First published: 1992
First produced: 1990, at the Institute for Contemporary Art, London
Type of plot: Mystery and detective
Time of work: 1990
Locale: Chile
The fear with which Paulina responds to the sound of an unfamiliar car pulling up to the couple’s isolated beach house at the beginning of the play establishes the fragile nature of both her emotional state and the newly elected government. The fragility of her marriage is established as Gerardo blames her for the indignity, vulnerability, and loneliness of being stranded on the way home after his meeting with the president. He holds Paulina responsible not because of his punctured tire but because she had failed to have the spare repaired and had loaned their jack to her mother. Fortunately, a good Samaritan, the medical doctor Roberto Miranda, stopped and drove him home. The marital tension increases as Paulina in turn accuses him of lying to her, pretending to “need” her approval, her “yes,” before accepting the commission appointment that he has already accepted.
Late that night, Gerardo and Paulina are awakened by a knock at their door—just the kind of knock they feared during the earlier regime’s reign of terror, and continue to fear. However, the visitor is Miranda, who, having heard on the radio of Gerardo’s appointment, has come to return Gerardo’s flat tire and, in this “small way,” facilitate Gerardo’s important work. The two men talk rather freely about that work and engage in a bit of sexist banter before Gerardo invites Roberto to stay the night. However, the sound of Roberto’s voice, a particular line of Nietzsche he quotes, the tape of Austrian composer Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet she finds in his car, and later, the smell of his body convince a distraught Paulina that he is the man who presided over her torture fifteen years before. She knocks the sleeping doctor unconscious, ties him up, and puts him on trial. Appalled by what his “unrecognizable,” pistol-wielding wife has done yet powerless either to stop her or to convince her of the harm she is doing to herself and their cause (as well as his career), Gerardo reluctantly accepts the role she assigns him, defending Miranda.
Because Paulina will free the doctor only if he confesses to having committed wrongs of which he claims his innocence and ignorance, Gerardo believes it necessary to betray Paulina in order to save her, his innocent guest, his newly elected government, and his own ideals and career. He plays the part of good cop in order to elicit from her the story that will become Roberto’s confession. In one of the play’s most startling moments, with the stage darkened, Paulina’s harrowing narrative of abuse segues into Miranda’s contrite narrative of abuse inflicted. As the lights come up, it becomes clear that the words the audience hears are part of Miranda’s tape-recorded confession, which he is now writing down.
Although the confession ostensibly satisfies the terms established for Miranda’s release, Paulina now claims that having anticipated Gerardo’s ploy, she incorporated mistakes into her account, which Miranda unwittingly corrected and thus proved both his guilt and her right to punish him. It is unclear whether Paulina really did outwit Gerardo or whether she merely pretends to have outwitted him, but her actions point to how desperate and unstable she is. Other events are left open for interpretation, including whether Paulina does finally shoot Miranda and if she does, whether doing so brings her any relief. With Gerardo sent to fetch the doctor’s car, Paulina and Miranda confront each other, he proclaiming his innocence and refusing to yield further (least of all to a woman), and she threatening to kill him while asking why it is that people such as herself always have to compromise and asking “What do we lose by killing one of them?”
The play’s final scene deepens the ambiguity. Set “some months later,” after the commission has made its final report, it shows Paulina able for the first time in fifteen years to listen to the music she had come to associate with her torture, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Paulina is silent throughout the entire scene, including the intermission when Gerardo, once again in command and his star still rising, talks continuously and confidently, even as Roberto—or his ghost—enters the hall and locks eyes with Paulina while the music “plays and plays and plays.”
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The play I wrote 20 years ago about Chile's torture and trauma has a painful, global relevance today
It happened yesterday but it could well be today. A woman awaits the return of her husband as the sun goes down. The dictatorship that plagued her land has just fallen, and everything is uncertain. The woman is full of fear, gripped by a secret terror that she only shares with the man she loves. During the night and the day that follows she will have to confront that fear, she will bring to justice in her living room the doctor she believes is responsible for having tortured and raped her years ago. Her husband, a lawyer in charge of a commission investigating the deaths of thousands of dissidents under the previous regime, must defend the accused man because without the rule of law the transition to democracy will be compromised; if his wife kills that doctor, the husband will not be able to help heal a sick and wounded land.
Twenty years ago, when Death and the Maiden, the play that tells this story, opened in London at the Royal Court Upstairs, the country where that woman, Paulina, awaited a constantly delayed justice, was my own Chile or the Argentina where I was born. Or South Africa. Or Hungary. Or China. So many societies that back then were being torn by the question of what you do with the trauma of the past, how to live side by side with your enemies, how to judge those who had abused power without destroying the fabric of a reconciliation necessary to move forward.
Today, as the same play is revived in London's West End, its main drama is echoed in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Iran, Nigeria, Sudan, Ivory Coast, Iraq, Thailand, Zimbabwe and now Libya. In fact, because torture became widespread after the criminal attacks on New York on 9/11, because the most powerful nations in the world, and particularly the US, justified or were complicit in egregious abuses of human rights in order to make themselves feel safe, because they unleashed terror to fight and avenge terror, it could be ventured that the core dilemmas of Death and the Maiden are more relevant today than they ever were.
It was not something I had anticipated, this planetary weight and import, when I wrote the play in Santiago. My goals were far more modest. Returning to my country after 17 years in exile, I saw this work as my gift to its turbulent transition. The dictator was no longer in power, but his influence, his disciples, his corrupting shadow invaded every aspect of political life. Just as today in Egypt (or Russia, for that matter), those who had benefitted from decades of privileges and oppression continued to occupy enclaves from where they controlled the economy, the judiciary, the military, and threatened to return and murder and plunder and banish.
It seemed to me the obligation of a writer was to force the country to look at itself, at what all those years of mendacity and dread had wrought. Death and the Maiden plunged its finger into the wound of Chile by showing that the executioners were among us, smiling on the streets but also interrogated the democratic elite, wondering what ideals they had forced themselves to sacrifice. Neither did I let the victims off the hook. Paulina, the woman who had been raped and tortured and betrayed, was the most violent person on that stage, so the question for her was not any easier: are you going to perpetuate the cycle of terror, how can you forgive if the price they are demanding is that you forget? But one does not create such a transgressive play in a country still reeling from many years of pain without suffering the consequences oneself. The elite of Chile hated what I had done, reviled it.
But what my compatriots did not want for themselves was celebrated by the world. And now I have come back to London, and my characters have returned to the city that embraced them when they were as homeless as I was.
I'm thrilled that Death and the Maiden has not aged over these 20 years, that it still moves people to tears, confronts them with a tragedy that has no clear solution, that it speaks to our world today with the same passion it embodied yesterday. I'm thrilled that the relations between men and women that I explored, the intricacies of memory and madness, the aftermath of violence, the uncertainty of truth and narrative, continue to capture the imagination of so many. Thrilled, yes, but it is also sobering to realise that humanity has not managed to learn from the past, that torture has not been abolished, that justice is so rarely served, that censorship prevails, that the hopes of a democratic revolution can be gutted and distorted and warped.
I can't help but ask if 20 years from now I will be writing this phrase all over again: this story happened yesterday, but it could well be today.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/14/death-maiden-relevance-play