ABSTRACT
Crisis – Janet Roitman writes – is “the defining category of our contemporary situation” (2012). It can manifest as a group experience and as a personal condition, it can be imposed from outside and experienced from within. Theatre has a special power to stage such crisis: focusing on the issues of forced migration, for instance, it can give voice and return dignity to a victim. But what theatrical devices does theatre use to approximate the reality of forced displacement off-stage to the one evoked on-stage? What are the leading characteristics of a new tragedy and how is the tragic hero of crisis made? This chapter argues: unlike an Aristotelian tragic character, who willingly embraces their personal responsibility for the fate of their people, today’s tragic hero is a hesitant, angry, fatigued and often confused individual. It is often a person of displacement, who finds oneself forced to accept the role of a leader and thus turns into a tragic hero. Often this hero of displacement appears in the singularity of their broken self and as a member of a chorus, someone whose voice and agency are simultaneously lost and revealed within the collectivity of the group. To illustrate this statement, this article examines three theatre productions, in which an individual journey of migration is folded into a collective experience of a group.
