Turkish Awakening (12 page)

The stardom and money involved in TV has completely changed the world of acting in Turkey, and has been the death knell of theatre. The Golden Age of Turkish theatre peaked in the seventies and eighties, before the dramatic emergence of popular culture in the nineties and the mushrooming of singers and well-paid celebrities of every kind. Theatre was politicised and relevant in a pre-TV era where people went there to hear a story. Touring Anatolian troupes earned money, like British theatre in rep, and new plays were a talking point. An industry existed.

That is, for the most part, lost now. There is a relatively poor tradition of philanthropy in the arts in Turkey, which is partly the product of decades of turbulent politics and economic uncertainty, but it is also just not a big part of the culture. The result of this is that, when not prioritised by the state – as is the case now – theatres are crippled. In Britain, despite much vilified Arts Council cuts, theatre is still going relatively strong. One has the sense that it is still important,
that it can affect people’s conversations and concerns and be part of the popular voice. Many young people in Turkey don’t even know what theatre is any more. It is a word vaguely connected with actors, so people think it is a genre of television series or film. Many of those that do know of it think it is a slightly effete waste of time.

If theatre had been replaced by good TV, this would not be such a catastrophic loss. As it is,
diziler
dominate primetime TV and a
dizi
is emphatically not a TV series, but a soap opera. They are completely based on ratings, episode by episode, and if they get a negative response from the public, the plot is rewritten or the show is simply pulled. There is no equivalent of BBC drama on the national channels in terms of artistic integrity or vision. The name of the game is profit, and each production company is a moneymaking powerhouse riding the crest of a six-year boom.

Serdar Bilis is a Turkish theatre director based in London, but he occasionally works in Turkish theatre despite the constant frustrations involved. He also teaches drama at private universities Kadir Has and Yeditepe, both in Istanbul, which is pretty much the only avenue for theatre directors to earn money these days. According to him, Turkish actors feel obliged to pretend they want to be involved in stage productions, but only because they are guiltily aware that theatre used to be a noble art. Serdar has been frequently subjected to the frustration of beginning rehearsals for a play only to have his actors answer calls from their agents mid-rehearsal, claiming to be available and agreeing to offers of parts in the newest TV series. Their priorities are clear, and the figures make sense: TV actors earn the equivalent of £7,000 a week,
on average. Huge stars get about £12,000 a week while lower, plot-filling actors get about £2,000. That is big money in a country where the minimum wage is less than £100 per week. Not only is there no money involved in theatre, the glamour and popular support it used to enjoy have now vanished. As a result, there is very low morale among the few stage actors who still try to make a career of it.

Young actors are rarely stage-trained these days, heading straight for TV or film, but it is interesting to note that most of the successful
diziler
have a couple of ageing stage legends to lend gravitas to a cast otherwise comprised of nubile youths with patchy talent. These are generally male, and no younger than fifty-five. In the UK, it would be like watching Derek Jacobi or Ian McKellen on screen with the cast of
Hollyoaks
, uttering crass lines with sonorous subtlety.

A striking example of a stage legend who never featured on glitzy TV soaps is the late theatre actor Erol Günaydın, whom I met a few weeks before his death in August 2012. The once lauded thespian star spent the last years of his life in relative poverty, ill health and obscurity in his daughter Ayşe’s house in Bodrum, with frequent stints in nearby hospitals. I remember watching
Kuzey Güney
with him in a stuffy room one night during a heatwave, and asking him what he thought of the acting. His answer was unprintable. A successful celebrity of the seventies, his only income at the end of his life consisted in paltry royalties from a couple of TV commercials, although he had played the lead in
Çiçek Taksi
,
a low-budget, low-profile soap about taxi drivers. One day, out of the blue, his AKP-despising daughter Ayşe received a call from Prime Minister Erdoğan in her Italian
restaurant in Bodrum. Mr Erdoğan had heard of Günaydın’s plight and wished to offer his personal help to such a distinguished icon of the stage. Günaydın was immediately airlifted from his hospital in Bodrum (where he was more feared than adored by the staff due to his furious temper and foul language) to a hospital offering the best care possible in Istanbul. When he died, a few days later, Ayşe received condolences from AKP members and a call offering to send refreshments to the wake. Ayşe’s requests for beer were quietly ignored – crates of soft drinks were sent to the house. These were left untouched in a corner as mourners drank in happy memory of the great man.

