“Dear Shameless Death – Dirmit” by Tiyatro Hemhâl: A Gift of Resistance

Based on a well-loved Turkish novel by Latife Tekin, Dear Shameless Death – Dirmit by Tiyatro Hemhâl is a one-woman play adapted to the stage by Nezaket Erden and Hakan Emre Ünal. It is the company’s first time at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

The original novel, written in 1983, tells the story of a family migrating from their village to the big city. It depicts their struggle to survive and adapt, living as a big family in a house with one room. It writes of their fears, the poverty in which they live, and the way they each become lonelier in the big city. The novel is described as a work of magical realism with the way it uses folktales and folk songs, weaving them into its storytelling.

The adaptation that Erden and Ünal created for the stage distills the story to the voice of one character – the youngest girl in the family who is called Dirmit. The choice to tell the story through Dirmit shapes the dramaturgy of the play and the transformation of the novel to a one-woman show manages to highlight all the intricacies of the original text while giving the audience members a chance to delve into Dirmit’s unique world. In other words, the play stays true to the original text, but offers people a different and powerful way of entering it. In this stripped back version of the story, the audience is confronted with Dirmit’s innocence and courage, and it is difficult to look away from it.

Nezaket Erden (Dirmit). Photo by Nazlı Erdemirel.

Dirmit’s voice gives the audience a glimpse into her world and her family members. Her never-ending curiosity means that she keeps finding ways to overcome the obstacles that her family and life in the big city keep placing on her way. She finds different ways to open herself out to this new world: she goes out to the library and starts stealing books, finds a friend called Aysun that she choreographs dances to popular music with. She starts writing poetry and listening to the radio, learns how to protest, she finds made-up games to play that offers her a moment of peace in her crowded home life. Drawing from elements of magical realism that exist in the novel, Dirmit makes friends with and speaks to the street, the sea, wind and the snow, and each offers her advice about how to deal with her family’s restrictions on nearly all her freedoms. In response, her family finds ways to ruin and forbid her each venture, sometimes because they think she is meeting the wrong kind of people, or because they do not like that Dirmit shortens her skirt when dancing with Aysun. Even the way she talks to non-human beings like the sea and the street scares her mother, making her fear that Dirmit’s talking to jinns – magical spirits who can take control of a person in Islamic culture and beliefs. They tell her the same thing each time: ‘It’s not your mother, it’s not your father, so you should let it go,’ a saying that underlines how the traditionally patriarchal family structure of Turkish society underpins notions of ownership which do not allow Dirmit to explore her curiosities outside her familial environment.

Nezaket Erden (Dirmit). Photo by Sumru Uçak.

Erden, who plays Dirmit, enraptures the audience from the beginning to the end. She delivers Dirmit’s charisma and charm expertly and there are moments when you find yourself unable to look away from her to see the subtitles. The elements of humor that exist within the performance make some of the more difficult parts of the play, such as the moment when Dirmit’s mother ‘checks’ whether her hymen is still intact while Dirmit is sleeping, easier to confront and bear. The play has become a hit in Turkey, and compared to seeing it on big stages with big crowds in Istanbul, the intimate staging of the Fringe version allows audiences a much closer look into Erden’s characterization of Dirmit as well as her dedication to the role. The stage at the venue C ARTS – C alto is small: a limited number of audiences sit around Erden, and while this set-up allows for an intimacy that complements the play’s personal subject matter, it does mean that the English subtitles become tricky for a non-Turkish speaking audience to follow. The story is an important one to share – not only with a Turkish-speaking community living abroad, but with everyone who would like to see theatre from less well-represented countries within an international scale, such as Türkiye, and acquaint themselves with the way artists from these countries tell their stories. It is not an easy feat to bring something so culturally specific as this play into an international festival at the scale of the Fringe – Ünal works meticulously to move the subtitles in sync with Erden’s performance, an act illustrating their years of collaboration. The Fringe is a challenging set-up for all artists, but particularly for artists trying to platform their international shows in foreign languages – and the Tiyatro Hemhâl members share in a post written after their Fringe run that they have learned a lot from this first experience, vowing to make more of it and reach more audiences the next time they take part.

Things are not always black and white in the performance. Towards the end, despite being one of the most oppressive characters, Dirmit’s mother tells her to ‘keep educating herself and to never bow down to anyone’ on her deathbed. The legacies we inherit are complicated – the cycles of violence perpetuated by some of these customs and traditions are difficult to untangle, and Dirmit’s loving and non-judgmental defiance of her mother pays tribute to this complexity.

Nezaket Erden (Dirmit). Photo by Nazlı Erdemirel.

There is a harrowing moment in the performance where Dirmit asks the sea, if she was born to a different family, would things be different? The question is one that finds an echo in today’s society. The performance paints an honest picture and offers a glimpse into the experiences of women and young girls in Türkiye. In today’s political climate where violence against women of all ages is a growing issue, it becomes even more important to keep sharing these stories, highlighting our struggles, the injustices we face, and the resistance and the love we find in unlikely places. Talking about writing the novel, Latife Tekin said that ‘I resisted to protect my values, my language, and the love that the people I grew up with offered me. The novel in your hand is a gift of resistance given to me by the people I grew up amongst.’ Dear Shameless Death – Dirmit is of a similar kind of gift.