When her husband brings a stranger home, Paulina is convinced that he is the same man who tortured her 15 years ago. A new production of Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden, which deftly treads the thin line between justice and vengeance, is set to thrill audiences at the NCPA this month.
By Akshaya Pillai
You could sit in the dark, thinking theatre is a kind of escape until Death and the Maiden proves you wrong. Somehow, one can only wish that this play, now over three decades old, would stop being relevant. That someday it will finally be a relic, a period piece, something we flip through in classrooms like an object from another era, no longer able to locate ourselves inside it. But we are not as far from it as we would like to think. The easiest instance in fiction is the 2025 Jafar Panahi film It Was Just an Accident, set in Iran, where we see a ghost of this play as we watch a man seize someone he believes once tortured him. He gathers others who carry the same memory, hoping they will confirm it. But as they drive through the city with him, arguing, remembering, doubting, the certainty that brought them together begins to thin, and the question of what the alleged torturer deserves becomes harder to answer.
Ariel Dorfman wrote Death and the Maiden in 1990, in the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian dictatorship in Chile, a country trying to fold its atrocities into the past. A new production of the play, directed by Bruce Guthrie, is currently in early rehearsals; a process the cast describes variously as exciting, terrifying and generating “an inordinate amount of homework.” We speak over Zoom on World Theatre Day, which lends the whole thing a faint sense of occasion, slightly undercut by the fact that everyone is still, very obviously, figuring the play out.
Guthrie, however, is characteristically precise about what he is after. “I think that Death and the Maiden is one of the great political thrillers of the 20th century, and that different audience members will have different interpretations of it,” he says. “People will come in and they’ll be absolutely convinced that this person did it, or that he didn’t. How could she possibly remember this 15 years later? How could she not? So, there will be all sorts of things that an audience will find quite challenging.” He pauses, letting the thought hang there, as if the point is not what happened, but how urgently we want to believe that we know.
Paulina Salas is the play’s ferocious, fractured centre. One night, a stranger is brought into her home by her husband, a man who believes in the correct procedures of justice, and Paulina believes, with every nerve in her body, that this stranger is the same man who tortured her 15 years ago. What follows is three people in a room, and the slow, nauseating unravelling of what truth actually means when the systems designed to protect it have already failed you once.
The play operates simultaneously on three levels, Guthrie explains. There is the marriage: Paulina and Gerardo, played by Ira Dubey and Vivek Gomber, two people who have built a life on shared values and now find those values in direct, shattering conflict. There is the stranger at the door, Roberto Miranda, played by Neil Bhoopalam, whose guilt or innocence the audience will never quite have confirmed. And then there is the widest frame: a country, and the civilisational question of what we owe to accountability when it has been denied.
“It is structured like a Greek play,” says Guthrie. “Most Greek tragedies take place within 24 hours. Or like All My Sons, for example, where everything happens over a single day. Part of the work the team is doing now is extrapolating the timelines. She was kidnapped 15 years ago, and how long was she taken and tortured for? And then you read up on the military coup, the thousands of people who went missing, were tortured, murdered, disappeared. How does a country move forward with that?”
In the play, Paulina cannot move on. This is what makes her both heroine and, in the eyes of some, hysteric. The play will not tell you how to read her. The Roman Polanski film adaptation, Guthrie notes, made a very clear choice, resolved the ambiguity and closed the wound. “The play doesn’t do that,” he says. “And I think it’s actually all the better for it.”
Dubey, who anchors the production as Paulina, speaks with the concentrated calm of someone who has thought about this a great deal. She gravitates, she says, towards weight-bearing roles, the parts that demand you carry history in your body. She did it before with Nine Parts of Desire, a play about nine Iraqi women set between the Gulf Wars. “I clearly have a thing for women who have been traumatised and have suffered,” she says, half-laughing, with a kind of self-awareness that only very good actors have. She also notes the uncomfortable timeliness of the subject: Epstein is in the air, accountability is in the air, the question of who gets believed and who gets smoothed over is very much in the air. But she’s quick to pull back from the topical frame. “If you strip all that away,” she says, “it’s also a story of marriage, a story of trust and trauma on a very individual level. And I think that can resonate very deeply with every member of an audience. At the same time, we have to use our bodies to challenge ourselves in the room in terms of intimacy and movement to discover the lightness. I think that’s equally important.”
