İkinci Katil [The Second Murderer]: A Turkish Adaptation of Shakespeare's Scottish Play, Macbeth

Serhat Yiğit’s İkinci Katil (2017) is a Turkish adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Reminiscent of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966), it focuses on minor characters and their otherwise disregarded and peripheral microcosms. However, different from the post-modern self-reflexivity of Stoppard’s play, Yiğit uses an Aristotelian model in his play. Through its concentration on hitherto insignificant minor characters, non-self-reflexive intertextuality, and non-Brechtian acting, İkinci Katil departs both from conventional Shakespearean tragedies and conventionalised avant-garde post-Shakespearean interpretations of these tragedies. The construction of the stage and scenery allows to construct and to deconstruct the play and the source text’s interplay of textual allusions by setting the story of Macbeth to the periphery and the story of the Second Murderer, Warden, to the centre of the action. Therefore, this article will analyse Yiğit’s İkinci Katil and illustrate how the play borrows, adapts and transforms Shakespeare’s Macbeth.