REVIEW: Cihangir Atölye Sahnesi Presents AYAK BACAK FABRiKASI

There is a presumption that advocacy theatre is aesthetically disinterested. I won’t deny recognizing its reflexes, polemical, sanctimonious, self-satisfied, but these reflexes are just that, reflexes. When socially engaged theatre fails, it is usually due less to its political interest than to a lack of dramaturgical curiosity or, in most cases, the absence of resources to mount a simultaneous dramatic and social argument. Cihangir Atölye Sahnesi shows no such deficiency. Its young actors and artists approach activist drama with confidence and a striking aesthetic range. Filler ve Karıncalar balanced Aesop’s fable with Greek tragedy; Saloz’un Mavalı was poetic and documentarian. The most recent production I attended, Sermet Çağan’s Ayak Bacak Fabrikası, adopts a Lecoq-inflected, vaudevillian style that delights rather than sermonizes.

Premiered in 1964, Ayak Bacak Fabrikası is a landmark of early Turkish epic theatre. Çağan’s death in 1970, at the age of forty-one, has rendered him a Marlowe-like figure in Turkish drama, positioned against Haldun Taner’s Shakespeare. This play remains his most enduring work. Set in an unnamed country, it offers an absurdist critique of manipulated supply and demand. A village enjoys a year of wheat surplus, only to face three feudal lords enraged that their stockpiled seed will lose value. Through the seizure of production and the manipulation of authority, the lords manufacture scarcity, culminating in the literal crippling of the population. Their proposed solution is grotesque: an “arm-and-leg factory” where villagers may purchase replacements.

On the page, this tragicomedy hardly sounds lighthearted. Onstage, Cihangir Atölye Sahnesi extracts every ounce of comedy, leaving the tragedy to the logic of the plot. I have seen comic approaches to epic theatre before, often filtered through cabaret looseness. The impulse is understandable. Epic theatre should never be stodgy. It is, however, hierarchical: performance must serve the structure of the text. Achieving that balance requires sustained collective development, something American companies, which typically hire actors to execute rather than build a previously conceived production, rarely have the resources to pursue. Cihangir Atölye Sahnesi builds.

The company draws from a broad arsenal of techniques: mouthed sound effects, overlapping and choral dialogue, rhythmic chant, and song. These register not as gimmicks but as a shared company language. This production’s aesthetic also borrows freely from vaudeville, Lecoq, and Charlie Chaplin. The three feudal lords, in particular, steal the show, their twisted faces and conniving grimaces reveling in the exaggerated villainy of children’s theatre. The point-of-view character, Köylü, sustains a skeptical bemusement without slipping into smugness, while the Sokak Serserisi offers her opinions with Chaplinesque charm. The ensemble as a whole is impressively cohesive, with performances by Barış Kaan Güven, Ela Güldüren, Kerem Aktı, Mithat Seçinti, Nihal Parlak, Özge Doğan, Seren Köken, Serhat Güney, Yusuf Kısa, and Boran Özsaygı.

The utilitarian design of Cihangir Atölye Sahnesi is unsurprising given the variety of work the space accommodates. Selda Uyan’s costume design stands out for its playful inventiveness and pairs effectively with the exaggerated makeup by Ela Güldüren and Özge Doğan. Berkay Özides’s music meets the delicate challenge of producing rhythms that feel musical without burdening performers with technical virtuosity. Finally, director Muhammet Uzuner and choreographer Hicran Akın animate the production with a plastic vitality, sustaining a unified aesthetic without exhaustion and locating grotesque charm within an otherwise bleak political drama.