Şevket Çoruh

Üsküdar, Kartal, and the Müjdat Gezen years

Çoruh was born in Istanbul on 30 June 1973, to a mother who worked as a tailor and a father who drove a taxi. The family name points east: his father's side comes from Anaçlı in Ardanuç, Artvin, while his mother's people settled in Sapanca after the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78. He went to primary school at Taşmektep in Üsküdar, then to Kartal Anadolu High School, then to the Müjdat Gezen Art Centre — a private conservatory rather than a state one, which matters later, because Gezen himself turns up at the opening of Çoruh's theatre with a piece of theatrical property to hand over.

He dates his own stage work from 1989 and his professional screen career from 1996. The thing that actually made his face familiar was neither: it was an advertisement for an internet company in which he played a street-food seller, a small comic turn that lodged with a national audience. From 2011 he carried the one-man comedy Cave Man, a useful apprenticeship in holding a room alone for two hours — a skill the later work leans on heavily.

A cinema, seven cars and a seven-million-lira loan

On 3 April 2017 Çoruh opened Baba Sahne in Kadıköy. The funding model was not a grant or a sponsor: he sold seven classic cars and three properties — twenty-one years of accumulated savings — and took a seven-million-lira bank loan, putting the total outlay for the building at around 17 million lira. The site was a run-down cinema, gutted and rebuilt as a playhouse. He runs it as general artistic director, and its main auditorium is named the Savaş Dinçel Hall after the late actor.

At that opening Müjdat Gezen handed Çoruh a fez that had belonged to İsmail Dümbüllü, the twentieth century's defining figure in Turkish popular comedy. It reads, in hindsight, like a rehearsal for what happened three years later.

Baba Sahne has since built a repertoire of seven productions and a touring operation that reaches well beyond Istanbul. The 2024–25 season closed with the premiere of Nokta, a production Çoruh's team worked on for eight months, six of them in planning alone, with a cast including Ozan Güven, Günay Karacaoğlu, Mert Asutay and Gülenay Çoruh. Nokta still tours — İzmir, Ankara, Sakarya, Lüleburgaz and Çorlu in the autumn of 2026 — alongside the house's biggest earner.

Bir Baba Hamlet: two actors, some planks, and eight awards

The play that defines his stage career is Bir Baba Hamlet, Sebastian Seidel's two-hander about a pair of chancers who decide to mount Hamlet with nothing but timber and enthusiasm. One of them plays the self-appointed Shakespeare authority; the other keeps trying to turn it into a musical. Yücel Erten translated it, Emrah Eren directed, Barış Dinçel designed set and costumes, and it opened in Baba Sahne's first season in 2017 with Çoruh opposite Murat Akkoyunlu.

It swept the following year's prize-giving. At the 22nd Afife Theatre Awards in 2018 it took Best Director for Eren, a Best Actor award, and the Haldun Dormen Special Award for Çoruh. It also won the Direklerarası award for comedy ensemble and Üstün Akmen awards for stage design and male actor, and Çoruh was named best male actor in the comedy/musical category at the Tiyatro Dergisi work-and-success awards. Eight awards in total are now claimed for the production.

Not every notice was a rave. A 2018 review in Tiyatro Günlüğü came away disappointed, judging the adaptation under-prepared rather than under-played, and felt Çoruh was leaning on the register his television work had set for him; the critic's single highlight was the Danish king's speech, played almost entirely as mime over music, which drew the night's largest round of applause. The hoverboards and the contemporary interpolations divided opinion. Audience scores have been consistently kinder — 8.5 out of 10 across 1,764 ratings on tiyatrolar.com.tr, and 4.9 out of 5 across 2,260 ratings on Biletinial.

The second chair has since changed hands: Çoruh now plays it with İlker Ayrık, the television presenter and comic actor, and that pairing is what the current tour sells.

The kavuk, and what it obliges

On 20 September 2020, at the Cemil Topuzlu Open-Air Theatre in Harbiye, Rasim Öztekin handed Çoruh the kavuk — the turban-like headpiece that functions as the inherited mark of mastery in Turkish traditional comedy. The line of succession runs from Kel Hasan Efendi to İsmail Dümbüllü, then Münir Özkul, Ferhan Şensoy and Öztekin, who had received it in May 2016. Çoruh is the sixth holder.

Öztekin's reason was medical and bluntly put. Heart failure compounded by serious arrhythmia had led his doctor to forbid him from performing live, and he described himself as the most unlucky of the kavuk's owners: if he could not go on stage, he said, there was no sense in keeping it, and he wanted it transferred at once. He consulted Şensoy before telephoning Çoruh.

Çoruh accepted it, he said, on behalf of every theatre worker trying to keep a curtain open in difficult conditions — a line that lands differently from a man carrying a seven-million-lira loan on a converted cinema. He also noted the timing mattered because two of the living masters were there to see it.

751 episodes, and then none

For two decades Çoruh's income and public profile came from Arka Sokaklar, the Kanal D police series that premiered on 31 July 2006 and ran to 751 episodes across twenty seasons. He played Mesut Güneri, a former special-forces bomb disposal officer carrying the psychological damage that implies, appearing in episodes 1 to 632 and again from 672 to the end; the character was killed in a bomb attack. The last episode went out on 5 June 2026.

Çoruh announced the finish himself on X in late May 2026 with six words — "bir efsane daha bitti", one more legend has ended — and thanks to the production and broadcast crews. Asked about it afterwards, he was unsentimental about who decides: the series was still beating much of the current schedule on ratings, he said, and ending it was a producer's and a channel's call, not an actor's.

The film work sits alongside. He won best male actor at the 23rd Istanbul Film Festival in 2004 for İnşaat, with further acting prizes for the same film from the Turkish film critics' association and ÇASOD, and has appeared across the Çakallarla Dans comedy franchise from 2010 onwards, as well as in Anlat İstanbul, Eğreti Gelin and Usta.

Autumn 2026: a new black comedy and a tour bus

In September 2026 Baba Sahne announced its seventh production, Pasta Yesinler!, a black comedy by Peter Jordan again translated by Yücel Erten and directed by Emrah Eren. Çoruh is in the cast with Farah Zeynep Abdullah, Özgür Ozan and Bülent Şakrak. Gamze Kuş designs set and costumes, Ömer Özgür writes the music to Faruk Üstün's lyrics, Irmak Bahçeci is dramaturg, and Gülenay Çoruh and Ahmet Balta assist the director. It takes figures from the French Revolution as a way into how power operates and what happens to a world after power changes hands, played as absurdism rather than history, and it opens in the Savaş Dinçel Hall.

Bir Baba Hamlet, meanwhile, has been on the road continuously. The first week of October 2026 took it to the Turkish diaspora in Hamburg on 1 October and Rotterdam and Amsterdam on 3 and 4 October, with Kırklareli on 8 October and two İzmir nights on 20 and 21 October. Three dates are currently on sale in the Istanbul region and the northwest: Çanakkale's İÇDAŞ Kara Yusuf Congress Centre on Monday 23 November, Beylikdüzü Atatürk Culture and Arts Centre on Sunday 29 November, and the Ünal Baysan Culture Centre in Çorlu, Tekirdağ, on Monday 30 November, with a further night at Sancaktepe's congress centre on 22 December. All start at 20:30 and tickets open at ₺1,250.