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Mehmet Ergen is a Turkish theatre director, producer and entrepreneur, currently based in London Borough of Hackney.
After completing a nine-month acting course in Turkey, Mehmet decided to become a director. He put an ad in The Stage inviting applicants to join a new theater company, and began putting on plays in pub theaters. Soon after, Ergen co-founded the Southwark Playhouse with Juliet Alderdice, Tom Wilson and Annabelle Harvey-Longmire in 1993. Ergen and his colleagues created the Theater after identifying possible areas in need for an accessible theater, which would provide its surrounding community with a hub for creativity. They converted a disused workshop into a theater space which quickly gained popularity, and by working closely with local teachers, the city council, businesses and government agencies, they were able to develop an innovative, free at source, education program. He was also the theatre's first artistic director between 1993 and 1999.
Mehmet went on to become Associate Producer at the BAC (Battersea Arts Centre) from 1999 to 2001. While there he directed Scott Joplin's Treemonisha , Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars and had a workshop performance of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock . It was during this period he also founded The Grimeborn opera festival. The artistic director at the time, Tom Morris, asked Ergen to create something new and different from the normal operatic preconceptions in a manner similar to that of Tete-a-Tete of the Riverside Studios. Grimeborn was his creation, an opera and musical theater festival that now runs yearly at Arcola Theatre.
In 2000, Ergen founded Arcola Theatre in the London Borough of Hackney with Leyla Nazli. They converted an old shirt factory while teaching in Dalston, East London, into a fringe venue. Ergen acquired £5,000 of start-up money and sent invitations to all the actors and directors he knew to join him in a paint party. They even recycled cutting tables into benches for the audience.
Ergen's role in the development of London theater has often been noted in the media. Arcola is known for its bold selection of plays; "a melting pot of classic revivals and new work … aspiring theater professionals make a beeline for it prepared to work there for less than a pittance; respectable touring outfits, such as the Oxford Stage Company and Out of Joint, have been queuing up to use its cavernous main space and acquire a bit of its urban cred".[ citation needed ] Past productions have included Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade and David Farr's version of Crime and Punishment . There were an estimated 30,000 visits in 2003.
In Turkey in 2003, Ergen put together a company and directed The Lieutenant of Inishmore . The Turkish company had "a bit of a panic" about going ahead: some of the cast thought they should cancel as terrorists had bombed the city less than a month before. The recent bombs had come very close to the theater district and one of the actors from the country's National Theater was killed while he made his way to do a voice-over at a TV studio.
Ergen was unapologetic about the play's content. However, he did stop the newspaper advertising campaign which was to have run teasing trails "Terror in the Theatre: Two Cats Blown Up". The Turkish Prime Minister appeared on stage, drunk at the time after spending the afternoon drinking raki, appealing to the people to return.
The Kenterler Theater where it was staged had never shown a play containing so much swearing, and never one which even touched on terrorism. Ergen translated it himself, creating for the terrorists a mixture of rural idiom and street slang. At the time Ergen claimed he was likely to end up "either dead or with a sold-out show".
Ergen has submitted a proposal for a social-realist program for theater in Turkey, to the British Council. He is now founder of Yeni Kusak Theatre in Istanbul and runs Turkey's only new writing program Oyun Yaz with the British Council. He established Arcola Istanbul in 2008, known as Talimhane Tiyatrosu (Training Room Theatre).
Sweet Smell of Success by John Guare and Marvin Hamlisch Mare Rider by Leyla Nazlı
Mehmet directs extensively abroad in Israel, Ireland, Canada and Turkey.
The Threepenny Opera is a German "play with music" by Bertolt Brecht, adapted from a translation by Elisabeth Hauptmann of John Gay's 18th-century English ballad opera, The Beggar's Opera, and four ballads by François Villon, with music by Kurt Weill. Although there is debate as to how much, if any, contribution Hauptmann might have made to the text, Brecht is usually listed as sole author.
Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, was an American composer, lyricist, and librettist. He won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, was shut down by the Works Progress Administration. He is known for The Cradle Will Rock and for his off-Broadway translation/adaptation of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His works also include the opera Regina, an adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes; the Broadway musical Juno, based on Seán O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock; and No for an Answer. He completed translation/adaptations of Brecht's and Weill's musical play Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and of Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children with music by Paul Dessau. Blitzstein also composed music for films, such as Surf and Seaweed (1931) and The Spanish Earth (1937), and he contributed two songs to the original 1960 production of Hellman's play Toys in the Attic.
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Arcola Theatre is in the London Borough of Hackney. It presents plays, operas and musicals featuring established and emerging artists.
Silver Birch House is the first play by the British-Turkish playwright Leyla Nazli. The play concerns the life of a peasant family in the Anatolian mountains during the 1960s and 1970s, a turbulent period in modern Turkish history. Silver Birch House was first staged in May 2007 at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston, London, as part of the Orient Express Season. It was directed by the Arcola's founder, Mehmet Ergen, and starred Peter Polycarpou in the role of the family patriarch Haydar. The play received largely positive reviews from London's theatre press.
Southwark Playhouse is a theatre in London, located between Borough and Elephant and Castle tube stations.
Grimeborn is an annual East London musical theatre and opera festival which coincides with the world famous East Sussex Glyndebourne Opera Festival. Founded by Arcola Theatre's artistic director Mehmet Ergen in 2007, the festival is held at Arcola Theatre in Dalston, East London. It takes place in and around August, and tends to showcase new and experimental works alongside radical productions of classic opera, using both the Arcola's performing stages.
Serhat Tutumluer is a Turkish actor. His period series are Filinta, Vatanım Sensin, Alparslan: Büyük Selçuklu. Other notably series are Hercai, "Sahra", "Ezo Gelin" from true story alongside Nurgül Yeşilçay, Umutsuz Ev Kadınları adaptation of Desperate of Housewifes.
Teunkie Van Der Sluijs is a Dutch-British theatre director, translator of plays, and playwright working predominantly in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and sporadically in the United States. Born in the Netherlands in 1981, Van Der Sluijs studied Drama at the University of Amsterdam before studying directing at London's Rose Bruford College and training at the National Film and Television School.
The Francis Bacon Opera is a comic chamber opera in one act composed by Stephen Crowe. The libretto is based on Crowe's transcript of Melvyn Bragg's interview with the British artist Francis Bacon, filmed for The South Bank Show in 1985. The opera was first performed in its final version on 8 August 2012 in London, and went on to win the Hilton Edwards Award in May 2013.
Liveartshow is a company that makes theatre with music and was established by director Martin Constantine, writer Alan Harris and composer Harry Blake. The company works with a wide range of artists from different disciplines.
Gabriel Gbadamosi is a British poet, playwright and novelist of Irish-Nigerian descent. He is founding editor of the online literary platform WritersMosaic, an initiative of The Royal Literary Fund.
Karl Samuel Lewkowicz is a musical theatre composer and lyricist from London.
Oluwafemi Elufowoju Jr. is a British born, Nigerian raised performance practitioner working across the creative industries After Alton Kumalo's Temba Theatre Company, he is the second theatre director of African descent to establish a national touring company in the UK. Elufowoju's stage work has been seen across most key flagship production houses in the UK, and has collaborated extensively with notable creatives within the film, television and radio sectors.
Goodbye Barcelona is a British stage musical with music and lyrics by K.S. Lewkowicz and a book by Judith Johnson. The musical is inspired by the true story of the International Brigades and tells the story of 18 year old Sammy from London's East End, who goes to Spain to help fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War in 1936. it made its world premiere at the Arcola Theatre in November 2011 followed by a Catalan production in Barcelona at the Teatre Del Raval from October 2013 to January 2014, which won the Best Spanish Musical award.
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