Barbaros Uzunöner

Trabzon schooling, Istanbul apprenticeship, Gırgır wages

Uzunöner was born in Istanbul on 1 January 1976 and went to school in the Black Sea region before coming back to the city as an adult. His first degree was in business administration at Karadeniz Technical University; the acting came afterwards, on the "ABC of Acting" course at Akademi Kenter, where he studied under Yıldız Kenter and Müşfik Kenter. He has since said he avoids tragedy and writes comedy instead, and puts that partly down to his Trabzon background.

The comedy arrived in print before it arrived on stage. He spent ten years on the staff of Gırgır, the satirical magazine that schooled a good deal of Turkish comic writing, and also filed columns for the newspaper Takvim and the magazines Zıpır and Çarşaf. Broadcasting followed: "Orta Şut Karışımı" on Fenerbahçe Television, where he handled football as a joke subject, and "Barbaros On Air", which he produced and presented on Kiss FM and Radyo D for several years. He taught drama at Fenerbahçe Lisesi, has published books including Siyasal Loto and Cehennemi Yakan Çılgın Türk, and still works with Fenerbahçe's media side as a supporter of the club.

A company with his initials on it

BU Tiyatro was set up in 2010 and takes its name from the first letters of his own, and he has been its artistic director since November 2010. Its working principle is blunt: stage new writing rather than recycle texts that are centuries old, and put recognisable Turkish domestic behaviour back in front of the people who produce it. He writes the scripts himself, which is also his stated reason for acting in them — the characters are already shaped to what he can play.

His account of the method is unglamorous. Productions are prepared over long stretches and rewritten repeatedly, and he adds material on his feet during performances rather than treating the script as fixed. The company has toured Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and England, playing to Turkish communities there, and he has described those trips as being about the contact rather than the receipts. He also takes part in fundraising work for wheelchairs and scholarships for visually impaired students, and does not publicise it much.

The repertoire that keeps returning

Seninle Evlenir Miyim? is the piece that established him. First staged in 2011, supervised by Haldun Dormen, it took a best comedy play of the year award in 2012 and has been performed several hundred times, at various points with Şebnem Özinal and Yosi Mizrahi in the leads. It was restaged in 2019 and is on the road again now with Melda Gür opposite Uzunöner: Baran works in a printing house, talks constantly and reads nothing; Cansu is a white-collar reader with a Galatasaray habit; the play runs them from introduction through the wedding preparations into married life.

Around it sits a body of work he wrote but did not always perform. Bir Öyle Bir Böyle gave Merve Sevi the role that won her a best comic actress award in 2015. Gülmeye Geldik Dünyaya, staged in 2018, was co-written with the veteran actor Yılmaz Gruda to mark Gruda's seventieth year in the theatre. Aşk Tamircisi followed in 2017. Freud'un İnsanları, dated 2023 and directed by Volkan Dinç for Tiyatro Yeditepe and BAM Yapım with Onur Büyüktopçu and Tuğçe Kumral, turns Freud's five stages of psychosexual development into a comedy about adults who never finished them, and became one of the most-performed productions of its season. Etik Alkol he performs himself, and Görecek Günler Var Daha, Olağanüstü Bir Gece, Don Kişot'suz Don Kişot and Alçalarak Yüksel remain in or near the active list.

Asked in May 2024 what he was actually doing at the desk, he put it as writing about what people who never lived would have done had they lived. Three further plays were planned for the following season at that point.

Boşanma Teklifi: a marriage run as a coalition

The show doing the heaviest lifting now is Boşanma Teklifi, which he wrote, directs and appears in. A man who backs the governing party marries a woman who backs the opposition; the arguments start at the first meeting, carry on through the wedding, and the marriage is described in the production's own terms as a coalition. It ends with each of them asking the other for a divorce. It runs 75 minutes in a single act and is rated 13 and over.

Casting has moved. Fulden Akyürek played opposite him in the run praised in May 2024; by August 2025 the production was being announced with Merve Sevi in the part, and that is the pairing touring this season. Ticket-platform ratings sit at 4.4 out of 5 from 573 audience scores, with 415 of them five-star and 25 at one star — a split that reads less like a quality dispute than like a room where roughly one viewer in twenty does not want the argument staged at all.

Autumn 2026: two comedies, a rolling map

The calendar currently on sale runs from 1 October at Yozgat Kültür Merkezi through to 27 December, with the two comedies alternating rather than touring as a single package. Boşanma Teklifi plays Torium Sahne on the European side of Istanbul on 24 October, Caddebostan Kültür Merkezi's A Salonu on 27 October, Ankara Çayyolu Sahne on 30 October, Runa Stage Art Cafe in Eskişehir on 31 October, Zonguldak Belediyesi Sinema Salonu on 9 November and Kadıköy's Barış Manço Kültür Merkezi on 26 November. Seninle Evlenir Miyim? takes Caddebostan on 4 October, Torium on 8 November and again on 27 December, and the Barış Manço centre in Bandırma and the Şükrü Tunar centre in Edremit on consecutive nights, 21 and 22 November. Tickets start between 800 and 1,200 lira depending on the hall.

The pattern is the one that has defined his working life: a fixed Istanbul base at Torium, Caddebostan and Kadıköy, regular Ankara and Eskişehir dates, and then a long tail of municipal culture centres in Yozgat, Bandırma, Edremit, Zonguldak and similar towns, where a touring two-hander is often the month's only professional comedy. His ticket listings this season also carry dates for Duvar, Zülfü Livaneli's first play — an 80-minute one-act drama about displaced people from 1978 Maraş, 1989 Berlin and 2011 Aleppo meeting in a hotel room — alongside his own two comedies.

The solo work

Uzunöner's stand-up sits under one title, Türk Müsün Canım?, a solo hour he has played at the Kenter Theatre among other rooms, built out of the same observational habit as the magazine work: ordinary Turkish behaviour described closely enough that the audience recognises itself, with the point arriving after the laugh rather than instead of it. In 2020 he put the show out as one of the first Turkish stand-up performances streamed live worldwide.

He has also worked the double-bill format, sharing a stand-up evening titled A+B with the comedian Alpay Erdem. The solo material and the plays feed each other — the improvised additions that go into a night of Boşanma Teklifi come from the same reflex that a stand-up set is built on.