When I walked into Dennis Perera's Neranjana, I expected to watch a controversial play about a man who falls in love with a goat. By the time the curtain fell, I realized that this was not the play I had actually seen. The goat, although central to the story, was never its true subject. Rather, the play gradually revealed itself as an exploration of a far more disturbing question: why does any object come to occupy the centre of human desire? Whether that object is another person, wealth, professional success, religion, political power, or, in this case, a goat, the underlying structure appears remarkably similar. It is precisely this structure that Jacques Lacan devoted much of his teaching to investigating.
One detail immediately caught my attention. The protagonist's psychological disturbance does not begin after he falls in love with the goat. Long before the audience learns of the affair, something has already begun to fracture. He forgets words, loses concentration, hesitates in conversation, and appears strangely absent from his own life. These are not merely dramatic devices to create suspense. From a psychoanalytic perspective, they are symptoms. Freud argued that symptoms are not meaningless accidents but formations through which unconscious conflicts find expression (Freud, 1900/1953; Freud, 1916–1917/1963). Lacan radicalized this insight by proposing that "the unconscious is structured like a language" (Lacan, 2006, p. 413). If the unconscious speaks through language, then the protagonist's forgetfulness is not simply memory failure. It is the unconscious already speaking before either the audience or the protagonist understands what it is trying to say. The goat does not create the crisis; it merely gives the crisis a visible form.
This observation becomes even more striking when one considers the protagonist's social position. He is approaching his fiftieth birthday, stands at the pinnacle of his professional career as an internationally celebrated architect, enjoys public recognition, and appears to possess the kind of marriage that many people would describe as ideal. In contemporary society, this is often presented as the image of complete success. Yet his crisis emerges precisely at the moment when everything appears fulfilled. This apparent paradox lies at the heart of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Desire, Lacan insists, is not extinguished by achievement because desire is not directed toward particular objects in the first place. Rather, objects become desirable because they are recruited to occupy the place of a more fundamental lack constitutive of human subjectivity (Lacan, 1977). Success therefore does not abolish desire; if anything, it can intensify the confrontation with the emptiness that symbolic success was expected to eliminate. The protagonist's symptoms suggest that this confrontation had already begun before the goat entered his life.
The marriage itself deserves closer attention. Throughout the play, both husband and wife repeatedly reassure themselves and others that theirs is a perfect relationship. On first viewing, these declarations seem natural enough. Yet the very need to repeat them suggests something more complicated. Human beings rarely insist upon what is entirely secure. Repetition often reveals anxiety rather than certainty. Lacan's concept of the Big Other becomes useful here. The Big Other is not another person but the symbolic field of language, law, and social recognition before which we continually perform our identities (Lacan, 2006). The couple's repeated affirmations are therefore addressed not only to each other but also to this invisible symbolic audience. They seek confirmation that their marriage embodies the ideal they have come to represent. Ironically, the more frequently perfection is declared, the more fragile it begins to appear.
One of Dennis Perera's most impressive theatrical decisions is to postpone the audience's encounter with the goat. We do not initially see the object of the protagonist's affection. Instead, we hear him speak with extraordinary sincerity about the being he loves. His words resemble those of someone recalling a profound romantic encounter. The audience naturally begins constructing its own image of this mysterious beloved. Only then does Dennis abruptly dismantle that construction. The protagonist hands his mobile phone to his oldest friend. The friend looks at the image and blurts out, "මේ එළුවෙක් යකෝ!" The theatre erupts with laughter.
This moment is far more than comic relief. It is arguably the structural centre of the entire play. Two radically different realities suddenly occupy the same stage. The friend sees an ordinary goat. The protagonist sees something entirely different. Nothing about the goat itself has changed. What has changed is the meaning invested in it. This distinction is fundamental to Lacan's theory of desire. The goat is not extraordinary because of any intrinsic property. Rather, it becomes the support upon which the protagonist projects what Lacan called objet petit a—the object-cause of desire (Lacan, 1977; Lacan, 2014). This concept is frequently misunderstood. Objet petit a is not a physical object. It is the structural function through which the subject imagines that something missing in existence might finally be recovered. The goat simply comes to occupy that position. The audience laughs because it continues to perceive livestock. The protagonist no longer does.