Erdoğan’s concern for Erol Günaydın is confusingly at odds with his attitude to modern theatre practitioners, whom he has vilified in the national press as alcoholic lowlifes, but this instance of respectable old-world celebrity is an interesting precursor to the current, stratospheric stardom of commercial TV actors. According to Serdar, Turkish actors are unique even among the international acting community for wanting to be the Star – of everything. As he put it, wryly, ‘In a production of
Hamlet
, there would have to be six Hamlets. The most common question I get asked is: “Have you got a one-man show?”’ The obvious outcome of this attitude is that there is no sense of ensemble in a cast. This egocentricity is no doubt an inevitable result of the rise of TV – when there is the opportunity for one’s face to be known by millions of people, it is understandable to crave that kind of recognition and respect. Theatre, by comparison, offers very little in that department. In all probability, a combination of factors within the industry and society in general has resulted
in this fame-hungry approach, but it also fits with the stereotypical personality of a Turkish actor, according to those who know them best.

I was once waiting in the passport control queue at Atatürk airport when I spotted a familiar face in the snaking line behind me: Martin Turner, a British actor with whom I had worked a couple of years previously in London. He was bearded and tanned and I was astonished to learn that he had been in Turkey for the last six months shooting a series called
Son
(
End
). Martin looks a lot like Jeremy Irons and has distinguished himself as a stage actor under directors like Rupert Goold and Max Stafford-Clark – what on earth was he doing in a Turkish soap opera that would do nothing for his career? The answer was money. The hard truth is that an ex-RSC actor with decades of acting experience can earn far more as a peripheral character on the set of a relatively unsuccessful Turkish soap opera than on a West End stage. His agent had been delighted with the offer.

In the ample time afforded us in the passport queue, Martin confessed that he was relieved to be leaving a deeply uncomfortable working routine that had seen him floundering in the midst of an all-Turkish-speaking cast and crew, mainly in the eastern town of Mardin. He had been playing the part of a roguish English ex-spy in Iran, and the first few episodes had required him to speak in English, plus some broken Turkish. As the series progressed, the producers (none other than Ay Yapım) had worried that the subtitles were turning viewers off, and he had to master subsequent dialogue in Turkish and Farsi. The production team was chaotic and the only person who could really communicate
with him was the actor Philip Arditti, who trained at RADA and was in rather the same boat as him, but with the benefit of Turkish as a mother tongue.

I had previously heard of Philip through the drama scene in London and phoned him up to ask him what it was like working on
Son.
To my surprise, he told me that
Son
had been a risk for Ay Yapım, who had earmarked money especially for a slightly braver, mould-breaking
dizi
. They had drafted in a playwright in place of the usual formula-churning scriptwriters, and the gritty themes of drug smuggling, espionage and cross-border mafias are a far cry from the usual fare of unsuitable love matches and domestic wrangling.
Son
is relatively cutting edge – and correspondingly unpopular with the average housewife viewer.

Did the mould-breaking nature of
Son
mean that the actors were excited to work on a meaningful project? Did they view
Son
as a career-building opportunity, a chance to test their craft on meatier material? Perhaps, says Philip, but the money was still good. In other words, the career-building opportunities were right on the money.

Turkish soaps rarely include controversial material (at least by European standards) and, despite the fact that many of the plots revolve around illicit affairs, never explicitly show sex scenes or nudity. In Turkey, as in much of the Middle East, even kissing is sometimes seen to be inappropriate in a programme that could be seen by children, and is often cut in the dubbed Arabic versions. The mere fact that women are uncovered and illicitly in love is a problem for some authorities. In Turkey, the conservative government is particularly unhappy with the ‘anti-Turkish’ nature of some plots
and characters. Erdoğan has repeatedly called for the axing of
Muhteşem Yüzyıl
(
Magnificent Century
), on the grounds that its characterisation of Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Great is overly sexualised and historically inaccurate. Suleiman’s onscreen incarnation has a vicious harem of women who compete for his attention, and this is, according to Erdoğan, malicious and unpatriotic slander. In November 2012 Erdoğan took the opportunity while opening a regional airport to voice his concerns and issue a warning to the show’s producers: ‘Those who toy with these [Turkish] values should be taught a lesson within the premises of law.’

