Istanbul is a city of layers. Walking through its streets, we passed Ottoman-era hans turned into cafés and shopping complexes, Art Nouveau facades embedded in apartment blocks, pop-up stores in dilapidated buildings, and arts and entertainment venues standing in the shadow of glassy high-rises. In theatre, too, these layers persist. Tradition flickers beneath contemporary performance practices: In multiple theatre lobbies we see paintings Karagöz – the famous Turkish shadow-puppetry and nods of the legacies of Ortaoyunu proudly displayed via exhibited kavuk hats denoting a professional legacy in this particular performance tradition. At the same time, we observed a clear investment in the Western canon – with Shakespeare’s plays in particular featured heavily, and an interest in more experimental performance formats – such as site-specific works and avant-garde dramaturgies.

But this layering is also spatial. The issue is not just that theatre spaces are being converted into short-term rental flats as the city’s tourism industry grows and grows (as we saw with the former space of Galata Perform), it’s that luxury developments are proliferating, and former industrial sites, like old ports or breweries, are being rebranded as cultural/commercial hubs. In these spaces, theatre and the arts function less as core institutions and more as aesthetic flourishes, lending an air of creativity and an 'alternative' cultural identity to what are, in essence, commercial entertainment districts. This impression was particularly strong at the newly built cultural complex in the renovated Bomonti Brewery. Walking through, we were struck by its eerie resemblance to Berlin’s Kulturbrauerei—another repurposed industrial site where bars, clubs, and curated cultural experiences frame the arts as a lifestyle accessory rather than a site of production. These spaces offer a semblance of artistic vibrancy, but their logic is one of consumption rather than creation. To me it felt like the neoliberal city building over its own histories, erasing and rebranding in the same gesture. It made me wonder how much of the city’s theatrical past can withstand these cycles of demolition and reinvention?

Another thing that struck me was that in Istanbul, theatre exists at a remove from the tourist gaze. In Berlin, theatre is a major draw. The Berliner Ensemble, the Schaubühne, even experimental spaces like the Gorki Theatre—these institutions form part of the city’s cultural economy, drawing international audiences and sustaining an industry that thrives on visibility. Here the Grand Bazaar, the Hagia Sophia, the Bosphorus cruises are the city’s attractions, not its stages. Even in Beyoğlu, where independent theatres carve out spaces for themselves, audiences remain largely local. While this might go some ways towards explaining why theatre remains an afterthought for developers and city planners, this absence from the tourist economy also creates a different kind of artistic ecology. Theatre here is not a spectacle for visitors but a site of political and cultural negotiation. It resists the logic of the marketplace in ways that theatre in Berlin often cannot. I left Istanbul wondering whether this separation from tourism was a form of freedom—or just another kind of marginality.

In the margins, tucked away between unassuming shop fronts and in basements, is also where we found most of the cities independent theatres. A space where this tension between tradition and reinvention was especially palpable was Baba Sahne, an private theatre in Istanbul’s Kadıköy district. Founded by Şevket Çoruh, a celebrated Turkish actor who invested his life savings into its creation, the theatre’s name—roughly translating to ‘Father Stage’—gestures toward a paternal role in Turkish theatre history. The space exudes reverence for this history. The entrance is lined with photographs of renowned theatre personalities, both Turkish and international, as if to situate itself within a larger theatrical genealogy. Inside, the red velvet curtains and traditional proscenium stage evoke a nostalgia for classical performance spaces, while the lobby houses an eclectic collection of theatre artifacts—set pieces, puppets, masks—objects that seem to resist the erasure of theatrical memory.

Among these artifacts, I was drawn to a pair of paintings that encapsulate the contradictions shaping Turkish theatre today. The first depicts a traditional proscenium stage, framed by Karagöz performers, grounding the image in the long history of shadow puppetry and live performance. The second, by contrast, presents a starkly modern landscape—a newly built glass complex, heralding a supposed cultural renaissance, while remnants of the past hover in the sky, bricks and stones crumbling away. This image was particularly potent because just the evening before we had visited the Atatürk Cultural Centre at Taksim Square, a shiny performance complex recently rebuilt by the Turkish government, with more than a passing resemblance to the building in the painting.