MEMET BAYDUR’S DRAMATURGY: FROM LIFE-PLAY RELATIONSHIP TO STRATEGY OF “THE PLAY WITHIN THE PLAY”

Memet Baydur was one of the most productive playwrights of the 20th century Turkish Theater. Not only living in many different countries for several years, but also closely following the societal and historical changes in Turkey would be the key points of his choice of the themes and also his character building approach for his plays. In his plays Baydur had goals on reaching the universal level of understanding the reality while he analyzed his own country’s reality based on the reflections on the lives of individuals. In terms of writing technique, Baydur has three important common essentials: situation, time and place that he took into consideration. In his plays, while Baydur developed his characters based on those three essentials, he created a play area in the play for himself as the writer. In this study, how the role of playing, which is considered as one of the basic human instincts, impacted Memet Baydur as a playwright as well as how it is placed in the life-play relationship and his “the play within the play” strategy in Memet Baydur’s plays was critically analyzed. As a result of the study, it was revealed that throughout the writing process Memet Baydur had experienced both being the writer of the play and empathetically in the place of the characters that he created for the play