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Night: A lady's bedchamber in Bulgaria, in a small town near the Dragoman Pass, late in November in the year 1885. This is the opening to Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man. The play, a comedy referencing the Serbo-Bulgarian war of 1885, has recently become the backdrop of a different kind of (political) performance. I would set the scene something like this:

I wish this were a play. Unfortunately, it is the Bulgarian reality. On Nov. 7, a crowd of right-wing protesters attacked the audience of the National Theater before the premiere of John Malkovich’s production of Arms and the Man. Among the angry nationalists were key political figures and current representatives in Parliament from the parties “Vuzrazhdane” (translated “Revival”) and “Mech” (translated “Sword”). Images from the night show the protesters holding signs with slogans such as “Malkovich go home,” “No to the anti-Bulgarian sentiments in the National Theater,” and “Resign, you traitors.” From footage and filmed interviews with some of the “patriots” in front of the theater, only one thing is clear: they have not read the play at all.

I did. On the surface level, Arms and the Man can be read as a comedy about love: Raina, a young rich Bulgarian girl and the daughter of a Major fighting in the Serbo-Bulgarian war, saves an enemy soldier, sparking a love triangle (that at some point becomes a much more irregular shape) with him and her fiance, an officer in the Bulgarian army. If one were to dig a tad bit deeper, it is a play about weaponizing people’s feelings and gambling with their lives. But if we were to truly intellectualize it, Shaw’s play is a witty critique of the institution of war, a commentary on the loss of the romantic ideals of nationhood and warfare, and a conversation starter of whether Western Europe can exist as a civilization if war is how that civilization is achieved. The play ridicules not only the Bulgarian characters in the play but every character. The occasional stereotype about the Serbs, the Bulgarians, the Swiss, the Austrians, the English, and the Russians is only a sign of the times when Shaw wrote the play. Other than that, the Serbo-Bulgarian war, which really could be considered one of the last wars of the Romantic period temporally speaking, is only a convenient backdrop, not the focus, of Arms and the Man, and least of all the recipient of Shaw’s snarky mockery.

Without knowing the exact contents of the play, I can see how, to a radical nationalist, a comedy about the Serbo-Bulgarian war would sound offensive. Additionally, the fact that the premier coincided with the commemoration of the end of the Serbo-Bulgarian war, Nov. 7, might also have heightened the tension and confirmed in the minds of the “patriots” that the performance was meant to ridicule Bulgarians. The result, however, was the opposite: it is because of the ignorance of the protesting nationalists, who assaulted the director of the National Theater and members of the audience who had been asked to leave, that Bulgaria was once again negatively featured in the spotlight of European news.

The following night, Nov. 8, another modern Bulgarian tradition came into the spotlight: the tradition of contra-protesting. The park in front of the National Theater filled up with protestors again, but this time of two opposing protests. On one side of the square, nationalists were chanting for the resignation of the administration of the Theater and for Bulgarians to stay strong against the threat of Western propaganda. On the other side, theatergoers, actors, poets, writers, sculptors, overall erudites, and the Bulgarian “intelligentsia” were protesting against the censorship of art and violence against artists. Right in the middle, between the two crowds, a wall of police officers kept the protestors away from each other to avoid another violent clash.

But what did we expect? With a history curriculum hyper-focused on war, conquest, and the Revival period of national liberation for Bulgaria, taught in a language that is not at all scientific and mostly overly dramatic, it is only natural that people would grow up glamorizing conflict. From the first grade, the history of Bulgaria intertwines with our lessons on fine art and literature, and the most time is spent exactly on the period 1877-1878, the final years of the Ottoman rule over Bulgaria, and the revolts and wars led against the Ottomans. In the 12 years I spent studying Bulgarian literature and history, we repeated the same Revival-period topics three times. I can see how the fact that Arms and the Man deromanticizes war and is an expression of Shaw’s belief in the futility and performativity of conflicts, especially on a nationalist basis, would be an alien idea to someone who has only received state education. Most likely the majority of the protestors, on both sides of the police wall, had not even read the play and based their views on the vague recollections of their middle school history lessons when they learned a much more dramatized version of the events than any theater production could ever conjure.

In terms of reading the play, even if these protestors had read it, I am not certain the result would have been much different. The way we are taught to interpret text does not allow room for much imagination, and Bernard Shaw is impossible to understand if one does not read entirely between the lines. Bulgarian literature classes rely on the students memorizing first the source text, then the interpretation of some literary critics and professors from Sofia University, and finally the exact academic essays written by the students of said literary critics. Success in this class – and overall of your education, as the mandatory matriculation exam at the end of high school is only in Bulgarian Language and Literature – is evaluated based on the extent to which one has managed to replicate the writing style and ideas of the scholars of the day. Since matriculation exams determine one’s admission into university, then a higher education diploma determines one’s employability, the way the educational system is structured suggests that obedient replication of the same glamorized and dramatized version of Bulgarian history and art is what is useful to our society. Whenever contemporary authors, poets, sculptors, actors, and directors attempt to go beyond the boundaries of the “architectonics of the Bulgarian literary canon” (to put all the memorization I did to use one last time) it is looked down upon. Now also attacked, physically. It is almost as if Bulgarians have achieved nothing of importance since the Revival period. That is not a foreign idea or Western propaganda, as the nationalists would like to believe. It is already an internalized belief perpetuated by our homegrown curricula in the arts and humanities.

In response to the protests, the National Theater of Bulgaria took down the ads for upcoming productions on the outside and instead put up the article in the Law for Protection and Development of Cultural Activity which protects artists and art organizations from censorship. On the topic of whether the play should be staged, that is that. Enough said.

However, on the topic of the right of expression, we should consider teaching people how to express themselves first, and how to find their original voices and ideas, instead of replicating praise for times gone by. While schools keep preaching instead of teaching and students keep parroting old dogmas with unrealistic national ideals, the wounds of wars we fought over a century ago would only fester and the hate for our neighbors and ourselves will never be cured.