Burc İdem Dincel [BİD]: Modernism has an intricate history in Turkey's theatrical climate, one that is associated with Westernisation. I am basically talking about a past in which the quest for ‘synthesis’ in the 1940s and 1950s was refined in the extreme political theatre of the 1960s and 1970s, and resurfaced under the name of ‘hybrid’ artistic works of the 1980s and 1990s, where artists tended to turn their backs on modernist aesthetics due to the postmodern wave that was dominating the period. Your journey with the Studio Oyuncuları starts exactly at this point. In the years when this rejection was experienced most severely, you began by making a modernist statement, so to speak: Happy Days by Samuel Beckett. What were the motives that led you to this statement, while modernism itself was going through transformations, fractures and slippages in that postmodern wave, which, arguably, soon became clear to have no vitality, or sustainability for that matter?

Şahika Tekand [ŞT]: The political theatre experience in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s that you mentioned had a textual focus; blazing the trail for a ‘new’ form was not on the cards. It was more concerned with what was said than with what was done on stage. Theatres that did seek form acted mostly in the convention of Bertolt Brecht's demonstrative approach. Thanks to the formal kinship between Brecht's demonstrative form and traditional oriental demonstrativeness, the Turkish audience was receptive to this sort of theatre, which, in turn, was quickly accepted. Whilst it is certainly true that artistically very good examples of this type of theatre were staged in Turkey, tackling the question of meaning as an issue intrinsic to the ‘form’ itself was often perceived then, as nowadays, unnecessary.

In the early 1980s, change in the world was so intense and rapid that it was almost tangible. The idea that ‘since we can't change the world, let's play games’ was embraced and spread at an incredible speed. It was the times when shiny aspirations for the dolce vita ensuing from the ‘irresponsible lightness’ of the postmodern era and liberal capitalism were rising. Humanity was convinced that it could not change the world and chose to live life by playing ‘games’ and discharging itself from responsibilities …