The most poignant aspect of the play is that it does not unravel this ambiguity but instead shows how the issues of healing and reconciliation are not as straight-forward as we may want to believe. Maqbul Mohammed and Mumbi Kaigwa in Death and the Maiden Picture by Susan Wong It is not easy to tell if Paulina, as a result of her unstable mental health, (which is manifested in actions like stuffing her panties into Dr Miranda’s mouth to gag him) is merely being paranoid or if Miranda is really the doctor who tortured her. Paulina demands a confession from Dr Miranda, while Gerard, a firm believer in justice and fair trial defend him. Perhaps by coincidence, she also finds in his car a cassette that has Shubert’s Death and the Maiden, which is what the prison doctor played during the sessions of torture. However, Paulina recognises his voice as that of the doctor who conducted the rape and torture she endured in prison. The doctor, learning from the radio about Gerard’s appointment, comes back to congratulate him. He has just been dropped at his house by a Dr Miranda (Gakunju Kaigwa) who has rescued him from the roadside where he was stranded with a flat tyre. “We will die from an excessive dose of the truth” and reconciliation sometimes means further victimising the victim. Gerald finds himself fighting for justice on two fronts: at home and nationally and finds that the truth is not necessarily liberating. The play opens on the evening that Paulina’s husband Gerald (Maqbul Mohammed), a lawyer, has been appointed the president of the newly restored democracy, to head the commission responsible for investigating crimes committed by the former regime, with a view to healing and reconciling. Mumbi Kaigwa, Maqbul Mohammed and Gakunju Kaigwa in Death and the Maiden Picture by Susan Wong The country and the regime are unnamed but since Dorfman is Chiliean, it is often supposed that he writes about the country’s coup d’état of 1973 that resulted in the murder of President Salvador Allende and the coming of power of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Pauline (Mumbi Kaigwa), a former medical student, still suffers from the trauma she experienced when she was tortured and raped years ago for being and activist protesting the totalitarian regime that ruled her country. However, instead of a man, think of a woman in the circumstances that Schubert depicts in his letter, and you will get a fitting description of Paulina, the protagonist in Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden (1991), which opened at Phoenix Theatre on Friday, November 4 th, directed by Mumbi Kaigwa. So wrote the Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1829) in a letter to a friend, as he suffered from the late stages of syphilis, around the time he wrote his famous string quartet, Death and the Maiden (1831). Think, I say, of a man whose brightest hopes have come to nothing, to whom love and friendship are but torture, and whose enthusiasm for the beautiful is fast vanishing and ask yourself if such a man is not truly unhappy.” Think of a man whose health can never be restored and who from sheer despair makes matters worse instead of better. (This article appeared in The EastAfrican 21-27 November 2011 under the title Phoenix Take On Death and the Maiden) Mumbi Kaigwa as Paulina in Death and the Maiden Photo by Susan Wong
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