End Makam

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The year 1918. Ottoman Istanbul is under occupation. Once-famous poet Şehvar Hanım now lives alone in her ruined mansion and suffers from typhus. Her maid Sabriye visits Şehvar on her last days. Two women revive the past from different times and memories. The songs that are composed by Sabriye with reference to Şehvar’s poems accompany this time journey. As the story opens, it reveals the hidden love between two women, class differences, hidden songs, and changing lives with the war for liberty and unrealized potentials due to the historical and social circumstances. Staged by Altıdan Sonra Tiyatro, End Makam is a historical drama combining the elements of classical Turkish music and feminist approaches. It re-tells and reveals the stories of women who have been hidden in history. It is one of the first plays drawing attention to the love between women from different classes. It also shows how a servant can become both a composer and a revolutionist.

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The Real Gala

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The Real Gala is a comedy for two staged by Tiyatrotem. Mrs. Müesser and Mr. Lütfi who are not performers come to the stage for the first time to tell their life story. They can not start to tell their own stories since they are so excited about being on stage. What they try to tell about their life is based on third-page tragicomic news and today’s rated and popular television programs. Are they real or fake? When it comes to the pathetic stories, their presence on stage begins to change and they make the audience believe what they tell through the joyful and painful stories. However, in the end, they confess that none of them belongs to their own.
The Real Gala combines the traditional storytelling forms with the questions of representation and theatricality and it concerns the relations between the self and role, reality and fiction, telling and performing, authenticity and insincerity.

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Truth, A Day For Sure

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Truth, A Day For Sure is the story of a journey constructed with metaphors in search of a child’s letter to his mother. The action takes in a distant fairy tale country which will turn into a dystopia, where the sun is forbidden and the truth is covered. When the colorful world of childhood is destroyed by the violence, pressure, and silencing mechanism, the story begins to carry the language of mices and crows. However, by the metaphors of sunflowers, it also raises hopes that truth will reveal in any case, even though the sun is forbidden in this ‘distance’ country. Staged by D22, the performance contains indirect references to the current political and social conflicted atmosphere in Turkey ranging from censorship, the restriction of ‘freedom of thought’ to the civil deaths and arrested people for criticizing the government as well as it questions the nature of the concept of truth itself. This play won the 25 Cevdet Kudret Literature Prizes in field of best drama in 2017.

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