I Wish to Die Singing. Neil McPherson
shift responsibility on to the victims. Denial is truly ‘the final stage of genocide’, but so too is the betrayal of the Armenian people by the rest of the world, and the pusillanimous reaction of the international community – especially the UK – to recognition. I needed to scream about how these wounds, hurt, anguish and grief were all intensified because of a blank-faced refusal to tell the truth. And if I wasn’t able to find a play that would do that, then I vowed to try and create one myself.
Normally, I would have just commissioned a playwright to write something for us, but I knew that I wanted something more than just a fictional domestic piece with the Genocide as a plot twist in Act II. And I had already done the research. Hubristic or not, I wanted to tell the whole story as simply and honestly as I could, and wherever possible using the words of the people who were there. The most authentic way I could think to do that was a hybrid of history lesson and documentary drama and verbatim theatre – and for it to be unashamedly agitprop. Agitprop theatre has become deeply unfashionable, but, for an event which was so unknown and where the facts were so stark, it seemed the only truthful way of presenting the story. A theatre production in an intimate Off West End theatre is never going to change the world. But I needed to at least try.
I called my old school friend who, with his customary generosity, lent me some rare books to get me started, and despite some death threats (always a sign that you’re doing something right), the 2005 production completely sold out its few performances. I decided to wait until the centenary in 2015 before doing it again so that we could open the production on the exact anniversary of the start of the Genocide – 24th April. For it, I wrote a radically different new version of the script, making full use of the hearteningly vast amount of additional research which had been published in the ten years since 2005, and trying to make the play as topical as possible. Our month long run saw the centenaries of both the Genocide and the Gallipoli landings, as well as the UK general election and continued atrocities by Islamic State, and so I also included a sequence that was updated for every performance so that the play would always be as up to date as possible.
The play is based entirely on published sources, drawing heavily on the memories of eyewitnesses, primarily those collected over many years by the Armenian ethnographer Verjine Svazlian. Turkey’s denial of the Genocide has moved over the years from a bludgeoning denial to an increasingly sophisticated use of very well paid academics to dissect and dismiss all of the primary sources, and so I started out being as scrupulous with my sources as possible, quoting them verbatim and in full. Any manipulation of the material for theatrical purposes might mean that the truth of the piece would be questioned by the denialist lobby. I soon found though that if I included everything I would have liked to, the play would have lasted for days. I always felt that the play should last absolutely no longer than ninety minutes, with no interval or no curtain call, so that it could be a hard-hitting salutary shock without allowing the audience the excuse of ‘compassion fatigue’.
As every source that deals with the Genocide is dismissed as ‘forgeries and falsehoods’, and it would make no difference how careful I was, I eventually accepted that some changes to the material to make the piece dramatically viable were necessary. Given the time constraints and the multiplicity of material, I conflated the stories from many different survivors into the stories told here. It was not a deliberate decision to focus the play around the memories of three children. I was concerned that it might be seen as manipulative or even precious, but the most interesting and affecting testimonies I found were from survivors who were children at the time of the Genocide, and I was anxious to avoid an evening made up of elderly survivors speaking entirely in the past tense. I therefore transposed the testimonies into the present tense to make it more dramatically alive, and allowed myself a little dramatic licence in expanding the back stories for Gayané and Souren. It was a fortunate coincidence that the best actors we found for the children’s parts were three performers from very different ethnic backgrounds which added resonances not originally in the script.
Internationally, the denialist lobby were careful to keep their heads down in the run up to the centenary, and so we were able to present the 2015 production without any death threats. The reaction of the Armenian community was overwhelming, including parents bringing their children, and even people who travelled especially to the theatre from as far afield as Beirut and Yerevan to see it. On the other side, a Turkish acquaintance wrote a lengthy polemic on my Facebook wall (along the lines of ‘it never happened and they asked for it’) and then summarily unfriended me. A lady insisted on handing out leaflets denying the Genocide at some performances. The most negative reaction we received wasn’t about the Genocide at all, but an email vehemently complaining that the play criticised Israel’s continued refusal to recognise the Genocide. We did however receive some quite spectacular abuse on social media, which is where not being Armenian myself really came into its own. The first accusation would invariably be ‘What can we expect? You’re just a ‘LIARMENIAN’ (Genocide deniers seem to have something of a penchant for using block capitals) and were shocked to learn that no, I wasn’t, not at all. Their second accusation would usually then be that I was obviously a sell-out and the whole production had been paid for by Armenian money. To which the answer was – with no pun intended – ‘I wish’. After that, they usually moved on to suggestions that were mainly scatological and probably anatomically impossible, but which worked very well when I quoted them verbatim in the play itself.
I would like to thank the companies of both the 2005 and 2015 productions of I Wish To Die Singing and their directors Kate Wasserberg and Tommo Fowler; the staff and volunteers of the Finborough Theatre; Bianca Bagatourian of the Armenian Dramatic Arts Alliance; Philip and Christine Carne; James Graham; James Hogan and all at Oberon Books; Aram Kouyoumdjian; Bernard Nazarian; Misak Ohanian of the Centre for Armenian Information and Advice; Rafik Sarkissian of the Armenian Genocide Centenary Commemoration Committee; Sévan Stephan; Pier Carlo Talenti of the Center Theatre Group; and, above all, to Jane.
And if you still might be wondering the reason why a non-Armenian felt compelled to try and share this story, the last word should go to the poet Peter Balakian:
‘If the extermination of a million and half people and the erasure of a three-thousand-year-old civilization isn’t important enough to write about, what the fuck is?’
That’s reason enough.
– Neil McPherson, London, September 2015
Characters
All actors play multiple roles. Their main roles include:
ACTOR 1 – Female. Playing age 40s-50s.
Plays FETHIYE ÇETIN
ACTOR 2 – Female. Playing age 65+.
Plays GAYANÉ’S MOTHER, AMERICAN MISSIONARY
(American accent), SEHER
ACTOR 3 – Female. Playing age 7+.
Plays GAYANÉ ATOURIAN
ACTOR 4 – Female. Playing age 10+.
Plays HERANUŞ GADARYAN, SHIMON PERES
ACTOR 5 – Male. Playing age 60+.
Plays MESROB MESROBIAN, HENRY MORGENTHAU
(American accent), CAPTAIN GHANARA SHUKRI, SENATOR PAT HARRISON (American accent), ENGLISHMAN (English accent), DAVID LLOYD GEORGE (Welsh accent)
ACTOR 6 – Male. Playing age 30s.
Plays SHEIKH-UL-ISLAM, KRIKOR ZOHRAP, TURKISH CORPORAL, TALAAT PASHA, FATHER GRIGORIS BALAKIAN, TURKISH OFFICIAL, GEOFF HOON MP (British accent)
ACTOR 7 – Male. Playing age 14+.
Plays POLICEMAN, SOUREN SARGSIAN, BARACK OBAMA