April 25, 2026 | Saturday | 6:00 p.m.

City Stage

(underground level)   

 

Prophet Song

a performative reading by Snezhina Petrova

Sound: Yulian Stoichkov

 

The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window looking out onto the garden. How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. It gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark but accept the dark in whisper. – Prophet Song, Paul Lynch

 

The actress Snezhina Petrova will take on the role of Eilish Stack – the main character of the novel “Prophet Song,” a mother of four children whose husband is arrested by the “National Alliance” – an anti-democratic party that gradually takes over the state and enforces total control and terror. The narrative is emotional and non-linear, moving through the inner world of the heroine, who struggles against the darkness but loses much, far too much, before setting out toward salvation across the sea. Through various fragments, you will hear about the fate of her children – the baby Ben, her sons Mark and Bailey, and her daughter Molly, who ties white ribbons (the color of protest) to the tree in the yard for every day her father is absent.

Prophet Song is the novel for which Irish writer Paul Lynch received the prestigious Booker Prize in 2023. The Bulgarian translation is by Iglika Vassileva and it is published by “Lizst” publishing house. Another one of his books is also expected to be published in Bulgarian soon.

 

  Excerpt from Prophet Song:

…she looks at her infant son, this child who remains an innocent and she sees how she has fallen afoul of herself and grows aghast, seeing that out of terror comes pity and out of pity comes love and out of love the world can be redeemed again, and she can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight, and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore… – Prophet Song, Paul Lynch