A new season is beginning. The plays have been picked, the roles have been distributed and rehearsals have started. Theater actors are eagerly preparing for the delivery, and theatergoers are curious to see the newborn infant.
| |  | "tiyatrokeyfi.com" is also starting the season with a new incarnation; in an English/Turkish format. The purpose of this is to acquaint foreign theater artists with our playwrights and their works and to, of course, communicate the current events and state of Turkish theater to interested foreigners. We are in touch with hundreds of theater companies and theater artists from various countries. We are introducing the translated works of all the writers in our portfolio for all the world to see. I hope that Turkish theater will benefit from this effort. |
Unfortunately we do not know or recognize our writers properly, and we do not assign the necessary importance to their works. The prejudices of our theater managers play a significant role in this fact. For instance, the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman's play, "Death and the Maiden" is staged repeatedly by both subsidized and unsubsidized theaters, while the play "Çıkmaz Sokak (Dead End Street)" by Tuncer Cücenoğlu, which employs the same theme with similar characters and even some identical sentences is treated with contemptuous disregard. The writer is accused of "plagiarism." However, do the accusers know, or have they even stopped to consider that Tuncer Cücenoğlu's "Dead End Street" was written ten years before "Death and the Maiden"? The other day I came across a play. The last work of master Greek writer Yakovas Kambenellis, "Court of Dreams." A fine play; I was deeply impressed by Panayot Abaci's excellent translation and wished to stage it as soon as possible. Then a thought began to bother me, I rifled through the pages and pondered what other play this one reminded me of. As I chatted with artist Metin Oyman (Director of Izmir State Theater) on the play, he happened to comment on how much it resembled the play "Lodos". A lightbulb flashed on in my head! Indeed, the two plays are almost identical, from the characters all the way to the final scene. And it turns our Bayazıt Gülercan penned this work years and years ago. Our theater writers are looked down upon. Ignoring the fact that this nation has produced such writers as Melih Cevdet Anday, Haldun Taner, Orhan Asena, Turgut Özakman, Turan Oflazoğlu, Oktay Arayıcı, Güner Sümer, Adalet Ağaoğlu, Tuncer Cücenoğlu, Güngör Dilmen, Refik Erduran, Dinçer Sümer, Erhan Gökgücü, Bilgesu Erenus, Memet Baydur, Ferhan Şensoy, Ahmet Önel, Coşkun Irmak, Gülşah Banda, and many others, people flippantly comment: "This country just can't produce writers!" The Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs do not fulfill their duties in promoting our theater internationally. In countries like ours, where art is undervalued and where its effects on social life are disregarded, we need to take the matter into our own hands. Sadly, it is only through their personal efforts that our writers manage to gain international recognition. An example: Tuncer Cücenoğlu's plays are performed in Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Russia and Azerbaijan, and is commissioned to write a play that will be a joint project of Balkan countries. "tiyatrokeyfi.com" rejects this shallow statement and attitude. It believes that theater is alive in Turkey and that playwrights do in fact exist here. My wishes of success and plenty of applause in the upcoming season. Kemal Basar
Editor
Ankara State Theatre
Player, Director
kemalbasar@tiyatrokeyfi.com Translated by Pelin Ariner |
