Thirty years ago, the Royal Court introduced a Chilean playwright, Ariel Dorfman, with Death and the Maiden, a much-revived, twistily structured thriller about South American human rights abuses.
While theatre can have a one-hit-and-run attitude to distant politics, the Court has commendably kept an eye on Santiago. Its international programme mentors new writers in an initiative spawning several Court stagings, including Guillermo Calderón’s B in 2017 and now, in sparky English by the same translator, William Gregory, Una Lucha Contra … by Pablo Manzi.
Like most exported Chilean literature since Dorfman, the play is haunted by the 1973-90 genocidal dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, a Thatcher-backed anglophile who liked to shop at Harrods near the Court.
Three of the five short scenes occur in Chile or neighbouring Peru in 1998 (when Pinochet was finally indicted and arrested), 2014 and 2017, with interludes in 1880 Mexico, during a brief period of relative political enlightenment, and the US in 2019, where Trumpian vigilantes target Mexican immigrants. There are no overlapping characters but themes recur: resistance, violence, borders, human empathy, democracy’s fragility, and words a person dare not speak.
This fragmented, patterned narrative – from which viewers construct meaning and much is left unexplained – resembles novels by the cult Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, such as 2666 and Antwerp. As when reading Bolaño – or the great Peruvian political author, Mario Vargas Llosa – it struck me that foreign cultures might benefit from translation that adds footnotes or supporting information on details, such as identities of presidents and terrorist groups, that a native would know.
Challenging for consumers in any medium, jumpy multi-story plots in theatre are exceptionally demanding for actors. A cast of six brilliantly embodies multitudes under Sam Pritchard’s slick direction, with Joseph Balderrama showing outstanding variation as four men from diverse nationalities, professions and centuries.
Another lesson Manzi might learn from Bolaño is that the novelist wrote expansively, at up to 1,000 pages; the playwright should be encouraged to aim bigger to fulfil the potential of a play that feels like sketches for the epic political drama he could write.
A Fight Against … (Una Lucha Contra … ) is at the Royal Court theatre, London, until 22 January
