Who's there?Staging the silenced pasts in contemporary theater in Turkey: Kim var orada? Muhsin Bey'in Son Hamleti

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2549549_(Table of contents)

This thesis study aims to investigate the re-enactment of difficult pasts in theatrical performances while questioning the representation of the silenced events and subjects of Turkey’s recent history in the given political and aesthetic limits of present-day Turkey. To this end, this study investigates the representations of silenced accounts in the histories of Turkey’s theater by concentrating on a biographical play called Kim Var Orada? Muhsin Bey’in Son Hamleti [Who’s There? The Last Hamlet of Muhsin Bey] by Bogaziçi Gösteri Sanatları Toplulugu (BGST) premiered in 2016, Istanbul. The play portrays the life story of one of the most influential figures of Turkey’s theater history, Muhsin Ertugrul, and problematizes his mythic image within the ethnocentric history writing of Turkey’s theater by depicting the events taking place in the transition period from Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey. I will investigate Kim Var Orada’s strategies of performing history by looking at the critical and playful relationship that it builds with historical documents and discuss the performers’ potential to bear witness to the historical event that they re-enact. Since Kim Var Orada firmly ties its texture to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I will analyze the possible reasons and outcomes of Hamlet’s haunting of the Kim Var Orada’s structure as an attempt to communicate with the traumatic pasts of Turkey’s recent history