Synopsis
Paulina Salas is a former political prisoner from an unnamed Latin American country who was raped by her captors, including a sadistic doctor whose face she never saw. The doctor played Schubert's String Quartet No. 14, subtitled Death and the Maiden, during the act of rape, which gives the play its title.
Years later, after the repressive regime has fallen, Paulina lives in an isolated country house with her husband, Gerardo Escobar. When Gerardo returns home from a visit to the president, he gets a flat tire and is helped by a stranger named Dr. Miranda. Later that night, Dr. Miranda returns and Paulina recognizes his voice and mannerism as that of her rapist. She takes him captive in order to put him on trial and extract a confession from him.
Gerardo acts as Dr. Miranda's lawyer and attempts to save his life, but after hearing the full story of Paulina's captivity, he formulates a confession with Dr. Miranda based on the specific details Paulina shared with him. Paulina records the entire confession and has Dr. Miranda sign it. She then sends Gerardo to get Dr. Miranda's car so he can go home. While they are alone for the last time, Paulina accuses Dr. Miranda of being unrepentant and guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. She shares that she purposely altered small details of her story when sharing it with Gerardo, and Dr. Miranda corrected those details in his own confession. Although Dr. Miranda denies this, Paulina is completely convinced of his guilt and prepares to execute him.
The play then skips forward in time, and the audience sees Paulina and Gerardo attending a concert. It is never revealed whether Paulina ultimately killed Dr. Miranda. As the concert orchestra begins to play Schubert's Death and the Maiden, Paulina sees Dr. Miranda across the room cast in a "phantasmagoric" light, and the audience is left to wonder whether he is truly there or only in Paulina's mind.
Productions
Death and the Maiden had a reading at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London on 30 November 1990:
A workshop production was staged and opened in Santiago, Chile, on 10 March 1991:
- Paulina — Maria Elena Duvauchelle
- Gerardo — Hugo Medina
- Roberto — Tito Bustamante
- Directed by Ana Reeves
Death and the Maiden had its world premiere at The Royal Court Upstairs on 9 July 1991:
With the same cast and director, it transferred to the Mainstage at The Royal Court on 4 November 1991.
The American Broadway premiere of Death and the Maiden opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on 17 March 1992, produced by Roger Berlind, Gladys Nederlander and Frederick Zollo, in association with Thom Mount and Bonnie Timmermann:
The Australian premiere production of Death and the Maiden took place on 16 December 1992.
The Indian premiere of Death and the Maiden (in Hindi translation by Shalini Vatsa) opened at the India Habitat Centre New Delhi on 17 February 2002, produced by Asmita Theatre.
Death and the Maiden returned to London's West End in 2011 at the Harold Pinter Theatre.
Death and the Maiden was performed in Iran on 4 November 2015.
In 2015, Death and the Maiden was staged as a co-production between the Melbourne Theatre Company (18 July-22 August) and the Sydney Theatre Company (2 September-17 October). Susie Porter played Paulina with Eugene Gilfedder as the man whose voice might be his undoing.
On 22nd March, 2024, “Death and the Maiden” was staged at the Uganda National Cultural Centre (Uganda National Theatre). It was a Railroad Pictures first theatrical production, a company that had long been invested mainly in Film.
Cast
Crew
- Director’s Note on the production.
I wanted to look at the question of how one could coexist in the same room, with someone who has caused them grievous, perhaps irreparable harm. Would they be able to resist taking revenge, if that revenge were made possible? How much power is in death? If your life was in the hands of someone you’d consider inferior,how far would you be going to save it?
