Interruptions

estranging empathy

pp. 39-76

in: Lindsay B. Cummings, Empathy as dialogue in theatre and performance, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

Like the Writer in the dialogue quoted above, most audience members attending the National Theatre of Scotland's Black Watch have come, at least in part, to find out "what it was like" for members of the Scottish regiment during their deployments in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. This play, based on interviews with former members of the Black Watch, promises a kind of intimacy not available through more "impersonal" media accounts of the war. In other words, it promises an opportunity to empathize. But our curiosity, like the Writer's in the epigraph, is rebuked. Black Watch is replete with cautionary reminders that what we are seeing is never the whole story and that our interest may be exploitative. Yet the play persists in attempting to communicate these soldiers' experiences, first encouraging empathy, then interrupting it, and then encouraging it again. As audience members, we repeatedly confront our inability to know the very thing that we have come to the theatre to learn—what it was like for the soldiers on the ground. In the process, we are prompted to consider why we want to know these things and what it feels like to be on the receiving end of our empathetic curiosity.