Şükran Elmalıoğlu

The most distinctive feature of this Ferhan Şensoy play, which is performed in a much sharper language than what today's stand-up comedians describe as an interactive game, is that it takes place inside a ship...

A harmonious comedy, not with subtle references, but with dialogues flowing in empirical (made-up) Byzantine derived from our language, this is a classic. The conversations between Justinian and Theodora, the plans of the revolutionary greens who are after Justinian's death. You will want to watch this palace comedy, which has left its mark on our memories with the conversations in the Gothic language and the gossip of the guards, over and over again…

Ferhan Şensoy's play "Ce Fou de Gogol," written and staged in French in Montreal in 1974, won Monique Mercure, the play's sole performer, the "best actress" award and its author the "best foreign writer" award that year in Montreal. Twenty years later, the play was rewritten in Turkish and given the title "Gogol Duruşması" (The Trial of Gogol). The characters of the famous Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol judge the author within the framework of the story "The Diary of a Madman." Was Gogol a madman? Who is sane, then? In the play, Derya Baykal Şensoy portrays all of Gogol's characters, while Gogol's mocking voice from beyond the grave and the two separate collaborative shadows of the play's main character, the maid Mavra Mavroviç, 2nd Mavra and 3rd Mavra, and inevitably a Ukrainian pianist in a bow tie surround him in Petersburg, on Nevsky Prospect, each holding a madman's diary.