Ministers to hold a study on theaters

ANKARA - Anatolia News Agency

AA Photo

The government yesterday discussed the privatization of Turkey’s state theaters and Istanbul’s city theaters, Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç said after a Cabinet meeting. Arınç also said that the ministers of Culture and Finance had been asked to conduct a preliminary study on the issue. “We will make a final decision afterwards,” he said.

“At the city theaters, where the municipality is the employer and pays the salaries and the expenses, we see that quality has not improved as much as desired, that the number of spectators has not increased on a scale that would draw attention. The understanding of freedom is also not sufficiently implemented,” Arınç said.

He denounced the recent protests by the theaters’ personnel, stressing that it was natural for the municipality, as their employer, to have a say on the repertoire of plays.
Arts and culture in Turkey will not retrace, but rather develop, Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay has said.

Speaking about the recent decisions taken on the City Theaters, Günay said the right thing to do was first to talk in the Cabinet about the issue.

“We are trying to make theaters accessible to everyone in Turkey, to make both state and private theaters available to the public. These decisions are not new, we have been considering them for a very long time,” he said

Noting that everyone deserved to use the theater more actively, Günay denied the government was against theaters or other cultural activities.

“Our main aim is to make the theater more integrated into the public space. We will find a suitable model. But we need to discuss it first,” he said.