Mercaniye Çok Yaşa
Long live Mercaniye! -Exemplary Joke'teyn-
‘It's a theatre dream, a ship above and the sea below’
‘Long Live Mercaniye’, the new dream of Theatre Hayali, which takes its roots from tradition and its strength from the future, invites its audience to a time tunnel with its cheerful playfulness; unexplained humour; period tunes in its songs; sirto, longa, sirtaki, marches and exemplary characters.
The last times of the Ottoman Empire... The glorious navy of the empire has been asleep in the Golden Horn for twenty years... This is the dream: one of the tens of warships in this navy, which is rotting from within, is our ship ‘Mercaniye’. Actually, it is a passenger ship purchased from the French years ago. They disguised it as a warship with cannon reinforcements and added it to the navy. On the one hand, the inadequate and unqualified crew who lounged in Kasımpaşa cafes and rotted away their lives; on the other hand, the ‘Mercaniye’, which had gardens, chickens roaming, gazebos roofed, cows grazing, and which the State-i ‘Aliyye abandoned to its fate...
‘The horse is the rider, the sword is the wearer; Mercaniye belongs to Asaf Kaptan.’
Asaf Captain, a sea lover, waited for twenty years with great perseverance and patience to write heroic stories on the high seas. But it seems that this country has also kept him from his dreams. Together with his crew, Şerif Ali, Kazel and Mimhal, he is condemned to this surface village with broken equipment and rotten hulls. Endless rumours of war in the background and the economic depression on the backs of Istanbulites... The only witness of what is happening is the ship's ghost Mesaret.
‘Mercaniye or hometown, hometown or Mercaniye?’
‘Things that have no explanation have humour’ said Aziz Nesin...
By laughing and making them laugh, we can cope with what our minds cannot comprehend... What we are exposed to all over again and again... The leaves of history that get stuck in the mud as it repeats...
‘The homeland is now a garden built on water, every shore we approach is an expatriate for us...’
Will ‘Coralia’ really be able to swim?
Will that heroic story finally be written?
Will the anchor of ‘Mercaniye’, which Istanbulites will send off to an unknown voyage with the chants of ‘Long Live Mercaniye’ one afternoon, be cleaned of its seaweed?
