“Ghosts of My House” In İstanbul: A Contemporary Canadian Play Out Of Context Or Domesticating Whiteness

It is the 24th of September 2024 in İstanbul, and I’m finding my way through the curvy streets of Galata to reach Asmalı Sahne, an alternative-independent blackbox space that was established in the early 2010s, rooted within the exciting alternative theatre movement of the previous decade. I run my last few steps to make it at the time to the early preview of Susanna Fournier’s Ghosts of My House, directed by Büke Erkoç and performed by Berfin Ertan, Tamar Çıtak, Öykü Eraslan, Beril Çelik. Ghosts of My House is a text that deals with intergenerational family trauma, loss, grief, and unprocessed rage, by focusing on the women of a contemporary white middle-class Torontonian family with some dark humor. The play was previously performed under the name Always Still the Dawn in the 2022-2023 season in İstanbul’s DasDas theatre, within its double bill form, which included two interconnected plays: All the Ways You Scare Me and Ghosts of My House. For the upcoming 2024-2025 season the group decided to revisit the play and start performing Ghosts of My House as a separate play after a minor cast change. I was invited to this early preview as the Turkish-language editor of Susanna Fournier’s play book in Turkish, Always Still the Dawn, translated by Büke Erkoç initially for the 2022-2023 season in DasDas.

To start with: I think what Erkoç is doing in Turkey is quite precious. Considering that almost only exposure of Turkey to the Canadian theatre canon prior to Erkoç’s recent efforts were translations of two plays by two white male playwrights, namely David French and George F. Walker (translated by Turgut A. Akter initially for a 1994 Mitos Boyut Publication); it is undeniably a feminist and activist effort that Erkoç takes onto herself to introduce at least some (white) female playwrights from Canada to Turkey (the other play that Erkoç translated and I edited is Mouthpiece by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava). This exposure undeniably gives some insight to audiences in İstanbul about what it means to be a woman in Anglophone Canada, no matter how much of a privileged status one might have. Erkoç’s strategic trials to bridge theatre fields of Turkey and Canada remind me of the 2005-2012 experiments of the famous DOT Theatre in İstanbul^[1]For an analysis of this era, see pages 91-137 of this MA thesis., which carefully curated a selection of contemporary UK-based plays and brought in a raw, violent and confrontational aesthetics that shook my generation to its core and challenged our ways of thinking about theatre. Only years later, and after my own immigration experience to Canada, I now see that their curation was quite white-centric. Erkoç, an artist from a much younger generation with more decolonial sensibilities, recently started another major translation project to bring BIPOC and queer playwrights’ voices from Canada to Turkey (including Djarnet Sears, Art Babayants, Jovanni Sy, and Jordan Tannahill); which proves that she has learned from the model that DOT Theatre established about bridging cultures, but she will not repeat their mistakes of re-canonizing whiteness (exclusively) as universal.

After this opening, I also need to mention that Fournier’s text constructs a theatre aesthetics that I know well from the Toronto scenes, which is a style that I don’t particularly feel fond of. The play, in general, doesn’t take me inside its world until the very last twist at its final moments, since my exposure to Anglo-Canadian whiteness and North American white feminism alienates me too much from the struggles of the characters depicted in the play. For most of the İstanbul audiences, a certain lack of exposure to whiteness in its own context of power allows many to experience the performance through a feminist sensibility instead of an alienating racial-colonial cringe. Despite my own particular experience with the script, I should also give credit to Fournier’s perspective: she does a rare thing for Canadian theatre when her script full frontally challenges patriarchal-capitalism, by exposing how structures of capitalism are internally tied to the sustainability of patriarchy and how this particular brand of North American patriarchal-capitalism decays familial relationships, impacting especially women’s psyches and bodies. This is why, as a deeply gendered illness, anorexia appears as a major theme through the play, which Fournier’s character describes as “inverted capitalism” because “capitalism seeks expansion, whereas anorexia seeks contraction” (Fournier, Always Still the Dawn, Unpublished text).

Fournier’s text challenges me ideologically (which is my overall motivation to go to theatre) only through its twist at the end of the play, which became particularly strong when I saw the performance. This happens when the performance breaks the frame of a narrow dysfunctional family story and comments on the ecological state of the world, and invites the audience to “do what they can do”; reminding Voltaire’s famous ending to Candide: “we must cultivate our garden”. Centuries later, Fournier agrees with Voltaire, and I do agree with them, too – despite keeping my critical position on not distributing the guilt and shame of planetary crises equally. Perhaps Fournier mildly suggests this too, through introducing mythology as a knowledge system to understand the world in her text. I think this front could have been stronger though; because not every individual, community, peoples have the same equal amount of responsibility in the planetary crimes committed, and the ones who are hurt the most are generally the ones who contributed the least to the current regime of global ecocides.

