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  • Toasting Shakespeare in Armenia

    BBC News
    Oct 1 2005

    Toasting Shakespeare in Armenia
    By Gareth Armstrong
    Armenia



    William Shakespeare may have been born in the English town of
    Stratford-on-Avon but, as the actor Gareth Armstrong discovered at a
    theatre festival in Armenia, some literary giants belong to the
    world.

    I spoke of my pride in coming from the country which could claim
    Shakespeare as her own

    I had been warned about the "toasts".

    Armenian hospitality is infamous for its assault on the liver, and a
    lunch that lasted nearly three hours gave plenty of scope to prove
    it.

    Including our hosts, there were 22 of us seated at the long dining
    table. Altogether we represented a dozen different nations.

    What had brought us to Armenia? Or rather who?

    William Shakespeare.

    We were all taking part in a week-long theatre festival of solo
    performances based on Shakespeare's works.

    That along with the unlikely opportunity for an actor to work in the
    Republic of Armenia is why I found myself downing icy shots of vodka
    several hours before the sun was anywhere near the yardarm.

    Toastmaster

    Our host was the mayor of a small town an hour's drive from the
    capital city of Yerevan.

    According to Anna, the charming young translator assigned to me, his
    first toast was to the unity of nations.

    Glasses were clinked with murmurs of solidarity in many tongues.

    The Armenian tradition is that you drink vodka at meals only when
    acknowledging a toast, and the mayor was an enthusiastic toastmaster.

    After international friendship, he invoked art, music, Armenian
    womanhood and then several less comprehensible subjects, which even
    Anna had difficulty rendering into English.

    But the mayor's increasing incoherence did not mean an end to the
    toasting.

    An elderly Russian actor rose to his feet, unaffected by the
    quantities he had drunk (which was just as well as that very evening
    he was to perform his take on King Lear) and toasted our mutual muse:
    the theatre.

    Awed silence

    Opposite me sat a thick-haired, moustachioed Iranian actor.

    (His show was about an actor whose obsession with Hamlet gets him
    committed to a mental institution.)


    He stood, closed his eyes and, in a fine baritone voice, sang a
    Persian love lyric that reduced everyone to an awed silence.

    It was around then that I realised that each of us was expected to
    give voice at some time during the proceedings.

    I had been careless of my vodka consumption, since I had already
    performed my solo show on Shylock from The Merchant of Venice on the
    previous night.

    But I decided that, if I was to make a coherent contribution, it was
    now or never.

    Convinced that I held the ace in this particular pack, I stood and
    spoke of my pride in coming from the country which could claim
    Shakespeare as her own.

    He was Britain's greatest poet, greatest playwright and most
    illustrious son.

    Lost in translation

    I proposed a rousing toast: "To William Shakespeare".

    I encountered a mild hostility to my laying claim to the writer in
    whose name we were toasting the afternoon away


    There was polite assent but little enthusiasm. Had what I said lost
    something in translation?

    A German participant, who would be troubling Hamlet's Ghost later in
    the week, firmly echoed my toast to William Shakespeare. He even
    quoted some of Hamlet's lines in a German translation by Schlegel,
    which he promised us was as good as the original.

    Then a Polish lady, whose show dealt with the wretched women in the
    life of Richard III, made a similar claim for her mother tongue.

    Finally an Armenian actor who, like me, was exploring the enigma of
    Shylock, claimed that the translations of the poet Havhannes
    Hovhannesyan were unsurpassed.

    What I had encountered was a mild hostility to my laying claim to the
    writer in whose name we were toasting the afternoon away.

    Universal genius

    The accident of where Shakespeare was born - and therefore the
    language he wrote in - gave me no special claim to his heritage.

    His genius was quite simply - universal.

    As far as I know, no other country has ever hosted a festival of
    one-person plays about Shakespeare.

    It took an Armenian to dream that up.

    It had the virtues of economy of scale and expenditure and gave their
    vibrant theatre community a focus to welcome artists from other
    cultures and, of course, an excuse to show off their own.

    The day after our tipsy lunch, we made a painfully early pilgrimage
    to Khor Virap monastery: a very important site to Armenians who
    repeatedly remind you that theirs was the first country to become
    Christian.

    But its poignant location is what stays in the memory.

    Dove of peace

    It lies at the foot of Mount Ararat, the snow-capped symbol of
    Armenia, where Noah's Ark in the Old Testament story ran aground
    after the Great Flood.

    It's now located in Turkey with just a stretch of no-man's-land
    between the tense and disputed borders.

    As we were leaving, a small knot of souvenir sellers descended on us
    and, for a few small coins, I was prevailed upon to take hold of a
    white dove: the bird that returned to Noah bearing the olive branch
    in its beak, symbolising the hope for new life.

    It was a tired, bedraggled creature that I held, but I was told to
    release it and make a wish.

    It fluttered rather pathetically, as if in the early stages of avian
    flu, and returned gratefully to its master.

    It would be more admirable if I could claim that my wish had been to
    see an end to the legacy of bitterness between my host country and
    its Turkish neighbour over events back in 1915.

    But my silent desire was a little more mundane. An end to my
    monumental hangover.

    >From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 1 October, 2005
    at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for
    World Service transmission times.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4297792.stm
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