As Paulina was being tortured, her masked assailant played a recording of Schubert’s 1824 composition for string quartet, Death And The Maiden. It’s a terrible association that gets imprinted on the woman’s mind. It also explains the title of Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman’s Olivier Award-winning psychological thriller. While remaining allusive, the play references the reign of brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s and ‘80s. Thousands of people were killed or tortured under his regime before he was ousted in 1990. Death And The Maiden explores the plight of those who survived.
“Oh my God, this really happened,” actress Susie Porter says, describing her shock on learning more about what people like her character, Paulina, endured. “People went missing. People died. It’s pretty hectic. It’s a pretty, pretty horrible thing that happened, and the fact there are still human rights violations around the world…” Porter trails off.
"Some kind of word, some kind of smell, some kind of thought, and it retriggers your body into the fight or flight situation."
Years after her abuse, Paulina suffers what might be described as post-traumatic stress disorder, a deep somatic disturbance that often afflicts soldiers returned from warzones. “You’ll get a trigger,” Porter explains, “some kind of word, some kind of smell, some kind of thought, and it retriggers your body into the fight or flight situation. Basically, you’re always on edge, even if there has been no danger for a long time.
“By a strange twist of fate, [Paulina] believes the man who drops her home one night is her torturer, that he is the man who did these terrible things.” The play dives into the consequences of Paulina being so significantly triggered, and her intention to shift her pain onto this man who may or may not be deserving of it. “It’s very important that I’m not playing it mad. Paulina might be slightly unhinged, but certainly not mad. Her trauma plays out in the fact that she’s done nothing for the last 15 years of her life. It’s inaction. Then she finds this guy and puts him on trial because she wants to hear the truth. No one has listened to her. Even though the dictatorship is no longer in operation when we open the play, the criminals don’t get justice. They all have an amnesty. But what about the people who had gone through these horrific things?”
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In this sense, Dorfman’s piece asks difficult questions about what happens to individual humans in the aftermath of systematic trauma. They’re not only timeless questions, but particularly timely ones we should be asking ourselves in the unpleasant light of current human rights abuses all too close to home. “What’s interesting,” Porter suggests,” is, when does the victim become the perpetrator? Are the victim and perpetrator the same thing? All of us are completely capable of being violent, so it’s about looking at that as well. The perpetrator can become the victim.”
