Theatre of Ghosts and the Other under the Threat of Mass Death : Some Ethical Thoughts on Plays of Genocide

As Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, contends that Eichmann, the persecutor lacked imagination to think of the persecuted and was only thinking of following orders and rules, for any soldier fighting in a war, to defy given orders risks his life and therefore he has to oppress conscience in killing his enemy. Likewise, Kitty Felde's A Patch of Earth, a play set in Serbia, delves into the wound of a soldier who, with his fellow soldiers, took part in a genocide of hundreds of Islamic people. The soldier is the only man who admits the crime at the International Criminal Court. Other soldiers suppress the existence of the genocide itself. Such disavowal of persecutors' side always makes it difficult to disclose what happened. debbie tucker green's truth and reconciliation, a play set in the aftermath of genocidal incidents in five different countries — South Africa, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Bosnia, and Northern Ireland —, shows how it is difficult for persecutors to break their silence before their victims and the families of victims. In both plays by Felde and tucker green, ghosts appear to approach persecutors, trying to get the truth out of them. However, in either case, those who ordered the mass murders are speechless or invisible so that a Kafkaesque nightmare emerges. Moreover, treatment of refugees who escape genocidal violence and migrate to safer places also complicates the issue in a global scale. Key Adshead's The Bogus Woman denounces inhuman receptions of British authorities for asylum seekers who have escaped from brutality of their homelands. Such asylum seekers have no place to be sheltered in safe. This essay will focus on how such plays dealing with recent crimes of mass murders can bring ethics and aesthetics to the audience.