Violence on stage : an analytic study of selected contemporary Iraqi and American plays

Abstract EN

Theater is not completely a place or an outlet for entertainment.

Critics may agree that certain subjects are simply not well-suited to theatre.

Violence on stage presents sorts of cruelty before the audience through thrills of action and horror.

Touching with the Greek model of violence, it is obvious that Greek tragedies were about how to help audience come with the term of violence through experiencing life troubles and to create a therapeutic device to deal with trauma that caused by violence.

Similarly, in Shakespeare's tragedies violence was mainly aimed at to highlight certain purposes that serve for the audience's benefits.

In Romeo and Juliet, for example, the play starts with a fight between members of the Capulet and Montague clans, yet it serves to head the audience to the core of the climax and for logic speculation of what might happen then.

The argument over the use of violence on stage recently goes with the assumption that the stress relief brought by on-stage entertainment is replaced by exceedingly violent action and aggression.

This paper aims at showing the deep meaning of violence through an introductory and the horizon analysis for the plays which will be discussed separately.

The study implicitly falls into three parts.

The first part is mainly concerned with the violence and its practices on stages for many occasions.

It is about violence in social and theatrical practices.

It deals with the structural and technical use of on-stage violence.

Then, the study presents Iraqi plays to acknowledge that violence (mainly political) has penetrated deeply into Iraqi theatre.

Depicting of violence could be structured from the real events under certain circumstances.

Iraqi playwrights, for instance, weaved the problems of war through staging violence practiced inside and outside Iraq.

Ishtar in Baghdad (2017) by Rasha Fadhil, and Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad (2012) by Monadhil Daood, and other contemporary Iraqi plays examine the violence which Iraqi people were subject to.

The study then is mainly concerned with non-Iraqi plays, in particular, American as examples of staging violence.

It discusses Carson Kreutzer's Self Defense, or death of some salesmen (2002), Rajiv Joseph's Guard at the Taj (2015), and Gloria (2015) by Branden Jacobs Jenkins.