Death and The Maiden, Harold Pinter Theatre
reviewed for The Spectator, 27 October 2011
When I was a teenager, Death and The Maiden was one of the plays I read when I was discovering that theatre could be angry, obscene and unafraid of speaking truth to power. Ariel Dorfman’s tale introduces us to Paulina, a torture survivor who becomes convinced, but can’t prove, that the urbane neighbour her husband, a civil rights lawyer, has befriended was one of the secret servicemen who imprisoned her during a now-fallen military dictatorship.
When the play premiered in 1991, it delivered a shock blow to the culture of compromise and denial emerging as Dorfman’s homeland, Chile, made the transition to democracy, a year after the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship. But with Hollywood star Thandie Newton now in the lead role, the play seems drained of nuance and power, and left me wondering if the impression it made on me so many years ago was merely a silly symptom of the teenage taste for trashy melodrama.
What I loved about Death and The Maiden at the time was that it was unafraid of showing the dirt of human relationships — the things grown-ups did but didn’t let the adolescents see. But it also established a hold on more mature audiences, international and, eventually, Chilean. The play was a career-maker for Juliet Stevenson in the lead, and was championed by Harold Pinter, of whom Dorfman had written a book long before they ever met.
So it seems apt that Death and the Maiden should be the first play performed in the newly renamed ‘Harold Pinter Theatre’. Pinter’s literary presence dominated the premiere at the Royal Court all those years ago: he’d contributed an exclusive new sketch for the same festival, and even waived his royalties, as an incentive for the unsure Royal Court to take on his new protégé. Pinter even suggested Dorfman’s play could be a sequel to his own One for the Road, recently revived at the Print Room and Young Vic.
There are other, obvious reasons why the Harold Pinter theatre has revived Death and The Maiden now. Torture has again become something we talk about — in fact, we’ve been talking about it heavily for ten years, for reasons of which Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve and legal campaigner against Guantanamo Bay, is quick to remind us in his extensive programme notes.
But Thandie Newton’s doll-like performance gives us a soft-focus, passive view of the female torture victim and does little to invest Paulina with the dignity she wants to regain. Her kidnapping was 15 years ago, but there’s no suggestion here of the psychological complexities that must have intruded on Paulina’s character in those 15 years. Newton just switches between Stepford housewife and petulant child-bride. When she describes the effect on her sex life (eyes demurely downcast, voice low and breathy), it’s hard to feel that this is being sold to us as anything but voyeurism.
It’s not at all inevitable that a play featuring a female torture victim should end up diminishing her all over again — by all accounts, Juliet Stevenson’s performance of the same role showed intelligence and grit that awed her audiences. But Newton shows none of the earthy practicality one would expect of a character with a past in the underground resistance. She doesn’t have the vocal range for much emotional variety, with everything sounding like a temper tantrum, and waves a gun around in constant panics of reaction, rather than attack.
Structurally, the play is almost formulaic, with three characters stranded in a beach house in ridiculously contrived circumstances, but greater actresses have been able to draw out the ambiguities lurking beneath the obvious. At its best, it’s a play with plenty to say about doubt — recalling John Patrick Shanley’s script Doubt with its avenging angel, ambiguous suspect, and evenhanded, uncertain observer — but thanks to Newton’s schlock-melodrama, this reminded me more of Deathtrap.
Newton may yet earn her stage chops in other roles, but she’s fundamentally unsuited for Death and The Maiden. It feels like a classic case of producers picking a star for the box office, rather than a director finding an actress for a particular role.
It’s a shame, because Jeremy Herrin has proved himself a stellar director, most recently with Much Ado About Nothing in this year’s Globe Season. Tom Goodman-Hill gives solid support as Paulina’s long-suffering husband, and Anthony Calf is surprisingly noble as the suspected torturer, investing with dignity even the most unflattering pair of boxer shorts. There’s also intelligent set design from Peter McKintosh, marking out the windows of Paulina’s suburban home like a row of synthetic white prison grilles.
But the design story that’s had most of the press coverage is the contribution of Armani to Newton’s costumes. It’s almost too obvious a shorthand for the flaws of this production — in a play about torture, the key concern of the pre-press has been that ‘whatever the critics say about Newton’s West End debut, they absolutely won’t be able to knock her frock’.
