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, hes...
