From Armenia to Poland ‘with love’s light wings’

Abstract

French

On 30 July 2019, Yerevan State Chamber Theatre’s unconventional version of Romeo and Juliet was performed at the annual Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre Festival in Poland, after successfully premiering in Yerevan, Armenia, in 2017. Following the overwhelming success of the production with local and international audiences and critics, invitations from other European festivals followed. When the current devastating restrictions imposed on theatres worldwide by the Covid-19 pandemic are finally lifted, the journey of the world’s best-known love story retold by this innovative theatre troupe will resume.

Keywords

William Shakespeare Armenia Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre

In memory of Professor Jerzy Limon

Prologue

The tragedy of Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers has inspired Armenian editors and translators for nearly 200 years. The first extracts from the Shakespearean canon were translated from English into classical Armenian (Grapar) between 1821 and 1823 by editors and educators to instruct students of the newly established Armenian College and Philanthropic Academy (ACPA) in Calcutta.¹ Thereafter, over fifteen translations of Romeo and Juliet were released in Western and Eastern Armenian. The first complete translation from the original into Western Armenian was published in Smyrna by Aram K. Teteyan in 1866.² Delivered entirely in prose and in the Western Armenian vernacular of Smyrna (apart from the Prologue), Teteyan’s translation lacked the lyrical power of the original. Yet his successful version of the well-known Prologue demonstrates his poetic aptitude, not entirely exploited in his Shakespearean translations:

Երկու գերդաստանք, երկուսն հավասար

աստիճանով նման,

Վերոնայի մեջ, ու որ կբերենք մեր տեսարան

Հին ատելությամբ հակառակելով նոր

կրից հաղթասեր,

Ազնիվ արյան անմաքուր կ’ընեն ազնվական

ձեռքեր:

Two households, both alike in dignity,

(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

(Romeo and Juliet, Prologue, 1–4)³

After several attempts across various diasporas, a ground-breaking version of Romeo and Juliet was issued in Tiflis in 1896, translated from English into Eastern Armenian by Hovhannes Massehian.⁴ Thirty years later, Massehian published his second version of the tragedy with the publishing house of the Vienna Mekhitarists:

‘The first version of Romeo and Juliet, with its poetic artistry, has been a triumph of the 1890s Armenian literature. If the second version were not available, the first version would have remained one of the best samples of literary translation’, wrote Byurakn Andreassian, researcher at the Armenian Centre of Shakespeare Studies, which was inaugurated in 1964.⁵

A copy of the first Massehian translation can be found at the Shakespeare Birthplace Library, donated by actor-manager Hovhannes Abelian during his visit to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1899. The widespread popularity of the play among Armenian readers and translators continued into the 20th century. The finest version, by Khachik Dashtents, came out in 1951 and has been regularly reprinted since then.⁶ The most recent translation of Romeo and Juliet was published by the classical scholar and translator Aram Topchyan at the end of 2020.⁷

Although translations of Romeo and Juliet into Armenian were highly appreciated by readers, there were initially few stage adaptations of the play; perhaps theatre practitioners regarded The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear as better suited for their oppressed communities living under foreign rules. Extracts from Romeo and Juliet premiered at the Armenian theatre in 1880 by the Armenian permanent theatre troupe in Tiflis, with Stepan Safrazian (Romeo) and Varduhi [Anna Namurazian] (Juliet), in a translation by Hakop Ter-Hovhannissian. Prior to the foundation of the first Republic of Armenia in 1918, Armenian-language productions of Romeo and Juliet were also presented across various Armenian diasporas (such as Varna, Sofia, Constantinople, Tiflis, Baku, Lyon, Paris, New York) in the early 1900s.⁸

