratsa, as well as at Sofia Theatre.

In 1980, he staged the play Leonce and Lena in Ruse, translating it himself from German. Shortly afterward, the production was banned by the communist censorship authorities. The present production uses his translation.

Rostislav Georgiev

Rostislav Georgiev graduated in theatre directing in 2022 in the class of Prof. Margarita Mladenova. That same year, he won the National Competition for Young Theatre Directors “Slavi Shkarov” with the production Merci and Camier, based on Samuel Beckett. In 2025, he received the Askeer Award in the “Rising Star” category for directing the productions BIFEM by L. Petrushevskaya at the Sava Ognianov Drama Theatre in Ruse and The Government Inspector by N. V. Gogol at the Nikola Vaptsarov Drama Theatre in Blagoevgrad.

About the play

At first glance, Büchner’s Leonce and Lena appears to be a banal fairy-tale plot—a prince and a princess who have never met are to be married against their will. In fact, however, using this premise, Büchner tells a parable about the relationship between the individual and power in a totalitarian state—a kingdom on the verge of collapse.

The citizens who live there are sunk in unimaginable poverty, misery, and deprivation. Royal decrees and orders produce no action or change whatsoever, yet they continue to be formally proclaimed—emptied of all content. In the kingdom, behind the façade of order and propriety that all the king’s subjects are obliged to maintain, decay, debauchery, and vice reign, while the palace continues to preach lofty values and ideals.

It is in this hermetically sealed world—of unfreedom and dictatorship, of existence emptied of meaning and mechanical living—that Leonce and Lena must fall in love, and then inherit and assume responsibility for this very world, which they deeply despise. Is it possible for love to take root in such soil?

Büchner also raises another question, fundamental to all his work—is human beings capable of freely choosing and directing their lives and future, or are they subject to “the inexorable, iron law of history, in which man is merely a puppet and unknowable forces pull the strings”?

“I had the feeling that I was being crushed by the terrible fatalism of history. The individual is merely foam upon the wave, greatness is only a coincidence, the power of genius—a puppet show, an absurd struggle against the iron law, in which the greatest achievement is to become aware of its existence, while overcoming it is impossible.”

Recommended for: adults