Abstract
In 1981 actors appearing in a Turkish adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ended up in jail and were subjected to psychological “retraining”.
In Kemal Aydogan’s 2015 Turkish adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hippolyta (Didem Balcin) falls in love with the donkey-costumed Nick Bottom (Caner Erdem) and kisses him after being manipulated by the fairies
Credit: Mehmet Çakıcı
This was no ordinary Shakespeare staging. Even before it was premiered there were rumours about the production’s potential to serve as Yücel’s commentary on the new military regime, a regime which had just started arresting young people who shared Yücel’s politics. In 1981, any public event, newspaper article, poem or artistic production carrying even the slightest trace of dissent against the military authority was certain to be punished. It would be mad to stage a rebellion at the heart of Istanbul – but that is exactly what the Tepebaşı Experimental Theatre ended up doing.
Not long after the premiere in January 1981, Tepebaşı Experimental Theatre started having problems. Turkish citizens were being asked, and encouraged, to spy and inform on people they suspected of having “extremist” views. Arrests of political figures in Istanbul had become a daily occurrence; the coup resulted in the execution of 50 people, hundreds of deaths in prisons and the arrest of around half a million citizens.
Actors from the Tepebaşı Experimental Theatre experienced their share of trouble. Every other week a different actor would be arrested by the military police, sent to the Hasdal military barracks in Istanbul’s Kağıthane neighbourhood. Once there, their heads would be shaved, they would be forced to live with prisoners who held opposite political views and asked to accept the statist-militarist ideology as their own. As a result of the arrests, numerous actors of the company were obliged to play multiple roles in the remaining weeks of the run. Only 14 members of the original 22-strong cast survived the season as free citizens. The others ended up behind bars.
Located in Istanbul’s touristic centre, 100 metres from Agatha Christie’s favorite Istanbul hotel, the Pera Palace, the old theatre building is now a car park. Tepebaşı Experimental Theatre’s staging of Midsummer Night’s Dream soon achieved a kind of cult status. “Director Başar Sabuncu had staged this play in a building resembling a warehouse; it was great entertainment,” Turkish critic Fatih Özgüven wrote in his obituary for Sabuncu, who died in 2015. “This was the first half of the ominous Turkish 1980s. I remember how pleased people were with the wind that emanated from this production.”
That wind can still be felt in the streets of Istanbul, today. In an interview with Index on Censorship, Kemal Aydoğan, the director of the latest Turkish adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, described the work as “one of the most political plays ever written”. For Aydoğan, the scene in which the Amazonian queen Hippolyta is subjugated and taken hostage by the Theseus marks a turning point in the play. “This is the point where matriarchy ends and patriarchy begins,” he said. “That Hermia is not allowed to marry the man she loves but has to wed the man assigned to her by her father is another sign of women’s subjugation by men.” This, according to Aydoğan, is sadly familiar terrain for Turkey where women are frequently told by male politicians to know their place, keep silent and do what they are told by men.
Aydoğan is fascinated by the artisan/actor characters in the play (known as the rude mechanicals in Shakespearean scholarship), who point to the class-based nature of Athenian society. “Dialogues between artisans give a good sense of the tyrannical nature of the state apparatus,” Aydoğan said. “Theseus’s tolerance towards the artisans is fake. The upper classes here see the lower classes merely as objects of entertainment. And then there is the forest, the locale of the unconscious, the desires, the fantasies, the classlessness, the spirituality… If patriarchy has the city and the state, then the female has the forest where there is no hierarchy between fairies who manage that world.”
To make the production more experimental and interactive, Aydoğan’s team built a round structure at Istanbul’s Moda Sahnesi theatre. They placed the stage at the centre, so that members of the audience could surround the actors. When I went to watch this production I was able to observe the other spectators, as well as the actors, seated all round the theatre.
“The Globe theatre’s architecture played a huge role in Shakespeare’s works,” Aydoğan said. “It was a 270-degree chamber, watched by three levels of audience. This had a major influence on Shakespeare’s aesthetics. People from different classes could co-exist there. We can call this structure the most perfect form of democracy, and it was this that we wanted to construct at Moda Sahnesi. We wanted our audience to surround us and see each other. We wanted to remove the distance between the actor and the audience, between life and art.”