What I am most interested in this production in İstanbul is how, first, Erkoç, and then through following her lead, the entire ensemble domesticated this Canadian play with (white) feminist sensibilities, a very particular anti-capitalist stance, and an interventionist ecological perspective. I use the word domesticated here, because the labour that went into making this very foreign text and the very foreign experience that it is rooted in, readable for İstanbul audiences, is actually not an adaptation. It is not an adaptation because the meaning of the text is not radically reimagined and recreated for İstanbul, rather the world of the play is translated into Turkish first and then domesticated in a way that makes the performance readable and relatable to its local audiences. First of all, Erkoç did a very nuanced translation, which almost completely recreated the text in Turkish, yet without letting its poetry slip away. This created a text that is powerful but is clearly a translation, which resulted in a play that is a challenging read for a Turkish reading public. The performance, though, is a lot less challenging to interpret because the team translated the text within their bodies too: they domesticated a foreign experience through their physicality and sense of humor. The actors not only speak in Turkish but act in the cultural codes of the Turkish speaking public which makes the staging legible for the local audiences. Furthermore, the team turned the names of the characters in the play into Turkish names, which mildly placed the story to somewhere in the secular-Western fronts of İstanbul, which aligns with the audience profile of İstanbul.

After the play we have a post-show talk with Erkoç and the ensemble on the stage, surrounded by the performative remains of the show. I explicitly ask Erkoç and the team about their dramaturgical labor and overcoming the hardships of domesticating the play. Erkoç comments on the fact that, one of the major points of interest for her and her team that drew them into making this play in İstanbul was how the play was centered exclusively upon mother-daughter and sister relationships. It is true that in the global patriarchal canon of art and literature, we get to see many father-son and brother relationships, and not so much mother-daughter and sister relationships. Fournier’s work here also creates intertextual bridges with the Western dramatic canon’s strong female characters – all written by men – from Checkov’s three smart but dysfunctional sisters who we see partly reflected in the sisters portrayed in the play, to Ibsen’s dangerously imploding Hedda Gabler which is portrayed partly in the mother figure.

When it comes to introducing the physical comedy and very beautifully crafted little added lines that came through long-term improvs (such as “Inshallah” – “Amin” duo in a moment when a character talks about her wishes; or the moment in which sisters share blood stained chips after a violent family tragedy, soothing themselves by saying “it should be okay, it is family blood at the end”), the cast points at performer Berfin Ertan as a generator of humor. Most of the cast performed on a professional stage for the first time with this play in 2022 in their early twenties, and they are now approaching their mid-twenties. During these two years cast members experienced losses and an ever-growing economic crisis in Turkey, which made them understand some of the struggles of the characters in a much deeper and embodied way. Erkoç also notes that she was much more limiting as a director in the first run of the show when it came to improvisations, because she was feeling that the cast had not internalized the play enough yet to improvise within the universe of the play. In 2024, the ensemble has grown into the world of the play, making a home for their young and upcoming ensemble. When I explicitly ask each performer what they liked about the play enough to invest in it so much, the answers vary in unexpected ways. Beril Çelik notes that it was good for her to see a nuanced approach in feminism that does not blame individuals for the socio-historically structured workings of patriarchy. Ertan notes that she finds it exciting that such a tragic story is told within the setup of a party.

This party is a dramaturgical framework developed by Erkoç based on a reference to a celebration that characters reflect on in the aftermath of a major family tragedy, which sets up the dark humor of the performance. Beril Çelik and Tamar Çıtak note how a ghost is given a voice to tell her own perspective on stage instead of being spoken about, almost in a way that allows the “subaltern speak”. Beril Çelik and Öykü Eraslan both note the freshness of the post-dramatic text’s poetry for them, as young and emerging artists in İstanbul. They note that what they found particularly interesting was how this poetry was written in a dialogic form that moves the theatrical action instead of halting it.

As a final note Erkoç mentioned that what they were doing at this point is perhaps a bit of “dirtying” of the text, which loosens its sterile Torontonian aesthetics, and white Canadian rhetoric. Ertan then noted that she is excited to see how “the text will be further dirtied.” It is clear that Erkoç did a remarkable job to make the ensemble blossom in their collective and nuanced dramaturgical creativity. I look forward to how this young ensemble, under the direction of Erkoç, will continue to bridge two vastly different theatre fields in the coming decades.