TV regulating authorities are very much influenced by the government and interfere not only in the form of fines but also directly in plotlines. A prime example is
Behzat Ç
, which features a policeman anti-hero working within an inept police service in the capital city, Ankara. The production company of this unusually vocal anti-government series was fined 273,000 lira for the last episode, apparently because the anti-hero is ‘an unsuitable role model to the youth of Turkey due to excessive consumption of alcohol, pre-marital cohabitation and foul language’. This was the charmingly old-fashioned wording of the official offence, and explained the fine, but the unspoken and indeed unspeakable reason would have had more to do with the terrible picture painted of the Turkish police force. In addition to the fine, the plot had to be changed so that Behzat married his girlfriend, making an honest woman out of her and an example of the programme’s production company.

The threat of TV censorship must raise an interesting quandary for production companies: how to toe the line
between keeping authorities happy and keeping viewing figures high? A lot of these programmes’ popularity is based on racy storylines and sexual intrigue, however tame by Western standards. Erdoğan has not managed to mete out any punishment to the makers of
Muhteşem Yüzyıl,
despite his blustering (although there have been noticeably more scenes of Suleiman reading the Koran and praying since Erdoğan’s outburst), and it is possible that the reason has something to do with its extraordinary commercial success. An Arabic-speaking friend of mine stopped to help a lost Yemeni family on the Istanbul metro in the autumn of 2012. Speaking to the father, she learned that he had saved up to bring the whole family to see Topkapı Palace, where the series is set, and was very proud to have done so. His wife and children were over the moon to be in the former Ottoman capital. The extraordinary influence of this show might be the clue as to why it has gone unpunished while the relatively unpopular
Behzat Ç
has been both fined and censored. It remains to be seen whether the popular shows will continue unchecked, or whether government disapproval will win out.

Newly commissioned programmes often cater to the political flavour of the moment.
Avrupa
Avrupa
(
Europe, Europe
) is a recent series produced, significantly, by the state channel, TRT, whose main motif is to ridicule the idea of joining the EU. It posits bizarre, hypothetical scenarios like a mandatory number of toilet flushes to comply with EU standards – not satire at its most biting, but an interesting indication of the changing tide of opinion with regard to the desirability of EU accession, and most importantly the perceived
interest, or lack of interest, from the government in keeping up with EU demands.

If the government is limited in its interference on privatised TV channels, it can be far more vocal in the realm of state theatre. Serdar Bilis tries to steer clear of state projects after a peculiar experience at the Izmit City Theatre. When pitching for his show, he had a meeting with the artistic director and the general manager of the theatre. Normally, the artistic director decides whether to accept a play proposal and the general manager is there to confirm that putting on the show is practically possible. In Turkey, this is not always the case; when Bilis presented his show and suggested its billing as a
kara komedi
(‘black comedy’), the general manager immediately vetoed the decision and walked out of the room. An embarrassed silence followed, and the artistic director went to confer with his apparent superior. It turned out that the general manager felt that
kara komedi
could be construed as a subversive wordplay on the popular acronym of the ruling AKP –
Ak Parti
. In Turkish,
ak
means ‘white’ or ‘clean’, so the party’s acronym sounds like ‘White Party’ – this would be set unfavourably against the ‘black’ comedy that Bilis was proposing. The mind boggles at the extent of suspicion necessary to entertain this rather subtle association. Bilis was not allowed to pursue that marketing idea but went ahead with the play anyway. Apparently the farce was ill received, as it involved drinking and bare legs on stage. Bilis seems permanently discouraged from trying anything of that ilk again with a state theatre.