The Daily Star (Lebanon)
June 9, 2018 Saturday
Armenian play takes fresh approach to inner conflict
by Georgia Beeston
The Beirut Spring Festival wound down Thursday evening with "A Flight Over The City," a play staged at Dawar al-SHAMS by the Yerevan State Puppet Theater.
BEIRUT: The Beirut Spring Festival wound down Thursday evening with "A Flight Over The City," a play staged at Dawar al-SHAMS by the Yerevan State Puppet Theater. Written by Anush Aslibekyan, the two-person play has already had a successful career, having toured the world for the past eight years and scheduled to be staged elsewhere in the Arab world in the future.
It tells the story of a young blind girl who, about to have surgery to regain her sight, struggles with her love for her doctor and her fear of losing her inner world to reality.
The play is in two acts.
The first delves into the girl's mind before surgery. The audience witnesses her inner turmoil and her imaginary life – the latter full of colors, shapes and wonderful music – and her frightening vulnerability as a blind girl.
Throughout the first act, the audience hears the invisible doctor's voice guiding and aiding the young girl through all her fears.
In the second act, the girl has regained her eyesight and consequently loses her imaginary world and passion for her doctor.
Actors Narine Grigoryan and Sergey Tovmasyan were mostly alone onstage throughout.
Grigoryan's performance was particularly impressive, fluctuating from being a child in a fairy-tale world to frightened, sightless woman.
Most notable was the first act's set design and musical score, which highlighted the contrast between her fantasy world and reality.
One particularly impressive innovation was the upstage Velcro wall, with which Grigoryan interacted throughout the first act. Accompanied by folk music, she applied colorful string to the Velcro to create the wonderful figures of her fairytale world.
As her character is lost in fantasy, Grigoryan moved from swimming in an imaginary ocean, to acting like a doll pulled along by a string, to playing with the doctor's voice as if she'd trapped it in her hands.
When reality intervenes, the changed set design was equally effective. The soothing score was abruptly drowned out by harsh sounds of traffic. The Velcro wall was replaced by a screen upon which was projected the frightening reality of a car or unknown person striking the girl as she lost her way.
The colorful string that had adorned her fantasy world became a symbol of her inner turmoil, with Grigoryan throwing it about the stage before hurling it against the wall.
The first act closed spectacularly with Grigoryan affixing herself to the wall, flying into the unknown as her character goes into the surgery.
The second act was, perhaps intentionally, less enjoyable than the first, with the doctor's apartment replacing the young girl's fantasy.
Upon her departure from the doctor's life, he is left with nothing but his imagination.
Unable to surrender his love for her, the doctor rejects reality in favor of a world where her voice is now his guide. The play concludes with the doctor's retreat into his own fantastical world – the closing scene being projection of the pair flying over a city together.
"A Flight Over The City" offers a creative and fresh approach to the themes of love and conflict, and a reminder that a simple set design can effectively move an audience.