Death and the Maiden
by Ariel Dorfman
Sydney Theatre Company
Space

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Since Ariel Dorfman’s ethico-political thriller Death and the Maiden has emerged as one of the most admired new works performed in London for some time, the inclusion of the Sydney Theatre Company version in State’s current season provides a welcome opportunity to see the play- if not, perhaps, in the production it best deserves.

Whodunnit, sexual dialectic, theatrical nailbiter and timely reminder, Death and the Maiden is set in a place very like Chile nearly twenty years after the overthrow and murder of someone very like Allende. Paulina Salas is wife of Gerardo Escobar a civil rights lawyer under suspicion by the new regime. Paulina is arrested, interrogated and sexually tortured but refuses to divulge Escobar’s identity or activities. Physically and mentally violated, particularly by one inquisitor, a sadistic doctor, Paulina has withdrawn from the world while at the same time her husband is finding professional and political preferment as an investigator of human rights violations.

Dorfman’s play examines a complex of responses to political crime- the impulse for vengeance, the call to put the past behind, the easy resumption of normalcy by those not immediately affected. The play carries also a strong sense of the inexplicable ordinariness of terrible things. Paulina’s fear that she may meet her torturers again at a civic gathering or a concert is utterly credible in a society where the Disappeared are not only people but also deeds and ideas.

So when Escobar’s car breaks down and a stranger stops to help we can readily believe it might just be someone from Paulina’s dreadful past. That is, in fact, the premise of the play. When Escobar’s samaritan calls at their house late at night Paulina discovers she now has her nemesis on her terms- Dr Roberto Miranda is stripped and bound to a chair and the role reversals begin.

While Brian Thomson has devised a serviceable set – an irregularly rectangular parquet stage area backed with large sliding doors- the combined effect of Shane Stevens’ lighting concept, Julie Lynch’s costumes and Neil Armfield’s direction is stylistically mannerist, even, you might say, Peronist. Dorfman is reminding us of the sinister nature of everyday life- this Chile could be Canberra or Boston or Manchester. But Armfield’s production makes moody melodrama of the events – literally, since cellist Claudia Douglas continually punctuates the action with excerpts from the eponymous Schubert string quartet.

As Paulina, Helen Morse gives a courageous performance but it is undercut by her having to wear slinky backless numbers, fetishising her as the kind of Pauline who might have a penchant for perils. Morse is by turns desperate, vehement and doubtful of her own reason but finally she is too hectic to create the still terror that Dorfman adumbrates.

Geoff Morrell is good at playing bewildered types but this isn’t David Williamson and his Escabor is too light for the occasion. The character is a disturbingly self-serving one, his solicitude towards Paulina is controlling, his guilt at his infidelity (at the very time she was being tortured) ritually expressed. Morrell captures some of this, but without gravity enough to galvanise Dorfman’s triangulated action.

Dr Miranda is a difficult figure – part phantom, part monster, diabolic lover, emblem of death, even, perhaps, mistaken identity. John Gaden makes him bewildered, Despite the excellence vocalist affable, enraged and- reduced to almost nakedness- powerfully signifies Miranda’s abjection. But in the encounters with Morse the collision of destinies is blurred. When Pauline stuffs her panties into his mouth to gag him it is a kind of retribution but in the production it is underplayed. Similarly the final confrontations do not ultimately engage. Such an encounter -driven to the pitch of murder- should freeze the blood but Armfield’s production only hints at the playwright’s intention.

In his director’s note Neil Armfield writes -“no matter how monstrous people can be, how malicious and selfish and stupid, there is still the pure experience of Schubert and what Paulina calls his `sad, noble sense of life.'” Dorfman’s point is that there is no such thing as a pure experience of Schubert. When Paulina says that she cannot listen to Schubert’s quartet because Miranda is also listening to it, she is realising an awful truth about the limitations of art. It doesn’t make you good if you don’t want to be. Dorfman is not sentimentalising about the power of culture, he is describing its paradox. When Miranda stands behind Paulina in the final scene when she attends the Schubert recital – staged, by the way, with all the subtlety of Agent Cooper’s dream of Laura Palmer and the dwarf- her backward glance suggests she has come to her own terms, not that the conundrum is resolved. After all, change Schubert to Wagner and the idea of the pure experience of music becomes very ironic indeed.

The Adelaide Review, No.116, July, 1993, p.32.