Following the inauguration of the First State Theatre in Yerevan, the capital of Soviet Armenia, act 2 scene 2 from Romeo and Juliet was performed by the legendary Vahram Papazian⁹ (Romeo) and his lifelong muse Arus Voskanyan¹⁰ (Juliet), both at the prime of their dramatic careers. The subsequent notable adaptation of Romeo and Juliet was directed by Vardan Adjemian in 1964 during the celebrations of Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary at the same theatre (since renamed The Sundukyan State Academic Theatre), with two leading dramatic actors of their generation, Metaksya Simonian (Juliet) and Khoren Abrahamian (Romeo).¹¹ The next major production of Romeo and Juliet was staged almost 30 years later in 1996, at the Yerevan State Drama Theatre to mark the 30th anniversary of the theatre’s formation, with Lilit Mersopian (Juliet) and Hrachya Haroutunyan (Romeo). In this production, director Armen Khandikyan pursued the innovative approach adopted by the theatre’s founder, Hrachya Ghaplanyan, with a minimalist set and contemporary atmosphere.

Act 1: Romeo and Juliet on the stage of the Yerevan Chamber Theatre (YCT)

For her first Shakespeare adaptation, the 30-year-old director Lusiné Yernjakyan reclaimed the translation by Dashtents, which had proved to be the most suitable for stage adaptations:

‘My objective has not merely been to remain as close to the original as possible, but that the entire translation flows in Armenian: the sections in verse must be recited naturally in Armenian and the prose passages should reflect the inner rhythms of Shakespearean prose’, the translator wrote in 1966.¹²

The production had premiered at the Yerevan State Chamber Theatre (YSCT) on 17 March 2017. Directed and designed by Lusiné Yernjakyan – with a decade of directorial experience under her belt – this sold-out production instantly became a hit with audiences, winning the major national theatre award, the Artavazd Prize, in the categories of best production and best director of the year.

‘Our main purpose was to introduce Shakespeare’s celebrated tragedy to younger audiences’, the producer Arsho Harutyunyan explained during our backstage meeting. ‘Allegedly, spectators know the plot: a boy loves a girl, they belong to rival families, and it ends tragically. Yet this is crude and one-dimensional. Shakespeare’s text is incredibly multifaceted, colourful and even humorous. How to present the subtleties and subtexts of this great play, how to deliver the ostensibly familiar story in a novel way? These were the concerns that guided our approach’.

The playwright, theatre and film director Ara Yernjakyan (Lusiné’s father) founded the Chamber Theatre during the Soviet rule in 1982, when a small space was granted to his project by the Ministry of Culture in the basement of a residential building in the city centre. That uncongenial space was transformed into a boat-shaped auditorium, with 140 comfortable seats all adjacent to the mirror-backed stage. The small performance space suited Yernjakyan’s distinctive dramaturgical concept, which was radical in those repressive Brezhnev years, when artistic freedoms and human rights were hounded. His dramaturgy was guided by the fusion of the two worlds – the imaginary (stage) and the real (auditorium) – and the necessity to break Stanislavski’s ‘fourth wall’, thereby generating a direct dialogue between the actor and the spectator. ‘Audience response is a prerequisite for performers, engaging them directly with stage action. Our approach allows us not only to show and tell but also to invite debate and approval/disapproval’, Lusiné Yernjakyan told me.

The production’s neo-constructivist setting, choreography and costumes were all created by Lusiné Yernjakyan, who has been mulling over this project since the age of seventeen when she was a first-year student at the Yerevan State Institute of Theatre and Cinematography. During the reception at Capulet’s household (1.5), the masked guests paraded in glossy, steampunk-inspired outfits made from black leather, plastic and lace. The characters seemed to be competing on the catwalk for the limelight, inviting spectators to recall that Renaissance Italy was at the forefront of European arts and fashion. Juliet (Arminé Nazari-Dekhnavi) entered the ball in a lace mask, black tights, and a tiny, figure-hugging leather skirt, while Romeo (Jora Martirosyan) concealed his identity behind military goggles. Throughout the production, the stage atmosphere was dark and heavy, with occasional red, blue, or white spotlights highlighting this or that character’s speech. The most striking feature of the monochrome set was the structure of ropes hanging from the ceiling, which altered continuously, becoming a web that trapped the couple before recombining as the entrance to the chapel and then reassembling to become Juliet’s hammock or love-bed. In the final scene, the ropes formed a scaffolding upstage of the grieving families, where Friar Laurence committed suicide. The producer Arsho Harutyunyan described the overall concept:

