One Version of the Story

“When do stories become history?” Lusine is a musician and lives in Berlin. As far as her family’s origins are concerned, she knows only that her grandfather emigrated to the United States from Armenia via Berlin many years ago. She comes across a mysterious recording of a man’s voice that resembles her grandfather’s. The tape becomes the starting point for a journey into a past that has been hushed up – a past that is indissolubly linked with the genocide of Armenians that took place in 1915. At the time, the states of Europe failed to react and remained silent. And in the afflicted families, the inconceivable suffering has often remained present only as an unbroken silence down the generations. “The dead can speak. That was the eerie thing about it. The idea that there’s a voice that isn’t in the room at all. As if the voice could materialise.” Following the acoustic trail of the tape recordings, this piece by Simone Kucher, directed by Marco Milling, is one of the winning plays presented at the 2018 edition of the Autorentheatertage Berlin.