At this point, many viewers understandably begin asking whether the play is really about bestiality. I believe this question, although understandable, misses the deeper achievement of the drama. If the protagonist had instead fallen in love with another woman, the social scandal would certainly have been different, but the underlying psychic structure would remain remarkably similar. The goat is shocking precisely because it strips away the conventional romantic narratives through which we normally disguise the mechanisms of desire. By replacing the socially acceptable beloved with a socially impossible one, Dennis forces the audience to confront the structure itself rather than becoming distracted by familiar romantic conventions.
The friend occupies a particularly fascinating position within this structure. He appears at first to function simply as the voice of common sense. Yet his role is considerably more complex. He believes that the situation can still be repaired. If the truth is revealed, if everyone communicates honestly, if the affair is exposed, then normality can somehow be restored. His decision to write to Sulo emerges from precisely this conviction. Beneath his actions lies a deeply human assumption: that the marriage once possessed an original harmony which can be recovered if deception is removed.
Here the play approaches one of Lacan's most provocative formulations: "There is no sexual relationship" (il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel) (Lacan, 1998). Few Lacanian statements have been more frequently misunderstood. Lacan was not denying the existence of sexuality, intimacy, or love. Rather, he argued that there exists no complete symbolic formula capable of perfectly relating one subject to another. Every relationship remains mediated by language, fantasy, misunderstanding, and lack. From this perspective, the friend's project is doomed from the outset. He is attempting to restore a completeness that never actually existed. The revelation of the affair does not destroy a perfect marriage. It exposes the structural incompleteness that had always been present beneath its appearance of perfection.
The final image of the play leaves perhaps the deepest impression. Sulo enters carrying the severed head of the goat. The audience naturally experiences this as the culmination of the tragedy. Yet psychoanalytically, the scene resolves nothing. The goat has been destroyed, but the protagonist's desire has not. This is because desire was never contained within the goat itself. The goat merely carried the protagonist's fantasy. Lacan repeatedly argued that psychoanalysis cannot eliminate desire, nor can it eliminate the constitutive lack from which desire arises. What analysis can accomplish is a transformation of the subject's relation to fantasy—a movement Lacan later described as the traversal of fantasy (la traversée du fantasme) (Lacan, 1977). Sulo destroys the object that supported the fantasy. She cannot destroy the lack that made the fantasy necessary in the first place. The audience therefore leaves not with the comforting feeling that the problem has been solved but with the unsettling recognition that the true source of desire remains untouched.
This, I believe, is Dennis Perera's greatest achievement. Neranjana begins by inviting us to judge a man who loves a goat. It ends by quietly asking whether each of us possesses our own equivalent of that goat. For one person it may be professional success; for another, political recognition, wealth, romantic love, religious certainty, or intellectual achievement. The particular object matters less than the structural role it comes to occupy. Every such object whispers the same promise: "Once you possess me, you will finally become complete." Lacanian psychoanalysis insists that this promise can never be fulfilled because the lack it addresses is constitutive of the speaking subject itself. Read in this light, Neranjana is not ultimately a play about transgression. It is a profound meditation on the architecture of human desire. Dennis Perera has not placed a goat at the centre of his stage. He has placed the human condition there.
References
Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press.
Freud, S. (1953). The Interpretation of Dreams (J. Strachey, Trans.). Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1900)
Freud, S. (1963). Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (J. Strachey, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original lectures delivered 1916–1917)
Lacan, J. (1977). The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI, A. Sheridan, Trans.). W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (1998). Encore: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, 1972–1973 (B. Fink, Trans.). W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits (B. Fink, Trans.). W. W. Norton.
Lacan, J. (2014). Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X (A. R. Price, Trans.). Polity.
Žižek, S. (1992). Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. MIT Press.
Žižek, S. (2006). How to Read Lacan. W. W. Norton.