Speaker
Description
Reginald Rose’s play Twelve Angry Men (1955) has inspired several stage and film adaptations worldwide, with its political, ethical, and affective layers. Turkish playwright and director Murat Karahüseyinoğlu, known for his radical retellings of Western canonical works in the Turkish context, relies on Rose’s chassis to restructure the play around the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye's (GNAT) ratification of three capital punishment decisions issued by the military court in 1971. Produced by Öteki Tiyatro and staged at Moda Sahnesi’s meydan sahne (square stage) in İstanbul, 12 Öfkeli Adam (12 Angry Men, 2023) transforms the stage into a GNAT commission chamber and the audience into deliberative witnesses of the country's turbulent political landscape of the 70s with documentary collage, verbatim testimony, and powerful epiphanic moments. Based on open-access, official parliamentary records, the palimpsestic reimagination of the play features four deputies from different political parties who are tasked with reaching a unanimous vote to either abolish or endorse capital punishment for three young men convicted of several crimes, including attempts to overthrow the constitutional rule by force. From the first scene to the resolution, a multi-layered dramaturgy unfolds as it combines performance and discourse analysis within the framework of various aspects of political theatre and documentary theatre conventions, shaped by Brechtian estrangement, Piscator’s montage, and powerful audience engagement. Rose’s play and its twisted retelling explore political crises in their peculiar resolutions, essentially driven by two strikingly resonant rhetorics that turn into robust dramaturgical devices: the former challenges the jurisdictional irreversibility through “reasonable doubt”, while the latter painfully resorts to “public conscience”, resulting in a rupture and trauma in the sociopolitical memory of the society.
| Keywords | Twelve Angry Men, Reginald Rose, political theatre, adaptation |
|---|---|
| burakurucu@iuc.edu.tr |