The dangers posed to a free and independent press by governments are to be explored in a play commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The play is based on the true story of Can Dündar, a Turkish newspaper editor sentenced to jail and now in exile after exposing covert state arms deals with Islamic fundamentalists in Syria.
However, the RSC’s deputy artistic director said it would be more than a biography. It felt like a universal story, one that could happen anywhere, including the UK, Erica Whyman said.
“It is also our world, it is about things which could be taken away from us today or tomorrow. We think that they are entitlements but actually it would be very easy to take them away … the right to print something in the public interest, for example, is very easy to take away from someone and it is happening to some degree in the debate about fake news or not fake news.”
The play, #WeAreArrested, is based on Dündar’s book about his experiences. As editor-in-chief of Turkey’s oldest serious newspaper, Cumhuriyet, Dündar was arrested in November 2015 after publishing footage of weapons being sent by the intelligence service to rebel fighters in Syria.
He was held in jail for 92 days, accused of espionage and revealing state secrets, before the supreme court ordered his release. In May 2016 Dündar survived an attempted murder outside the Istanbul courthouse where he had been defending himself against charges of treason. He is now living in exile in Germany.
Whyman said the story deserved to be better known. “When I read the book I thought: oh my God, this is a country that is like ours in so many ways. He describes a liberated, liberal press, he describes a world of many equalities, many freedoms and privileges and pleasures, and yet in such a short space of time it has, for some people, become the equivalent of a police state or a totalitarian regime.
“To see it unravel is almost Orwellian. I really didn’t know. I thought I knew that press freedoms were under threat there, that things were shifting, but I didn’t understand that this was a catastrophe. It is almost like Turkey is at the periphery of our vision, we know something is changing but do we understand that liberties that were hard won there and we take for granted have, in large part, collapsed?”
The RSC approached Dündar, who gave the project his blessing and visited Stratford-on-Avon to see readings of the play and meet the actor playing him.
Whyman said it was a “fantastically dramatic” story about an honourable surrounded by his family, colleagues, compatriots and, on the other side, expected and unexpected enemies.
Adapted by Pippa Hill and Sophie Ivatts and directed by Ivatts, the play will be part of the RSC’s Mischief festival in Stratford in June. It will run alongside another new play, Day of the Living, inspired by events in Mexico in 2014 when 43 students were forcibly taken and disappeared.
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The RSC Mischief festival runs from 31 May - 23 June at The Other Place, Stratford-on-Avon.
