A Traveller’s Guide To Turkish Dogs

OK, this happened a couple of weeks ago now. But I’ve had a lot to catch up!

Circa Theatre’s first serious offering of the year (they started with panto) is A Traveller’s Guide To Turkish Dogs. With a start time of 7:30pm, we set out at what we thought was the entirely reasonable time of 5:15, to get to Pravda for a 6:00 dinner. Because, you know, traffic.

I don’t know what’s gone wrong with Wellington traffic recently. It took us over an hour to get in to town. We called ahead to Pravda to let them know we were running late. But it shouldn’t take 75 minutes to complete a journey that would normally take 20 minutes. Who are all these people, and where are they coming from? Cobham Drive is at a standstill, and the traffic sign gives a hopelessly optimistic “21 minutes to CBD” message (normally it shows 9 minutes).

After a somewhat hurried dinner at Pravda (only time for mains) we walked along the waterfront to Circa. We were in time to get an ice cream from the café, then took our seats.

A Traveller’s Guide To Turkish Dogs is set, unsurprisingly, in Turkey. It is the mostly true story of one kiwi’s OE (Overseas Experience), a rite of passage for many kiwis in their twenties, usually involving time spent living and working in Europe or America. Barnaby has been bumming around the Med, working on boats large and small, before he winds up in a boatyard in a small Turkish town. Here he meets a variety of characters, including fellow kiwi, the Turkish “historian” who manages to intertwine history with myth; and other boatyard workers of various nationalities including one who just shouts incomprehensibly. We never discover what he’s actually saying, but we get the meaning well enough. They take the story along as Barnaby finds and rescues a Turkish street dog. Most of the rest of the play is about one man and his dog, and (spoiler alert) the tale of how it was finally brought back to New Zealand with him.

Never work with children or animals, they say. Obviously, a dog can’t act live on stage each night, so instead they use a clever device of cardboard boxes for the dog, Helena. It sounds mad, but it works. You’ll believe a cardboard box is a dog by the end of the play.

It's a heartwarming story, based on true life, embellished somewhat, with a surprise final appearance. Enjoy it while you can.