Istanbul is as far east as one can go without leaving Europe. One does leave Europe, in fact—more than half the city is in Asia. But this summer’s International Istanbul Theatre Festival had managed to book some of the most celebrated productions of Western Europe in recent years: Heiner Muller’s Berliner Ensemble staging of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, the last production Muller directed before his death; the Piccolo Theatre’s production of Marivaux’s philosophical comedy The Island of Slaves, directed by Giorgio Strehler himself; and Richard Eyre’s critically hailed Royal National Theatre production of King Lear, starring Ian Holm.
It took my brief but total immersion in Turkey’s cultural crisis to grasp that the achievement of wooing these works to Istanbul for a 10-day period was not simply a coup of artistic negotiation and fundraising—it was a move in the war over the country’s future cultural direction. “We are doing politics through art and culture,” the executive director of the Istanbul Culture and Arts Foundation, Melih Fereli, said crisply in an interview. The Foundation he directs sponsors Istanbul’s five arts festivals: classical music, film, jazz, the every-other-year art biennale and the international theatre festival I was attending.
I hadn’t fully understood that Turkish intellectuals see the art of Western Europe (and the U.S., on the rare occasion that the U.S. funds art for export) as their birthright. The P.R. director of the foundation was educated at Cambridge, the director of the theatre festival in Texas, the professor of literature who became my friend there, at Harvard, a playwright I interviewed, in London. In its nine-year history, it has been natural for the International Istanbul Theatre Festival to face West. But this year, depending on who you talked to, the festival was making something of a statement: It was Facing West.
In the anxious cultural environment stirred by the coming to power of a coalition that resulted in an Islamic fundamentalist prime minister (who has now stepped down, pending elections) along with officials of his party with authority in the cultural sphere, the normal and accepted practices of Turkey’s most urbane class were being transformed into an expression of political consciousness. The normal had become political. This was the somewhat confusing environment in which the international theatre festival was mounted. An outsider could not be certain whether she was seeing a very good display of what-has-always-been-done, or a species of political defiance that announced, “We will do what we have always done—try to stop us!” Even the insiders seemed uncertain. In the new cultural circumstance, many had the it-will-blow-over calm of cultural sleepwalkers, and some were preparing to become warriors.
After seeing Strehler’s La Tempesta at the PepsiCo festival years ago, it was a particularly refined pleasure to see another Strehler shipwreck in Marivaux’s Island of Slaves. This one marooned a master, a mistress and their two servants on a sand-blown island (a set design of remarkable beauty) where their clothes, and their roles, are reversed, and much is learned. In a signature approach, Strehler brought the gymnastic wit and mask-play of commedia to Marivaux’s moral comedy. Of the two other large-scale visiting productions I saw, the Lear was a disappointment, and the Arturo Ui astounding. I saw this three-hour production twice in Istanbul and would rush to see it again tomorrow if I could. (For more on both productions, see below).
The Istanbul theatre festival used to improvise from season to season, raising budgets a year at a time and booking productions that happened to be on the touring circuit. It has now become a sophisticated exercise in multi-year planning: 1997 was dominated by a “dialogue” with Berlin, 1998 will bring a partnership with France and 1999 will focus on central Europe. The partnership with Berlin this year brought about $1 million of support to all the Istanbul festivals, which helped to make up for the total cutoff, after the Islamist electoral victories two years ago, of government support.
If the Germans were a dominant presence at the festival—they also sent a one-woman show starring Hanna Schygulla, a major dance piece by Ivo Kresnik and a number of other surrounding events—the nine Turkish productions were of special interest to me. Culled from among the state, municipal and private theatres, only three of these productions were actual plays, none of them Turkish. (The three playwrights were Dario Fo, Terrence McNally and the Bulgarian writer Stanislav Stratiev.) The six remaining Turkish productions were adaptations and collages, most of non-dramatic material. These offerings suggested a dearth of Turkish playwrights, which everyone confirmed, but why?
Younger theatre people pointed to the chilling effect of the third, and worst, military coup in 1980, in which the leaders of the major theatres with left leanings lost their jobs. But the playwright Memet Baydur, to whom I later spoke, scoffed at the notion: political repression has often been good for writing. He laid the problem to a Grotowskian turn against the text that had charmed Turkish theatre people under 40, creating an “intellectual gap between actions and explanations.”
By all accounts, the most exciting collage piece of the year was culled from Shakespeare under the dark sign of Jan Kott’s Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. It bore the discouraging title My Kingdom for a Horse, which, along with some cultural miscommunication, convinced me to skip the Istanbul Municipal Theatre that one night and recover from jet lag. I later discovered that the central set piece was a large automobile, which many took as a direct reference to “Susurluk,” the notorious auto accident in November 1996 that implicated Deputy Prime Minister Tansu Ciller—the Ma Ubu of Turkish politics, but prettier—in corruption and worse. So this production may have been the most political of the Turkish season: my loss.
