CELAL BELGİL

Twelve years old, then fourteen years off

Celal Belgil was born in Istanbul in 1956 and first went on stage in 1968, aged twelve, with the İstanbul Şehir Tiyatroları — the municipal theatres. Then nothing. He has described a gap of roughly fourteen years between that first stage and his return to one, a stretch that covers the whole of his adolescence and early twenties.

The return came through amateur structures rather than a conservatory. In 1982 he enrolled at the trial stage run by the Kadıköy public education centre, and the following year he was performing in Rumuz Goncagül. That is an unusual route into the Turkish professional theatre of the period, which tended to recruit out of the state conservatories, and it left him without the institutional backing most of his later colleagues had.

Şensoy, and the apprenticeship that defined the rest

In 1984 Belgil met Ferhan Şensoy — writer, director, and the founder in 1980 of the Ortaoyuncular company. He joined Şensoy's Nöbetçi Tiyatro stage and then the main Ortaoyuncular ensemble, turning professional with Hayrola Karyola. The company he walked into included Münir Özkul and Erol Günaydın, two of the most senior comic actors in the country, and Belgil has said the discipline he learned there was specifically about fidelity: how to keep the written text intact while playing it.

He stayed with Ortaoyuncular for roughly eighteen years. In a 2022 interview he put the relationship plainly, calling Şensoy his greatest piece of luck and describing him in the register people use for a father rather than a director. The quote he offered as his working principle — wipe the fog off first, whatever it is you want to see — is characteristic of how he talks about the job: technical, unsentimental, no theory.

After Ortaoyuncular he moved to other companies, including the troupe billed as E.S.E.K., where he appeared in Üçüncü Türden Yakın İlişkiler (2), Tanrım Beni Baştan Yarat and 27 Numara, and later worked with the Tiyatro Dünyası Oyuncuları.

The record: one award, a long shelf of plays, and a caretaker

The stage credits run continuously from the mid-1980s. İçinden Tramvay Geçen Şarkı in 1986, Yorgun Matador in 1991, Köhne Bizans Operası in 1993 — all Şensoy-era work. The recognition arrived in 2002, when he took the Afife Theatre Award for best supporting actor in a musical or comedy for Kahraman Osman. It remains his single major prize, which undersells a career that has mostly been built out of ensemble parts rather than leads.

The later theatre work is steady rather than headline-grabbing: Tatlı Kaçık in 2012, Ya Tutarsa in 2013, a detective in Hangisi Karısı? in 2015, and Müşfik Bey in Bir Bu Eksikti in 2017.

Screen work gave him the wider audience. He appeared in Arabesk in 1988, Varsayalım İsmail in 1991, Her Şey Çok Güzel Olacak in 1998, the television series Ekmek Teknesi from 2002, the 2003 mini-series Bekarlar, and the 2005 films Pardon and Döngel Kârhanesi. The part most Turkish viewers know him for is Sabit Efendi, the apartment caretaker in the sitcom Avrupa Yakası, which ran to 2009 — a role built on exactly the kind of deadpan, low-status comic presence the Şensoy school trained for.

A 1980 satire, revived after its author's death

Şahları da Vururlar is the work Belgil is currently attached to, and its history explains why. Şensoy wrote and staged the musical comedy in 1980, and the original production ran 586 consecutive performances across the first half of that decade. It is set in 1940s Iran: a man called Ömer Hayyam is arrested because his name is confused with that of an intelligence official, and from inside the machinery of Reza Pahlavi's court the play works outward into palace intrigue, the distance between a government and the people it governs, and the question of what westernisation actually consists of.

A revival was planned for 2020 and lost to the pandemic. Şensoy died on 31 August 2021. The company brought the play back without him, opening on 11 November 2022 at the Ses Tiyatrosu as part of the 26th Istanbul Theatre Festival, with Şensoy's daughters Müjgan Ferhan Şensoy and Derya Şensoy in the house. Volkan M. Sarıöz handled the restaging, Başak Özdoğan the set and costumes; the original music is credited to Fuat Güner and Şensoy.

Reviewing it that month, a critic at Diken described the audience response as extraordinary and reminiscent of the company's earlier years, and predicted the production would play to full houses for the season. Four years on it is still in the repertoire, which is the more useful verdict.

Where things stand in October 2026

Belgil is billed among the leads in Şahları da Vururlar alongside Erkan Üçüncü, in an ensemble that also lists Serap Günaydın, Özkan Aksu, Elif Durdu Şensoy, Orkun Akyıldız, Sefa Tantoğlu and İlksen Ökte, with Nejat Yavaşoğulları, Gökhan Şeşen and Burhan Şeşen playing live. The production has continued through 2026 — a performance ran on 13 March — and five dates are currently on sale for October, with curtains at 18.00 and 20.00.

On the aggregator tiyatrolar.com.tr the production carries a rating of 8.5 out of 10 from 611 users, which for a four-year-old revival of a forty-six-year-old script is a durable number.

Ortaoyuncular's repertoire alongside it is thin by design: the other current title at the Ses is Diyemedim, a solo tragicomedy written and performed by Derya Şensoy and directed by Yağız Can Konyalı. That leaves Şahları da Vururlar as the house's ensemble piece, and Belgil as one of the few people on that stage who was in the room with the man who wrote it.

The house on İstiklal

The venue matters to the work. The building in the Halep Pasajı on İstiklal Caddesi opened in 1885 as the Cirque de Pera, designed by the architect Campanaki, and passed through lives as a theatre, an operetta house and a cinema before falling empty. Şensoy took a share in it in 1989 and reopened it on 24 November that year, restored and renamed Ses-1885 after its founding date.

It seats 502 — 316 in the main salon, 102 in the lower boxes, 84 in the balcony. That scale is the point: it is large enough to need projection and small enough that a two-act political comedy built on verbal timing still lands without amplification doing the work.