About the work
“Istanbul” is a play with music credited jointly to director Selen Kara, musical director Torsten Kindermann and author Akın Emanuel Şipal; it premiered at Theater Bremen on 19 December 2015. The evening weaves fourteen songs by the Turkish singer and composer Sezen Aksu into a German-language narrative.
Plot
The play reverses the classic guest-worker story: in an imagined postwar history, the economic miracle takes place in Turkey, so the German worker Klaus Gruber emigrates to Istanbul to seek work and a future for his family. Arriving in the unfamiliar city proves difficult for him, and the story is carried by Aksu's melancholic songs, sung in Turkish, about longing, arrival and home.
Cultural significance
Since its Bremen premiere, the production has been restaged at numerous German-language theatres, including in Bochum, Mannheim, Bonn, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Essen, and is regarded as one of the most successful German-language theatre evenings about migration. Critic Karin E. Yeşilada described it as an example of successful immigration culture with the potential to become a theatre classic.