アーザーデ・シャーミーリー
『Voicelessness —声なき声』
A Daughter visits her Mother in hospital. Her Mother is in a coma, and cannot speak, but the Daughter explains that she has invented a device to hear the brainwaves of the unconscious and therefore proceeds to have a conversation with the Mother.
The Daughter wants to know why the Mother refused to continue to prosecute the death of her Father, the Daughter's Grandfather, fifty years ago. Yagil, a family friend and office manager had seemingly embezzled money, ruining the family business. Although the police had investigated the Father's sudden collapse and fall, they found no evidence of foul play. The Mother insists that although she, her brother and sister, suspected Yagil, they had no proof.
The Daughter then reveals recovered conversations between the Mother and her Sister, and a video without sound of Yagil's visit to her house, argument with the brother over discrepancies in the books. When Yagil leaves but is phoned and asked to return the office keys the ring is heard just outside the door--he appears to have been lurking, listening to the conversation between brother and sister about him. Despite this evidence, the Mother rebuffs the Daughter's efforts to renounce Yagil, long-since dead, saying it is best to forget and move on.
The Daughter then explains that she was also able to revive surveillance video from the hard-drive thought erased by Yagil. This shows him entering the office after the death of his boss, the Grandfather, taking out incriminating notebooks, and erasing the hard-drive. But the Mother rejects these as fakes, as the cameras had been broken so no video existed. She accuses the daughter of forging evidence in her pursuit of justice.
Finally the Daughter reveals her ability to communicate with the dead. She plays a recording of her Grandfather's speaking to her, a la Hamlet's father as Cody Poulton pointed out, demanding justice. He had fired Yagil, asked for the keys back, yet gone to a mountain lodge at his insistence to discuss the matter. Yagil begged forgiveness, promised to repay the money, and while considering this offer on a bench overlooking a ravine, both smoking cigarettes, he was pushed or fell into the ravine and died.
* * *
This relatively simple story of personal family tragedy and possible socieital cover-up is set fifty years in the future, presented on stage with simple technologies that make it into a sort of psychic mystery and thriller. At first the unseen Mother wants to see herself, so the Daughter projects her image on the wall in a way the comatose Mother can visualize her Daughter's vantagepoint: a frail, white-haired woman attached to tubes and monitors in a hospital bed. Later her younger self is revealed as avatar, arms crossed and head tilting in a primitive reconstruction of her younger self. (This is performed by an actress from behind a curtain, actually the playwright herself). Scenes from within a car supposedlytaken urreptitiously by the Mother on her cellphone are projected on the curatain: her sister and her father when they get a call form their brother Nuri, frustrated with his efforts to find proof that Yagil was in the office, as tapes are erased. And later the home visit, with Yagil appearing nonchalant in paying condolences to Nuri, upset over the book-keeping and demanding the office keys back. The Daughter wonders why the Mother stopped going to the family office ("it was too painful"), and fell out with her siblings (arguments about inheritance), and failure to press charges against Yagil (there was no evidence).
The Mother doesn't respond, not knowing whether any of this is real, or the Daughter's forgery. At one point she even yells for help, wondering who this strange woman is pretending to be her daughter. Yet the Daughter says she has come seeking justice a final time, as she is giving this evidence, including her mother's edited witness statement, to the court to demand justice. The power reversal is clear: she is not hear to comfort her mother but to pull the plug, giving permission to remove the artificial devices keeping her alive, therefore allowing one hour for confession.
As a family drama, there are gaps of information that make it difficult to figure out what might have been a simple mystery. Where is the Father, never mentioned except in an allusion to the Mother have left, not had a courage or decency to stay, implying a Daughter raised alone in poverty after a estranged Mother's family business when bankrupt. Was the Mother involved in the embezzlement, her sibling power struggle, or with a relationship with Yagil, and is maintaining her innocence as the Daughter's accusations lay bare the truth? Or are the tapes and purported voices real, or edited by this apparently expert IT computer wizard journalist Daughter?
Yet a moving post-talk discussion with the author, whose father was killed in mysterious circumstances that caused her to write this play as therapy for her trauma. Commissioned at its Belgian premiere, the theme of future pushed her to imagine a half century ahead. One can therefore infer that the unreliable narrator trying to put the pieces of the puzzle of fragmented and recovered memories is the playwright's daughter, the Mother the playwright herself, lying in coma in fifty years, being interrogated by her own daughter about the unanswered questions concerning the death of her father, the Grandfather.
And laying below this family story, the SF technological narrative device, and personal story, is the unspoken (probably for political reasons in the volatile Iranian political society today, alluded to in the after-talk). It is a society of questioning of females, protecting of males, using hijabs and tradition to maintain a male-dominated power structures which women can only question without power of persuasion. The personal tragedy that Shalim experienced has been transformed into a one-hour therapy for her that may not solve the question of her father's death, but raises them to the level of art, for all to hear, an insistent public shaming, and attempt to heal.
After eagerly discussing the play briefly with a group of friends after the play, and yet a week later still pondering the two-person, one-hour piece, means some level of success. There are not many plays that manage to reflect present gender and family power politics while alluding to more political undercurrents in a well-fashioned, acted, and intriguing manner only possible in live theatre. It bears repeat reviewing, and the playwright Shamir, feeling "liberated" temporarily from the turmoil in Iran, bears watching as she continues to spin her struggles into theatrical magic..
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