The West End theatre formerly known as the Comedy has now been weightily restyled the Harold Pinter. The bumf tells us this is “a fitting tribute to a legendary man”. (Distractingly, an unconscious borrowing from The Royle Family, when Nana’s last words are pronounced “a fitting tribute to the man” – the man in question being Trevor McDonald.)
Nonetheless the pugnacious playwright would surely have approved of the high moral seriousness of the first play to be staged here. Death and the Maiden was scripted some twenty years ago by his old Chilean friend and fanboy Ariel Dorfman, and concerns topics just as hot today as at the time. In this, the era of the toxic euphemism (“rendition”, “waterboarding”), the theme of state-sponsored torture is highly opportune. And as various countries – of which Libya is the latest – make their pragmatic accommodations with history and rebuild the shattered state, Dorfman’s scrutiny of the unpalatable business end of so-called truth and reconcilliation seems prescient.
Designer Peter McKintosh’s scene is a wind-blistered beach house in a nameless Latin American country. Even the slosh and scrape of the sea starts to sound neurotic, as a jittery Paulina (a delicate, dented Thandie Newton) jumps like a spooked cat at every noise, and awaits her husband, Gerardo (Tom Goodman-Hill). Hubby is naturally, in the manner of these idea-loaded plays, a human rights lawyer. Entirely fortuitously, the man who (she thinks) was her rapist and torturer fifteen years previously, turns up having helped her husband out with “a flat”.
The text is full of these Americanisms, like “flat” for “flat tyre” or “trunk” for “boot,” which stoke up a mild disorientation: just who are these people, with their British diction and their US idiom? Consistency of domestic detail, the moorings of time and place, are clearly outside, or beneath, the scope of the performance.
Paulina recognizes Dr Miranda (Anthony Calf) from his voice, then, later, his skin, and his smell. Unlike the other torturers, it seems this guy had class. He was a man of science, given to quoting Nietzsche. He would play Schubert’s Death and the Maiden quartet to set the mood. And now Paulina has plans to get Old Testament on his ass. It’s Misery meets Jean-Paul Sartre.
The play’s strengths lie in the way the truth is conceived as a will o’ the wisp: we are constantly having to reset the wobbly ethical compass. Paulina may well be wrong about Dr Miranda’s identity. Miranda himself flickers, like crude animation frames, between monster and broken family man. The ambitious, patrician Gerardo is quick to embrace expediency over justice in the interests of “moving on.” And he infantilises the damaged Paulina: she’s “silly girl,” and “my baby.” The very dynamics and drama of the piece seem, unusually, sited within the audience itself as we assess and revise our sympathies in this most ambiguous of studies.
Herein lies the problem, however. It’s tough to make drama out of party-crashing lines like “I want you on the commission, defending the truth”. It’s tougher still when the matinée crowd barely fills the first few rows of the stalls. This is the very engine of the theatre, and it was cold.
In the circumstances the triptych of actors under Jeremy Herrin’s baton turned in remarkably good performances, though one could quibble that Newton appears less in pain than just pained. When the anguish does break through it feels oddly indecorous, like a tourettish moment. Calf somehow keeps a quality of bruised latency, despite being shackled to a chair, and indeed gagged, for much of the hour and forty minutes running time.
In an underpowered auditorium, and squeezed somewhere between the political agenda, the thriller structure and the ersatz domesticity, I suspect they all felt a little hobbled.
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