Death and the Maiden returns

DEATH and the Maiden returns – and it’s more relevant than ever, says Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman.

ASKED how his fellow Chileans responded to his award-winning play Death and the Maiden when it was first staged, Ariel Dorfman doesn’t mince words. “Most people in Chile hated it,” says the playwright ruefully. “The people who wanted to see the play were too poor to pay for it and the people who could pay for it were in some way complicit [with what the play depicted].”

Yet Death and the Maiden, a taut, almost claustrophobic political thriller, has gone on to become the theatre’s most performed Latin American drama. It’s been staged on Broadway, the West End and at the Sydney Opera House. It has snared a Laurence Olivier award and been turned into a film by Roman Polanski, starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley.

Melbourne Theatre Company and Sydney Theatre Company are reviving Dorfman’s bestknown work next year in a co-production featuring Susie Porter and Eugene Gilfedder and directed by Leticia Cáceres. The STC premiered the play in Australia in 1992 and toured it nationally before staging a return season at the Sydney Opera House, which Dorfman attended and was “thrilled” by. That production starred Helen Morse as a torture victim of sparrow-like fragility and John Gaden as a doctor who spends much of the drama tied up and dressed only in his underpants.

Set in an unnamed Latin American country recovering from the human rights abuses of a fallen dictator, the play sets up a chance encounter between Paulina, who has been profoundly damaged by the torture she endured, and the doctor whom she believes was her persecutor.

Paulina never set eyes on her torturer, but she heard him and she is convinced the doctor was that man. Caught between Paulina’s need for revenge and the doctor’s protestations of his innocence is Paulina’s husband, a lawyer working for a human rights commission investigating past atrocities.

Now 72 and a grandfather, Dorfman is both pleased and disturbed by Death and the Maiden’s staying power. “I’m surprised to have had such extraordinary success beyond anybody’s wildest dreams,” he says. “It’s very gratifying as a writer but very sad as a human rights activist. Clearly, one of the reasons why the play continues to have staying power is because so does torture and abuse and the tremendously complicated relations between what we remember, what different people remember.” Much of this modern classic’s potency comes from its ambiguity – we never know whether Paulina is unhinged or right about the identity of her tormentor.

As for that frosty reception from his compatriots, Dorfman clarifies that the play was eventually revived in Chile and won a major drama prize there. Still, he insists he is not fully accepted in the country he fled in 1973 after the Marxist Allende government was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet’s notoriously violent dictatorship.

Dorfman returned from exile once democracy was restored in 1990. Soon after, he wrote Death and the Maiden, and he confides: “I didn’t expect the cultural elite of Chile to turn on it with a vengeance … That’s what happened, you know. There were critics who said it was the worst play in the history of Chile.”

In a sceptical tone, the playwright adds: “They gave it – typically Chilean – the best play of the year award afterwards. But that was after we had done Broadway, and we had won the Olivier award.”

The ferociously articulate writer, who divides his time between Santiago and the US, where he is Professor of Literature and Latin American studies at Duke University, declares defiantly: “I’d much rather be recognised in Sydney or Melbourne than in Santiago … the Australians give me a fair shake, right? They see the play and they judge it according to what the play says … There’s a sense that I’m recognised, I’m welcome, they understand me and I can have a dialogue. But it’s very difficult to have a dialogue with a wall.”

He has forged other professional links with Australia. In 2012, Melbourne University Press published his memoir, Feeding on Dreams, which focuses on the years he spent in exile. He had been a cultural adviser to the Allende government and when it was overthrown, many of his friends and colleagues were killed by Pinochet’s henchmen.

The writer sought sanctuary in Europe, but struggled to scratch out a living. “My wife and I were barely making enough to live. We were living off charity,” he recalls, stressing “the tremendous cost this has to one’s family and particularly to my wife”. Today, he and his spouse, Angelica, are about to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. “Angelica has been the mainstay of my life,” he says with quiet conviction.

He has just completed a work that is a play and novel. Titled Allegro, it features Mozart, Bach and Handel, and explores ideas centred on music, forgiveness and the search for transcendence. “It’s not exactly what you would expect from me,” he says, adding that he hopes this hybridised work will soon be staged in New York, London or Sydney.

Dorfman reckons Death and the Maiden is, if anything, more relevant than when he wrote it. He reflects: “We can see it all over the world, over and over again where we are going to have a Death and the Maiden situation. In Egypt you’ll have it, you’ll have it in Ukraine, you’ll have it in Burma, you’re gonna have it in Syria, where Death and the Maiden opened many years ago.” It also concerns him that in prosecuting the war on terror, “the United States itself has admitted to torture and has decided not to prosecute or even discover the names of people who did those acts”. He pauses for breath and reflects: “So it’s very relevant for today. I wish it were less relevant.”

Death and the Maiden

July 18-Aug 22: Southbank Theatre, Melbourne

Aug 28-Oct 10: Wharf 1, Sydney