About The Season for Kite-Hunting
Erfan Khalaghi
Departing from the structuralist tradition, Jacques Lacan reconceptualizes the notion of the ego (the self), arguing that both the subject and knowledge are structured like language. The self exists within a system of signifiers that seeks to construct and understand itself through its participation in an already existing and dominant linguistic order. In Lacan’s view, the self is something like a novel or a poem—always in the process of being written.
From this perspective, a subject outside language is impossible. The subject comes into being only when it begins to say “I” and enters into a linguistic relationship with others. During early childhood, the individual experiences a fundamental rupture upon recognizing themselves in a mirror for the first time. They encounter an image that is simultaneously “me” and “not me.” This external image becomes the basis of identity through what Lacan calls a misrecognition—the famous mirror stage. It marks the subject’s entrance into the Imaginary, the realm in which mental images are produced and organized to construct identity. Yet this identity remains founded upon external and imaginary images.
With the acquisition of language, the subject enters the Symbolic order, a realm defined by absence, lack, and an irreducible gap within the self. Human beings continually attempt to create images that resemble the world around them—images they accumulate and carry throughout their lives.
In constructing these images, the subject constantly collides with the Symbolic order imposed by the Big Other—language, hegemonic power, the social order, and similar structures. This confrontation unfolds through fantasy and anxiety. These two mechanisms allow the subject to conceal its profound internal lack, creating a vicious cycle that continually generates new fantasies and new fears.
Ultimately, the subject confronts the Real, the third Lacanian order, which resists both the Imaginary and the Symbolic. At this stage, every attempt to achieve complete meaning once again proves impossible. Desire itself becomes the force that drives the subject forward, condemning identity to an eternal state of absence and loss—an insatiable gap between the conscious and the unconscious self.
Using these Lacanian concepts, we can take another look at The Season for Kite-Hunting.
The woman at the center of the play is unable to find herself. She searches for her identity in the image of the remains of the Turquoise Pond, and in memories—both distant and recent—that she continually recalls and relives. Fundamentally, the play is about moving back and forth through different images. It is a journey into the Imaginary, where fantasies are repeatedly created in an attempt to fill the immense absence at the core of the self.
Yet these fantasies repeatedly return to anxiety. As the saying goes, all roads lead to Rome. The protagonist is caught in a continuous confrontation among Lacan’s three orders: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real.
Desire appears in the form of her love for Moses—a love we gradually realize has already failed. Peace, meanwhile, is imagined as a return to the mother’s embrace. The maternal body becomes the original lost object that drives both the woman’s story and, more broadly, human desire itself. Throughout the play she longs for a substitute for this lost paradise, propelled endlessly by desire, and repeatedly cries out to her mother for help.
From this perspective, The Tank, Gud Kuche, Kudal dar Jabehe, the Turquoise Pond, and similar images all function as metaphors for a rebellious desire to return to the womb. At the same time, they may also answer the play’s enduring question: Who is speaking?
Who speaks if not the lost self—a subject folded back upon itself, divided and estranged from the woman’s own “I”? Who speaks before the absent Nasreen, herself a metaphor? And who speaks of dragons, each representing the forces surrounding both the protagonist and ourselves?
Did Nasreen ever truly exist, or is she merely another version of the woman herself? Did the uncle ever exist, or is he another substitute for the absent father?
Even after reaching Nasreen, the woman remains trapped within the vast emptiness of her own subjectivity. She remains imprisoned within herself, incapable of communicating with others or reconnecting with her family, and ultimately loses contact with reality itself.
We should remember Lacan’s assertion that every signifier refers only to another signifier. No word exists outside the endless chain of metaphor, and every metaphor is simply one signifier replacing another.
From this perspective, The Season for Kite-Hunting also marks a departure from Jalal Tehrani’s earlier plays.
Unlike his previous works, the text contains explicit references to Iranian geography and history. Concrete historical events—which the playwright had previously left deliberately absent—now emerge through subtle but unmistakable historical allusions. The play returns to socio-historical reality with a directness appropriate to our own time, yet without becoming superficial or overtly political. It offers an epistemological inquiry that not only examines the structures of power but also interrogates the very signifiers through which power is constructed.
From a performance standpoint, the set design—which itself functions as a metaphor for wounded dragons crawling beneath the woman’s feet—guides the audience’s gaze as it rises and falls with the actress’s movements. The set deliberately encroaches upon the audience’s space, although it could have pushed this boundary even further, challenging spectators more aggressively.
Finally, a recommendation: this production is one of the rare plays best experienced from the balcony of the Main Hall. From that vantage point, the audience can fully appreciate the gradual retreat of the turquoise light and its replacement by yellow, culminating in the final image—the gaze of death, the triumph of absolute reality over the human subject.