“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in Nineteenth Century Ottoman Istanbul: Function of Appropriation and Performance in Çağan Irmak’s Creature (2023)”

Theatre and Drama Network: Adaptation, Appropriation, Translation, İstanbul, Türkiye, 8 - 10 Aralık 2023, ss.72, (Özet Bildiri)

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been the subject and object of numerous film and theatre

adaptations. One of the most recent adaptations of the 1818 novel is a Turkish Netflix series

called Yaratılan (Creature) by Çağan Irmak (2023), which reappropriates the novel into a

nineteenth-century Ottoman context. Although the storyline, somewhat loosely, follows the

original, as the running titles also suggest, the series is not loyally adapted from but inspired by

Shelley’s novel. Rather than the technical details of adapting the page to the screen, the need

for cultural (re)appropriation, and the critical choices and changes made by the

director/screenwriter mark the series as a work that opens itself to new theoretical discussions.

The series, which has the cholera outbreak (1847) as the triggering point of Ziya’s (Dr

Frankenstein) search for immortality, not only falls in line with the questions raised by the

novel, but also with the traumatic history of human helplessness in the face of

pandemics/epidemics, old and new, including COVID-19. Ihsan (Frankenstein’s creature) as

an unusual doctor, who quite extraordinarily becomes the “monster” of this adaptation, helps

to raise questions concerning (bio) ethics as well as trauma and recovery. Contrary to the

original creature who was depicted as a tabula rasa and as a noble savage that is educated

through eavesdropping on the works such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, Ihsan, whose name is

phonetically and symbolically very similar to “insan” (human) and literally means “gift,” is re-

educated and regains his memory through his encounter with a theatre troupe. Thus, it can be

suggested that performance, on all levels, functions as a way of facing and dealing with

traumatic memories. This paper aims to discuss in the context of cultural adaptation and

appropriation of a classical novel, how the act of adaptation itself as well as the choice of

theatrical rehearsal and performance serve as LaCapraesque acting out and working through to

help deal with fictional traumas as well as non-fictional ones.