The Colonel Bird

Bulgarian playwright Hristo Boytchev’s The Colonel Bird was originally written in 1997 against the backdrop of the military conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. The heroes of his play are the patients of a psychiatric hospital that has been abandoned to survive or perish within the walls of a monastery in the Balkan Mountains. During a snowstorm UN jets mistakenly drop on their territory a load of military uniforms intended for “peace keepers.” A silent patient, the former Colonel Fetisov (a Russian who lost his family during bombing raids), mobilizes the patients into a small combat unit, dressing them in the uniforms and returning to them the belief that they can be healthy. The Colonel Bird won the British Council’s International New Playwright Award in 1999, was translated into numerous languages and was staged in many European and Russian theatres. The anti-militaristic message of Boytchev’s comic parable is timely once again.

Director Roman Drobot is a graduate of both the acting and directing departments of the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute, where he now teaches.