Comic Routines of the “Traditional” and the Text in Turkish Theatre

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between Turkish theatre and text by questioning conventional historiographical frameworks that classify certain models as “traditional” and define them as anonymous, improvised, and fundamentally textless in opposition to authored, written, and dramatic literature. It argues that such classifications and binaries obscure the oral and literary features through which textuality operates in Turkish theatre. Focusing on Karagöz, orta oyunu, meddah, and village plays (köy seyirlik), it examines a corpus of published plays, manuscript scenarios, and documented performance scripts, and drawing on the concept of lazzi in Commedia dell’Arte as an analytical point of reference rather than a genealogical model, it aims to illustrate comic routines, formulaic dialogues, stock characters, and scenario structures that function as core text-building materials. It also demonstrates how routine-based compositional units circulate across performance modals and contexts through repetition, adaptation, and reconfiguration, enabling continuity and variation. Ultimately, it proposes a re-evaluation of authorship, improvisation, and text-making in Turkish theatre in accordance with its own methods of composing texts and devising performance.