ERMEN, TITRE PROVISOIRE, THéâTRE DE L’AQUARIUM, LA CARTOUCHERIE, PARIS
By Clare Shine
FT
May 1 2007 17:08
If the title leaves you mystified, think Armenia. This new work
forms part of France’s official Year of Armenia, which winds up
this July. And although it springs from questions surrounding the
20th-century genocide, it probes broader ideas of identity – national,
personal – that are high on today’s political agenda.
Pascal Tokatlian was raised in France of Italian and Armenian stock,
but started unravelling strands of family history only as a young
adult. His monologue interweaves direct and recounted experience
with excerpts from the writings of Aram Andonian, one of the few
intellectuals to survive deportation to concentration camps in Syria
and Mesopotamia between 1915 and 1919. Andonian provides gripping
testimony – of tents as far as the eye could see, dead bodies used as
pillows by the dying, inmates holding out shoes to scoop up servings
of soup.
The result is the opposite of polemic, even though the bare set is
framed with blackboards that starkly record the events leading to the
death of an estimated 1.5m victims. Tokatlian grounds his piece in
intimacy, piecing together family anecdotes to assemble dispersed
clues. He even integrates home video of a bewitching (Italian)
granny, using as catalyst the lonely music of Gaguik Mouradian’s solo
kamantcha, played with moving restraint.
Trying to convey the soul of a dispersed people is hugely ambitious:
history, however harrowing, can prove dry in theatrical terms. Here
the start proved too intense and breathless, leaving few silences for
shared reflection. But Tokatlian is an engaging performer who grows
more assured as he allows humour and warmth into his writing: shared
banter with Mouradian about traditional home cooking, indefinable
sadness filtered through memories of a soggy camping holiday. His
recital of the final segment of Andonian’s memoirs is compelling:
" ‘How long do we have to march?’ ‘Until your bodies can’t take any
more.’ " Tel +33 1 43 74 99 61
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress