RECORD OF LONGEVITY ON STAGE IN ARMENIA BELONGS TO DRAMATIC THEATER’S PERFORMANCE “TO FORGET HEROSTRATUS”

Noyan Tapan
May 11 2006

YEREVAN, MAY 11, NOYAN TAPAN. Today the record of stage longevity in
Armenia belongs to Grigory Gorin’s performance “To Forget Herostratus”
staged 30 years ago at Yerevan Hrachya Ghaplanian Dramatic Theater. The
performance is in the theater’s repertoire up to this day and is
considered the most frequently performed one. According to Armen
Khandikian, the producer of the performance and the Art Director
of the theater, on May 13, the performance will be presented for
the 240th time on the Dramatic Theater’s stage and first it was
presented as far back as on March 1 1976. Performance author Armen
Khandikian said that he started to stage this work with theater
founder Hrachya Ghaplanian. “Herostratus” has become the lath of
my stage biography, with which I continued to work in the future,”
A.Khandikian emphasized. According to theatrical critic Levon Mutafian,
“Herostratus” that was proved by time and which hundreds of spectators
admired, was a brave and new word for the theatrical critics of that
period. “The performance was persecuted and strictly criticized.

But the continuing flow of spectators coming to the theater and the
crowded halls just defeated the time and the ideology of the system,”
the theatrical critic emphasized. According to him, for 30 years the
performance has not lost its freshness, it remains modern “as it was
not national by its form and socialist by its content, it was general
by its form and common to mall mankind by its ideology”. “Khandikian
threw down a challenge to the rules and dicta torship of the time
by means of Herostratus, making unacceptable keeping silence and
tolerating any longer,” L.Mutafian considers.