Eighteenth International Istanbul Theatre Festival (review)

Turkish theatre today is on the verge of enormous change. Arguably, the current situation can be traced to April 2011, when a 31-year-old woman walked out of a play. The woman was Sümeyye Erdoǧan, the youngest daughter of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan—the leader of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), a neoliberal political organization whose conservative religiosity and attempts to suppress free speech have increasingly polarized Turkey over the past decade. At the performance in a state theatre in Ankara, an actor (who claimed not to have recognized her) allegedly mocked Sümeyye during an improvisational sequence; feeling insulted, she left. A year later, Istanbul mayor Kadir Topbaş (a protégé of Erdoǧan) instituted new rules regarding repertory selection for the city's municipal theatres, including an ambiguous mandate requiring that all plays reflect the "ethical values of the society." Angry resignations and vehement protests by artists and audiences followed, to no avail. The prime minister seized the opportunity to rail against Turkey's theatre-makers and spectators, characterizing them as arrogant elitist outliers. Even more distressingly, Erdoǧan threatened to terminate all governmental subsidies for state theatres.

The eighteenth International Istanbul Theatre Festival (2012) opened shortly after this highly publicized debate over artistic expression and public funding. The festival program included almost forty productions by Turkish companies, as well as five shows from other countries. Istanbul Kültür Sanat Vakfı (Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts [IKSV]), one of Turkey's most important cultural organizations, organizes the biannual theatre festival, as well as festivals showcasing film, music, dance, design, and visual art (the internationally acclaimed Istanbul Biennial). The founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, began supporting Western artistic practices as a way to modernize Turkey; since then, subsidized arts companies have provided opportunities for reflection and experimentation. In light of the uncertainty surrounding the future of theatre here, the festival's theme in 2012 ("Freedom-Questionings") seemed particularly relevant.

Members of Diyarbakır Şehir Tiyatrosu performing Antigone. (Photographer unknown.)

The sense of uncertainty that permeated the festival was evident to me even during Samuel Beckett's Play, directed by Şahika Tekand under the aegis of Istanbul Şehir Tiyatroları (Istanbul Municipal Theatres). Tekand has attracted considerable attention internationally since founding her own company, Studio Oyunculari, in 1990. Her productions have been featured at prominent venues and festivals in Germany, Greece, and Japan, among other countries. Tekand's stunning, thoroughly engrossing rendition of Play (in Turkish translation) constituted her first project with Istanbul's municipal theatre.

In Turkish, the word for a theatrical play is oyun, a homonym that can also mean "game" (similar to Spiel); Tekand consciously mined and explored this double entendre. As written, Play depicts three people—M, W1, and W2—interred in urns up to their necks. The members of this love triangle bitterly complain about the light, their lives, and one another. In Tekand's production, each actor (fifteen in all) inhabited one square of a massive grid of boxes that filled the stage. Although the actors could not see one another, their bodies were fully visible to the audience. During a fast and furious sixty minutes, the musicality of Beckett's text was foregrounded through repetition, stylized gestures, and text spoken in unison. Words flew by with amazing speed; small gestures and strange postures took on incredible (if illegible) weight; and the buoyant energy of the performers was palpable. The ensemble's precision was reminiscent of a dance troupe—a result of Tekand's distinctive directorial approach, which she calls the "Performative Staging and Acting Method." Light was deployed in such exacting and assertive ways that it seemed like a character in itself. During quiet moments, disembodied heads emerged slowly from the black void; during more tumultuous sequences, the claustrophobic compartments were illuminated in a flash—just long enough for a performer to stomp a foot, or guffaw, or hiccup—before the play/game mercilessly moved on, built to a crescendo...