ABSTRACT
The Itch, written by Deniz Başar in 2014, was a science-fiction dystopia; an exceptionally rare genre for Turkish theatre. The play takes place in Istanbul in a future time where all the hopes of Gezi generation for a different Turkey have been gone for a while, and the world is suffering under an unexplained skin disease pandemic that has shifted things fundamentally for everyone for over a century. The Itch has a conventional dramatic structure: it is set between three major characters, where one of them is a patient who is forcefully hospitalised, and the conflict arises because two doctors who are assigned to the patient have different medical, and therefore political, agendas on how to treat the patient. In this chapter, the playwright self-reflects on the process of creating the world of this play and discusses how it was received in different cultural contexts.
