A Striking Sample of Class Conflict in the Theater: Tahterevalli/ Aşağıdakiler- Yukarıdakiler

ÇetinAltan, who has produced literary works in many areas of literature such as novels, essays, memoirs, newspaper articles, also attracts attention with his theater script. One of the texts built by Altan, who had been a member of parliament for a while and did not hesitate to put his political identity in his works, through the metaphors in an ironic language is the playbooks entitled both Tahterevalli and Aşağıdakiler Yukarıdakiler.This text, which is very suitable for reading with Marxist literary theory, describes the degeneration and disintegration of a nouveau-riche family, whose members gradually move from the basement floor to the middle floor, and then to the top floor of the same block. While living in the basement, the family suffers from livelihoods and looks at the life of the upper floor with envy. The family has moved from the basement to the middle floor with the inheritance from the grandaunt, and the wishes of the family have been increased to the top floor. While living on the middle floor, thanks to the father who is doing the lawless work with the ambition of winning, they have moved to the upper floors they want, but these rapid social transitions have resulted in the dissolution of the family. Altan’s text, which he has successfully processed the “nouveau-riche” person type, ends with his realization of the mistakes of his family members. The distorted relationships witnessed in societies where wealth is valued more than people and the dignity is purchased with money are depicted through the characters of Baba, Anne, Erol, Gönül and Babaanne, and the struggle between the lower, middle and upper classes of the society was presented to the reader/audience through striking dialogues. The reader / spectator is confronted with the sudden difference in mentality between the social classes and the sudden change in the value judgments of the Turkish society, which rapidly industrialized in the deep structure, while the three-act text confronts this family s struggle for enrichment. The work, written in 1958, is also suitable for reading as a critique of Altan s Democratic Party era politics.The text which is written with a critical realistic perspective is fed with the idea that the theater should be “a social mirror”. The purpose of the study is to examine Altan’s play script Tahterevalli/Aşağıdakiler Yukarıdakiler within the framework of the Marxist theory of literature, and present the examples of the social class conflict in this text.