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We're all talking Turkey
By Claire Allfree, Metro 01.05.07
Top of the world: Leyla Nazli and Mehmet Ergen, pictured on the rooftop of the Arcola, have lofty ideas for the theatre
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'One of the biggest adverts we have is that Turkey came third in the 2002 World Cup,' grins Turkish theatre director Mehmet Ergen in the cafÈ of his Dalston theatre, the Arcola.
'And we won Eurovision in 2003 and Orhan Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel prize for literature. Turkey has been talked about an awful lot recently.'
Ergen is certainly right there. Add to that the ongoing debate about Turkey's fraught bid for EU membership and the interest in the fact that it's a secular democracy with a 90 per cent Muslim population, Turkey is barely out of the papers these days.
No wonder Ergen, who grew up in Istanbul, is putting on the Orient Express Season - a programme boasting two new English language plays and a host of smaller revivals of Turkish work, in what he claims will be the first season of Turkish theatre ever to be produced in this country.
'I've never wanted to programme a season for the Turkish-speaking community just for the sake of it,' says Ergen. 'But there's been some great work emerging recently. It feels like the right time.'
Ergen set up the Arcola on a shoestring in a former textiles factory seven years ago. Since then, he has triumphed over a formidable lack of capital and the theatre's unlovely location, several bus rides from London's West End, to establish a reputation for ambitious work with a strong international flavour.
Diverse highlights such as last year's Lorca season and 2005's Raymond Carver dramatisation have inspired the sort of loyal following other venues would sack their bar staff for: 60 per cent come from the neighbouring boroughs of Hackney and Islington and Ergen sees the same faces over again.
He may proudly state that this audience speaks 86 languages between them but it's the Turkish immigrants who make their presence felt the most on Dalston's Kingsland Road, with its array of Turkish food shops and restaurants.
'Our audiences like the fact they can expect the unexpected,' he says. 'But with the Orient Express Season, we've decided to tell stories some of them may directly share.'
The season's first play, Silver Birch House, embodies this notion rather neatly: it is the debut play by the Arcola's own executive producer Leyla Nazli and is heavily informed by her family's experience of the short-lived communist uprising in eastern Turkey in the late 1970s.
'I grew up in a small village where we had literally nothing: no electricity, no running water,' she says. 'Because of the political uprising, my family had to move to the south. Many other families will have had to do the same.'
The second play, Pera Palas, is very different: written by a Turkish-American writer, Sinan H <nel, it spans the 20th century in Turkey, from the last days of the Ottoman Empire and the new dawn of modernity heralded by the founding of Atat¸rk's Republic through to the Islamic revival of recent years.
A defining theme is the changing role of women. The issue has been brought to the forefront by the Islamic right's attempts to gain a foothold by challenging Turkey's secular rulings on the wearing of the headscarf, which is banned in official buildings and universities.
'It's a controversial issue at the moment because the wife of the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wears a headscarf in public,' says Ergen. 'We know university girls in Istanbul whose fees are paid by Islamic right organisations in return for wearing the headscarf,' adds Nazli, who came to London as a student and who, like Ergen, lives here permanently.
'Turkey kicked out this radical Islamic behaviour in the 1990s but recently some very powerful and well-organised factions have started trying to turn the country into an Islamic state. It can be dangerous: a journalist was killed a few months ago and last week three people were killed for publishing a Bible.'
Ergen is fully aware that secular Turkey has its own history of oppression: in 2005 novelist Orhan Pamuk was tried by a Turkish court for 'insulting Turkishness' when he accused the republic of covering up the massacre of Kurds and Armenians - charges that were eventually dropped.
'Turkish history is full of artists who live in fear for their lives,' he says. 'It makes the subject of Turkey all the more vibrant to discuss on stage.'
And where better than at the Arcola? Nowhere, if Ergen's ambitions are anything to go by: the next big plan is to turn it into the world's first carbon-neutral theatre by making it completely energy self-sufficient.
This is more than just a pipe dream: it's technically achievable but first the theatre needs to buy the building from its landlord, who, with crushing predictability, wants to turn the upper two floors into flats.
'It's a challenge,' grins Ergen. 'But what else are we going to do with the rest of our lives?'
The Orient Express Season opens tomorrow, until Jul 7, Arcola Theatre, 27 Arcola Street E8, various times and prices. Tel: 020 7503 1646. www.arcolatheatre.com Rail: Dalston Kingsland
