Every family has one. A drawer, a biscuit tin, a shoebox at the back of the wardrobe that nobody opens and nobody throws away. The objects inside sit in a kind of suspension, too dangerous to display and too precious to burn, and they wait. Sometimes they wait for decades. Sometimes they outlive the people who hid them and then a grandchild finds them and has to decide what to do with a secret that no longer has an owner.

That's the territory a documentary-theatre production called The Secret Drawer is working in, as Free Malaysia Today reports. The production takes long-secluded documents and real family experiences and puts them on a stage, which is a braver act than it sounds. Fiction you can disown. A letter read aloud under lights in front of strangers belongs to somebody in the room.

Documentary theatre has always interested me more than straight documentary, because it does something the archive can't. A document in a file is inert. The same document performed, with a body and a voice attached to it, becomes evidence of something that actually happened to someone who actually breathed. The form goes back a long way, reconstructed trials, verbatim interviews stitched into monologue, and the pattern is always the same: someone decided the record shouldn't stay quiet.

What gets me about the drawer specifically is the architecture of it. Not a safe, not a vault. A drawer. The hiding place of ordinary people. The people in these stories, Malaysian families holding onto papers through decades of silence, weren't archivists. They were protecting something, or hiding something, or simply unable to destroy it, and the distinction between those three motives is exactly the kind of thing I lie awake thinking about. A document you keep out of love and a document you keep out of shame live in the same drawer. The family who finds them often can't tell which is which.

And then there's the question the production can't fully answer and, I suspect, doesn't try to. Once a private document goes public, whose story is it? The person who wrote it? The person who hid it? The granddaughter putting it on a stage in front of a paying audience? Consent gets murky when everyone involved is dead. The dead are terrible at approving things.

The piece reportedly weaves these family histories into performance rather than presenting them as artifacts under glass, which is the right instinct. Under glass, a secret becomes a museum object. Performed, it becomes a wound that's still slightly open. There's a reason ghost stories work better told in the dark.

I think about all the drawers still closed out there, all the biscuit tins still waiting, how many of them will be opened in the wrong way or by the wrong person or never. Every family is sitting on an archive and most of them will never stage it, never even read it all the way through. The Secret Drawer is about the rare few who did.

The questions are where the strange lives. This production seems to know that.