BURÇHAN GÖZE

Drama school, children's theatre and the State Theatres

Burçhan Göze trained in the drama department of the Fine Arts Faculty at Süleyman Demirel University, where he met Özge Günay Göze, who would become his wife and creative partner. The company's own account of their early years is short. After graduating, both spent a year with the children's theatre ensemble of Tiyatro Kare in Istanbul, then moved on to careers as actors within Devlet Tiyatroları, Turkey's State Theatres. That institutional footing matters: the State Theatres are a salaried national network with regional branches, and it has remained the couple's day job while they built something of their own alongside it.

The writing came early. In 2012 Göze picked up two playwriting prizes, from the Feraizcizade Mehmet Şakir competition and from the Architects' Association young audiences playwriting competition. Those awards established him as a writer as well as a performer, and from then on his credits divide between acting jobs in other people's productions and shows he writes, directs and scores himself.

His acting record on the listings site tiyatrolar.com.tr sketches the range of the first phase: Molière's Gülünç Kibarlar in 2014, Bremen Mızıkacıları in 2015 as both actor and director, and Fehim Paşa Konağı in 2016.

Altı Üstü Kabare: a two-person company with its own stage

In 2015 the couple founded Altı Üstü Kabare and opened in Istanbul that year with Parkkolikler, a piece Göze wrote and scored and in which both performed. The name is a shrug: the idiom altı üstü means something like 'all it amounts to', and the shows trade in exactly that kind of deflation.

The founders' statement of purpose is unusually plain. They describe cabaret as socially and politically critical entertainment made from sketches, monologues, songs and poems, and they say the company does nothing else. Daily events are brought to the stage through what they call critical observation, and laughter is treated as a medicine that heals wounds while prompting the audience to think about the society around them.

By September 2023 the company was running its own stage in Ataşehir, on the Asian side of Istanbul. Biletinial gives the address as the second floor of the Ataçarşı building at 16/25 Ataşehir Bulvarı. Göze is general artistic director, house composer and principal writer; sets and costumes are credited to an in-house workshop, Altı Üstü Atölye. The company site also lists musical performance awards and a jury special prize for the founders from the 5th International Maltepe Theatre Festival.

The repertoire: couples, the nineties and a Hitler in Istanbul

Çiftler Çiftler is the show that gave the company its profile. A two-act musical of about 110 minutes, written, directed and scored by Göze and performed by the couple, it follows four pairs: newlyweds short of money, lovers who have fled to Istanbul, a couple who drifted into a virtual romance after a wrong-number phone call, and a childhood crush rekindled. In the 2022–23 season it won Yeni Tiyatro magazine's awards for best musical performance for both its actors; Göze's own listing records his as the Best Male Musical Performance prize at Yeni Tiyatro's Emek ve Başarı awards in 2023.

90'lar, which entered the repertoire in 2024, keeps the same shape: two acts, 110 minutes, the two of them on stage, Göze's music. Its material is the last decade before the smartphone. Telephone boxes, tube televisions and roof aerials, corner shopkeepers, Eurovision entrants, school friendships and street games are framed by the company as the final days of children playing outside and of neighbourhood life.

Korkunç Komik Ölümler, from 2023, widened the cast to four, adding Onur Singin and Neslihan Kaygusuz, with Özge Günay Göze as assistant director. Four deaths are played for dark laughs: an Ottoman official whose dreams go unfulfilled, a barber whose clumsiness turns him into a killer, a vampire family caught up in an election, and the last day of Hitler and Eva. The tagline translates as: one day we were going to save the world, then we found ourselves trying to save ourselves. It played Friday nights at 8.30pm through September and October 2025.

Hitler returns in Hayri Fitler, a title that mangles his name into something a Turkish neighbour might be called. First staged in 2018 and revived in 2025, it imagines the Angel of Democracy visiting Hitler and Eva in Hell some years after 1945 and sending him back to Earth, to Istanbul, to work a string of jobs. It is the company's longest piece, two acts running around two and a half hours with dance and music, played by the couple with Kağan Şenbaş, with arrangements by Yiğit Güçlü, choreography by Özge Günay Göze and lighting by Hasan Pehlivanoğlu. Göze has also written and directed Aşk Eski Bir Yalan (2024) and Olaylar Çok Büyük (2025) for the company without appearing in them, and wrote and performs in Bir Takım Terslikler.

Cyprus, a democracy musical and the State Theatre day job

Göze's writing travels beyond his own stage. His Pygmalion: Bir Demokrasi Müzikali won first prize in Girne Municipality's Cyprus mythology playwriting competition and was staged in Northern Cyprus by Gibetsu and Tiyatro Su, co-directed by Derman Atik and Cenk Gürçağ, with music by Kamil Atik built on folk dance. Writing on 30 April 2022, the Nicosia daily Yenidüzen described a kabare set in an imagined ancient Cypriot kingdom, in Greek-period costume, that uses two-thousand-year-old problems to satirise modern governance, complete with a Stoics-versus-Cynics debate, Cenk Gürçağ as the King and Haluk R. Serhun as the court jester Luricina. Göze told the paper that today's democracy differs little from a five-hundred-year-old monarchy, and that the play is an X-ray of social structures rather than a story about Turks and Greeks.

The State Theatre career continues in parallel. In 2026 he has been playing the Doctor in Son Ada'nın Çocukları, a State Theatres adaptation of Zülfü Livaneli's story about an island whose children resist a newcomer bent on driving off the gulls and reshaping the place. Directed by Ebru Kara, it runs 120 minutes and is pitched at ages ten and over, or seven with a parent; Biletinial now lists that run as completed.

Where things stand in September 2026

The Biletinial page for the Ataşehir venue lists six dates this month: Çiftler Çiftler on 11 and 18 September, 90'lar on 12 and 19 September, and Hayri Fitler on 25 and 26 September. That rotation, the prize-winning two-hander from 2022, the nostalgia piece from 2024 and the revived Hitler comedy, is the company's core, and it shows how the operation is built: a small repertory of Göze's own scripts, cycled at weekends, with the same two performers at the centre of nearly all of it.

Published criticism is thin. Beyond the awards from Yeni Tiyatro and the Maltepe festival, most writing about the company is listings copy. Oggusto's guide entry for Korkunç Komik Ölümler calls it a blend of entertainment and reflective storytelling that pushes at the limits of dark comedy, which is a fair summary of the house style rather than a review. Anyone wanting an independent verdict will have to go and sit in the room.

What a night at Altı Üstü Kabare is like

The pattern across the repertoire is consistent. Every Altı Üstü Kabare show is a musical in two acts, with Göze's songs and, in the newer pieces, arrangements and choreography credited separately. Running times sit at about 110 minutes for Çiftler Çiftler, 90'lar and Korkunç Komik Ölümler, and around two and a half hours for Hayri Fitler. The staging is the company's own, with sets and costumes from Altı Üstü Atölye, and the room is a second-floor space above a shopping arcade rather than a purpose-built theatre.

There are no support acts; the evening is the play. Casts are small, usually the two founders and at most two others, so the sketches, monologues and songs the company describes as its raw material are carried by a handful of people switching characters. Curtain for the 2025 run of Korkunç Komik Ölümler was 8.30pm on Fridays, and tickets for everything go through Biletinial.