Written by Ferhan Şensoy, Şu An Mutfaktayım (I'm in the Kitchen Right Now) is his 30th play, conceived for Derya Baykal as a one-woman show. Baykal's everyday life, as seen through Şensoy's eyes, gradually becomes generalized, offering a satirical view of contemporary Turkey through Şensoy's lens. The play bridges the local and the universal, engaging the audience in playful banter through its musical comedy.
Ferhan Şensoy and his team perform their play, which takes place inside a ship, from inside the same ship for their audience. Ferhan Şensoy, a true wordsmith, plays the captain, and the ship's crew returns from a long voyage and sets sail for Turkey. When they see the state of the country, they decide to turn back, saying, "Take it, it's yours." Deeply troubled by the public's tendency to accept every new crisis as normal, Şensoy remarks, "In another country, the people would rise up and protest, but here, such things do not occur," and in his "Audience Logbook," he critiques the nation's issues using the vernacular of the people.
While Beckett centered on existential matters in "Waiting for Godot," Şensoy authentically adapted this play to address and mock the oppressive and fascist authorities in "Godot Go Home."
A harmonious comedy, not with subtle references, but with dialogues flowing in empirical (made-up) Byzantine derived from our language, this is a classic. The conversations between Justinian and Theodora, the plans of the revolutionary greens who are after Justinian's death. You will want to watch this palace comedy, which has left its mark on our memories with the conversations in the Gothic language and the gossip of the guards, over and over again…
Ferhan Şensoy's play "Ce Fou de Gogol," written and staged in French in Montreal in 1974, won Monique Mercure, the play's sole performer, the "best actress" award and its author the "best foreign writer" award that year in Montreal. Twenty years later, the play was rewritten in Turkish and given the title "Gogol Duruşması" (The Trial of Gogol). The characters of the famous Ukrainian writer Nikolai Gogol judge the author within the framework of the story "The Diary of a Madman." Was Gogol a madman? Who is sane, then? In the play, Derya Baykal Şensoy portrays all of Gogol's characters, while Gogol's mocking voice from beyond the grave and the two separate collaborative shadows of the play's main character, the maid Mavra Mavroviç, 2nd Mavra and 3rd Mavra, and inevitably a Ukrainian pianist in a bow tie surround him in Petersburg, on Nevsky Prospect, each holding a madman's diary.
