Abstract
Epic theatre, which Bertolt Brecht laid out and applied as the theatre of the Marxist dialectical worldview in the first half of the twentieth century, is a contemporary synthesis that has been shaped by filtering the aesthetic principles of various movements and traditions before it. One of the main elements of this synthesis is the Eastern theatre, especially the Far Eastern (China) theatre tradition. Standing out with its anti-illusionist qualities that create an aesthetic distance between the audience and the stage, Eastern theatre also forms the basis of traditional Turkish theatre. In the 1960s, when the epic theatre model stepped into Turkish theatre in theory and practice, the similarity between this aesthetics and traditional Turkish theatre, as well as its political-ideological content in accordance with the political, economic and social background of the period and form that focuses on alienation, draws the attention of Turkish playwrights. In these years when a socialist-realist line became clear in Turkey, writers who want to bring social problems to the theatre stage and open them to discussion consider it necessary to build a national theatre understanding in order to establish a close connection with the audience. The inspiration created by Brecht, who sets up a contemporary aesthetics by reckoning with the past and tradition, has an undeniable share in this orientation of the writers. In the sixties and seventies, names such as Haldun Taner, Sermet Çağan, Turgut Özakman and Oktay Arayıcı are the leading playwrights who set off with this inspiration and progressed with determination to reach a contemporary national saying. Based on the theatrical tradition of their own society, these authors, who evaluate the common grounds of this tradition with epic theatre, which is the theatre of the scientific age, thus attempt to achieve a synthesis, make a remarkable contribution to the revival of the classical/cultural heritage and at the same time its feeding contemporary theatre. Arayıcı, one of these writers, continues his steady orientation towards tradition with his four plays based on the open form and non-illusionistic theatre from the early seventies. Rumuz Goncagül, written by the author in 1977 as a theatrical comedy just like Nafile Dünya, which is inspired by the tradition of urban-centered folk theatre, is a text produced with a contemporary approach in the extension of the middle play, genre of folk theatre. This contemporary middle play, which was first performed only four years after the date it was written, with Rutkay Aziz's stage order at the Ankara Art Theatre during the 1981-82 theatre period, is an attempt to arrive at a synthesis in which the artistic creation heritage is kneaded with the data of the epic theatre nourished by the same aesthetic structure, thus subjected to a process of recreation. In this article, in which Arayıcı’s search for a synthesis, which is open to be evaluated within the framework of intertextuality, is centered, the preserved and transformed features of the traditional middle play reproduced in Rumuz Goncagül with a creative perspective will be examined, thus the modernization process of the folkloric material will be tried to be revealed.