The EU Killed My Dad – Jermyn Street Theatre, London

Writer: Aaron Kilercioglu

Director: Georgia Green

A murder plot situated within a wider network of socio-cultural influence and long-term political strategy, Aaron Kilercioglu’s The EU Killed My Dad uses its accessible scenario to comment on the interrelated influences that shape Turkey’s position in Europe. Playing at the Jermyn Street Theatre as part of the Footprints Festival, although increasingly wayward as the tangled story unfolds, this satirical piece captures 50 years of political bargaining, military instability and questionable international relations in a 70-minute whodunnit.

Berker arrives in Turkey when his estranged father has been shot dead in the last few hours and meeting his stepsister Elif for the first time, finds she is already planning to sell the house and rush through the funeral. Questioned by the police years later, Berker recalls their conversation and the list of possible suspects, taking the fractious siblings back through their father’s life story.

Kilercioglu’s play creates a strong multi-level structure that takes place across several different time periods, wrapping layers of narrative around one another in different parts of the story, and the audience simultaneously sees the police interview with Berker and the investigations undertaken with Elif years before as though both are happening at the same time, forming the play’s central lines. From here, Kilercioglu expands the scope of his story to include flashbacks incidents in the father’s life covering the two relationships that produced his children as well as activities during his time in the UK and Turkey.

These are the strongest aspects of The EU Killed My Dad, examining the personal reasons that members of his own family might have wanted to kill him and beginning to explore the different kinds of reactions that Mustafa elicited from lovers, wives and his very different children. However, there is scope to more fully acknowledge how and why different individuals created alternative memories of the type of man Mustafa was and what sympathy the audience should have for someone who abandoned two children in separate countries.

The five-strong cast does an excellent job of portraying a much larger cast in multiple countries across several decades including some fast-paced and humorous montage sequences performed by Ojan Genc and Rosie Hilal. Luca Kamleh Chapman’s Berker is spiky and dissatisfied with the man he is trying to know posthumously while Dilek Şengül’s Elif gives very little away apart from a great affection for her father that resents Berker’s intrusion.

Less successful is the broader positioning of Turkey’s history in a network of relationships with other European countries and America that form the backdrop to this personal story. There are several military coups during the years of the play, including one on the day that Mustafa was shot, and while Kilercioglu argues for a confluence of external factors that brought the killer to that moment and put a gun in their hand, the writer could more clearly articulate the dynamic connection between international politics, the cumulative experience of Turkish domestic policy and the daily lives of the individuals represented in the play.

Runs until 6 February 2024