Playing With Violence

By Esen Çamurdan

This book investigates the subtly drawn dimensions of the theme of violence in contemporary Turkish drama.The plays analyzed give us characters caught in the cul-de-sac of a culture that demands conformity. They are unable to say “No”, and their gravest problem is the impossibility of existing as an individual. These plays deal with the most insidious and widespread forms of covert social violence. Ten plays by six writers are discussed:

Önemli Adam (An İmportant Man)
Müfettişler (The Inspectors)
Kahvede Şenlik Var (There's a party at the Coffeehouse)
Ölüler Konuşmak İsterler (The Dead Will Speak)
Kozalar (Cocoons)
Taziye (Mourning Rites)
Mahmud ile Yezida (Mahmud and Yezida)
Çöplük (Garbage Dump)
Sahibinin Sesi (His Master’s Voice)
İşte Baş İşte Gövde İşte Kanatlar, (Here is the Head, Here is the Trunk, Here are the Wings)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312778870

Book preview

Playing With Violence

Esen Çamurdan

PLAYING WITH VIOLENCE

Violence in Contemporary Turkish Theater

Translated from Turkish by Victoria Holbrook

You take photographs through the culture to which you belong.

Sebastiao Salgado

CONTENTS

Introduction ............

1.  The nature of the initial contact established with the audience is determined by the first scene ………..

2.  Space reveals itself only in partnership with time ..............                      

2.1   Public open space: Exterior spaces .............                            

2.2    Sites of Daily circular time: Homes ..............                 

3.  Confinement, constriction, and violence ..................                            

4.  Socially legitimate violence and the struggle to be an individual                                                                  .......................                                                    

5.  Surrendering to violence ......................

5.1  To close in on oneself and postpone hopes and dreams once again ..............      

An Important Man ......................                                                     

The Inspectors .................                                                          

5.2  Unconscious surrender; conformity to the established order, or the struggle to find a niche .....................

5.2.1  Linguistic assimilation goes along with social assimilation ...........

There’s a Party at the Coffeehouse ...................                                                        

The Dead Will Speak ....................

5.2.2  The characters in There’s a Party at the Coffeehouse and The Dead Will Speak spring from the same mold.

Cocoons .....................

5.2.3  Insulating oneself from the violence outside does not make one safe inside                                                                     

6.  Answering violence with violence ....................

6.1  Death is a way of self-realization and the victim kills while dying ......................                                                     

Mourning Rites, Mahmud and Yezida ..........................                                        

Garbage Dump ..............................                                             

6.2  Sevim Burak’s plays nurse an explosive rage concealed in chatter ..........................

His Master’s Voice ......................                                                     

Here is the Head, Here is the Trunk, Here are the Wings .........................                                   

7.  Dream and Reality spawn, affirm, and influence one another .......................                        8.  Children are usually part of identity and are connected with death ......                                           9.  The body is transformed into a space of violence ......................                                

10. Violence is made aural and visual ...............................   

11. To the audience the last word...........................

General Bibliography .....................

INTRODUCTION

To attempt a study of violence in the theater in a world and in a country where violence has become a way of life is a more arduous task than it seems.  One must first of all become reacquainted with the concept of violence, which is diversifying, broadening, and acquiring more subtle dimensions as time goes on.  (Here I have relied upon Hannah Arendt’s book and the special issue of Cogito on violence, Nos. 6-7).  The next and fundamental matter is the choice of plays.  Considering that in our country severity and despair are to be found just below the surface not only of plays that take violence as their subject or theme, but of many other works as well, I had many choices before me.  The ones that interested me most were those in which violence is implicit and indirect rather than explicit and direct; and those that test the limits of theater in terms of their structure and style as works of art.  With this in mind I chose for analysis six playwrights (Sabahattin Kudret Aksal, Melih Cevdet Anday, Adalet Ağaoğlu, Sevim Burak, Murathan Mungan, and Turgay Nar) and ten plays (There’s a Party at the Coffeehouse, An Important Man, The Dead Will Speak, The Inspectors, Cocoons, His Master’s Voice, Here is the Head, Here is the Trunk, Here are the Wings, Mourning Rites, Mahmud and Yezida, and Garbage Dump).  The really interesting thing was that as I examined plays that seemed quite different, whether in terms of their structure and style or approach to events, I found that they had a surprising number of points in common.  The most strikingly prominent characteristic, although dealt with in a various number of ways, was that the primary source of violence was an imposed social order/authority/power to which the characters could not conform, or to which they tried unsuccessfully to conform.  And when one goes deeper, one finds secondary elements such as feelings of being confined or squeezed into one kind of space or another, the transformation of the body into a space of violence, or the association of a child with death.  There are no melodramatic elements in any of the plays—all the playwrights take care to avoid that.  They try to bring out the tragic dimensions in their subjects and themes, and to move the audience by means of language. 

