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Tırnak İçi Hizmetçiler ("The Maids" in Quotation Marks)
An original play set in the present day, Tırnak İçinde Hizmetçiler ("The Maids" in Quotation Marks) places two "servants" at its center;  two women who, while continuing a game in which they can no longer tell who they are, find themselves forced to confront the very selves they are trying to escape. In the midst of the uncertainty that brings about this confrontation, their only refuge is to go on playing, unsettlingly, without end. As the game between them intensifies, the line between the play they are rehearsing and the life they are living dissolves. Caught in that uncertainty, they are forced to face the very selves they have been trying to escape, and the only shelter they find is to keep playing.

Departing from Jean Genet's The Maids, itself drawn from the real 1933 Papin sisters case in France, Tiyatro Hemhal does not offer simply an adaptation but almost an original text. Two women, İpek and Bahar, are actors struggling to survive: they cannot pay their rent, they feel worthless, they are rehearsing Genet's play in the living room of a flat that isn't really theirs. The class conflict at the heart of Genet's work does not disappear in the translation to contemporary Turkey, it migrates inward. The unseen character of Yıldız, their more comfortable flatmate and possible benefactor, functions as the play's absent Madame; a surface onto which envy, gratitude, and self-deception are projected in equal measure. The maids of Genet's title become, in this version, a metaphor for anyone who has ever felt servile within a system, a sector, a city, a century, that extracts labor and offers precarity in return.

Departing from Jean Genet's 1947 classic rather than adapting it, the play asks what class, rage, and self-deception look like in the present day Turkey, when everyone knows who is above and who is below, even when politeness insists otherwise.

Written and directed by Hakan Emre Ünal Dramaturgy: Ayşe Draz Stage Design: Nursev Demirbaş Lighting Design: İsmail Sağır Movement Design: Gizem Bilgen Costume Design: Sanem Gençalp Performed by: Nezaket Erden, Pınar Güntürkün

*Invited to Theater an der Ruhr, Mülheim an der Ruhr, November 2019

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