Ali Poyrazoğlu

Pertevniyal, the Conservatory, and a company of his own

Ali Poyrazoğlu was born in Istanbul on 9 July 1946. He went through Pertevniyal High School and then the theatre department of the Istanbul Conservatory, with further training in England and France. His first professional appearance came in 1959, in Tarla Kuşu at Istanbul City Theatres — a start date that makes 2026 his sixty-fifth year in the profession by his own count.

The years that followed took him through the private companies that defined Istanbul theatre in the 1960s, among them Dormen Tiyatrosu and Kent Oyuncuları. In 1972 he stopped working for other people's managements and set up Ali Poyrazoğlu Tiyatrosu, which has toured inside Turkey and abroad ever since. In the 1980s he added a cabaret arm, Yeşil Kabare, working alongside performers including Adile Naşit and Sezen Aksu. The Culture Ministry named him a State Artist in 1998.

He has also built a parallel career as a teacher, and the acting school attached to his name has fed performers into Turkish theatre and television for decades — the part of the work he talked about at most length in a Vogue Türkiye interview published on 1 July 2026, where he put his mission plainly as widening the amount of tolerance in the room.

Screen, dubbing booth and print

His cinema work starts around 1970 and runs through the mid-1970s comedy cycle — Hop Dedik Kazım, Deli Deli Tepeli, Çin İşi Japon İşi among them — before a gap and a return in the second half of the 1980s. Arkadaşım Şeytan (1988) brought him the Best Supporting Actor prize at the Ankara Film Festival in 1989. 9 (Dokuz), released in 2002, won him the Sadri Alışık Best Actor award in 2003. Alongside the features sits a large body of television, which he puts at roughly 350 episodes, and a long run in the dubbing booth: he is the Turkish voice of Manny across five Ice Age films, which is how a generation that has never been inside his theatre knows him.

He writes as well. Ödünç Yaşamlar appeared in 1999 and İçimdeki Timsah in 2006, the latter adapted by him for the French stage as Le Crocodile en Moi!. He told Vogue in July 2026 that he is working on a memoir with the title Aynayı tuttum yüzüme Ali göründü gözüme, and advised anyone interested to buy it the day it appears in case it is withdrawn the next.

Theatre awards have accumulated steadily rather than in a rush: Afife prizes in 2001, 2006 and 2007, the Sadri Alışık Theatre Awards honour prize in 2014, the Üstün Akmen Theatre Awards respect prize in 2018, and an honorary award from the Istanbul Theatre Festival in 2022. He was appointed a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in November 2012.

The repertoire, and the show that came out of a festival commission

The company's catalogue, as logged on the Turkish theatre database tiyatrolar.com.tr, runs to sixteen productions with fifty-five credited actors and crew across them, including more than one staging each of Woyzeck and Macbeth. The spread of dates shows how little the output has slowed: Oğlum Çiçek Açtı from 1984 and Ben Eskiden Küçüktüm from 2005 sit in the same list as Usta ve Çırak (2017), Tak Tak Takıntı (2019), Hayatım Roman (2020) and Habanera Makamı (2022). He has also played a lead in English, in a production of Pera Palas.

Şıngır Şıngır Beyoğlu, the piece he is touring now, was not a repertory decision. He wrote it in 2021 at the culture minister's request for the Beyoğlu Kültür Yolu Festivali, where it premiered, and kept it after the festival ended because audiences kept asking for it. It has since travelled widely: Bodrum Municipality programmed it in the north moat of Bodrum Castle on 1 October 2022, free and open to the public, with the mayor Ahmet Aras framing it as bringing a sixty-year stage career to local audiences. Poyrazoğlu's own line about the piece, given to Cumhuriyet before that performance, was that stage dust covers everything with the same unlikely magic as snow, and that the traces stay in the mind after the cover melts.

Standing in 2026

Poyrazoğlu turned 80 in July 2026 and has been unusually visible this year, mostly outside the theatre. On 23 June 2026 Sözcü ran photographs of him in Nişantaşı after losing 25 kilograms, which he attributed to exercise and diet rather than any procedure; the comment threads split between approval and worry that he had gone too far. On 22 August 2026 he turned up behind a fruit stall at a market, calling out peaches and apricots in full stage voice, following an earlier clip of him selling olive oil that he had labelled an economics lesson. Milliyet, Hürriyet and CNN Türk all covered it.

The same day, Habertürk broadcast an hour of Hayatın İçinden with Mehtap Tekin from the open-air stage at Özgürlük Parkı, built around his sixty-five years in theatre. He talked about the making of Şıngır Şıngır Beyoğlu, a childhood in Fatsa alongside Kadir İnanır, and the Beyoğlu that no longer exists, and summarised his working position as a refusal to be anything other than in love with the job.

What is on sale against that is narrow and deliberate: a handful of dates for the solo show listed between 27 October and 28 November 2026, rather than a long fixed-venue season. It is the pattern of a performer who still wants the stage but is choosing when to be on it.

What the current run actually is

There is no set to speak of. İsmail Yavuztekin, reviewing the show for the Mimesis sahne sanatları portal on 6 December 2025, describes a sofa, an armchair and a scatter of coloured cushions, and nothing else doing any work. The material is Turkish theatre history told as a chain of linked stories — Muhsin Ertuğrul, the Kenter family, Ulvi Uraz, Zeki Müren — braided into Poyrazoğlu's own memories, carried by mimicry and quick costume changes rather than by staging.

The listed running time and the reviewed one diverge, and that is worth knowing before booking. Ticketing pages give 150 minutes on Biletinial and Biletix and 150 minutes at Paribu Pass, while the theatre database entry says 90; Yavuztekin clocked close to three hours without an interval, followed by an extended open exchange with the audience that he treats as part of the evening rather than an add-on. His one real criticism is not of the show but of its management: he questions why Poyrazoğlu lets the front rows film on their phones unchallenged, and whether the tolerance is a position or a shrug.

Audience numbers on the ticket platforms are strong. Biletinial shows 4.9 out of 5 from 447 ratings, 417 of them full marks; tiyatrolar.com.tr, with a much smaller and more critic-adjacent sample, sits at 7.5 out of 10 from 39 users. Age guidance is 15 and over on most listings. Nobody opens for him.