The plays contain the reverberations stored up inside us of life as it is lived in this land.  Violence either constitutes the dramatic action, or is one of the primary factors bringing it about.  As if telling a fairy tale, relating a myth or phantasm, playwrights tell the audience stories about itself which are difficult to take in.  The plays have no definitive endings.  No ending constitutes a solution; either one returns to the beginning, or there is a climactic explosion of violence...  The plays do not end.  Problems are not solved.  They acquire dimensions one may call unreal, which in itself constitutes a kind of system of communication; it is a message sent to the audience.  In fact the audience is told stories about things that seem to be outside of its experience.  Clues are given, and the audience is expected to interpret for itself.  In other words, the play creates its own reality and waits for the audience to unravel it, while at the same time taking care to preserve a certain distance between the stage and the house.  Fantastic, mythical or unreal elements really do block the audience’s identification with the actors on the stage, and even challenge the audience.  But they never permit the audience to remain passive.

What our plays of violence project onto the stage is the condition of persons who are not able to survive as individuals within the social order in which they live.  These are the silent screams, heard at the breaking point of a culture that does not offer release, that does not know how to say no, that submits itself to passivity. 

1.   The nature of the initial contact established with the audience is determined by the first scene.

Today it is beyond dispute that the interpretation of a play or other work of art is to great extent determined by its language and style, or in other words, by its creator’s form of presentation.  In the theater the first step in this process is usually to insert the audience into the atmosphere of the play, preparing them for what will happen—and not happen—later.  Playwrights begin the work according to the style and structure they have adopted as sufficient to develop the chosen subject or theme, and in some way, or at some point, wink at the audience, revealing certain clues; even if the audience is not made an organic part of the atmosphere created, it is prepared to be a witness.  In this regard it will be interesting to look at how our playwrights who have used violence in the theater in various forms and styles begin their plays.

Murathan Mungan maintains a certain distance from the fictional worlds he creates.  He begins his Mahmud and Yezida with a Ceremony scene: Yezidis in three concentric circles circumambulate a large fire burning at the center of the stage.  Fire parts the darkness in two, and in the background is revealed a phallic totem made of the feathers of the peacock, a bird sacred to the Yezidis.  An old man is being wound up in a pure white shroud, which he resists but finally relents, upon which old women throw red paint on the shroud.  For a while the man is carried around like a ceremonial corpse, but when his shroud is stripped off and thrown into the fire, he comes alive and begins to dance around it.  The circles get smaller and smaller until finally the Yezidis make this wish: May all evils be confined to this circle!  May all evils burn in this fire and be naught!

Mourning Rites begins with a long Prologue the playwright wants performed as if it were a dream, a hallucination; the main problematic is presented here in all its dimensions and secondary aspects.  Basically, the Prologue is made up of three sections.  In the first, three young men enter the castle like three black shadows in a penetrating light of dazzling intensity, coming through a gate black as pitch, all three carrying their black guns in one hand and dragging a white shroud on the ground with the other.  Then the Riflemen and the other characters in the play come on stage and take their places.  The second part is the Lament section.  While Fasla Kadin endures the pains of labor and gives birth to Heja on a white shroud spread on the ground, Kevsa Ana sacrifices animals and casts spells to make her womb dry up, for her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy violates the customs of the tribe.  Her son Bedirhan Aga wishes for a boy though his head burns with questions about tribal custom.  In the end when a boy child is born, the only thing in his mind is fear of death.  In the final section the three young men who entered through the black gate exit whence they came, but this time the gaping doorway is filled like the gates of Hell with flaming light.  Father and son sit in a ritualistic position of prayer while mother and daughter-in-law exchange glances.

In