The Silent Grammars of Two Plays from France and Nepal

After completing the Nepali adaptation of Florian Zeller’s acclaimed play The Father (Le Père), I had the opportunity to read the Lost and Found by Shilpi Theatre’s Artistic Director Ghimire Yubaraj. While the stories, geography, and cultural backgrounds of these two plays differ, I discovered many parallels. The purpose of this essay is to discuss and comparatively analyze the shared social and human themes resonating equally in both works.

Florian Zeller writes in French from France, while Ghimire Yubaraj is based in Nepal and writes in Nepali. Mother tongue is a powerful tool for theater and expression. These two playwrights, born in the same year but living on different continents, powerfully express the crisis of humanity through their plays. Zeller’s work has been translated into many languages and performed in over 45 countries.

His play has also been adapted into a film that won an Oscar and is currently being prepared for staging in Nepali translation. Similarly, Ghimire’s Lost and Found has been staged multiple times in Nepal and in nine European cities. Due to location and language barriers, it is not easy for Nepali playwrights to reach global audiences, but I felt inclined to examine these two contemporaries together, especially since I have access to the French original and a personal interest in theater, which has led me to translate many French plays.

Considering the physical settings, on one hand, there is André, the main character in an upscale Parisian apartment suffering from dementia; on the other, characters living in a psychologically devastated city affected by earthquake trauma.

Both French and Nepali plays pose a fundamental question: Are we ready to listen to, understand, and contemplate the truths revealed more by unspoken words, fragmented sentences, and absences than by presence?

One play delves into the consciousness of an elderly man with declining memory, while the other follows characters burdened by collective grief and displacement. Despite differences in these external environments, both share a profound commonality: they speak the same dramatic grammar — a world built from fragmented time, unfinished dialogue, and absence. When a person fragments, even time loses its path.

In The Father, dementia causes the fragmented world of André where the same scene repeats, characters’ faces and behaviors alter, furniture disappears and reappears. The audience or reader is immersed in André’s consciousness where time flow is dictated not by clock hands but by fading memory. Boundaries between past, present, and imagination gradually blur.

In Lost and Found, the source of temporal fragmentation differs. Time here unfolds not through memory loss of old age but through the story of many youths forced into statelessness in their own birthplace.

One key character, Bhumi, aspires to live above social and cultural superstitions but struggles amid a male-dominated society. When her lover disappears without notice, even the existence of her unborn child becomes uncertain. This predicament reflects many historical and contemporary social wounds deeply embedded in our society.

The same tea is heated repeatedly but never drunk. A letter moves back and forth from table to window and back again. Characters list lost items — citizenship, photo albums, familiar radio tunes — but the list is never complete. Time does not progress but circles around what is lost.

In both plays, feelings prevail over plot and events. Characters are not living through linear time but become trapped within its shattered remnants. Fragmentation forms not only the subject matter but the very fundamental structure of both works.

Dialogue reveals interesting similarities as well. In The Father, conversations are often incomplete and repetitious. André repeats the same questions, but answers vary. The truth of one scene does not hold in the next. Dialogues do not connect but flank each other.

Similarly, in Lost and Found, dialogues are also incomplete. In Nepali society, grief is often expressed through silence. Although there are rituals for the deceased, there is little language to express the pain of the living. Characters speak, but not fully or openly; the unspoken is conveyed through the eyes, silence, and repetitive daily acts.

Despite silence playing an important role in both, its sources differ: Zeller’s characters are silent because they cannot remember, while Yubaraj’s characters remain silent due to social customs that do not teach expressing sorrow in words. One silence arises from memory loss, the other from cultural restraint.

Characters in both plays are defined by what they have lost. André’s life, personality, and past are revealed only through gradually fading memories. The Lost and Found characters are defined by what they have lost — some await letters, others mend shirts, some compile lists.

The plays define their characters by what they failed to preserve, reclaim, or express. This ultimately becomes their most concrete identity. In Lost and Found, characters from history and present meet due to their shared crisis of sensitivity and existence. Sometimes, these identities even merge into a single persona. Meanwhile, Sagar grapples with relational crises — engaged in multiple relationships yet burdened by self-imposed moral dilemmas.

Both plays centrally pose the question “Who am I?” in terms of identity, although their sources differ. In The Father, André’s identity disintegrates internally alongside his memory loss; in Lost and Found, characters’ identities are defined less by words spoken and more by unexpressed emotions, which become their most intense forms of existence.

However, beyond characters’ identity crises lies a painful, external, social, and institutional struggle. Being denied citizenship is not merely the absence of an identity document but a denial of legal existence and civic identity by the state itself. Thus, while one play is about the disintegration of memory, the other tells the story of the stateless, deprived of all rights guaranteed by the nation despite being born within its borders.

Where parallels exist, meaningful differences are equally significant. The tragedy in The Father is deeply personal and internal — a man’s mind collapsing within. In contrast, the pain in Lost and Found is not only personal but primarily collective and external, with entire families, homes, and societies undergoing displacement. Zeller’s disintegration imprisons the character within himself; Yubaraj’s disintegration scatters families in every direction.

Both playwrights utilize mystery and silence as powerful dramatic devices but with different aims. Zeller disorients the audience to allow immersion into André’s unstable mind. Some things remain unspoken, some questions unanswered, some wounds beyond words — these are intimate parts of the Nepali social experience. Yubaraj confronts the audience with a mirror reflecting familiar suffering.

Ultimately, these two plays, born from distinct geographies, cultures, social sensibilities, and historical contexts, converge around the same profound human question. The silence in The Father is that of one who cannot remember; in Lost and Found, it is the silence of a society unable to speak. More than that, to me, these plays resemble two windows facing opposite directions within the same room.

The external views differ, but the light entering the room is the same human experience. Both plays stand before us with uncomfortable truths — the deepest conversations are often never spoken aloud; the most intense cries often have no sound; the most profound emotions remain confined within our hearts.

A line from a spiritual book I read years ago often comes to mind — silence can be more expressive than sound, but our ears and hearts must be ready to listen. Both The Father and Lost and Found ultimately demand an answer to a profound question from us as viewers and readers — are we ready to hear, understand, and reflect on the unspoken words, fragmented sentences, conversations woven by silence, and truths revealed more by absence than presence?

(Kalpana Ghimire Nurisso has been living in France for the past 24 years. She has translated more than a dozen French works into Nepali.)