We attempted to make each element of the production meaningful and consequential, so that all the components – lighting, music, costumes – supported our story-telling, urging spectators to reflect upon the ghastly tribalism, the wasteful decadence, which was juxtaposed with the selfless love. At the same time, we wanted to offer aesthetic and visual enjoyment, essential in live theatre.

The original text was reduced to a 90-minute, high-speed emotional rollercoaster, yet it seemed that nothing was left out from Shakespeare’s timeless tragedy. As Lusiné Yernjakyan explained, ‘editing made the storyline and action extremely sharp and condensed. Those tragic fates and intense emotions clash and fall in front of spectators, who remain constantly engaged with stage action’.

Yernjakyan discards outdated period drama and seeks to address the audience here and now, conveying the values and concerns of her generation through theatre. In her first stage entrance, with oversized headphones listening to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, Arminé Nazari-Dekhnavi (Juliet) seemed undisturbed and untouched by the ongoing violence ripping Verona apart. Later, with her speech, ‘What’s a Montague? It is not hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face …’ (2.2.43–5), which she repeated twice in different scenes, her Juliet was profoundly moving:¹³

Ի՞նչ է Մոնտեգյուն։ Ո՛չ ձեռք է, ո՛չ ոտք, Ոչ բազուկ, ո՛չ դեմք, ոչ էլ մի այլ մաս

Մարդուն պատկանող։ Ա՛ռ ուրիշ անուն։

Ինչ կա անվան մեջ։Դրա փոխարեն, առ ինձ մինչև վերջ։

In keeping with the alternative take on the play, Friar Laurence was represented as the anti-hero in this production, who carried the blame for the couple’s tragic end. Senik Barseghyan, interpreting the roles of the Chorus and of Friar Laurence, won the national theatre award, the Artavazd Prize, in the category of best male actor in 2018. Several symbolic and key speeches of other characters were spoken by Barseghyan, giving additional breadth to his role. For example, the production opened with Prince Escalus’s concluding speech from the final act, delivered poignantly by Barseghyan, who instantly captured the audience’s attention:

Արևը վշտից չի ուզում ցույց տալ իր դեմքն երկնքում,

Գնանք, այս տրտում անցքերի վրա դեռ շատ կխոսենք,

Ոմանց կներենք, ոմանց կպատժենք,

Քանզի չի եղել լուսնի տակ երբեք մի ողբ այնքան խոր,

Որքան Ջուլիետի և Ռոմեոյի վեպը սգավոր:

The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.

Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.

(5.3.317–21)

Furthermore, Barseghyan, as narrator, also delivered Mercutio’s lengthy, allegorical soliloquy about Queen Mab ‘in shape no bigger than an agate stone’ (1.4.58–100, 60) and her manipulation of human dreams and minds. During this scene, the actor approached spectators in the first row, handing them the thread from the yarn he was unwinding. This scene worked better in the Chamber Theatre’s intimate auditorium. At the end of the play, in an unexpected moment of catharsis, unable to forgive himself for the tragic outcome of his master plan, Friar Lawrence went against his own religious doctrine and hanged himself amid the shared lamentations of the rival dynasties.

