TEHRAN – The Iranian Artists Forum (IAF) in Tehran will host the play “Kaspar” written by Austrian playwright Peter Handke from June 8.

A solo performance, the one-hour play is directed and performed by Farid Adhami and will be staged at the Entezami Hall of the IAF for three weeks, Honaronline reported.

Published in 1967, it was Handke's first full-length drama. It depicts the foundling Kaspar Hauser as a near-speechless innocent destroyed by society’s attempts to impose on him its language and its own rational values.

“Kaspar” is loosely based on the story of Kaspar Hauser. Raised in a dark hole, at 17 he wandered into an 1824 German town knowing only a single sentence and became a scientific curiosity: a nearly-adult human without language and external influences, a tabula rasa upon which society and its scientific teachers could write with impunity.

The play is about language and its ability to torture. In this play, Handke allows us to listen differently and to reflect on how language is forced upon us by a society where conformism is the norm and received speech an almost tyrannical exploitation of the individual.

It is also a play that suggests individuals are bound to negate themselves under the pressure of the societies in which they live. What Kaspar experiences on stage can happen daily: The need or desire to conform, to observe and imitate someone else’s words and actions, to assert oneself, and at the same time, negate oneself.

Individuals can also invent themselves using the language. In “Kaspar,” Handke writes: “Already you have a sentence with which you can make yourself noticeable... You can explain to yourself how it goes with you . . . You have a sentence with which you can bring order into every disorder”.

Handke himself wrote in the prologue to the play: “The play ‘Kaspar’ shows how someone can be made to speak through speaking. The play could also be called speech torture”.

SS/SAB