What happens when you are forced to choose between your duty to your family and your duty to the state?  The trials of the house of Oedipus reaches its tragic conclusion

Tartuffe

Death and the Maiden

January 2007

By Ariel Dorfman

 http://www.illuminatedproductions.org.uk/doc/DATMposter2.pdf

We continued to strengthen our reputation for producing high quality, hard hitting drama by performing Ariel Dorfman's challenging play at the New Wimbledon Studio Theatre in January 2007.  Here are links to a couple of reviews:

Noda http://www.illuminatedproductions.org.uk/doc/DatMReviewNoda.rtf    &   Epoch Times

Here's some info about the play...

Plot Outline

During a reign of violent political repression in her South American homeland, a student activist named Paulina is kidnapped, blindfolded, beaten and raped.

Long after her release she is still haunted by the memory of her unseen tormentors’ voices and the Franz Schubert string quartet “Death and the Maiden” played whilst she was violated.

Now in an isolated cottage by the sea, Paulina awaits Gerardo, her husband’s, arrival and news that he has been asked to head a ‘truth and reconciliation’ commission.

Gerardo’s character is introduced as one who, because of his lawyer status and his new role, is to be trusted – this is important when a stranger has to rely on him to save his life.

By coincidence a stranger enters her house as the result of car trouble, a doctor named Roberto Miranda.

On hearing his voice, Paulina decides that this is the man who shocked her with electrodes amongst other violations – and coolly enraged, takes justice into her own hands with her husband defending the accused.

Contextualising the Play

Written in 1991, Death and the Maiden is said to be based upon events in Chile, but could take place in any country where rule is by force and intimidation. Although rooted in the Pinochet regime, the play explores wider questions of justice, revenge and the consequences of repression for both victims and perpetrators of torture.

The second half of the twentieth century has seen persistent poverty, political instability and social injustice in many Latin American republics still undergoing modernization.

It is a play about guilt, both individual and national. Are the perpetrators of evil deeds simply a product of evil regimes and therefore less culpable?

By the time the play arrives at its answers, they have become questions. The most difficult being, how must we punish evil?

It makes a compelling argument against capital punishment – not that a society should not execute individuals, but that society should not make anyone into an executioner.

The play is far more than a revenge fantasy of the oppressed, it subtly grafts the political drama onto the intense relationships of husband and wife, torturer and victim.

Furthermore, not far beneath the surface is a feminist argument about how women’s voices and experiences are silenced or ignored within both family relationships and wider socio-political contexts. Gerardo’s patronising inability to acknowledge his wife’s experiences act as a microcosmic reflection of the sadistic misogyny of Roberto and his torturers.

At this time of fear from terrorism, war and loss of freedom this is a pertinent and powerfully ambiguous piece entirely relevant to contemporary society. Such questions as What is justice? How do we punish terror? Do we do to them what they did to us? (Think especially of the aftermath of September 11^th.)