A year after premiering, Yernjakyan’s adaptation was included in the programme of the Armenian Shakespeare Association’s (ASA) bi-annual international Shakespeare conference in Yerevan, which brought together scholars from Japan, America, Britain, Poland, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Conference participants, who had spent the whole of Sunday visiting ancient Armenian monasteries (Goshavank and Hagartsin) hours away from Yerevan, were rushed back to the capital for the evening show of Romeo and Juliet. The post-performance Q&A session was led by Jerzy Limon, the keynote speaker of the conference, in the presence of the cast and the theatre’s artistic director, Ara Yernjakyan. Limon praised the production’s ‘youthful vivacity and originality’, the atmospheric design and costumes inspired by the 1970s music. Noting the musical accompaniment throughout the production, a feature ‘characteristic of movies’, the Polish professor saw in this ‘the signature of someone belonging to the new generation’. Anais Vanian-Cooper, from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, found the Armenian adaptation more emotional than any Romeo and Juliet she had seen in Stratford, and noted that Shakespeare’s text sounded profoundly lyrical in Armenian. Reviewing the production for Cahiers Élisabéthains, Coen Heijes emphasised the dramatic impact of some directorial decisions, such as Friar Lawrence’s suicide and Juliet awakening ‘after Romeo had swallowed the poison, but before he died, allowing for a brief encounter between the two, before their inevitable death’.¹⁴ Heijes also wondered whether the impact of the production was magnified by his total ignorance of the Armenian language, an experience that endorses Shakespeare’s universality yet again.

Act 2: Romeo and Juliet on the stage of the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre

An internationally renowned academic, Jerzy Limon is also the founder and the director of Gdańsk’s annual Shakespeare Festival, which has been taking place for more than 25 years, bringing together companies from Poland and around the world to perform Shakespeare in their national languages. Since 2014, the festival has taken place in the magnificent, versatile Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, Limon’s brainchild, which was inaugurated for the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.¹⁵ It was in this picturesque medieval Baltic seaport, the hometown of the Solidarność movement in the 1980s, that protests triggered the collapse of the communist rule in Eastern Europe and the fragmentation of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), leading to the independence of all the Soviet republics, including Armenia, in 1991.

Limon invited the Chamber Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet to the Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival in 2019. This was a historic visit for the young Armenian troupe, its first performance of this production outside Armenia, which happened to be the second-largest (with a cast of 26) of the festival, after the multilingual Hamlet directed by the Polish director Maja Kleczewska (with a cast of over 60 actors and musicians).

Concerns were expressed about how a production designed for a small auditorium would fare on the imposing Gdańsk stage. Despite some apprehension among the Armenian troupe, spectators greeted the cast with a five-minute standing ovation at the end of the show. On her way out of the theatre, one of the festival’s regulars, who attended the performance with her teenage daughter, was wiping her tears:

This is the best Romeo and Juliet I have seen in twenty years at the festival. I loved everything about it, the design, the music, Friar Laurence, Juliet and Romeo, and the beauty of the Armenian language, that I do not understand, but it sounded like music to my ears!

A young Polish couple for whom this was their first theatre-going experience, admitted they ‘did not think that theatre could be so relevant, enjoyable and so much fun’. Clearly, this modern adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, which I was happily watching for the fourth time, had inspired theatregoers from all walks of life.

Recent graduates of the Theatre Institute, Arminé Nazari-Dekhnavi (Juliet) and Jora Martirosyan (Romeo), delivered touching performances, while feeling tremendous pressure in front of foreign audiences on a foreign stage. Senik Barsegyan (the Chorus and Friar Laurence) shared his post-performance emotions:

The initial fear vanished instantly, as I felt enormous responsibility and pride from the second I was alone on that imposing stage, with spotlights, fixed on me and speaking to the audience in the dark. It became irrelevant who they were, what language they spoke, they were my audience.