The first time I read Ariel Dorfman’s play ‘Death and the Maiden’, I loved it,really instantly loved it. And I think for me, it was that transformation of sympathizing with characters, and judgment I would have put on the characters into a meditation on truth and , a superb character development. As an individual who doesn’t believe in karma,this play partly created the possible existence of a Karma, and the possible effect of trauma on a delicate person. When I finally made up my mind about directing such a play,I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to,I didn’t feel ready, only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to ask the audience the same questions that I myself asked myself the first time I read the play. Whose truth was the truth? and are words really sufficient to heal a physical pain? In order to do this, I needed a team, people who I knew felt a similar way to the play. First person I got in touch with Nsimenta Precious, who was to be the Stage manager of the play who introduced Mboowa Gideon, who was to be her assistant Stage Manager. I reached out to Railroad Pictures Company, a film production company and I was amazed to have them as one of the producers of the show,this was to be their first involvement into theatre,and to start with me, was a honor. Since this play heavily relied on dialogue,my production of Death and the Maiden focused on using a synthesis of confronting design and stylistic decisions to appeal to the audience’s perception of memory, trauma and the senses, inciting emotions intimate to the character’s portrayal of grief and anger. . Making the audience to focus on the confronting questions the play asks and immersing them into the themes, I incorporated that with Stanislavski s exploration of symbolism and the realism of emulating human behaviour, and connecting the audience to a deep understanding of the in-depth emotions conveyed.This heightened realism of Stanislavski helped even my actors create a realistic interpretation of the characters which created a connection to the audience and the characters. The use of realism created characters that were believable and convinced the audience for a moment that they are real, and that they have experienced what the play says they have experienced. My vision for the production was to emerge the audience into a performance that engulfs their reality with that of the play’s, taking them hostage into the world of Death and the Maiden,but above all their reward was to make out the truth and what to believe in,for themselves .. My production of Death and the Maiden was at a point inspired from the original quartet by the same title by Schubert. After extensive research,I did realize that there existed the renaissance era art works of the motif of death and the maiden ; the popular motif that depicted itself through an image of a young woman seized by the personification of death in a manner of sinisterly warped exposure and eroticism the association between death and sex. The image originally acted as a reference for one of the posters of my production Such other important elements that I employed in the production included Sound,lighting,makeup and costume designing. The set design of the production,which consisted of the sitting room,dinning,kitchen and the terrace to the stage left. The organization of this stage and placing of every prop made sense to me and was to be precise and specific to where they were placed because to me,it was Paulina brain. The delicacy of the house was to mirror the delicacy of Paulina and her situation. The spacing of props was to show the distance between her thoughts,that kept on changing through the play. For example,he had wanted to rape the doctor,or maybe let him confess? Perhaps kill him? The house was Paulina’s head,and how everything existed there,the part of Roberto confessing was in the center of the stage because even for Paulina,that confession was central and important. Sound is an important element in theatre because it allows the audience to experience the play in a multi-layered sensory focus. From the sound of the sea that took the audience’s mind to a beach house, a loud thud heard in Roberto’s room shortly after Paulina entered it,all signified important moments in the play and aided the audience in intensify the meaning, emotion and key moments of our performance. The Quartet ‘Death and the maiden’ by Schubert is the only kind of music I used in the play since it signified the torture sessions, I often used it to constantly remind the audience of what Paulina went through. The lighting in the performance was strategically used. There was more use of the dim blue lights to signify the night,which is the time of day that the play mostly took place. There was a transition in light during the confession of Roberto to signify a change of day,this lighting was like the wave of the ocean, fading in and out, getting darker, then lighter, then darker. From the first act,first scene,the lights kept getting dimmer preparing for the third scene in Act one where the Paulina character evolved and with everything she did in that scene,we added a red light to signify danger creating a dramatic shift of character that signified her hostility in the following scenes creating a contrast from the past scenes where she was fearful and a bit hysterical, she was now hostile,and determined to be in control! Perhaps another lighting technique we used of fading light can be highlighted, it hinted at the question of what extent should we trust Roberto confession, and what extent we should trust Paulina’s memories, and during that confession scenes, the beam of light was only on the cassette recorder, the dark parts of the stage to communicate what Paulina always went through during the torture sessions,so the audience would feel that too. Whether it would be possible and credible to not see a thing and see if they could remember the voice speaking, as Paulina had claimed to have remembered the doctor’s voice, even after around 15 years. When Roberto appears in act 1, Scene 2, he is in a white shirt, our next revelation of him portrays him tied up, his forehead with blood and shirt having blood stains,this kind of makeup was to explain the heavy thud sound heard by the audience in act 1, Scene 3, when Paulina had entered his room. The colors used on the production, from the stage designs props colors like the red carpet, to the costumes used in the play all played a significant role in communicating the character, for example, notably, was Paulina’s costume in the play which was red to signify the danger that would come with her,plus a black top, to communicate her trauma and how she has been in a dark place all her life, seeking for a way out, and either a confession or death of the oppressor would settle that,she was entirely determined.
Death and the Maiden tells the story of a woman shattered by a torturous experience, who finds revenge through violently taking hostage a man whom she unwavering believes to be the man responsible for the trauma that plagues her. In my vision,and according to my production, I wished to present all the questions in the play, those that were answered, made it feel things, and have a rollercoaster of Emotions,only to leave the decision to them of whose truth they were to accept,but it wasn’t coming easy, as I removed the very last scene of the play to end it on the Act 3, Scene 1 with a slight change, where Roberto is left alone with Paulina after the confession,Paulina instead of letting the man go, points the gun at him- all this was in script until my ending which consisted of Gerardo coming in to find the two fighting with the gun, and at this point, I lowered the curtains and a shot was heard, giving the audience the opportunity of killing that, whom deserved to die,since now, they knew the full story.
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