Understanding Precarious Lives. Empathy for the Criminal in Pornography and The Events

Book excerpt: Many claim the contemporary world lacks empathy, this being the reason for all the atrocities in it. When thinking about the perpetrators of such brutalities, it is easy to assume they cannot acknowledge others as their equals. But is a lack of empathy a prerequisite for becoming a criminal? Would empathy then be preemptive of murder? When something terrible happens, we may be tempted to look for the source of violence exclusively in the criminals. However, when talking about human beings and the motives for their actions, one has to delve deeper. In Simon Stephens’s Pornography and David Greig’s The Events, two different crimes against humanity are portrayed. The aim of this book is to analyse the way in which the perpetrators are depicted in each play and whether the audience is asked to challenge the initial impulse to dehumanise them. Will the multifaceted nature of empathy be explored to the extent of debunking the myth of its simplicity?