Theater festival continues around Istanbul

ISTANBUL

Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is on stage at Harbiye Muhsin Ertuğrul Stage.

The 19th Istanbul Theater Festival, which opened on May 9, will continue tonight with a Shakespeare classic, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The Harbiye Muhsin Ertuğrul Stage will host British theater company Propeller’s take on the play today at 8:30 p.m. Propeller seeks to find a more engaging way of expressing Shakespeare and to more completely explore the relationship between text and performance. Mixing a rigorous approach to the text with a modern physical aesthetic, they have been influenced by mask work, animation and classic and modern film and music from all ages.

Tomorrow night at 8:30 p.m., Propeller will be on the same stage with another Shakespeare play, “The Comedy of Errors.” The play is Shakespeare’s most hilarious comedy and also his smartest. Two sets of estranged twins, separated at birth, find themselves in the same city 25 years later with hilarious consequences. A series of mistaken identities, assumed personas, and wild mishaps bring a family crisis – so complicated that time itself loses the plot – into heart-warming focus.

Haldun Taner Sahnesi

Another venue of the festival, the Haldun Taner Sahnesi will present a new play from the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality City Theaters, “Lillian,” tonight at 8:30 p.m. and tomorrow night at 6:30 p.m. In the play by William Luce, Lillian Helman, a prominent author in American literature, remembers herself as a child, challenging a group of men in a tram just to sit with her vivacious nanny, living a bohemian existence that pushes the boundaries and more. In this parade of remembering, only love is much stronger than the death.

Until June 5, the festival will be hosting 100 performances by seven foreign and 35 local Turkish theater, dance and performance companies, as well as other attractions.

The festival is being organized under the auspices of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV).