Panic Attack: The Ironic Sermon of Cosmic Fear
Published in Turkish at https://tiyatrodergisi.com.tr/tolga-yildiz-yazdi-panik-atak-kozmik-korkunun-ironik-vaazi/
Remaining silent as the world shatters before our eyes is not merely a psychological numbness; it is also an expression of a conscious political blindness. It is precisely at this juncture that Cosmic Fear—or, The Day Brad Pitt Got Paranoia—enters the scene. Moda Sahnesi’s production transforms Danish playwright Christian Lollike’s play into not only an ironic protest but also a second-order protest targeting the very forms of protest themselves. What emerges is a multi-layered structure that dismantles not only our inertia but also our obsession with the very idea of action—through bursts of laughter.
Through the collective hysteria it brings to the stage, the play does more than question the catastrophic scenarios of the climate crisis—it interrogates the ways we represent those scenarios. Our aesthetic obsessions, shaped by the helplessness of our age, are laid bare. Here, the fear evoked on stage reflects not so much the uncanny terror of Lovecraft but rather the internal conflicts of a subject split within Freud’s Id–Ego–Superego triangle. The characters behave almost like superego figures on stage—constantly judging, mocking, and ridiculing their own impulses, reactions, and reflexes. Yet even this judging, moralizing voice eventually morphs into a caricature of neoliberal morality. What is revealed to the audience is clear: neither our inner voice is innocent, nor is the horror of the external world reserved solely for “the others.” In this sense, invoking Brad Pitt becomes nothing more than a symbolic act of projecting our guilt onto a screen idol.
According to Freud, the superego is the internalized representative of societal laws. The play’s characters have internalized this law, yet they can no longer fully obey it—nor outright reject it. The euphoric paralysis displayed by characters A, B, and C—a disconnection between hyperactivity and awareness—is not so much a reflection of Freudian guilt as it is the product of a mutated, almost invisible and thus hyper-potent superego shaped by late capitalism. In this era where we judge ourselves, that very judgment has become a spectacle, or more accurately, a show of moral posturing. As Moda Sahnesi’s actors perform this transformation, what they offer the audience is not an “inner reckoning” but an ironic “internal collapse.” Perhaps the true cosmic horror lies in the fact that not even irony serves as a stable or familiar refuge anymore; in trying to sense and understand truth indirectly, we tumble down a rabbit hole.
The play also opens up important space to question why the oppositional energy in Turkey, so often trapped in domestic politics, remains silent in the face of global issues. The imperialist nature of neoliberalism is symbolically rendered through the notion of “becoming Brad Pitt.” Pitt here is no messiah saving the world, but rather a “white contractor” figure who exposes his own guilt even as he renders it invisible. By the end of the play, his transformation into a shipbreaking worker in Bangladesh illustrates both the colonizer’s pseudo-self-critique and the cunning way this critique re-centers the self. The issue is not Brad’s empathy—it is how that empathy is staged. Conscience, in this case, is no longer a feeling but a performance. And this performance does not absolve responsibility—on the contrary, it turns it into something aesthetically pleasing and consumable.
Director Kemal Aydoğan’s choices deepen these contradictions further. The actors don’t seem to play characters—they seem to play themselves. As each of them becomes a Brad Pitt, any stable figure for the audience to identify with vanishes. Bodies, identities, and roles are fluid; what we witness is not acting but a crisis of subjectivity. Each actor is both perpetrator and victim. Lighting and stage design reinforce this sensation: no figure is ever fully illuminated, no one breathes a sigh of relief, and no monologue reaches a definite conclusion—they hang in midair, unresolved. The direction creates cohesion out of this very incompleteness. The fragmentation of the narrative turns into the internal coherence of fragility. The stage may not directly depict the apocalypse, but it is more than capable of constantly exposing our dependence on its modes of representation.
The “ecopalypse” emphasized in Lollike’s play represents not only the collapse of the planet but of narrative itself. Ecology is no longer a natural science—it is the new name for God in the secular age. Environmental movements have become the modern churches of this new sanctity. The play offers a subtle satire of this transformation—not only through environmentalism but toward all political utopias. The critique here is not of action per se, but of how action is represented, how it is staged. The figure embodied by Brad Pitt does not remind us how ironic the fantasy of “the last white man who will save the world” has become—it reminds us how seductive it still is.
While dissecting the contradictions produced by that seduction, the actors’ bodies wrestle with this irony on stage—sometimes with facial expressions that can’t decide whether to laugh or cry; sometimes with lines that erupt into screams; with flailing bodies, ever-shifting transparent gestures, facial expressions, and vocal masks... All of it feels familiar, all of it eerily “Hollywood.” The audience is expected to confront this familiarity. Because here, irony is not peeking safely from a hiding place—it is a gravity-free zone of perpetual exposure and discomfort.
In this context, the play targets not only climate politics but the very idea of protest itself. The characters try to construct a “proper” Hollywood-style climate crisis story—and fail. Because the aesthetic clichés of this story crash into their own limitations. The play shows less the action itself and more how the desire for action has become a commodity. The audience is subjected not just to a critique of a narrative, but of the very effort to construct narrative itself. In this regard, Cosmic Fear offers a de-dramatized proposition from within a world that “can no longer dramatize anything,” about the very impossibility of dramatization.
Cosmic Fear stands out in Turkey as one of the rare examples that stages the invisibility of the new imperialism. Global injustices, often drowned in the noise of domestic politics, are here made visible through ironic screams, wordplay, and dark humor. The image of the “Black child” near the end of the play both acknowledges the white subject’s position of exploitation and stages this acknowledgement almost as caricature. This is the colonizer’s self-assured self-critique: even as he confesses, he once again places himself at the center of the story.
Yet this awareness does not offer the audience a soothing identification. On the contrary, the audience is both tickled and unsettled, forced into confrontation. For the play does not merely appeal to the viewer’s conscience—it also exposes how that conscience has been turned into a performance, how it has become part of a stylish stage set. It reminds us that empathy is not merely an emotional response but also a stage design. Thus, complicity is not only revealed—it is theatrically re-enacted as a performative as-if.
As I mentioned at the beginning, Cosmic Fear does not stage an apocalypse in the classical sense. The real issue is that no catastrophe, no story, can be represented through dramatic narrative anymore. In this sense, the play can be read as an “epistemological rupture.” At this breaking point—where knowing, showing, and feeling are increasingly distanced—so too does theatre switch tracks: rather than representing sensitivity, it opens up a space for awareness of our numbness.
It is precisely at this point that Moda Sahnesi’s aesthetic and social vision enters the equation. Cosmic Fear doesn’t merely offer the audience a play—it calls them beyond the stage, into the public square, into reality itself. For the true catastrophe hasn’t occurred on stage; it began the moment the curtain fell over the audience’s eyes. And now, the time for those eyes to look into the mirror has long passed. As the curtain closes, the play leaves behind a lingering void in the audience’s chest: an ironic, exuberant, yet deeply unsettling reflection of a world that can no longer be dramatized.
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