As his seminal play Death And The Maiden is revived in London, Matthew Amer talks to writer Ariel Dorfman about Harold Pinter and living in exile.
How often, as a child, did I shout, “Run for your life” before scampering away from a friend, giggling with excitement? The greatest threat to me at that point was the chance I might trip over my own feet and graze a knee.
South American writer Ariel Dorfman, whose play Death And The Maiden is revived in the West End this week, is one of the small percentage of people who knows how it feels to run for your life in the most real and mortal sense.
As a cultural advisor to then Chilean President Salvador Allende, when General Pinochet launched his coup in the South American country in 1973, Dorfman’s life was in very serious danger. He had to escape his country.
“You don’t run for your life,” he tells me, when we speak on the phone, “you crawl for your life. You sneak into different places.”
“You flee,” he continues, “because your life is in danger. If they catch you, they will kill you; you’ll be lucky if they kill you, because probably they’ll do worse things to you before they kill you.”
With Pinochet ruling, Dorfman was unable to return home for 17 years. He had left almost everything and everyone behind.
“Going into exile,” he explains, “is like going into the country of the dead, because you’ve lost everything that gave meaning to your life; you’ve lost your library, you’ve lost your friends, you’ve lost your everyday language, you’ve lost the jokes, you’ve lost the smells of familiar food in the air, you’ve lost the trees that you used to walk under. You lose the physical world that you belong to and it comes out of a great sense of defeat; defeat of a project, defeat of dreams.”
“I would not want to repeat that period of exile ever again,” he tells me, which, to be honest, is not that surprising. “However, it did turn me into the man I am. Death And The Maiden is the work of an exile, because only a man who came back to Chile with the distance exile gave him could have written a play that was that transgressive and that disturbing to a country in transition itself.”
“I think plays should be disturbing, or at least there should be a place for disturbing plays on the stage in every city”
If it is not too flippant to suggest, Death And The Maiden is the silver lining to the cloud of exile. Though not as significantly, it also changed his life. It is his most well known play and the piece that drew him to the attention of a British playwright who was to become his friend, a British playwright whose work had inspired Dorfman, a British playwright whose name is now shared by the theatre in which Death And The Maiden is being revived: Harold Pinter.
Such was Pinter’s effect on Dorfman’s writing that the Chilean playwright describes him as “my mentor before I even met him”.
Their first meeting came in London in 1990 at a reading of the play that would become Death And The Maiden, given as part of a campaign against censorship, where Pinter encouraged the younger playwright. But his association with Death And The Maiden went much further. When a possible production with Peter Hall at the helm fell through because the British director wanted the ending to be “a little bit less disturbing”, Pinter once again stepped in, offering a world premiere of his own short piece The New World Order to the Royal Court if they would also stage Death And The Maiden. When it was felt that, as public performances crept closer, the production could use the writer’s touch once more, an anonymous donor paid for Dorfman’s plane ticket to London. Though Pinter never admitted it, Dorfman suspects his old friend and mentor.
All this explains why Death And The Maiden is such a fitting first play for the newly renamed Harold Pinter theatre.
“To be supported and sponsored by this man, as I was by other very famous writers who helped me at different moments in my life, gives me great joy and exhilaration,” he says, “but also responsibility, because it means that now that I am in a situation where I can help others, I very often do something similar for other people. It’s a passing of a baton in some senses, a relay race, where you’re helping others just like you were helped yourself.”
Little to do with Death And The Maiden, I learn from talking to Dorfman, comes easily. The play’s very inception grew out of a military coup and a life of exile. Its tale, in which a former prisoner comes face to face with a man she believes to have been her captor and torturer, asks huge and harrowing questions of the audience: “The one thing I knew,” Dorfman says about writing the piece, “was that I had to disturb the audience. I think plays should be disturbing, or at least there should be a place for disturbing plays on the stage in every city.” Even this revival had issues. Not that producers, directors or even actors did not want to stage it. “I didn’t have to convince anybody,” Dorfman assures me, but the project, as a whole, “didn’t seem to gel”.
“Going into exile is like going into the country of the dead”
Now, fortunately for London audiences, it has. With Royal Court associate Jeremy Herrin in the director’s chair and a cast of Thandie Newton, Tom Goodman-Hill and Anthony Calf, Dorfman is eager to experience his play once more. The last time he saw any production of it was in 2006, when the Royal Court staged a rehearsed reading as part of its 50th anniversary celebrations.
He is, he says, a writer who likes to be involved with his shows when they are first being staged. With the words in place, he can let go and leave them to have a life of their own. He has been invited to many performances of Death And The Maiden across the globe, but has turned most of them down.
“This is different. This is London. It’s where the play was welcomed and where the play first established itself worldwide. I particularly like the London stage and the London audience, so I’m looking forward to a very special experience.”
In fact, his experience may be extra special as it is part of a fabulous trans-European double bill. After arriving in London to lend his support to Death And The Maiden, he flies off to Madrid, where Lord Of The Rings star Viggo Mortenson is starring in a production of the piece that Dorfman considers his “intellectual and emotional sequel to Death And The Maiden,” Purgatorio. “It’s going to be one of those very, very good trips to the theatre,” he says. I imagine him smiling.
In fact, I imagine him smiling most of the way through our slightly truncated interview. He has a lightness and humour to his voice that belies a man who had decades of his life altered by exile, who lost huge parts of himself and great swathes of possessions in fleeing, who has conjured the darkness and disturbance of Death And The Maiden. “I’m full of optimism,” he says, “full of cheerfulness, full of desire, full of hope.”
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