Simple as Magic
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BY CEREN TURAN (CS/IV)
Reading is an ungrateful business. For starters, never once when an author finishes telling you his story does he thank you for listening. Instead, he silently leaves the room while you are struggling to convince your soul that it is time to be reunited with your body. No matter how much you read and no matter how great the piece of work is, the pain one gets at the end of a book never goes away. But there is one thing even worse than finishing a book: that is seeing the curtains go down after a play. One is always allowed to go through the pages of a book and hang on to moments of pleasure, but the curtains -- they tell you that the world you had been a part of only a minute ago has collapsed. And as if that's not enough, one is not allowed to sit still and find a way to balance pleasure and grief; one must stand up and applaud the generous messengers for brilliantly creating the bonds between the audience and the playwright.
Edmond Rostand's play "Cyrano de Bergerac" is based on the life of a French writer, one who valued honor as being of the utmost importance. After seeing the performance, I was nowhere close to letting go of the amazement I experienced during the play - which is the reason why I saw the same production a second time during the same week.
To begin with, it was a shock to me was that the play was longer than three hours. The first thing that came to my mind was a play written by Coşkun Büktel, a Turkish theater critic who has himself sometimes been severely criticized. Büktel regards the fact that plays are often shortened to please the audience and productions are frequently staged according to the director's preferences rather than the writer's intentions as one of the greatest flaws of Turkish theater. So, on my way to the theater to see the play for the very first time, I was trying to figure out which scenes of Rostand's five-act play would be cut. To my surprise, not even a single scene was cut, and "Cyrano de Bergerac" was three and a half hours of pure magic.
Obviously the play being staged in full is not the only reason why I decided to dedicate my column to this production. It is not easy to do a production that is equally successful in every single aspect. The odds are that a great script may be wasted in the hands of a mediocre director or the atmosphere may be ruined by a musician who misses a note during a ballad at the heart of the play. Or it may be the other way around: a play that is not well written is doomed to fail no matter how much effort is made to hide its shortcomings behind a production that relies on spectacle in order to make it look better than it really is.
Having said that a production has various elements that are used to further develop the theater experience, what combination of these elements of differing importance makes a production a spectacle? A play pleases me if it has a well-written script. The production starts climbing the ladder when to this are added actors who not only know what they are doing but also have no other desire than to leave their own personalities backstage and let themselves be recreated by the words according to the writer's wishes. The journey to the top of the mountain continues with music that has the power to make the scene visible in the mind even at some moments when the eyes of the audience are shut with pleasure. The only thing that can further increase the pleasure at this point is the visual elements: that is, the lighting, the set design and the placement of the objects on the stage. If the stage makes the observer question whether he is looking at a painting, then it is safe to assume that he has found warmth at the snowy peak of the mountain.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that there aren't many productions that satisfy the aforementioned conditions. For those that do, one cannot help but wonder about the effort that is being put into the production and how, unfairly, it is undoubtedly worth a lot more than what is bestowed upon the cast and crew members in terms of their wages. That having been an ongoing concern for a long while now, on the day of the performance of "Cyrano de Bergerac," I had more reason than ever to be thinking about this: right before the performance I was handed a flyer announcing a march to protest the demolition of the two oldest and most used theaters in Ankara to build a mall and a hotel.
It has been a long time since people stopped trying to explain the beauties of things in order to convince others that they are worth keeping in existence. Unless they are proven to be financially beneficial, such things are doomed to vanish. As the reader would probably agree, I can't say that theaters serve the Turkish economy more than malls or hotels do. But they have a power so extraordinary that they allow talking to the dead, they allow time travel, and they allow the exchange of souls. When one realizes that he hasn't seen the stage as a platform or the people sitting in front of him as the audience for almost an hour, when he has felt as if he were a spectator at a real-life event, all he can do is to admit that theater is magic. Jumping down from the top of the mountain to the cold and muddy asphalt once more, the harsh reality is that if they were able to feel what I feel, they would be tearing down malls to build theaters.