Six Against Turkey, at The Kosovo Albania Showcase, is a new satire from playwright Jeton Neziraj and director and wife collaborator Blerta Neziraj. It explores the main actors in Turkey’s 2016 attempted coup against President Erdoğan. It takes as its inspiration the “kidnapping” and extradition of six Turkish teachers from Kosovo. They were accused by the Turkish authorities of being senior members of Fethullah Gülen’s network, the recently deceased US-based Muslim cleric Erdoğan believed to be behind the coup.
Darkness pervades the show in the form of suffering – the suffering of citizens whose governments inflict violence upon them, uprooting them from their lives. It’s also a warning to countries that are democratic – democracy is something that has to be maintained and, like a garden, kept free of the choking weeds of corruption. At the time of the teachers’ extradition in 2018, Kosovo’s Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj claimed ignorance and that the deportation was carried out by Kosovo’s secret services without his knowledge. Understandably, there were public protests in Prishtina (and worldwide) and worries that the country’s freedoms were being secretly undermined.
Though the play follows Erdoğan’s resistance to the coup and traces the fractious relationship between himself and Gülen and their hangers-on, it is hard to draw a distinguishing line between the two men. Gülen lounges around on a sun-bed from his Pennsylvania base (a now familiar trope of armchair agitators) and appears as a speaking hologram, like a “Turkish big brother” – but he could also quite easily be Erdoğan and vice versa. They even look similar. And sometimes, if one closed one’s eyes and squinted, either could morph into a Putin, a Trump or a Lukashenko. There also is not much to choose between Erdoğan’s policeman, Murat, and the Head of the Kosovo Secret Service (KIA) who has a predilection for nudist beaches, either. There is no differentiation between the physicality of the politician characters onstage, their chief motivations are mostly the same and they happen to be on opposing sides. Around them are those who either ignorantly get in the way or try to have a voice against the corruption and suffer – sometimes with their lives. In the midst of all of this is one of the accused teachers, Ugur, his little girl Elem, her talking cat Zoy, and an “innocent” candy seller in Istanbul – these are the more fully rounded characters and the ones who really pay with being killed, uprooted or their lives being torn apart.
This main body of the play is framed and punctuated by a traditional Turkish karagöz shadow puppet show – an ancient Turkish art form dating back to Anatolian times. The two stock characters, foils to each other, Karagöz and Hacivat, narrate the tale of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, setting up the fallout between the brothers Polynices and Eteocles. But then they dissolve into Gülen and Erdoğan, drawing obvious parallels between Polynices and Eteocles and the two would be leaders. Who or what is pulling the strings of these two leaders? Are artists doomed to be on repeat, repeat and repeat, forced to retell the same story of tragedy and destruction at the hands of politicians over and over? What is the role of the artist in such times? These are the questions that the shadow puppetry asks of the play and the audience.
Erdoğan’s next words are chilling: “Democracy is like a streetcar, you get off when you have reached your destination. Turkey has reached that destination, thus now we have no need of democracy.” It’s no accident Erdoğan’s words come after the puppet show. Erdoğan wishes to distance himself from democracy. There is also an implication of what Erdoğan thinks about art and artists – which is made clear at the end.
In other productions where Blerta Neziraj and Jeton Neziraj have collaborated, the role of art is expertly critiqued. The Handke Project contrasts the fate of a boy and his father the Serbs wait to murder, with the works of Nobel Prize-winning Peter Handke and his support for the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milošević, the former head of Serbia and Yugoslavia (the first sitting head of a state to be charged with war crimes). Negotiating Peace dramatizes the efforts of politicians to find peace as if they were in TV shows and the peace negotiators famous but self-absorbed actors. A.Y. L. A. N disrupts the role of the passive observing audience, almost casting them as citizens of a fishing community which, for capitalist gain, falsifies the number of refugees arriving on its shores so it can collect funding from the EU. Each time, the indifferent arrogance of the individual main players as they ignore the suffering they inflict on others, is rigorously explored.
This dark absurdist satire is in similar territory, but it is harder, more unforgiving – even tired – and definitely sad. There are surrealist moments – Zoy flies through the air as if in a Chagall painting on the end of someone’s spiteful boot, or is in a giant bubble separated from her beloved Elem. Zoy blazes with life and light even as they try to take it from her. Towards the play’s end Emel, now in France, is overcome with nostalgia having had to leave Istanbul, Zoy, and her father (when he is eventually arrested). This scene arrives after the shadow puppets Karagöz and Hacivat narrate the closing lines of Seven against Thebes. The natural heir to Aeschylus’s last play in the Theban Trilogy is Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone. At this moment, it’s possible to reflect on Antigone’s feelings instigated by the terrible actions of those who control her and events beyond her control. How similar must Emel’s rage and sadness be to hers?
In an interlude in the production, after a scene where the puppets are arrested by Erdoğan’s Murat after being accused of being political agitators, the actors step out of their roles to discuss how two Turkish actors walked away from the show during rehearsals in real fear of their own lives and those of their families in Turkey (it meant that Neziraj had to change the play). This documentary episode gives momentary relief to the show, a sense of reclaiming control from the chaos, and a sense of artistic responsibility amidst all the violence (and responsibility towards those who had to walk away). The ensemble’s last words are “We are six, all of us actors from Kosova, and we think we are a genetic mixture, a bit like that Hungarian goulash that we eat in Vienna airport … considering that the Ottoman Empire ruled these parts for 500 years, one could say that we are all a little Turkish…”
After this, the puppets are put in a coffin and an octopus adorns the stage, its suckers waving wildly to entangle whoever isn’t watching closely enough.
Blerta Neziraj seeks to prise from and separate the destructiveness of authoritarian leaders such as Erdoğan from their effects on citizens the world over. But in doing so, the play throws down a gauntlet, in the form of an artistic provocation directed at artists and their abilities and desires to respond to and communicate the suffering of societies to the public. Sophocles picked up on the story of Polynices’ sister Antigone after the Theban trilogy. At the end of this show, who will do a deep dive into Emel’s story and her life? Perhaps it could be Handke – Peter Handke attempts to write about Elem and Zoy at the end of Jeton Neziraj’s Six Against Turkey to make a case against tyranny and redeem himself?
Six against Turkey was at The Kosovo Albania Theatre Showcase 2024. For more information on tour dates go here.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Verity Healey.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
