Akın's Dream

Life isn’t easy for Alter Ego. He wants to write a play or a movie about the Ottoman Empire, but it isn’t really working out. While drifting around Gelsenkirchen on his electric scooter, pondering his life as a house husband, buying wet wipes at dm, and running last-minute errands for his wife at the electronics store around the corner, a talking Mesohippus suddenly appears and lets him know that he is the Chosen One, the eye of the needle for modern history. When Osman’s dream and Edith, the Greek love of his youth, come into the picture, the world turns upside down. “Let me tell you how it all began,” the dream says. The dust cloud that the scooter stirred up turns into a sand storm in another world. Alter Ego is pulled into his own story, landing in the middle of the Ottoman-Safavid War and getting involved with emperors, viziers, janissaries, family dynasties, and sovereign demands.

The author Akın Emanuel Şipal who won the 2022 Mühlheimer Theatertage Publikumspreis for MUTTER VATER LAND, takes a fresh look at the history of the Ottoman empire, focusing on the events in modern Turkey’s prehistory that remain untold. With humor and levity, his story zooms between different timescales, and in fairy tale fashion takes us on a spiritual, literary journey through the Ottoman world.