Genco Erkal
Genco Erkal is a graduate of the Psychology Department of Istanbul University, and has worked as a director and an actor in prominent Turkish theater companies since 1959. He is the artistic director of “Dostlar Theater,” a private theater company which he founded in 1969. He has directed numerous plays by both foreign playwrights such as Gorky, Brecht, Sartre, and Dorst, as well as by Turkish playwrights such as Aziz Nesin, Haldun Taner, Nazim Hikmet, and Can Yücel. Erkal has also adapted several novels, short stories, and poems and translated numerous foreign plays into Turkish. His award-winning performances include The Good Soldier Svejk by Yaroslav Hasek, Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol, Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, Barefoot in Athens by Maxwell Anderson, Like Kerem and My People by Nazim Hikmet, and Can by Can Yücel. He narrated Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Stravinsky’s The Soldier's Tale, and Fazil Say’s Nazim. He starred in international award winning movies such as The Horse, Faize, Hucum, A Season in Hakkari, and The Glass Heart. He won the Golden Orange award for the best male actor in the Antalya Film Festival in 1982 and 1983. Later in his career, in 1993, he started acting in French plays in Paris and Avignon Festival such as The Amorous Cloud by Nazim Hikmet, Ou vas-tu Jérémie? by Philippe Minyana, and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.