Armenia’s playing dead

“Oh, woe! Woe are we!” the West, it does cry, as it stands idly by, watching other folk die

A few years back, I played one of the supporting roles in Irishman Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. When it was mooted that this amateur production would be put up, some of the wags in the theatrical circles in Brussels joked, “I wanna play Godot.” Which is a bit funny, because, despite the title of the play and the fact that Godot is mentioned a few times in it, there is no character Godot in the play Waiting for Godot. Actually, it’s fairly obvious from the title that the play is about waiting for someone, not about the someone, but some folk are little bit slow. Clearly Handel would have meant something completely different if he’d written “Waiting for the Queen of Sheba” instead of The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba. For a start, instead of George Frederick’s heavy hip-hop dub beat, it would have been more Irish in tone.

Gotcha curious now, hey?

Anyway, there is no Godot in Waiting for Godot. Several years earlier, I was cast as Major Muldoon in Tom Stoppard’s play-within-a-play The Real Inspector Hound. The Hound of the piece was played by the Irish Ambassador to Belgium (you really do have to love the Irish), who was suitably diplomatic with his blocking suggestions, until the iron hand of our own iron-lady director put him firmly in his designated place on our diamond-shaped thrust stage (which basically means you obstruct at least someone if you’re any farther forward than mid stage).

Tom Stoppard has been a theatre critic in his day, and wrote The Real Inspector Hound as his farewell to the critic’s profession (accompanied by a large, virtual raspberry). He was born a Czech and fled the Nazi invasion of his homeland, thus finding the good life (by marrying actress Felicity Kendall) in the UK. I don’t know if he ever played rugby, but it is hard to imagine him as a pupil of Pocklington School (or Pock) and not at some time having handled an oval ball. On the rugger field. (Pock regularly trounced my own school, so we treat them and their balls with eternal deference.)

Brits with a long memory will recall the comics Morecambe and Wise, whose television shows regularly ended with them singing their signature tune Bring Me Sunshine, and, as they took their final bow, they would be thrust aside by a corpulent and lavishly dressed smiling lady, not a glimpse of whom had been seen during the entire proceedings, who then took her own curtain call with the words, “I’d like to thank all of you for watching me and my little show here tonight; if you’ve enjoyed it, then it’s all been worthwhile. So, until we meet again, goodbye—and I love you all!” Her name was Janet Webb and the character she played in this hilarious upstaging of the show’s eponymous stars was never more than the lady who comes down at the end.

If you haven’t seen it for a while, here she is:

The reason I’m reminiscing in this vein today is that last weekend saw a visit from an old theatrical acquaintance who, I only recently learned, lives in the same village as I do, so on Saturday we got together again for a cuppa, and we were talking about the last play we were in together, which was The Real Inspector Hound, by the great British playwright who started out as a Czech, in which Hound was played by an ebullient Irishman, but turned out to be me in the final reel (or is that real?), and in which the star of the show was a dead body that the cast constantly didn’t notice for wheeling the sofa over him. The dead body was played by this old pal Hayk Zayimtsyan, who’s from Gyumri in Armenia. Being a dead body, he didn’t have a word to say in the whole play. Not so much as a cough. But, when it came to taking our bows at the end, the biggest applause was reserved for Hayk: his was the show! His was the glory! And his were the accolades! How a man can lie there, without so much as a twitch, for an hour and a half is beyond all understanding: thank you, thank you, thank you, Hayk!!!

It is very hard to stay in character as a dead body when you are in fact a living actor. Hayk’s homeland hit the headlines briefly last year, as Nagorno Karabakh was cleared of its Armenian population in a blitz-strike by its Azerbaijani neighbours. Make no mistake, Nagorno Karabakh was ethnically cleansed of Armenians, a people who had been victims of a genocide a century before. A mountain people from the high country between Georgia and Iran. A proud people that, in the past, has suffered, just as the Jews, in the past, have suffered and as Palestine, in the present, is suffering.

“Y’know,” I said to Hayk, “six months ago, nobody was sparing so much as a thought for Palestine. And now the world is up in arms and clamouring for a ceasefire that the Palestinians’ aggressors will not grant them, that many western nations’ representatives will not call for despite the cries of their own people, in which there is more discussion of the meaning of lasting, or permanent or temporary than of life. Nowadays, everyone is speaking of Palestinians because they are dying in their droves. When Armenians died in their droves in 1915, who was up in arms then?” A people, be they Jews, Palestinians or Armenians, First Nation, Nama, Aztec, Uyghur, must all die, in their droves, before anyone will care: for only then do they acquire value as political capital. To a foreign power, a people is worth more dead than it is alive.

Who was up in arms for the Palestinians in 1948? And who will be up in arms at the next genocide and the next ethnic cleansing? Whose will it be, at whose hands? For it is coming, make no mistake. What is the Armenian story, and can we learn anything from it?

Ethnic cleansing is paradoxical, because the act of cleansing focuses on those who are killed and yet the term proclaims the cleanliness of the killers: a people that is ethnically cleansed is, you can count on it, anything but clean. You can eradicate an element of your society, but you cannot eradicate the horror and the guilt of doing so; nor can you eradicate the revulsion of those who observe you doing it. And nor can they eradicate the false dignity they assume when they condemn from afar your doing of it, without their making any plea for you to desist from it. Guilt can only be assuaged by self-deception. But, unlike a life, it cannot be eradicated, not for an act you knew from the outset was wrong. Filthy guilt and shame live on far longer than any act of ethnic cleansing. When two-thirds of a nation’s people cry to their representatives, yea, in a free democracy, to call for a ceasefire and stop a horror, what does democracy even mean when those representatives refuse to heed the cries of the people they were voted into office to represent? As David Runciman has remarked about the tussle between democracy and unity: Enacting the people’s will can be a deeply divisive enterprise.

Hayk made a strange confession on Saturday. He doesn’t know so very much about the details of his country’s woeful past. So, together, we agreed, we will be exploring Armenia, and our thinking will make its way into The Endless Chain. Because in order to learn the past’s lessons, one has not only to know the present, but to also know the past.

A favourite piece of Armenian-influenced music is The Entrance of the Sirdar, by the Russian Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, composed when he was working as a conductor in Tbilisi, Georgia. Like Handel’s treatment of Sheba, it announces an arrival. Perhaps even of an unexpected star who has lain, playing dead, throughout the whole show.