Erkan Karadeniz writes, directs and performs his own comedies through Finitolar Tiyatrosu, the company he founded in 2007 and has driven into every one of Turkey's 81 provinces. His relationship comedy Ruh Öküzüm reached its tenth season in 2026, and he currently has dates on sale from October 2026 through to January 2027.

A company before a career

Karadeniz's working life begins on the production side rather than in the audition queue. He founded Finitolar Tiyatrosu in 2007 and has run it ever since, and in an interview published in May 2026 he was plain about the trade-off involved: television work was available to him, and he turned away from it in order to build and own his own productions instead. Eighteen years on, that choice still determines the shape of everything — small casts, scripts he writes himself, a company that books and drives its own tour rather than waiting for a slot in a state theatre season.

On most of those productions he holds three credits at once: writer, director and one of the two people on stage. The second is Tuğçe Karabayır, who came up through the Güldür Güldür Show cast and who, in the same interview, credited him with her own move into professional work — 'he was my first guide in professionalising this craft.' The partnership is now the company's main asset. Both current touring titles are two-handers for the pair of them, written by Karadeniz around what the two of them can do together in front of a room.

Alongside the two touring shows, Finitolar's listed repertoire includes Robot Aşkım, another piece on which Karadeniz is credited as writer, director and performer.

Ruh Öküzüm: ten seasons on a single living room

Ruh Öküzüm is the show that pays for the rest. A two-act comedy about a couple, it works through domestic argument, mismatched communication and the small accommodations people make for each other, and it has been built to travel: a minimal set amounting to one sparsely furnished living room, set and costume by Kemal Özyakut, light and sound by Arda Onat, and nothing on stage that two performers and a van cannot manage. The running time is 120 minutes across two acts, and the Kadıköy municipal listing for its 12 March 2026 date at Barış Manço Kültür Merkezi carried a 13+ age guidance.

By February 2026 the production was being described as running through its ninth and tenth seasons, routinely to full houses — an unusual lifespan for an independently produced Turkish comedy with no television property behind it. Karabayır's account of how that endurance actually works is unsentimental: the show stays the same, she said, and the audience changes daily. She also admitted to losing sleep before performances over how a given room will take it.

The writing is pitched squarely at recognition rather than at jokes in the abstract. The recurring audience response, reported repeatedly in coverage of the play, is some version of seeing themselves on stage — which is also the mechanism by which a relationship comedy survives a decade of touring to towns that have never heard of its author.

İte Kaka: turning the tour into the material

The second show takes the obvious next step and makes the road itself the subject. İte Kaka — subtitled Bi Dünya Hikaye — is an interactive two-act comedy in which Karadeniz and Karabayır tell real stories and touring misadventures drawn from their years on stage, stitched together with theatrical sketches. The ticketing copy now puts that accumulated experience at seventeen years.

The interactive element is structural rather than decorative. Volunteers are picked out of the audience and brought up to play scenes, which means each performance is partly unrepeatable and partly a test of how quickly two experienced comic actors can absorb a stranger. Karadeniz wrote and directs it; Arda Onat again handles light and sound, and Galip Aksular designed the poster. It runs 120 minutes over two acts and carries a 15+ guidance, two years higher than Ruh Öküzüm.

The audience numbers on Biletinial are the clearest external measure of how it lands: 4.9 out of 5 across 627 ratings, of which 587 are five-star and five are two-star or below.

Eighty-one provinces, by car

The distinguishing fact about Finitolar is not a venue or a prize but a map. Speaking after a performance in Ağrı on 18 November 2025, Karadeniz noted that the company had by then played in all 81 Turkish provinces across its eighteen years, under a touring project framed as 81 cities, 81 theatres. The pair covered the country by road, and in the May 2026 interview described stretches of performing 27 days out of a month, consecutively. Cyprus remains on the list of places they have not yet taken a show.

That kind of schedule puts them in municipal culture centres and congress halls rather than in Istanbul's commercial theatre circuit, and it changes what the work is for. The Ağrı date at the Kültür ve Kongre Merkezi was put together through a local culture and arts platform, led by the director of the Ağrı sugar factory, Kürşad Erdoğan, and Nurgül Erdoğan — the sort of arrangement that gets a touring comedy into a province with little standing theatre provision. Karadeniz's own summary of that night was about the children in the room seeing a play for the first time, which he said was the part that stayed with him.

He has also been direct about the cost of the method, calling the 81-province run spiritually perfect and genuinely punishing in the same breath.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

The current Ruh Öküzüm itinerary shows the pattern unchanged. Listings have the play in Osmaniye on 7 October 2026, Adana on the 8th, Niğde on the 9th and Mersin on the 10th, then Aksaray on the 12th, Kayseri on the 13th and Ankara on the 15th — seven towns inside nine days, with Düzce on 24 October, Zonguldak on the 26th, Istanbul on 2 and 3 November and Samsun on the 12th to follow. Advertised prices across those dates run from roughly 450 to 1,210 lira.

İte Kaka is running in parallel on its own route: Nevşehir's Kapadokya Kültür Merkezi on 14 October 2026, Kartal in Istanbul on the 23rd, Sakarya's Kale Sahne on the 25th, Vesahne Panora in Ankara on the 28th, Sinop in November, and a date already on sale at the Adana 01 Burda culture centre on 13 January 2027. Several of those houses were still showing well over a hundred unsold seats in early October, which is the honest texture of a provincial tour rather than a sell-out myth.

Nothing about the next few months suggests a change of model. Two shows, two performers, one writer-director, a car, and a calendar that reaches into 2027 before it thins out.

The show, now

An evening with Karadeniz runs 120 minutes in two acts with an interval, and there is no support act — he and Tuğçe Karabayır carry the whole show between them. Ruh Öküzüm plays on a deliberately bare set, essentially one sparsely furnished living room designed by Kemal Özyakut, with Arda Onat's lighting and sound doing the scene changes; the material is domestic argument and recognition comedy, and it carries a 13+ guidance. İte Kaka is the looser of the two: a 15+ show built from the pair's seventeen years of real touring stories, with volunteers picked from the audience and brought on stage to play scenes, so no two performances match. Venues are mostly municipal culture centres and congress halls rather than purpose-built theatres, with tickets in autumn 2026 advertised from roughly 450 to 1,210 lira. On Biletinial, İte Kaka holds 4.9 out of 5 from 627 ratings, 587 of them five-star; the recurring audience comment on Ruh Öküzüm is that they saw themselves on stage. Karabayır's own description of the discipline behind it is that the show stays the same while the audience changes every day.

Researched from samsunetkinlik.com · karsmanset.com · biletinial.com · biletix.com · tiyatrolar.com.tr · tiyatrolar.com.tr · kultursanat.kadikoy.bel.tr · leparole.net