By Henrietta Foster
Freak was the most visually spectacular of the shows on offer.
It was an immersive piece set in one of Istanbul's oldest cinemas, the Alkazar Cinema, which had recently been restored as the Hope Alkazar.
The Alkazar is an early cinema housed in an apartment building and is a total architectural gem. An ordinary apartment door reveals a double-height grand cinema with incredible architectural features.
Freak was a complex performance with an intense, extensive digital projection playing across the creamy stucco walls. I was never entirely sure what was happening, but the performance utterly mesmerised me. Even though there were only two actors on stage, fifty backstage staff had to get it working.
The play consisted of a dialogue through the ages between a malevolent, ugly woman named Shiva and her pet chicken. They fight and argue through time and adversity, sometimes with hilarious but more often shocking results.
The digital effects surrounding them take up the narrative. It might sound like a surreal mash-up, but for the precise brilliance of the two performances, it is not.
Nihal Yalcin and Onur Berk Aralanoglu are well-known television and stage actors. Together, they were an unstoppable force. In an after-show discussion, they admitted that they had held open rehearsals to gauge the audience's reaction to all the twists and turns in the plot.
I can imagine Freak being shown at the Coronet Theatre or Wiltons Musical Hall in London to great acclaim, though probably with fewer backstage people. It was a unique experience.
The other great show-off piece of theatre on display was How To Forget In Ten Steps, written and directed by Sahika Tekand. Our puce disco bus took us to a huge state-funded theatre on the Asian side of Istanbul with a vast audience.
Tekand’s play has been in production for at least ten years and is well travelled. It was a surprising addition to a showcase of current theatre, but it was so well attended that we began to understand that it has achieved an almost cult-like status.
The stage was divided into the squares of a gaming board, and groups of men with chairs played an endless game of Kafkaesque Tic Tac Toe with one another.
It was supposed to be about the tragedy of the common man, trapped and frustrated in his increasingly small personal world. His only belief is in the system as the way to better his lot, but the system proves to be a hard taskmaster. He becomes a prisoner and a victim of the system.
How To Forget In Ten Steps was challenging to understand as it was the only show without subtitles. However, the Turkish speakers in our group assured me that the words were meaningless and that the visual games were important.
The performance was an exhausting 70 minutes and quite an athletic feat. In the end, the men were almost tidied away by the presence of several cleaning women who seemed to stand outside the system.
The Other Day was a similar play, but this time it had music. Two actors perform in front of an eclectic orchestra full of strange instruments made from household bric-a-brac.
From time to time, the actors are accompanied by one of the solo instrumentalists and join the story of these two characters lost in a city who endlessly miss one another.
They change shape and age but remain the same two characters looking for their own story. The Other Day’s protagonists are Turkey’s flotsam and jetsam washed up along the pavements of a busy, uncaring city that fails to value them.
Was the production a play, concert, or modern dance piece? It was a mixture of all to them and none of them. The Other Day was incredibly popular with the critics, and the soundtrack was fantastic.
It was also the first of three plays we saw at the Beykoz Kundura - an old shoe factory about 25 miles outside Istanbul on the banks of the Bosphorus.
It reminded me of Snape Maltings in East Anglia with a magical setting, delicious restaurants and a spectacular series of theatrical spaces along with a museum about the old shoe factory.
The other two plays were unremarkable dance pieces about displaced immigrants on the border between Norway and Russia and Misket.
Misket was the story of Ersin and Denis. Two young men started the performance as wedding dancers, almost in drag.
Think Ru Paul meets Carmen Miranda and huge fun, but just as we prepared for a musical comedy, the play turned into something entirely different.
Misket turned into a gay love story between the two men who were too scared to come out to their families and friends or, indeed, themselves.
One of them was openly gay to himself and knew exactly who he was and what he wanted. The other was conflicted and full of self-hatred. He ended up denying his desires, marrying, and leaving the dance profession.
Misket was harrowing and superbly acted. It was full of furtive expressions of love and open violence. Again, it is a play that should be seen outside of Turkey.
At the end of the play talk, the two actors and the director claimed that although they were not gay themselves, they were doing this play for their many friends who were.
Women were the next issue at hand, and most specifically, first in a small chamber piece at the tiny living room-like Duende Sahnesi theatre.
Nifas was written by Sirin Oten and starred a well-known television actress, Zeynep. Married to Mert - a man with severe autism, she is trying to get used to being a mother to Baby Ada.
The play opens on a day when she discovers that her baby has gone missing. In fact, a very lifelike baby doll was near my seat, and when Zeynep became increasingly desperate, I was tempted to push it into the centre of the stage.
I wasn’t the only audience member who was bemused by the presence of the pink plastic doll and the fever-pitch play.
On stage was also her sister Ozlem, who was the victim of a violent marriage, and her mother-in-law Sevim, who had a terrible secret that impacted the relationship between the couple.
Their marital relations were overwrought and exhausting in their complexity, but extraordinarily honest about postpartum depression.
How Did You Know The Deceased was written and performed by Elif Ongan Tekca, with an involved sonic background. It was about a woman who sees and lives side-by -side with the dead.
Tekca helps the dead to be understood by the living and, in a way, becomes a ghost herself. The play was somewhat confusing and opaque.
The showcase finished as it started: with another well-known play, Bernarda, which was based on Federico Garcia Lorca’s La Casa De Bernarda Alba.
This was a world-class production with the incredible Ozge Arslan in the title role - in fact, in all five roles.
A change of lighting or a simple adjustment of a shoulder angle or a scarf signified a different character or mood. She was evil, simpering, sexy, angry, pathetic and lost.
Arslan has won almost every Turkish award for this performance, and rightly so. Someone pick it up so other countries can witness this ground-breaking performance. It was a fitting end to a stunning week of theatre.
I had spent every waking moment in Istanbul expecting a phone call telling me that my mother had died or was near death. The friends I made there knew this, and their kindness towards me was magnificent.
Every morning, as I came down to breakfast bleary-eyed and muddle-headed after no sleep, they asked me tactfully how she was and then how I was. I am profoundly grateful to them for their humanity and care.
When I returned to London, thankfully, my mother was still alive.
She lived for another eleven days and died at our family home a few days short of her 91st birthday.
My mother loved theatre and would have enjoyed my tales of Istanbul and the plays I saw there.
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Photograph courtesy of Jürgen Luger. Published under a Creative Commons license.