You can’t put a gun in the hands of Ami Jones for practically an entire play and end up with a boring show. Nevertheless, something is missing from this production of Ariel Dorfman’s 1990 Chilean three-hander, though I’d be hard-pressed to place my finger on it exactly. The text may lie at the heart of my problems – it’s in translation from the Spanish for one thing, and has that certain clunkiness you get when you have a timid translation, the kind where you realise that no one has said anything unusual or fresh. It doesn’t help that the play – in which a married woman (Jones) attempts to convince her husband (Tom Stuchfield)  that the doctor (Julian Mack) she’s just bound and gagged is responsible for raping and torturing her during a recent period of dictatorship – wears its themes on its sleeve.  People say things like “we’re going to die from so much past” and “you can die from excessive doses of the truth” – it’s great for Part II English students who want nice big questions about tragedy, justice, crime and revenge to write about, but the best dramas for audiences at least tend to talk about their issues by never actually talking about them.

 

The cast is a good one, but it lacks the intensity and fluency required of the material it deals with. Stuchfield as the lawyer husband I really liked. His over-sized glasses and beta-male demeanour hid a believably decent man with more control than he at first appears. Jones is frighteningly intimate with her captive, twirling a seemingly over-sized gun in her diminutive hands in a lovely display of sudden unchecked power for someone used to being the victim. Mack takes it all stubbornly, though I wished his characterisation had been more fleshed out in one direction or the other – the ambiguity surrounding him becomes too much a lacuna. Unfortunately they don’t cohere together as a cast with the chemistry and vim that such a horrifying subject would surely engender in these people – possibly it is simply a text that requires a certain degree of maturity from its actors to convince. They are also bogged down by long, dark scene changes, superfluous sound effects and awkward staging, though I liked watching the sheer difficulty and time taken to properly bind and gag an unconscious man to a chair.

 

It is still a solidly thought-provoking play, with a keen sense of loss and tragedy, and worth your time if the cast relaxes into the intensity a bit more. But it isn’t quite the play it could be, or the themes of 20thcentury tyranny, brutalisation and retribution deserve.