The formal and democratic nature of Shakespeare’s work is something Aydoğan and his fellow dramatists at Moda Sahnesi care deeply about. Aydoğan is grateful for Turkish directors who came before him and adapted Shakespeare for Turkish audiences. He accepts that his Moda Sahnesi didn’t have the kind of experience Tepebaşı Theatre actors had in 1981 and describes that production “a milestone”.
“In the past 70 years, Shakespeare’s most popular play, Antony and Cleopatra only had four different productions in Turkey. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, meanwhile, was staged hundreds of times, under numerous productions whose dramatic approaches ranged from the traditional to the experimental,” said Aydoğan. “The reason it became this popular was the way Yücel and the Tepebaşı Theatre crew adapted it to Turkey’s oppressive atmosphere in the 1980s. They added a Turkish tone. From what I [heard from those] who had seen it, it was staged in an atmosphere of a rebellion. Before the 1981 production, Shakespeare was seen as an elite figure, who audiences felt they should keep away from and admire from afar. With Yücel’s translation this changed completely. It gave rise to the birth of a more comprehensible, more human Shakespeare for Turkey’s theatre-goers.”
In the Turkey of 2016, Aydoğan found echoes of the Athenian conflict, pointing to the continuing struggle between what he calls “the forces of desire and law”.
“In the forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream there is no divide between women and men. No social classes divide people there,” he said. “In the play there is a struggle between desire and law. And that is the main feature of today’s liberation struggles in Turkey. We all live at the bosom of the law while collectively desiring to reach our forests where we can dream of a society far placed miles away from the forces of law.”
Perhaps it was this same conflict Yücel had identified a quarter of a century ago in Istanbul, in the days following the worst military coup the country had seen. As a Marxist who believed in using all forms of culture to pursue his left-wing agenda, Yücel saw, in this Shakespeare production, the potential to reflect Turkey’s authoritarian climate in a way that would pass under the radar of the military intelligence’s hardworking censors. Like lovers in Shakespeare’s comedy who are tricked by fairies into falling in love with characters they actually dislike, his adaptation drew on the idea that Turkey’s people were forced by the state to love the authority figures that oppressed them the most. They were subjugated by the military patriarchy, the same way the play’s female and artisan characters were subjugated by Athenian patriarchy. The class distinctions that are at the heart of Shakespeare’s play (one group of its characters consists of a duke and other leading members of the Athenian aristocracy; the other group, made up of six amateur actors with working-class backgrounds) similarly defined life in Turkey and was the actual reason behind the coup. According to Yücel’s Marxist reading, they desired to stifle all forms of working-class dissent.
Thanks to Yücel’s localisation of Shakespeare’s text – his translation featured numerous Istanbul references from the French school Notre Dame de Sion to the city’s luxurious hotels and even included a Turkish character called Müezzen – the coup-shocked audience felt that this might well be a play about contemporary Turkey. There were additions to Shakespeare’s text, with references to demagogues who, like the coup’s ultra-nationalist leader general Kenan Evren, fooled the nation through their demagoguery.
Yet 35 years after the influential Tepebaşı production, I found myself sitting in an Irish pub on the Asian side of Istanbul, before seeing Aydoğan’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a second time and wondering whether the play might still inspire Turkey’s theatre world into questioning their country’s status quo.
Demetrius (Mert Firat) and Lysander (Onur Unsal) try to stop Hermia (Beyza Sekerci), who is enraged after Helena (Melis Birkan) mocks her height in Kemal Aydogan’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Credit: Mehmet Çakıcı
Before I paid for my pint, a group of protesters walked past the pub, chanting political slogans. They asked customers to “wake up” and pay attention to the things going on in Turkey’s south-eastern cities. The escalation of violence between Turkish military and militants of the Kurdish PKK claimed the lives of dozens of people every week during 2015. Upon entering Moda Sahnesi, I saw how the issue was addressed through the casting. My favourite character in the play, Nick Bottom, was played there by Caner Erdem in such a way that he resembled a working-class Kurdish citizen. His Kurdish accent and rebellious attitude towards the condescending Athenian elites were received with warm applause. He was the brightest character out there. I knew it. He knew it. And the audience knew it. Although both Yücel and Sabuncu had passed away, the rebellious spirit of the legendary Tepebaşı production was still alive.