Still, one couldn’t be sure sometimes whether one was seeing politics or not. Was the choice of Master Class by Turkey’s celebrated actress, Yildiz Kenter, motivated solely by the need for a star vehicle for an older actress, or was it a political statement about the transcendent role of art in human culture? After all, the new government seemed to think art should be narrowly Turkish, or just go away. The audience gave Kenter an ecstatic standing ovation for Maria Callas’s devotion to art: Was that personal or political? One had heard the story of the million people at a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth recently who turned to President Demirel when he arrived and chanted, “Turkey is a secular state!”
Those who watch Turkish theatre closely take special interest these days in the young private theatres. These groups, whose artists have day jobs, stand outside the professional state and municipal theatre structures. They are breathing new life into Turkish theatre with performance pieces based on fiction, improvisation, group therapy and, in the case of the remarkable Everest, My Lord, startlingly beautiful multimedia work.
Everest, My Lord: Here Is the Head, Here Is the Body, Here Are the Arms is the title of the 1984 “novel in three acts” by Sevim Burak, a major figure in Turkish literary modernism, who ended her life in suicide. In bits to be assembled by the audience, the text as it was adapted here unfolded the remembered domestic life of Lord Everest (the milieu of the underlying novel is British with a dash of Ottoman). The text’s concern is domestic details, and the style is minimalist: the life is revealed in lists of household objects, in recitals of gerunds, in conjugations of verbs, in letters of the alphabet—linguistic play which may sound like dubious material for a theatre piece. But the director, who with her husband is co-director of the theatre company Kumpanya (“troupe”) which produced it, is also a film designer, and of this material she made something shimmering and memorable.
The piece was performed out-of-doors in a small neighborhood park the size of a city block, surrounded by streets and houses. The setting, in effect, was already on the scale of the domestic. The audience stood or sat in the park, facing the “stage,” at the side of which were grouped five lime-white figures in Edwardian dress, a Lord in a top hat, a Lady with a parasol, a Prime Minister…we are in England. As the performance begins, the ashen figures are revealed in brilliant lighting to be statues. One more figure in white appears, the writer/narrator, in modern dress, who “animates” the figures. Much of the time she rocks repetitively on a bench. She speaks with and over a tape of her own recorded narrative. We’ve just begun and the “gap between actions and explanations” is already too great for a foreigner to follow, but the still elegance of the scene and the rhetorical beauty of the choral effect, live voice over recorded voice, are hypnotizing.
Across the street from the park, behind and above this scene, were two older five-story buildings laced with many pairs of French doors opening to wrought-iron balconies. In the next two parts of the performance, the director used these facades as a projection surface. Building-size images from both film and slides appeared—faces, hands, words, objects and entire rooms. Actors in the troupe later appeared on the balconies, their voices amplified in live choral effects as actors’ faces, architectural details, slides and film played off one another. The production seemed staged under the sign of Robert Wilson, whose Persephone made an impression at last year’s festival, but even in the work of Wilson and Jennifer Tipton, I have rarely seen such elegant lighting.
And finally there were the voices. Turkish, with its even stress of syllables that makes it so difficult for a foreigner to scan, is one of the most beautiful spoken languages I have heard. Listening to this choral speech was like hearing music.
We were introduced, one day, to some of the young directors: Naz Erayda, the director of Everest, My Lord, her husband Kerem Kurdoglu, who together with his wife runs Kumpanya, and Nihal Geyran Koldas, the director of the Bilsak Theatre Atelier, which presented a performance piece entitled No Parking, developed from improvisation inspired by some Heiner Muller material. The piece had played at a disco for several nights earlier in the festival. From this small sample, I was struck by this younger generation’s turn away from politics, at least politics as understood on a left-right spectrum.
Kerem, a computer graphics designer and an avid reader of Fredric Jameson and other postmodern theorists, described how Turkey, along with much of the world, had left behind the modern age, and not necessarily for the better. “In the modern period, people had hope for the future, but a left-oriented utopian age is a thing of the past. Nowhere in the world do people believe in the future.” His idea of the theatre of the future was one that resisted global capital by putting complications in the way of “corporate popular culture.” Nihal wanted a more honest theatre, “closer to the streets.” Her central image of the coffin, in No Parking, was less a political statement than an image through which to explore the actors’ feelings about their lives and individual futures. These directors assumed secular culture, but were not actively engaged in its preservation. Nor, one should add, were their theatres under seige. As for the distantly threatened position of women in Turkish life, the two women directors could not foresee a rollback: “In almost all intellectual lobs, women predominate.”
