‘Doesn’t Every Dying Person’s Last Breath Touch the Living?’

Doesn't every dying person's last breath touch the living?':Breath performance and the politics of asphyxiation in contemporary Turkish theatre Christina Banalopoulou There are theatre roles for everyone but for tuberculosis patients.[{note}]1With these words, in Rstem Ertu Altnay's tuberculosis (TB) (meta)melodrama Melek (dir.Jale Karabekir, 2013 and 2020), a fictionalized character based on the Turkish actor and TB patient Melek Kobra addresses the impossibility of a real TB patient performing on stage.Set in a room at the Cerrahpaa Hospital in mid-1930s Istanbul, the play draws loosely upon Kobra's diaries and enacts her last breathing moments.Written and produced in the same city almost a century later, Melek offers a performative resolution to her longing for the stage.In Melek, Kobra, performed by actor Yeim Koak, enacts many scenes and roles, both everyday and artistic, including those of female protagonists who died of TB (Erdem 2015).Due to her breath's contagious transmissibility and the failing body's inability to perform, these performances can only happen within the confines of her sanatorium room and in front of an imaginary audience.Far from solely being an imaginative fabrication, however, Kobra's audience complicates the boundaries between real and imagined spectatorship.Within the play, Kobra's performances are also witnessed by the hospital's other patients .While they never become visible on stage, they listen to Kobra performing from within their own rooms.Adding one more