Nick Awde talks to playwright Jeton Neziraj and director Blerta Neziraj about Six Against Turkey, their darkly comic new play about the fallout from the 2016 coup in Turkey and the long reach of oppressive regimes.
Arriving with the subtitle “a political play, inspired by real events”, Six Against Turkey is the latest offering from the writer/director team of Jeton Neziraj and Blerta Neziraj. Deep in rehearsal, it’s already shaping up to be another manifestation of the duo’s long-honed left-field commentary. Via darkly comic vignettes fusing reportage with Kafkaesque characters and nods to Aeschylus’ tragedy Seven Against Thebes, the play dissects the struggle for power in Turkey that came to a head with the attempted coup of 2016 (the seventh in six decades) – and the fallout that led to events such as Kosovo’s 2018 rendition to Turkey of six Turkish nationals.
The six’s crime (not a crime in Kosovo) was to be teachers in the international network of schools linked to the movement led by Fethullah Gülen (currently exiled in the USA). He and his followers are accused by Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling AKP party of being terrorists and masterminding the coup through the armed forces. While the government has targeted perceived Gülenists worldwide, the play points out that abuse of power and illegal deprivation of liberty isn’t solely Turkey’s preserve – and Kosovo is a good place to start.
So this production from Prishtina’s Qendra Multimedia is a wider commentary on how big nations interfere in the life of small nations, a theme covered in other plays by Jeton such as Negotiating Peace which asks whether politicians have the right to make decisions on the people’s behalf, or The Handke Project which tests the ethical limits of artists in politics.
Six against Turkey is however not the searing documentary theatre that one might expect. Neziraj resists the temptation to document the Byzantine stand-off between Erdoğan and Gülen, instead he goes for a fast-moving satire. Hence the Six Men from the Title of the Play share the stage with Tayyip Effendi (President of Turkey), Hocaefendi (‘a cleric from Pennsylvania, a Turkish Big Brother’), Head of the Secret Service of Kosovo (‘fan of nudist beaches’) and John Smith (‘from the Global Agency of Coup d’Etats Ltd’). Throw in a French critic, a talking cat, karagöz puppets and a dippy chorus that ‘sometimes sings, sometimes recites and sometimes wanders around, lost in the chain of events’, and it would seem that everyone is a legitimate target.
The premise was a no-brainer from the outset, says Neziraj. “When we saw the footage on our TVs of the arrest of the six Turkish citizens, people were legitimately asking, how can a mafia-like abduction like this take place in a country like Kosovo that claims to be democratic, yet with the authorization and in full view of our leaders?
“As always, a fog of confusion was created for the public through the controversial and hardly convincing statements from our state officials. Ping-pong declarations were made between Erdoğan and Kosovar leaders, sometimes supportive and sometimes critical. And then someone, a low-ranking state official, was taken to court – I believe the case is still being judged. This incident hurt and insulted people in Kosovo, a country where the principle of hospitality has been elevated to a cult.”
The abduction of the six had the effect of exposing the fragility of Kosovo’s state institutions, held hostage by the political and economic hegemonies of powerful nations. Through this vehicle, Six Against Turkey has become a denunciation of the new seeds of fascism being planted and cultivated across Europe by authoritarian leaders in a continent that has near zero immunity to fascism.
Casting the play must surely have posed a challenge given the script’s problematic diplomacy? This is a point on which director Blerta Neziraj disagrees: “I don’t think the play is controversial, at least no more than the other plays we have produced recently. But we realise that this is a sensitive topic in Turkey and we totally understand any reluctance from Turkish actors to join the production. So what we have done is to shift the focus of the show much more onto the Kosovo events and align it more with Seven Against Thebes.”
In Aeschylus’ tragedy seven warriors lead a doomed attempt to put one of Oedipus’s sons on the throne of Thebes by attacking his brother. The number six is significant because all but one of the seven perish, echoed in the Table of Six, the opposition parties who failed to topple the AKP in Turkey’s 2023 elections. History – at least when documented by theatre – seems incapable of evolving.
Director Blerta Neziraj
“The battle for power is the axis that connects the two plays – and that’s a phenomenon as old as humanity,” points out Jeton. “In both plays you find, on the one hand, a leader who has not fulfilled his promises once elected and is now ruling through violence and terror, and on the other there is a leader, no less powerful, who wants to take power at all costs even if it means the destruction of his own country.”
