The Argentina-born Melbourne-based director Leticia Cáceres has been rehearsing Death and the Maiden, the play in which Paulina, a character played by Susie Porter, can choose whether to avenge her state-sponsored rape and torture or break the cycle of hate.
Written in 1990 by Buenos Aires-born playwright Ariel Dorfman and first staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1991, the play was inspired by the then-recent atrocities committed in Chile under the regime of General Augusto Pinochet. Yet the play’s setting is unnamed, because it could be about any South American country in transition from brutal dictatorship to democracy.
Cáceres has never met the playwright, but their respective experiences of exile have informed their art.
During rehearsals, Cáceres cannot help thinking of her parents, Carlos and Maria Cáceres, who chose to fight oppression through protest, before fleeing Argentina for Canada in the 80s, and finally migrating to Australia.
When we speak, Maria is seriously ill, and the director will dedicate the upcoming seasons of the production at Melbourne Theatre Company in July and Sydney Theatre Company from August to her parents.
They live in Brisbane, where the family first arrived in 1991, and where, as a student at Indooroopilly state school Leticia was encouraged to pursue a career in drama.
In Argentina in 1976, a military junta had seized power at the beginning of the “dirty war”, but a young and idealistic Carlos, who identified strongly as a Marxist, would become a physicist, and Maria a computer programmer.
While Carlos was completing his doctorate at Argentina’s oldest university, the National University of Cordoba, the couple joined rallies against poverty and for workers’ and women’s rights.
During one rally, Maria was grabbed by police officers, her spectacles falling to the ground, yet she managed to leave unscathed, while two friends were bashed over the head and punched in the stomach.
But Carlos and Maria rightly sensed they were being followed. One night in 1977, the secret police turned up. The couple fled via their planned escape route through their apartment roof while being fired upon by shotguns.
“They were screaming out to neighbours to help them,” says Cáceres, “but everyone was terrified and didn’t know how to help them. It was a completely hopeless and terrifying situation.”
Although Carlos and Maria returned to their lives, they suspected neighbours had denounced the pair for their political views.
Later an uncle in the military, who would be killed by rebel forces in the jungle, warned Carlos and Maria they were on the regime’s “lists”, and to keep their heads down. Now with two small children, Leticia and her brother, Marcos, Maria was so scared that Carlos applied for post-doctoral study at McMaster university in Ontario, so the family left for Canada in 1981.
They returned to Argentina in 1983, hopeful of the future given certain military generals who had committed the worst crimes had been imprisoned.
“But, like in Death and the Maiden, when we returned, the same people who allowed these persecutions to happen were still in place,” says Cáceres. “It was still a conservative place, and the wheels of change were moving slowly. My parents couldn’t shake their post-traumatic stress.”
The family returned to Canada in 1989, then arrived in Australia two years later.
Does Cáceres think art can enlighten the unaware and be cathartic for those who have suffered? “Absolutely. This play has lasted the test of time because it is so incredibly potent, and the scenes touch and resonate in such a human way. The price of politics on the very personal is something only art can articulate.”
In 2011 Dorfman, who now lives in the US, wrote in the Guardian that Paulina, the woman on the stage earlier “raped, tortured and betrayed”, faces the question: “Are you going to perpetuate the cycle of terror? How can you forgive if the price they are demanding is that you forget?”
A quarter of a century after the play was written, Cáceres says it is still relevant. “You could still look at it in the global age: the situation of 9/11 and retribution as the result of attack. We’ve compromised certain human rights declarations to satisfy our other base instincts of vengeance.”
Cáceres is “deeply concerned” by the decision of the federal arts minister, George Brandis, to sequester $104m over four years from the arm’s-length Australia Council budget for his own national program for excellence in the arts.
“In a way, it resonates with some of the themes in Death and the Maiden: how many versions of the truth are we going to be allowed to share with audiences?
“I find it distressing when power is handed over and given to one figure, to dictate whether or not a story or a particular type of form is going to be considered permissible for the rest of the community.”
- Death and the Maiden opens at Melbourne Theatre Company on 18 July and at Sydney Theatre Company on 28 August
