A thematic examination on Refik Erduran's theaters

Refik Erduran, one of the important figures of contemporary Turkish theater, has made numerous contributions to the world of literature with his versatile personality and has produced almost all kinds of works. The artist, who created his works in a socialist realistic line, was influenced by Nazım Hikmet and took his art as an example when creating his theaters. The common point in Refik Erduran's almost all works is that he benefits from his experiences. The criticism of the intellectual environment in which it grew up, giving emphasis to social disorders and giving ironic messages through individuals and authorities are the result of their experiences and socialist realistic view. In addition, conflicts of interest, corruption, gender inequality, ignorance, East-West conflict, Western admiration, superstition, patriotism, socialism, and revolution oriented oppressor-oppressed relationship are the themes most addressed in the author's theaters. In order to reveal Refik Erduran's understanding of art in a real sense and to understand the author better, we analyzed the theater plays printed on their themes to show how he intertwines theater and real life. While making our analysis, we benefited from document analysis, which is one of the qualitative research techniques, and we classified the themes on theaters we identified. Then, we made examples based on the author's literary understanding by showing exemplary dialogues related to the theme and sub-ideas. "Theme" and "subject" appear as the basic values that support each other in the works. However, it should not be forgotten that these two concepts are different from each other. The theme is the structure that contains the message that the author wishes to give to the reader in his work. The subject is the structure that forms the basis of the written work and in which all the values belonging to the work are clustered. In other words, the subject represents the tool used by the author for the message he wants to convey to the reader. On the other hand, the theme represents the lesson that the reader should take and his suggestion in his mind. In this regard, in our study, the definition of the theme that Nurullah Çetin has revealed in his work named Novel Analysis Method has been taken as reference at the point of topic-theme separation. According to Nurullah Çetin, the theme is "the synthesis of the subject on which the novel is based, in a subjective judgment in the feelings and thoughts of the author, is the final goal of the novel and the main purpose of the novelist. (Çetin, 2008, s. 123). In our study consisting of two parts, the development of the theater and the Turkish theater were discussed under the title of introduction before entering the departments. Then, in the first section, detailed information about Refik Erduran's life, education, art understanding, military years, publishing, awards and works were given, and in the second section, printed theaters of Refik Erduran were discussed one by one. After giving the summaries of the works, the themes and side ideas supporting themes were examined. This process was applied to a total of 15 printed theater works. While examining the themes, Refik Erduran's life, art view and intellectual personality were used. After the theme review, the conclusion section was tackled which contians the determinations about the themes used by Refik Erduran and the study with the bibliography section ends.