A generation up in age and several in power, other theatre people expressed grave concern about the future direction of Turkish culture: the country’s Minister of Culture was a fundamentalist, the Mayor of Istanbul a fundamentalist too, arts budgets had been slashed, and there were plenty of stories.
“Just 10 days ago another touring play in Anatolia was banned.”
“After the fundamentalist party came to power in Istanbul in 1995 the artistic directors of the theatres were changed and the repertoire was forced to be 80 percent Turkish!”
“The Minister of Culture said that the Turkish people have not accepted ballet, but wrestling is a Turkish expression.”
Yet activism is just beginning to revive. One famous actor, known for his political engagement, lamented, “We are in the wild days of capitalism. Everybody is in a race to save himself.”
No one expressed opposition to the fundamentalist threat more bluntly than Melih Fereli, the elegant director of the Istanbul festivals, to whom the Ministry of Culture foisted on Turkey by the Islamist government was “pre-Dark Ages.” Educated in Germany, Pennsylvania and Virginia in addition to Istanbul, Fereli had worked in London for almost 20 years when the invitation came in 1992 to leave the management consulting firm he created and directed and return to Turkey to head up the Foundation for Culture and Arts. The offer seemed a natural extension of his interests—culture would augment business in the new global economy—and Fereli returned home determined to make Istanbul one of the great cultural capitals of Europe. But “all of a sudden,” he says, after the election that brought the change of regime, “I find myself wearing a political animal’s fur.”
He relates the most recent skirmish. “Only four days ago, the Mayor of Istanbul gave an interview on television, and said one of his missions was to make sure that our own culture ‘sap’—like the sap of a tree—was nurtured and promoted. He stood against those—he didn’t mention us by name—who were trying to import and impose culture.” In his impeccable British accent, Fereli delivered a scornful riposte that one can hear him using to educate the corporate constituency whose support for the festivals he has vastly increased. “We who live in this country are the inheritors of layers upon layers of culture. Five thousand, ten thousand, years of cultures have gone through these grounds.” His voice becomes fervent, “I feel lucky, almost distinguished, that I am able to live as the inheritor of this very rich heritage, be it Hittite, Phrygian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Selcuk, you name it. My culture has been shaped through whatever has been filtered through layers and layers of history. It isn’t just a case of saying I only want to remember back to 1204 when the first Turks appeared, I take that as a very simplistic attitude. One can’t say ‘This is Mine,’ about culture. It’s all Ours.”
I had made a last-minute decision to stay one day longer to see the final offering of the festival, an adaptation for the stage of poetry by Turkey’s greatest 20th-century poet, Nazim Hikmet. The production gave me an opportunity to meditate on what Fereli meant by “Ours.” Who exactly was “Us?” Hikmet was not only a great poet but a committed communist, educated in Moscow just after the Russian Revolution. He spent half his life in Turkish jails, where he wrote most of his great work. After his release in 1950, he exiled himself to the Soviet Union and died there in 1963. Only then were his works freely published in Turkey, where he was posthumously adopted as a poet of the people and a hero of the left. The contemporary clamor to bring Hikmet home and re-bury him in Turkey has so far been strongly resisted by the Islamists and others on the Turkish right.
One section of Hikmet’s epic on the Turkish people, Human Landscapes, concerned the war of independence successfully waged by the Turkish army after World War I under the former army general, Mustafa Kemal, who became a revolutionary democratic leader. After defeating the Greeks, Armenians and western powers who wanted a piece of the moribund Ottoman Empire, Kemal went on to become Kemal Ataturk (Father of Turks), the founder of the Turkish secular republic. It was Kemal who with dizzying speed pushed Turkey towards secular westernization through such changes as the suppression of the dervish orders, the banning of traditional headgear and female veiling, the emancipation of women, and alphabet and calendar reform. There is a statue of Kemal in every town square in Turkey, and every second bank and business seems to be named after him, but last summer his reforms appeared to be under greater threat of reversal than at any time in the century. At the time of the theatre festival, the possibility of a fourth military coup, this one to depose Islamist prime minister Necmettin Erbakan and outlaw his fundamentalist Welfare Party, was a daily topic of discussion.
The War of Independence, the stage oratorio, as one might describe it, was adapted from Hikmet’s 17,000-line epic by the Ankara State Theatre, which employs some of the greatest actors in Turkey. Eight of these, four men and four women, wearing modern suits and dresses circa 1920, alternated in reciting the verses, which narratively worked their way through the growing strength of the people’s army, its struggles, setbacks, increasing confidence and ultimate victory. Behind these actors was a much larger chorus of younger performers in colorful ethnic attire, who spoke no words but performed dances to stirring music and struck tableaux suggesting the greatness of the Anatolian people. If my language here sounds like an ad for a tourist show or a description of a Stakhanovite labor ballet, it’s no accident: the staging was awful.
But this awfulness was at another level one of the most interesting things I saw in the Turkish theatre. The simple classicism of the eight lead actors, both in the resonance and depth of their voices and their precisely placed physical presence, helped me to see that Turkey’s pride in its world-class actors is well taken. And the corny staging didn’t in itself bother me that much: I imagined these were theatre students glad for an opportunity to perform. It was the class structure underlying the entire conception that leapt out…Turkey’s very own fire bell in the night.
Here onstage was an image of Turkish culture at its finest moment of self-definition, an image that could not fail to suggest that only a few—a certain class, the ones who wear western dress and have the most beautiful diction—are entitled to speak. They are the principal performers of culture, control the script, have all the lines. Behind them is arrayed an ethnic chorus, the People. The chorus performs the hard, physical labor, defends the country and wins the battles, but they remain essentially mute. Ethnic costumes notwithstanding, they seem less the national culture than the decorative backdrop against which it is performed. And this, one would take it from the performance, is uncritically accepted as the way it has always been and should be.
The troubling question lurking behind all the discussions about Turkish art and culture I’d been having, of course, was, Whose culture is it? Inevitably, the impressive festivals, which this year as a group marked their 25th anniversary, were designed by and for the folks downstage in the good clothes. And to be fair, it could scarcely be otherwise given the immense educational gulf that divides the Turkish nation. One of the major issues under debate while I was there was the proposal to extend required public education from five to eight years. This move, modest as it might seem by the standards of the western democracies, was hotly resisted by the Islamists as a threat to their elaborate network of religious training schools, which take up where the state leaves off.
But whatever the realities of Turkish society, it was striking that the director of War of Independence took none of the opportunities the stage so richly offers for the imagination of a more ideal world. There was no moment in the performance when the two lines of performers, star actors and ethnic chorus, exchanged places, or even mingled, not even, if I recall correctly, in the curtain call. One was left with a vivid sense of the dilemma of Turkish intellectuals and artists. On the one hand, they were now forced to circle the wagons around high culture. On the other, they were isolated, perhaps self-endangered, by the circle itself.
Since I left Istanbul the mood among those I met there has changed to relief and hope. Legislation for expanded public education was pushed through by the new governing coalition, and the climate at the Ministry of Culture has been transformed. No sooner was the new Minister installed in Ankara, Fereli told me in a recent phone interview, “than he rang me up and said, ‘What can I do for you?’ In the whole 18 months the Welfare Party was in power I had exactly one three-minute interview at the Ministry. Now they have already offered $240,000 for the Biennale! The atmosphere is so changed that I can’t even describe it!” “You must be happy about this turn of events,” I responded, joining his mood. “It’s music to my ears,” he celebrated.
When thinking about Turkey, I have been cautioned, one does well to take the long view. When I asked the playwright Memet Baydur, who lives near Washington, about the recent political changes, he shrugged. “Turkey has been a land of contradictions for the past 2,000 years and I don’t think it will change in the near future.” The long view is always before one’s eyes in Turkey, where there are more ancient amphitheatres than in all the rest of the world. After the festival I visited one of these sites, near the Aegean coast, where a scene painter was touching up his set for a performance of Oedipus Rex. In the central park of the nearby town, banners were flying announcing visiting stage productions, productions subsidized by the state and municipalities. In the short view, those subsidies are unthreatened. I could wish for the United States, today, now, some of Turkey’s resurgent cultural commitment.
Lears As Fashion Statement
Admittedly, the Brits visiting Istanbul had a problem. There are few good theatres in Istanbul, and none both intimate and well-equipped like the National Theatre’s Cottlesloe, where the Richard Eyre/Ian Holm King Lear was first performed. The presenters opted for the beautiful if dank 11th-century basilica of Haghia Eirene (St. Irene), where the play was staged on a central ramp with audience on the two long sides and at the end. The attempt to defy the echoing acoustics of the church with amplification actually made the problem worse. Even in the front row, and with full knowledge of the text, one frequently found the language incomprehensible. One didn’t need the language, however, to catch this production’s cynicism and vulgarity.
