Death and the Maiden

Synopsis

Paulina Salas (Thandie Newton) is a former political prisoner in an unnamed Latin American country who suffered at the hands of her captor whose face she never saw and who played played Schubert's composition Death and the Maiden during the act of rape.

Tonight, by chance, a stranger arrives at the secluded beach house she shares with her husband Gerardo, a human rights lawyer.... A stranger Paulina is convinced was her tormentor and must now be held to account...

Thandie Newton  makes her stage debut in the first London revival of Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden. Her extensive screen credits include Crash (for which she won a BAFTA), Beloved opposite Oprah Winfrey, Mission Impossible II with Tom Cruise, The Pursuit of Happyness alongside Will Smith and and she played Condoleezza Rice in Oliver Stone’s Ws.

Death and the Maiden premiered at the Royal Court in 1991 before transferring to the West End’s Duke of York’s Theatre for a year. The original production was directed by Lindsay Posner and starred Juliet Stevenson, Michael Byrne and Bill Paterson. It won Airel Dorfman the 1992 Olivier Award for Best New Play.

The  Broadway premiere of Death and the Maiden opened in 1992 and starred Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss and Gene Hackman and was directed by Mike Nichols.

A film version of Death and the Maiden, released in 1994 and directed by Roman Polanski starring Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley and Stuart Wilson.

This London revival of Death and the Maiden at the Comedy Theatre is directed by Jeremy Herrin who’s  recent credits include That Face, Tusk Tusk, The Vertical Hour, The Priory and  The Heretic. He made his Shakespearean debut this summer with Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare’s Globe starring Eve Best and Charles Edwards.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 25 October 2011

Thandie Newton, making a West End debut at the Harold Pinter formerly known as the Comedy Theatre, has big boots to fill in Death and the Maiden, following Juliet Stevenson in the role of Paulina Salas, a rape and torture victim in Pinochet’s Chile who corners her supposed tormentor in a beach house shortly after her lawyer husband has been appointed to a government amnesty commission.

So how does she do? She works hard and gets through it. But her voice is severely limited in range and colour and her emotional register underwhelming. Whereas Stevenson tore you apart, Newton presents a doll-like figure, wielding a handgun as big as her head, barking out her rage and sense of injustice with the pettiness of someone who’s been short-changed at a supermarket check-out.

For the first few scenes of Jeremy Herrin’s otherwise sleek production, smartly designed by Peter McKintosh, with piles of pebbles on the forestage and crash...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 17 November 2011:

This has been quite a year for screen actresses to make belated stage debuts, but with mixed results. Keeley Hawes chose a relatively minor role at the National, Emma Pierson was superb but in one of the worst plays of this or any other year, and now Thandie Newton bravely tackles the role of a medical student who suffered unspeakable torture in Pinochet's Chile and now confronts the doctor who oversaw the evil process. Although confirming that Ms Newton is one of the most beautiful women in the world I'm afraid she has come a bit of a cropper with this performance. There's no real fear, anger, grief or believable need for retribution and her voice lacks emotional range. However I'm not sure if this is entirely her fault as the much more experienced Tom Goodman-Hill and Anthony Calf are not much better so maybe Jeremy Herrin has inexplicably chosen to portray this story in a way that is drained of almost all the tension. Ariel Dorfman's play did maintain enough interest for me to return after a totally unnecessary interval but it's noticeable that it closed with a highly perfunctory curtain call. Maybe that was influenced by so many negative reviews, a sparse audience, the news that this will close early or perhaps the cast are aware that they are in a production that has badly misfired. Death and the Maiden is a highly appropriate choice for the newly renamed Harold Pinter Theatre but Pinter himself would never have allowed such a limp production of what should be a powerful play....

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