Six Against Turkey structurally evokes the spirit of Aeschylus’s play in unexpected places, including moments where meter takes over the prose. There’s also the heightened drama in his narration of events which gives Blerta’s direction an extra level, such as establishing the chorus and its function, expanding the storytelling dimension. “Although the show is based on events that happened in real life,” she says, “we set out to create a parable that reflects the political and social contradictions in societies beyond Turkey and Kosovo. We want to discuss this growing tendency everywhere that ends in authoritarianism. We have addressed it directly or indirectly in our earlier shows, so we are well within our thematic and aesthetic ‘ecosystem’.”
“We are definitely drawn to political topics that seem random ‘historical incidents’ at first sight,” adds Jeton. “But in fact they are symptomatic of sick eras where societies are seized by the sickness and then fall into vicious cycles that kill off entire generations. Authoritarian leaders are like queen bees but with the opposite function: they lead their societies to self-destruction. It is perfectly legitimate if anyone in the audience – or any structure outside of the performance-spectator cycle – is frustrated or offended. On our part, we are simply not in a position to accommodate the interests and expectations of everyone in the audience, even less so those of the power structures or the behind-the-scenes groups which in regions like ours are inclined to suppress every critical voice and every approach outside of their repressive mindset.”
Satire is an effective vehicle for highlighting the universals of this pointless struggle for political power, while it can also explore specifics such as the more than 300 civilians and military on both sides who lost their lives in the coup, or the blurred lines between Erdoğan and Gülen’s ambitions. Good guys and bad guys may not be always clear in satire, but we always know who the victims are.
“Like Seven Against Thebes, we’re aiming at an objectivity and seriousness in our approach, falling strongly on the side of the victims and of the ordinary people, who are caught in the trap of this battle of the Titans,’ says Jeton. “Major momentums, especially when they are in the process – that is when history is still happening and not yet taken its final form – are often confusing and leave room for interpretation. So in Six Against Turkey we have been careful not to draw any conclusions. What we are holding on to is the fate of individuals, of the citizens who in the end have to pay the bills for their abusive leaders. But of course political satire is something we really enjoy, and we make room for it in every show we do. It enables us to dig deeper, with more ‘generosity’ into things that we often think about but for any number of reasons don’t say out loud.”
The evident depth of research by both writer and director pays off. In amongst the satire, there are direct quotes from the coup protagonists, while Blerta has brought traditional Turkish karagöz shadow puppetry to the action, using it beyond its conventional format, adding to the narrative frame. “Jeton’s script is short but dense,” she says. “There are references and layers of meaning that connect the events that Aeschylus wrote about to those taking place today. The play avoids the violent narratives offered to us today from social networks, paid mass media or the history books, but it offers us a direct and bold perspective. So beyond Kosovo and Turkey, it also reflects what is happening in Slovakia or in Hungary, Serbia, Poland, in countries where democracy has started to degrade. Democracy needs homework which leaders forget to do or refuse to do. So the show is about what happens when governments don’t do their ‘democracy homework’.
But, she adds, “it is difficult at this point to predict what its resonance in Kosovo, Turkey or elsewhere will actually be. Being focused on the rehearsal process, it’s hard to think about things of this nature which are important but not in my power.”
Adds Jeton: “Just as Turkish artists in and out of their country know how to find the best ways to communicate the issues that are important to them, we are simply doing our job, for ourselves, doing what we have been doing for over 20 years. I therefore hope that as well as in Europe, there may come the chance to stage the show in Turkey.”
Main image: Nikolas Pipero
Six Against Turkey premieres in Prishtina on 16th October. For more information, visit: Qendra.org
Further reading: Interview with Blerta Neziraj: “People never seem to learn from their tragedies”
Nick Awde is a journalist, playwright, editor, critic and producer. Based in the UK, he is co-director of Morecambe's Alhambra Theatre. Books include Equal Stages (diversity and inclusion in theatre), Mellotron, Women In Islam, and translations of plays by other writers. Much of his work focuses on ethnoconflict and language/cultural genocide.
