Vatermal at Maxim Gorki Theater
Berlin Premiere Production
By: Angelika Jansen - Dec 26, 2024
It turned out to be an interesting opening on December 21, 2024 at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, Germany. The new play Vatermal, (permanent skin discoloration attributed to his father) transformed from the first novel by Necati Öziris into a play by Hakan Savas Mican, is a sad saga of a young man not getting a chance to live a life of his own. Before the iron theater curtain rose, film sequences introduced us to the main player Arda (Doga Gürer) being told by two doctors that he does not look well. Then, the play started with Arda trying to find his grounding by talking about his life, the family he left, and about his imminent death that he did not expect. It is an accusation, addressed to his absent father.
All this unfolded as a musical revue with Arda's mother Ümran (SesedeTerziyan) and his sister Aylin (Flavia Lefèvre) coming and going as in a dream sequence on a red stage and clad in red as well. Arda, in evening attire, introduced the audience to his life in Germany that was hard and was overshadowed by his longing for his father. A dark spot under his left eye, the Vatermal, is all that he has to remind him of the long since gone parent. The work being loaded with musical passages, really a musical, underscores the desperate attempt of Arda and his mother and sister to fit in a society that is not theirs.
Mican directed the play as an adaptation of Necati Öziris' first novel that had made it in 2023 to the shortlist of the German Book prize. Öziris also had created and directed several other plays for the Maxim Gorki Theater's experimental stage, the Studio R. Vatermal was kind of a home coming for the author and former artistic director of the Maxim Gorki Theater. The audience in the packed house thanked him for this work, for the depiction of the struggles that Turkish emigrants face when they try to adjust to a life in Germany.