Synopsis
From Booker Prize-winner and literary phenomenon Han Kang, a lyrical and disquieting exploration of personal grief, written through the prism of the colour white.
While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator wanders the twin white worlds of the blank page and snowy Warsaw. THE WHITE BOOK becomes a meditation on the colour white, as well as a fictional journey inspired by an older sister who died in her mother’s arms, a few hours old. The narrator grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, an event she colours in stark white–breast milk, swaddling bands, the baby’s rice cake-coloured skin–and, from here, visits all that glows in her memory: from a white dog to sugar cubes.
As the writer reckons with the enormity of her sister’s death, Han Kang’s trademark frank and chilling prose is softened by retrospection, introspection, and a deep sense of resilience and love. THE WHITE BOOK–ultimately a letter from Kang to her sister–offers powerful philosophy and personal psychology on the tenacity and fragility of the human spirit, and our attempts to graft new life from the ashes of destruction.
Director’s Note
The urgency to do ‘something’ in theatre had been building in lockdown. I was not a firm believer in the digital content that was generated in these incredibly sad and unprecedented times. The idea of theatre put up in these digital times was something I had strongly discarded and actually sneered at the mere proposition.
But a month and half back I succumbed and decided to explore possibilities. ‘What’s the harm’, I thought? I started scouting for text to work with, which could be adapted for the digital platform. Han Kang’s, ‘The White Book’ moved me. It was personal yet universal, a fragmented account of a writer’s ruminations about her dead sister just two hours into birth. The piece is a complex mix of pain, loss, despair, filth, sadness and at the same time about compassion, love, empathy and forgiveness. The loss and death we see abundant in today’s pandemic and empathy and compassion is what we really need as we start stepping into this new world after it.
After the initial period of rehearsal with four actors and two assistants, soon more people joined the bandwagon. Costume and Light designer. Production designer and scenographer. Music director and sound editor. There were small discoveries and findings on some days and on some, just frustration and a fight with the limitations of the digital platforms.
It became an exciting, exhaustive and enriching process to build the piece. What has emerged is neither theatre nor film but a form which is new, borrowing a little from both. Other questions which strongly emerged in this process are, what is live, what is theatre, is it theatre just because it’s live and how can we find ‘theatricality’ in this new form? The rehearsals had started with a clear understanding that we might not reach any solid performance piece but the team put in all they had and today we are ready, to share these experiments and discoveries.