Holm found the seeds of Lear’s madness in the very first scene. He was instantly irrational and furious, leaping on the table and emitting sudden explosive laughs. Where could he go from there? Cordelia was represented as a chip off the old block, blunt and impatient. A contemporary theatregoer might agree with Eyre’s chucking out the idealized Victorian devotion between two “birds in a golden cage,” but these were two fighting cocks in a pit.
I will say that Eyre did a good storm. A rear wall fell, and behind it appeared a black burlap, whipped by wind, with water pouring down its sides. Unfortunately the water continued to drip through the rest of the play. What we saw onstage in the storm was a bigger problem: a perfect demonstration of Bert States’s thesis that you break the frame at your risk when you put real dogs on artificial streets, as in Two Gentlemen of Verona. In this case, the real dog was Holm’s troll-like body, which—with the briskness of a commuter taking a shower—he unveiled, pale and mushroom-like, on Lear’s line, “Off, off, you lendings!”
This was a Lear of images, never mind whether they told a moral tale: Lear wearing rags festooned with flowers; Lear wearing a raffish fool’s cap; Lear enfeebled in a wheelchair; next scene: Lear out of the wheelchair. There was Cordelia appearing as Saint Joan in a suit of chain mail; there was Goneril in a gown deliberately revealing the scars of the actress, perhaps the result of a skin graft or a radical mastectomy. Sometimes we were to cultivate illusion, sometimes strip it ruthlessly away, whatever. At the end, the bodies littering the stage were removed by dead cart. Lear and Cordelia were tossed on the pile, so much garbage, one last fashion statement.
Marvin Rosenberg (The Masks of King Lear) traces the great performances: Garrick, Kean, Scofield, Gielgud, Carnovsky, Mikhoels. The movement goes from weak to strong, from strong to weak, from delusion to insight, from arrogance to compassion, always a trajectory that told a story about the nature of human existence. The Holm Lear went from photo op to photo op. Maybe it looked better in London.
An Underdog Learns New Tricks
Arturo Ui was downsized by history. The Chicago gangster metaphor had long seemed the equivalent of attacking the Third Reich with a wet noodle. But in their first re-thinking of the play 30 years after its original production, Heiner Muller and his co-director Stephan Suschke took most literally the idea of the “resistible rise,” the incremental steps by which weak but legitimate authority (of Hindenberg in the Weimar Republic, of Dollfuss in Austria) was subverted. And today, the arrival of new, avoidable, criminal regimes, for instance in the former Yugoslavia, has given fresh immediacy to the parable of the resistible rise.
And what a rise! From a hellish, red and boiling pit below the stage—below the streets of “Chicago” and its rumbling elevated train—slithered the sickening crowd: Goring, Goebbels, Ernst Rahm and A.H. himself. But Hitler/Ui, who sees himself as an underdog, is precisely—a dog! On all fours, with bloody tongue lolling from his mouth, he can only crawl and whine. This brilliant characterization was hit upon by Martin Wuttke in an effort to differentiate himself from the historic performance of Ekkehard Schall. As a result, the short, wiry Wuttke has now become something of a matinee idol in reunited Berlin.
Unlike the British Lear, all image, the German Ui was all architecture. All rise and Rise and Rise and fall, as Ui slowly learns to walk and talk, and insinuate himself onto the lap of the elevated Hindenberg/Dogsborough. Dogsborough sits high above the fray on a platform mounted on a tank engine (“It was Heiner’s dream to put a tank engine onstage,” Teschke said), and just as slowly as Ui rises, Dogsborough crashes from power.
A number of delicious subplots of music, sex, American gangster movies and theatre parody thread through this architectonic staging. The overture to Meistersinger, with its anti-Semitic implications, makes several appearances, along with “The Night Chicago Died.” In a Richard the Third send-up, Ui presides over the assassination of Dollfuss/Dullfeet, then courts his wife. Ui drops his pants and jumps her in her white ball-gown fight on the floor next to a propped-up dummy of her dead husband. When Ui withdraws, he has lost his penis! Frantically he searches the private parts of this Austrian Lady Anne, but—it is gone! The audience weeps with laughter, but is immediately sobered by a blast of the mad scene from Lucia da Lammermoor. Ach!
The “rise” metaphor is carried through to a brilliant conclusion. In the penultimate scene, one of the respectables whose allegiance Ui now commands extends his hand for a shake. Wuttke gazes at the hand, the man, the hand again, as if sighting a new disease. Then his own hand attempts to mimic the human gesture and rise, but springs up in an uncontrollable, mechanical gesture. Heil Hitler!, the new currency of greeting, is born.
Critic Elinor Fuchs is the author of The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theatre After Modernism (Indiana University Press) and a frequent contributor to this magazine.
