Faruk Sofuoğlu

Adana, a school hall, and the long way round

Faruk Sofuoğlu was born in Adana on 18 March 1969, and the theatre found him in the most ordinary way available: his school had a drama group, and he joined it. The step from that to professional work was short in distance and long in time. He took his first paid stage training at Adana Şehir Tiyatrosu, the municipal company, which in the Turkish system means learning the craft in repertory rather than in a conservatoire — a distinction he has since made a point of in interviews.

Asked in Bornova in July 2026 what he would tell someone starting out, he refused the tidy answer about training. Conservatoire alone is not enough, he said; what matters is time spent near masters, work done with the hands, and the patience to keep going when nothing is happening. His phrasing was blunter than the sentiment usually gets: stars do not always shine, he said, and the whole thing is a matter of patience. It reads less like advice than like an account of his own route, which took him from Adana to Istanbul in search of bigger rooms, and then to founding his own company rather than waiting to be cast in someone else's.

The performers he names as formative are broadcasters and comic actors rather than classical stage figures — Münir Özkul, Orhan Boran, Nejat Uygur, men he watched as a child. That lineage matters, because it explains the kind of theatre he has ended up making: direct address, comic storytelling, an audience spoken to rather than performed at. Of his contemporaries he reserves the highest praise for Haluk Bilginer, whom he calls the leading theatrical figure in the country.

Kasap Bahtiyar, and what television did for the box office

Sofuoğlu came to the camera late. His first film credit was Merdiven Baba in 2015, by which point he was already forty-six and running a theatre company. But the role that changed his working life was on television: Kasap Bahtiyar, the butcher in Seksenler, the long-running TRT period sitcom set in a 1980s Istanbul neighbourhood, which he played across the show's run from 2012 to 2019. He followed it with the series Ev Yapımı in 2020.

Seksenler was a national fixture for seven years, and it did two things for him. It made him recognisable in towns where he had never played, which is the precondition for the touring model he has built since. And it typecast him in exactly the register he has gone on to monetise on stage — the warm neighbourhood figure, the period before everything got faster. The nostalgia show he tours now is, in commercial terms, the sitcom's audience collected in person.

The screen work has not continued at pace, and he has not pretended otherwise. His output since 2020 has been overwhelmingly live.

Meydan Sahnesi: a company built for the road

Sofuoğlu is the founder and artistic director of İstanbul Meydan Sahnesi, and the company's economics are worth understanding because they shape everything he does. It is not a venue-based operation with a season and a subscriber list. It is a touring house that sells comedies into municipal culture centres, festival programmes and open-air stages across Anatolia, which is where most of Turkey's theatre audience actually lives.

Its biggest title has been Hayat Kime Güzel? — roughly, whose life is good? — a two-act domestic comedy that uses satire to compare how the question looks from different generations and social positions. It opened in 2019 and was still being programmed three years later. The billing shifted over that run: the October 2019 staging at Van State Theatre credited the script to Tekin Duman and Çınar Şahin with Sofuoğlu directing and playing in it, while the August 2022 open-air date at Özgürlük Parkı Tepe Sahne in Kadıköy credited Sofuoğlu as both writer and director. The cast rotated too — Deniz Oral and Tuba Erdem in both versions, with Hacı Ali Konuk and Burçak Kabadayı in 2019 giving way to Müge Karataşlı, Selda Kara and Zeki Yılmaz by 2022.

The Van performance is the most revealing thing on the record about how he works. The second act contains a game-show segment, and that night it pulled a couple out of the stalls and onto the stage, where they competed well enough to impress the professionals. Sofuoğlu also noticed a student in the audience called Fatma whose laugh kept altering the rhythm of the scene, and invited her up as well. Afterwards he said Van audiences understand jokes, react, and like taking part, and that people increasingly want something interactive rather than something to sit in front of. The second act ran around forty-five minutes.

The rest of the company's catalogue sits in the same commercial comedy space: Herkesin Bildiği Sırlar, which he produced in 2019, plus Pijamalı Adamlar, Hak Dostum Hak, which he both produced and performed in, and Vay Sen Misin Ben Olan? as producer.

The nostalgia show that became the main business

Since at least November 2023, Sofuoğlu's principal work has been 80'ler 90'lar Gülümseten Hatıralar — smile-raising memories of the eighties and nineties — a musical two-hander with Deniz Oral, his colleague from Hayat Kime Güzel?. It is billed as comedy with music and runs 120 minutes. Rather than a scripted play it is a sequence of storytelling, surprise turns and period songs, with live accompaniment: Mert Aktürk on piano and vocals on most dates, and the clarinettist Aytaç Bergamalı on the Söke performance of 28 November 2023.

The content is neighbourhood life before the internet — the mahalle culture, the friendships, the manners — and Sofuoğlu is explicit that it is not purely affectionate. On stage, he has said, the show reminds a coarsened public of what it used to be: we were not like this. He has said flatly that humanity has been lost, and that the show addresses it by holding the earlier decades up for comparison. The marketing is softer than he is, pitching it at those who miss their own younger selves and at values on the verge of being forgotten.

The show has been working this circuit for three years with no sign of fatigue. Söke Municipality presented plaques and flowers after the November 2023 date, where the actors noted they had last played the town's Efes Cinema twenty-four years earlier. Zonguldak followed on 30 October 2024. By June 2026 it was being promoted commercially in Hatay — a 21:00 performance on 20 June at the Nazım Hikmet Kültür Merkezi in Arsuz, produced by Mors Yapım, with tickets on Biletinial and over the counter at two local shops.

Where things stand in October 2026

The summer and autumn of 2026 have been busy. On 30 July he played the Ayfer Feray open-air theatre in Bornova, İzmir, and gave the extended interview that is currently the fullest statement of his thinking on the trade — including an unexpectedly generous reading of stand-up comedians, whom he describes as the present-day version of the traditional storyteller. On 27 September he performed at the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Congress and Culture Centre in Besni as part of Besni Municipality's 28th Education Festival, alongside Reşit Alkan, in the free civic-programme format that makes up a good share of his diary.

The immediate position is a dense run of dates on sale. The Biletinial listing for him carries eighteen performances, all of them Gülümseten Hatıralar and nothing else: Kocaeli on 31 October, Antalya on 3 November, İzmir on 6 and 7 November, Manisa on 8 November, Hatay on 11 November, Konya on 13 November, four Ankara dates between 19 and 22 November, Bursa on 26 and 29 November, two Istanbul dates on the Anatolian side on 27 and 28 November, Yalova on 7 December, Manisa again on 11 December, Didim on 15 December, Muğla on 16 and 19 December, and Adana — his home city — on 1 March.

The pattern is the same one he has been running for years, and it is a particular kind of career: no permanent stage, no subsidy, a recognisable face from television, and a show light enough in staging to play a school hall in Konya one week and a 1,000-seat culture centre in Ankara the next.