Death and the Maiden

Ariel Dorfman’s 1991 classic is a chillingly balanced, deliciously dialectical three-hander about the human and moral compromises made in Chile after the bloody Pinochet regime.  It’s relevance today is still sharp as a tack, much as this cramped and flaccid MTC/STC co-production works to blunt it.

Susie Porter is Paulina Salas still haunted by memories of her own rape and torture.  When her husband, Gerardo, returns to their clifftop house, with a good Samaritan doctor who helped him change a tyre, Pauline recognises her torturer.  Gerardo, ironically, has just been appointed to the new Reconciliation Commission, but one deeply compromised by the strict limits on what it can investigate about the country’s murderous past.  Not surprisingly them, to Gerardo’s horror, Pauline strips and binds the doctor and conducts her own kangaroo court.  

Only by the end do we know whether this Roberto (played as a harmless old duffer by Eugene Gilfedder) is that same sexual sadist, torturing multitudes as he played his  favourite Schubert, Death and the Maiden. By the end, though, we don’t much care given the emotional restraint and shuffling of Leticia Caceres’ production.

It begins promisingly on Nick Schlieper’s small revolve of three empty rooms, each connected by doorways, and artfully suggesting surveillance and entrapment.  But it’s the actors who end entrapped, stripped of their capacity to allude to darker secrets, and build tensions around intimacies, some horrific, if true, others now polite and commonplace.  

Susie Porter is an engaging actor but here lacks in her belly the black undertow of her experience and that thirst for revenge.  She is no match for Sigourney Weaver in the stunning Roman Polanski film of the play. Steven Mouzakis is miscast as Gerardo, all Ocker and boyish when he would better have the smooth gravitas and reason of an ambitious lawyer about to roll over and be part of a spineless Commission.

This Death and the Maiden is not the best calling card in Sydney from the Melbourne Theatre Company.

Martin Portus

Image: Susie Porter. Photogerapher: Jeff Busby.