Gomber, playing Gerardo, the liberal lawyer husband, has been characteristically restrained on the Zoom call. He jokes that he has been keeping himself as “neutral” as possible. “I think it’s important to get in the room and let everybody else feed off everybody else’s energy,” he says. “The play is kind of like a piece of music from start to finish. So, I think the real challenge would be to make sure that all the beats are served. Just because it’s a dramatic moment doesn’t mean that that is the important part. What leads up to it is equally important; the silences, the gaps, the listening, the pauses,” he adds.
Meanwhile, Bhoopalam, who plays Roberto, the play’s central uncertainty, its haunted and haunting question mark, is careful to give nothing away. Asked how he plans to live inside a part like this, without knowing for sure who he is, he jokes that a little whiskey in a hip flask would probably help, before adding, more seriously, “We will have to take hard breaks and joke around. Bruce said at the beginning that we’re going to have fun doing this play.” This may sound counterintuitive for a play about justice deferred, but it is, in fact, a kind of professional wisdom; the only way to stay close to difficult fire without being consumed by it.
The cast and crew of Death and the Maiden want to make the audience work. “Theatre is an art form where the audience is not passive. They’re very active. In a way, this is the best sort of seva in order to fix society. For a better society, this art form is number one,” says Bhoopalam.
It is somewhere in this question of responsibility (who holds what and how much of it) that Emilia Cadenasso’s presence begins to matter. As the movement director and intimacy coordinator, she is there to structure what cannot be improvised. She is also Chilean, which places her at a difficult proximity to the material, where the line between work and memory is not always steady. “It’s particularly triggering for me,” she says. “What does it mean to not have a memory about these things? At the same time, when I was re-reading the play, I discovered that I have to do my own intimacy coordination with myself in the sense of protecting me from things that are triggering.”
She has already put together an “intimacy script”, an Excel sheet where each scene is broken down for its physical, psychological and verbal impact, marked low, medium, high. “Part of the work is to say ‘yes’, acknowledging the things that are actually happening in the country and in this room, and how triggering they could be. Not as if it was something normal to go through.” Alongside this, she is doing her own derolling too. “Right now, I’m not speaking about my country. Right now, I’m just telling the story through this production. I’m also doing my own boundary work.” De-rolling, the rituals that help everyone involved create boundaries between fiction and reality, will be the first thing she introduces to the cast before blocking, before choreography, before anything else. A way to step out of it.
The work of holding and containing does not stop with the actors. The set, when Guthrie describes it, sounds like the play has been given architectural form: a palatial beach hut that can, depending on how the light falls, look like a prison. Safe space and confinement occupying identical coordinates. There will be a string quartet, woven through because the play takes its name from Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14, a piece of music that Paulina associates with her torture, with the doctor who played it while she suffered and which has since become impossible for her to hear as merely beautiful.
What the production refuses to give you, and what it knows you will leave wanting, is verdict. Whether Roberto is guilty is a question the play holds out and then withdraws. What it insists on instead is the reality of Paulina’s experience, the cost of a system that demanded her silence, and the question of what justice looks like when it is never offered. These are not comfortable questions. They are not meant to be. “We will take them on that big old journey, and make the obstacles nice and big,” Guthrie says, almost cheerfully, at the thought of a rapt audience, “and none of the answers will be particularly easy. And then you can all sit back and enjoy it.”
Enjoy, Guthrie worries, might not be the right word but is quick to chip in that it probably is. Cadenasso speaks about polyphony and the way this text accumulates layers that do not resolve but echo. “The play doesn’t really end,” she says. “It continues with an echo when you go home.” This is the sensation that the best theatre produces: not catharsis, exactly, not the neat release of a tragedy, but something more persistent. A conversation you keep having with yourself, weeks later, in the car, in the shower, midconversation, in the middle of a sentence you thought was about something else.
This article was originally published in the May 2026 issue of ON Stage.
