In William Shakespeare’s comedy, As You Like It, the elderly and cynical servant Jaques delivers a speech on the “seven ages of man," which begins with "All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players" and which ends with a reference to “second childishness” or extreme old age, “mere oblivion”, without teeth, eyes, taste or anything else. Who knows what the group of elderly guests residing in the Yerevan care home who feature in the documentary Outliving Shakespeare and who decide to stage one of the Bard’s plays in order to feel more alive, would think about this. Written by Inna Sahakyan and Lilit Movsisyan and directed by Sahakyan in league with Ruben Ghazaryan, the film was presented in a premiere in Amsterdam’s most recent IDFA and has recently screened in the Trieste Film Festival’s Documentary Competition.

Developed as part of an art therapy project for elderly people, the play written and directed by filmmaker Garnik Seyranyan is called Shakespeare Sins and it revolves around some of the English playwright’s biggest characters, ranging from Romeo and Juliette to Hamlet, Orphelia, Richard III, Queen Anne, Cordelia, Goneril and Regan (King Lear’s daughters). The documentary follows the not-so-straightforward creation of the troupe - composed of the not-so-easy to manage seventy-year-old care home residents who are brought together by Seyranyan in Tarmani Theatre - and their subsequent rehearsals. And it ends a moment or two before the performance begins, when Garnik shouts “Lights!”. Fundamentally, what we witness, between one gathering and another, is the routine in the Armenian capital’s retirement home, whose guests are struggling with monotony and boredom, and often physical issues and anxieties, but who are also chatting and forging relationships, friendships and love.

Bagrat Saroyan’s camera scrutinises the lines of the guests’ faces, the delipidated Soviet-era building, yawning cats, billiards, backgammon tables, nostalgic portraits of Stalin hung on the wall, and a strange, self-propelled, talking device screening old Russian cartoons. But amidst all of this, the directors reveal a tragic event which is disturbing the peace in those rooms: radio and TV sets are broadcasting news of the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing to Armenia from the region of Artsakh, as Nagorno Karabakh is known in Armenian, following the military attacks by Azerbaijani troops. Care home resident Gayane fled from Artsakh and now she’s returning home. But before the documentary ends, she’s forced to flee once again and return to Yerevan, to talk about the bombing and the children hidden in basements without food or medicine. 

Death isn’t an alien concept to the people living in the care home: we witness the passing of 88-year-old Ararat who was supposed to play Richard III but who is instead buried in a communal grave because he doesn’t have any family. Seyranyan is determined to stage his Shakespeare play, no matter the challenges, in order to stop them all thinking about their demise. He stalks his aspiring actors in the canteen or in their bedrooms, he “forces” them to take a look at themselves, to draw parallels between themselves and Shakespeare’s characters, and to share their past lives. “What was your first love like?”, he enquires. “I’ve had a hundred lovers”, boasts Ligia, turning to face the camera.

So, is it possible to “outlive” Shakespeare? The documentary demonstrates humanity and sensitivity to depict the modern experience of age-related decline. In a world where we pay so much attention to designing spaces for childhood or work, Sahakyan and Ghazaryan suggest that rather than waiting for increasingly miraculous life-lengthening drugs, the right thing to do would be to focus on social adjustments and to design our communities and social structures so that they do a better job of supporting the end-of-life phase. And to fight “mere oblivion” through theatre.

Outliving Shakespeare was co-produced by Armenia and the Netherlands via Bars Media Documentary Film Studio in league with Bind.