Skloot, Robert. “Whose Evil Is This? Perpetrators in the Theater.”

Robert Skloot in The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies describes a noticeable shift in theater from the focus on the victim narrative to that of the perpetrator. This shift is a consequence of the genocides in the twentieth century which have triggered questions of responsibility and guilt (311). Audiences responded negatively to the shift because they were uncomfortable with the new information the plays provided, which disrupted their existing views of history (312-3). There exists the desire to categorize perpetrators and victims, but this distinction has never been black-and-white in practice, as both groups cross boundaries into each other’s territories (313). Through a list of examples, starting with Erwin Sylvanus’ heroic victim play Dr. Korczak and the Children (1957) and ending with “perpetrator plays” The Monument (1996) by Colleen Wagner and Murder (1997/2002) by Hanoch Levin (316), Skloot shows how since the late 1950’s theater plays changed their portrayal of the victim-perpetrator dynamic by blurring the lines between them. Gradually, more plays shifted from the depiction of the heroic victim to the victims who became perpetrators themselves and vice versa (314-6).

Primo Levi’s notion of “The Gray Zone” summarizes Skloot’s argument perfectly. In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi describes this concept as a “mimesis … or exchange of roles between oppressor and victim” (32). The plays that Skloot describes include situations that force the characters, initially victims, to perform violent acts that turn them into perpetrators. They confront the audience with a reality that is difficult to accept because it is not as black-and-white as they were taught it was; it is gray.

Skloot centralizes the question – Whose evil is this? – and explores how theater addresses this question. Skloot argues that the answer to this question in theater plays depends on the playwright, and the context in which the works are produced, but he concludes that more recent plays about genocide present the complexities of evil and illustrate how humans are all capable of both evil and good (318). Skloot paints a clear picture of how the representation of perpetrators in theater has developed since the 1960s, but the chapter does not provide any recent examples.

Works Cited

Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Penguin, 1988. The Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/drownedsaved0000levi/mode/1up. Accessed 11 April 2024.

Skloot, Robert. “Whose Evil Is This? Perpetrators in the Theater.” The Routledge International Handbook of Perpetrator Studies, edited by Susanne C. Knittel and Zachary J. Goldberg, Routledge, 2019, pp. 311-20.

Author of this entry: Helenie Demir.

Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. Great Britain: Penguin, 2023.