World of Dreams
BY CEREN TURAN (CS/IV)
Anyone thinking about man's hunger for knowledge would likely agree with me that the oldest of his desires in this respect dates back to the time when he was attempting to make sense of his environment; in other words, trying to understand the world. In order to do so, he made use of his own experiences. He realized the great number of resemblances between the world and his life, just like the ones between nature and himself. Some people who were very good with words knew that it wouldn't be fair to others to hide their functions as mirrors of the universe. Ever since they started being the interpreters of mankind, the number of metaphors derived from nature has increased.
One of these phrases is "All the world is a stage, And all the men and women merely players." These widely accepted lines are often used to mark the changeability of one's role in life. The young man grows older and becomes a father who has to make a living, rather than staying a child who can play outside all day long. He who was once the student, then becomes the instructor, and so on. Though the roles people fill throughout their lives may be as separate as they are in the aforementioned examples, it is in fact often hard to draw a line between the multiple parts they play.
Starting with the roles one may play in his life, I began pondering upon the role of a writer. I have recently focused on what the reader's and writer's roles are. This time I will move on to the function of the playwright, which I think is even more complicated than that of the creators of other genres. What distinguishes a play from those genres is that a play is not completed when the playwright finishes writing it; it comes to life when it is performed. The challenge with a performance is that rather than being a creation of a writer and a reader, it is that of a large group of people, including the playwright, director, actors and others who make a production possible.
So the question that I am struggling to find an answer to is, "Where does the role of the playwright end, and is he expected to leave the stage to the director?" Obviously there is no straightforward answer. While some writers think their work is done once they finish writing and can trust directors and dramaturges to do a good job in staging their plays, some don't even consider having their plays directed by other people.
The difference in these two schools of thought comes from the description of a play and also that of a production. The commonsense idea of a play is as a genre that consists of works written in the form of dialogues (or monologues) that tell a story. What is missing in this description is the world created in playwright's mind. Though it may seem like that to the reader, or even to the theatergoer, it is never just characters or events that are formed by the playwright. It is almost always more vivid and detailed than what can possibly be given via the lines of the characters or the stage directions. So, is it really possible to deliver the image of this unique world to a director? Or, even worse: should a director be allowed to create his own version by using the text as a source?
I personally don't think it is possible to decide where the playwright's job ends and that of a director starts; nor do I think a performance is completed when it is directed by someone who does not have any interactions with the playwright apart from reading his plays. But in the contemporary world, though there are many new playwrights who have written promising plays that are being performed all around the world, classics still have a major importance in the theater world. Though the plays do not change over time, their staging changes, mainly due to the ever-increasing power of technology, raising the following question: does the play lose an important part of itself in modernization? Having accepted the play as the world created in the writer's mind, I think modernizations do alienate the plays from themselves.
One reason why I wanted to focus on this topic is that I was writing this column on "World Theater Day." Being threatened with losing the two oldest stages in Ankara, I believe that the answer is theater itself. It is a break from life, in which we have to perform multiple roles. It's time to sit down and let our souls wander in a dreamer's mind; because only there are we truly free.