The Art of Joy and Sorrow: Theatre

Narrating and trying to understand have always seemed to me intertwined pursuits. For this reason I believe that speaking, telling stories — indeed all artistic endeavours — rest on the aim of trying to understand at least as much as on the aim of narrating.

This is also how I understand Bacon's saying, which I find wise: “Art is man added to nature.” Seen from this angle, the effort to understand and to narrate corresponds to man kneading nature and, by giving new forms to reality, expressing it outwardly.

This is, of course, also true for theatre, one of humanity's most ancient arts. With its actor, its writer and its audience, all the components of theatre are engaged in a kind of effort to understand. And in the most fundamental way; by embodying characters, revealing human conditions, thinking, taking a stance…

Like painting, poetry, sculpture and music, theatre too is a way of being human added to nature. Unfortunately, this way of being human — perhaps one could say it has always been so, but especially over the last hundred years — continues its existence amid the rumbles of the terrible destruction called war. As the only living species seized by the madness of annihilating its own kind en masse, man lives under the dark shadow of bloody wars.

On one side there is the creative human, added to nature and interpreting it; on the other, the destructive human, who carries the aim of destroying this accumulation — two different kinds of human being. The distinguishing features between these two kinds of human have long been a subject of theatre as well. Throughout its long history, theatre aimed to transform the destructive human into the creative human by criticising him on the stage. And sometimes it did this even while the building housing the stage was being bombed. By holding up a mirror to the spectator seated in a chair and looking at the stage, it tried to criticise the destructive human and to bring out the creative human power within the spectator. For this reason it was never liked by those in power and by tyrants, and they tried to place it under pressure. Theatre reached the 21st century by resisting and overcoming all difficulties, but today it is under a different, more insidious and harder-to-perceive pressure. The pressure of indifference…

As is experienced especially in Turkey, in a period of coarsening in which culture is turned into entertainment and human values are eliminated one by one, they are forcing theatre either to change its form or to disappear. The method used for this is to disregard theatre, to ignore it, to withhold news of it, and to turn theatre into an intellectual bogeyman.

This reality of indifference reveals itself, perhaps most concretely, during the pandemic we are living through. Although it is one of the areas most affected by the measures taken against the epidemic, no policies are being produced toward solving the problems of theatre and of theatre people. Unfortunately, indifference toward theatre also holds true for broad segments of society. One might say, “People have fallen into worrying about their very lives, worn down by the struggle to make a living — is this any time to trouble oneself over theatre!” But how independent are these matters from one another?

Is not the oxygen that theatre needs in order to live the interest, enthusiasm and theatrical passion of the young generations? Aşık Veysel said, “Affection is to sow a crop and make it grow green.” Theatre too, like a crop, needs to be sown, cultivated and tended. And here is where the most destructive effect of this conspiracy of indifference emerges. If you discredit theatre — and especially if you make it hard for new writers to come up — you will have blocked the creative theatrical energy in the young generations from the very start, redirected it to other fields, and left the field of theatre to desertification. The deed done is terrible; in Bacon's definition, it is the crime of preventing man from being added to nature.

But, like the other crimes committed against creativity in Turkey, this too is plastered over with a salve of tolerance. Despite everything, theatre continues its existence by resisting wars, destruction, degeneration, and most of all indifference. And it will continue. The joy and sorrow that are always together in human life will be reflected in theatre as well.

Joy sweeps us toward the sublimities of that effort of man to be added to nature which is called theatre, while sorrow reminds us that we must remain alert in this field and must strive so as not to fall into becoming a nation that has lost its national theatre.

Zülfü Livaneli
Edebiyatist Magazine, May–June 2021