Careful substitutions by the director specifically for the Gdańsk festival proved beneficial and highlighted subtle relationships and bonds in Shakespeare’s text. For instance, Juliet’s nurse, called Daya (dayak in Armenian means nanny), was performed by the energetic Victoria Sahakyan, who was as young as Juliet, which made their bond more credible. Tybalt (Vahé Ziroyan) and Mercutio (Jora Hovhannisyan) brilliantly epitomised Southern hot-tempered macho males, whose tribal loyalties brought not only self-destruction, but bereavement for their families and ultimately destabilised the hegemony of Prince Escalus. In Gdańsk as in Yerevan, Eva Khachatryan interpreted Benvolia (instead of Benvolio), who effortlessly integrated within Mercutio’s gang, endowing the character with feminine charm, and seeking to calm the fiery Montague and Capulet opponents. She was the only witness with ‘common sense’ to testify in front of Prince Escalus about the brutal slaying of Tybalt and Mercutio.

The tense mother–daughter relationship was highlighted by brisk interactions between Juliet and Lady Capulet (Ketrin Manasyan), who lacked warmth or understanding towards her daughter. Stylish, young-looking and locked in an unhappy marriage, this Lady Capulet was thrusting Juliet into an arranged marriage, convinced that love and marriage were incompatible. Noticeably bored and constantly drinking, Lady Capulet stroked Tybalt fondly, revealing her hidden affection for her edgy, virile nephew. Her much older husband, Lord Capulet (Mkhitar Avetisyan), with his distinct baritone, displayed signs of mild remorse over the ruthless feuding between the two families.

Yernjakyan’s nuanced production of Romeo and Juliet was welcomed also by the press and scholars attending the Gdańsk Festival. The President of the Polish Shakespeare Association, Jacek Fabiszak, commented after the show:

The use of ropes to design the stage and the space, the very modern, almost steampunk costumes, as well as the very idea of a retrospective narrative by one of the characters, were in keeping with the dynamic feel of the performance and added to it. This was a dark production, which contrasted beautifully with the virtue of our star-crossed lovers.

Watching the play with her three young children, Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik, from the Polish Shakespeare Association, shared her thoughts with me in conversation:

Yernjakyan masterfully retells Shakespeare’s gripping tale of an innocent love that struggles not to know hate. Framed as a tragic cautionary tale, this production raises a question of much importance in our contemporary world, which is torn apart by the narrow-mindedness of political leaders and the catastrophic tribalism of nation-states: what will become of our children when grownups play at war?

In her press review, Alina Kietrys wrote,

Romeo and Juliet alludes to modern productions happening in the here-and-now, almost in the streets, where gangs are fighting each other. The director, Lusiné Yarnjakyan, stages the feuding families of Montagues and Capulets as modern-day gangsters, against the heavy riffs of hard rock music. […] All the characters, including the Friar, are relatively young; even Julia’s nurse is more her friend than an aging nanny. …A few well-lit platforms, metal bars forming the balcony, and the magical ropes used as the main setting, create an image of ascetic modernity. This minimalism…contrasts with the energy…of the actors.¹⁶

After the performance, I questioned producer Arsho Harutyunyan about the benefits of participation in the Polish theatre festival:

It was important to evaluate where we stand, compared to European theatres, whether our approach was similar or dissimilar from others. In my view, wherever you are, in Armenia or in Europe, the mission of theatre is the same, it should invite spectators to reflect upon human life and legacy. At the Gdańsk festival, we realised that the main difference was the high-level energy of our production. Armenians tend to be rather emotional and passionate. Compared to the restrained European productions we have seen here, our adaptation was more lyrical and emotionally charged.

Lethal pandemics have threatened civilisations since the dawn of times, recorded in ancient chronicles, folklore and literature. When theatres finally reopen their doors after the disheartening lockdown, this poignant contemporary Armenian adaptation of Romeo and Juliet will resume its journey, travelling ‘on the wings of love’ to encounter, share, and celebrate Shakespeare with audiences once again.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Professor Jerzy Limon for his boundless curiosity, enthusiasm and generosity in backing free theatre and creative talent. Special thanks equally to all Polish, French, Dutch and other European Members of Parliament, politicians and academics, who continue to defend progressive culture, universal human rights and peace in recent perilous times of Armenian history.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.