Ayça Koyunoğlu

State theatre first, conservatory second

Koyunoğlu was born in Istanbul on 1 January 1979, and her stage record starts earlier than most Turkish actors' of her generation: she was already appearing at Istanbul State Theatre across the 1996-98 seasons, in Orkestra and Kuvay-ı Milliye, before any formal training. The schooling came afterwards. She entered the theatre department of Mimar Sinan University's State Conservatory in 1998 and graduated in 2002.

That order — payroll ensemble, then conservatory — shows in the work. She came out of Mimar Sinan with a professional sense of what a repertory season demands, and went straight into the independent companies that were then absorbing conservatory graduates rather than into another state house.

Fifteen years in other people's ensembles

Her first substantial post-graduation base was Oyun Atölyesi, where she played in Azrail'in Gözyaşları and in Atinalı Timon, Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, logged in the theatre databases at 2005. The repertoire around her in those years was the kind that independent Istanbul companies were drawn to: Brecht's Arturo Ui and 5. Frank also sit in her credits.

In 2007 she became a founding member of Tiyatroadam, and the company gave her Albay Kuş in 2008 and Markalı Hava. Generaller, Savaş ve Barbekü followed in 2009, then two parts in 2011 — Külkedisi in Bölge Hastanesi and Maria in Babaanem 100 Yaşında. Screen work stayed occasional rather than central: the television films Şara and Sünnet Davası, and the series Biz Size Aşık Olduk.

Then the record goes quiet. Koyunoğlu stepped away from theatre for five years after the birth of her child, a gap she has spoken about plainly in interviews rather than glossed over. The return, when it came, was not a job offer. It was a company.

Commissioning Aşk Hikayen Düşmüş

Tiyatro Hayali was set up by Koyunoğlu, her husband Fatih Koyunoğlu and the director Emrah Eren. Rather than pick a script from the existing repertoire, the three approached the playwright Ahmet Sami Özbudak and asked him to write something new for them. The result, Aşk Hikayen Düşmüş, opened at Baba Sahne on Saturday 10 December 2022 at 20:30, with further performances on 11 and 12 December and again on 24 December.

The name of the company was a deliberate choice. Speaking to Tiyatro Dergisi on 4 February 2023, Koyunoğlu explained that they called it Hayali — dreamed, imaginary — because all of them were the sort of people others keep telling to stop dreaming. A day later, in Milliyet, she described the venture as a protected garden in which the variables that harsh external reality usually dictates could be controlled, and summed up the whole project in one line: they wanted to believe in their own fairy tale.

The piece itself is a two-hander about a woman and a man who are each other's great love and have never met, playing out their courtship at a distance. Özbudak's text moves past, present, dream and memory simultaneously, so the emotional line rather than the plot carries the evening. Merve Yörük's costumes work in black and white with orange accents, built on an albatross motif that only completes itself as a single bird when the two performers come together on stage. Deniz Bayrak wrote the score, with a song by Rana Alagöz. The staging borrows from Karagöz shadow theatre and uses finger-sized figures alongside contemporary devices, and both performers switch between multiple characters in short scenes without leaving the audience's sight — a demand Fatih Koyunoğlu has described as pushing the limits of their acting.

An award, a touring circuit and a long run

The show found an audience quickly. By the time of those February 2023 interviews the company was three months old and had already given ten performances. Koyunoğlu went on to take the Jury Special Prize at the 2023 Yeni Tiyatro Dergisi Emek ve Başarı Ödülleri for her work in it.

What has kept the production alive, though, is touring rather than a fixed residency. It played the Kadıköy municipal programme in June 2023, and on 22 May 2024 it was staged at Bursa's BAOB hall, where the two actors were called back for an extended ovation. Four years into its life the piece is still being booked into municipal and private stages across Turkey, which for an independent two-hander with no state subsidy is the harder achievement.

Critical attention has arrived late and favourably. Writing in Sanat Okur on 27 October 2025, Tüveyç Demir called the production existential rather than romantic, argued that it hands the choice of genre to the audience, and said Koyunoğlu and Fatih Koyunoğlu perform like two echoes of a single soul — two voices searching for each other, generating their charge through proximity without contact. Demir's conclusion was that the play works by leading spectators into the dark room of their own hearts instead of prescribing a feeling, and that theatre really begins in the spectator rather than on the stage.

From two-hander to ensemble: Çok Büyük Romulus

Koyunoğlu's second strand of current work moved her out of the duet and into a company of seven. Tiyatro Hayali's Çok Büyük Romulus premiered on 22 November 2024 — Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Romulus the Great, translated and dramaturged by Irmak Bahçeci, directed again by Emrah Eren, with set design by Barış Dinçel, costumes by Gül Sağer and music by Çağrı Beklen. Koyunoğlu appears alongside Buğra Ağalday, Buse Demirel, Haydar Özkan, Nazan Demir, Raşit Can and Utku Öcal.

The production plays Dürrenmatt's collapsing Roman empire as absurdist black comedy with musical elements: the Germanic armies advance while the last emperor concerns himself with whether his chickens are laying, and the hens become the measure by which conscience and justice get weighed. It runs 120 minutes across two acts and carries a 12+ rating. It was programmed at Kadıköy's Gönül Ülkü and Gazanfer Özcan Sahnesi on 15 February 2025 at 20:30.

Tiyatro Hayali has broadened steadily around these two titles — Meçhul Paşa and Hayalbaz Kaşifler in 2023, Mercaniye Çok Yaşa in 2024, Şebbaz in 2025 — making it one of the more productive independent outfits to emerge in Istanbul in the past five years. Koyunoğlu and her husband have attributed that wider surge in Turkish independent theatre partly to social media reach and partly to platforms such as GalataPerform's New Text Festival, and they cite Müşfik and Yıldız Kenter as the pair they measure their own directness against.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

Three dates are currently on sale, all for Aşk Hikayen Düşmüş rather than the Dürrenmatt. The two confirmed on the ticketing listing are Saturday 24 October 2026 at 20:30 at Kadıköy Eğitim Sahnesi on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, and Tuesday 17 November 2026 at 20:00 at TED Sahne in Sakarya. Tickets open at ₺900.

The pattern is the same one the company has run since 2022: no long Istanbul sit-down, a handful of bookings a month, and a text that has now been played for the best part of four years by the two people it was written for. Nearly a thousand ticket-buyers have rated it on Biletinial, averaging 4.3 out of 5 — unusually heavy feedback for a self-produced two-hander, and a reasonable proxy for why it keeps getting rebooked.