ABSTRACT
By what he has written so far, the playwright (and he is as much a playwright as he is a poet because his plays and his collections of poems are nearly equal in number), Stefan Tsanev has angered those in power, those stringently adhering to the dry outline of historical facts, those paying homage to myths and mythological personalities, the critics and even his closest friends and supporters. By his play The Secret Gospel of John, whose premiere in Bulgaria was during the Holy Week, Stefan Tsanev ran the risk of getting the anger of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, too. Whether the holy priests would call “anathema” or “glory be” to him will be known in the future. The writer has been audacious enough to present, for the first time in the world of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Jesus Christ on the stage, making the most sacred figure of Christianity act. At a time when missionaries of most diverse religious sects are busy in Bulgaria, synods are splitting up and ethnical disputes come to the fore, Stefan Tsanev is trying to vindicate “the divine in Man” and “the human in the deities”. The Secret Gospel of John tells how eminent personalities are manipulated and their ideas are misrepresented. Jesus has at long last to be accepted by his teaching: “People, love each other, love your enemies, too!”, and has to be saved from manipulators. John the Evangelist has been presented in a new light, Judas is a victim rather than a traitor, Jesus is more of a man than the Lord God. This is a mystery play the action of which proceeds as in a classical tragedy, interrupted by interludes of a Chorus of Executioners. Stefan Tsanev admits that he has been influenced by Lloyd-Webber’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar, and most of all by the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus, the man-god openly enters into a dispute with the Lord God.
