As actors Ira Dubey, Vivek Gomber and Neil Bhoopalam prepare for a second run of Ariel Dorfman’s political thriller Death and the Maiden, they discuss the physical and psychological memories of the first run, the intense preparation that went into it and what it taught them about essaying lives vastly different from their own.
By Akshaya Pillai
Ira Dubey is on a boat off the coast of Greece when we speak, with the Acropolis, from the night before, somewhere behind her, where she had watched a theatre company do the same handful of Greek tragedies they have been doing for eight years, 20 shows a month, without apparently tiring of any of them. It is an odd vantage point from which to talk about Death and the Maiden, an Ariel Dorfman play that hasn’t left her system since her last performance, six months ago.
Dubey plays Paulina, a survivor of political torture who believes she has, years later, come face to face with her torturer. Vivek Gomber, who plays her husband and a lawyer, describes the first run of the show the way one would describe a fever breaking: “You perform and perform and perform, and it goes by in a blur. You don’t get to sit inside until it’s over.” Neil Bhoopalam, who plays the doctor Paulina believes tortured her, was struck by how differently the play could be understood from one seat to the next, even by people sitting shoulder to shoulder. Now, months later, with a second run coming up in October, they return to a play they know differently, having learnt how much of it belongs to the audience.
For the first run, director Bruce Guthrie watched all three of them find their footing from two technical seats at the back of the auditorium. “It was great to watch the actors settle into it and really take ownership of the material.” From back there, he could also watch the audience responding in ways he hadn’t necessarily anticipated, with laughter appearing at moments that seemed to have little to do with comedy. “A laugh doesn’t necessarily need to come from a place of finding a thing funny,” he explains. “It can come from discomfort, or a sense of absurdity.”
What Guthrie didn’t do, in between shows, was give much feedback to his cast. “You’ve got to give the actors an opportunity to really take ownership, without the burden of a director giving lots and lots of notes,” he says. His favourite one, when he does give it, is two words long: think quicker. “You’ve got to play those moments as if they’re the first and only time that they happen,” he adds.
On what became of the mountain of homework they had taken on the last time we spoke—all those books, conversations, bits of research and rabbit holes—Gomber says it was really about having things to reach for when they needed them. “Bruce gave us a huge toolbox with different things which the actors could use to, you know, get out of trouble,” says the actor whose script has not been opened since the last show. It is somewhere in his house now, while six months of ordinary life has happened around it, and he isn’t the least worried about it. “I think it was more about us as performers becoming almost like investigative journalists or detectives. We lived with the text enough and researched it enough to really understand the world of the play,” he says, of the early homework, and that part, for him, is done now. What he is curious about next is what the play does to the three actors who have spent six months not interacting with it.
Gomber is also the one who seems most talented at puncturing the seriousness of the room. Everyone falls silent when asked if there are scenes they still want to work on and perfect. Gomber calls out, “Say something, f*****, somebody else speak.” He reminds one of that cheeky boy in school who somehow managed to be the teacher’s favourite. He has that same instinct for getting a laugh and keeping the room moving, even when the subject at hand is as heavy as this one.
The question of what makes a room laugh is, of course, a strange one in a play like this. “If the audience decides to turn discomfort into laughter, I let that feed me,” Dubey says. There’s no wrong or right reaction. She recounts watching Naseeruddin Shah’s plays with her family, laughing at moments when, on paper, they shouldn’t be laughing at all. “I’ve noticed how the minute one person laughs, the whole audience feels, okay, we can laugh, too. It’s okay to laugh.” For Dubey, who is also the show’s producer, that is part of what makes theatre so different from film: the audience is in the room, sharing in the experience, and its response becomes part of the performance. She had expected audiences to question Paulina’s state of mind, but the feedback she kept hearing was quite different. “It was another interpretation. She’s not seen as unhinged. Instead, people noted that she’s got this clarity and logic about how she wants to get revenge and needs accountability for what happened to her.”
Bhoopalam has a more physical memory of the first run. For most of the play, he is strapped to a chair, held in one spot as Paulina circles him, interrogates him and takes control of the room. “My ab muscles get a thorough workout,” he says, sitting back and then forward again, unconsciously finding the position his body knows from the stage. “For two weeks at showtime every day, my stomach started twitching so much that I had to speak to my trainer about it.” It is one of the less glamorous souvenirs of a play that asks a lot of the body. “We have way more fun working now because we are familiar with it, so it’s not such uncharted territory as it was the first time around,” he adds. The first time, he was still getting used to that chair: being tied to it, listening, fighting, keeping track of Dubey and Gomber, anticipating what was coming next. The luxury of getting lost in the scene was simply not available. Now, he is looking forward to returning to the work with the benefit of everything they had built during the first run, as well as the distance of the months since. “I’m so happy we’ve got a second run,” he says. His is one of those voices that makes you want to stop taking notes for a second. It is unhurried and, I want to say, smoky, with a slight huskiness that makes even my own name sound unfamiliar when he says it. Bhoopalam has been doing theatre since he was 19; perhaps some of those years in theatre have coated his voice. I can imagine an audience waiting for him to speak again.
Dubey’s physical reckoning was different. There is a moment in Death and the Maiden when Paulina has the gun in her hand and Roberto is tied up in front of her. The gun is heavy and it is her first time holding one. Yet, she has to make holding it look natural, even effortless. “I did a lot of research on how to use the gun,” she says. “Especially in the first monologue, it was exciting to work with it, because it sort of gives her a lot of power. She is in charge because of that gun. And when you first see Paulina, when he’s tied up and she has the gun, he’s totally helpless. She doesn’t have to use the gun in a violent way. It’s almost a toy, in a way.”
As the interview proceeds, Emilia Cadenasso, the production’s movement director and intimacy coordinator, is scribbling away in her notebook, making notes beside things the actors say about the first run. Cadenasso is Chilean, and brings with her a kind of first-hand access none of the others could have manufactured on their own. She has now seen which things become bigger, which ones become smaller and those that disappear altogether once the three are in front of an audience. So, preparing for the second run will have little to do with the rehearsal room but would be more a return to the actors she has already seen on stage.
The de-rolling itself, something Cadenasso introduced before any blocking or choreography began in the rehearsal process of the first run, starts to make more sense when they talk about what happens after the curtain comes down. You have spent the evening inside somebody else’s fear, anger, suspicion; then, at some point, you have to remember where you left your own life. There is no one universal ritual, she explains: “If you need to pray, you pray. If you need to have a cigarette, you have a cigarette. If you need to run five times because you need to be very tired for your mind to be free to perform, you do that. It’s very personal, and it’s something that every actor has to discover for themself. It’s very private and sacred, and you don’t mess with that,” she says. What is shared is the second half of the ritual; a group warm-up before every show, small physical cues the cast developed together to mark when they were ‘in’ the space of the play and when they were out of it, and a set of house rules about how to behave on breaks, given the material.
Gomber calls it a blessing to know when you’re on and know when you’re off. “It’s important to close that book and go back to your life and to be able to come back again. It’s an important skill. It helps you and the rest of the room.” How strange that so much of acting is as much about learning how to enter another person’s life, as it is about learning how to leave it.
This article was originally published in the October 2026 issue of ON Stage.
