La muerte y la doncella

David Serrano's new version of Ariel Dorfman's text about a victim of repression who believes she recognises the man who tortured her, with Miguel Rellán, Manuela Velasco and Juan Carlos Vellido in the cast.

David Serrano signs the writing and direction of this new version of La muerte y la doncella, a text by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman. On stage are Miguel Rellán, Manuela Velasco and Juan Carlos Vellido, in a contemporary theatre production that reflects on memory, justice and the aftermath left by dictatorships.

The play grows out of a personal experience of Dorfman's, who in his autobiography explains how he managed to escape Augusto Pinochet's coup d'état in Chile. The night before the assault on La Moneda, he was due to stand guard beside President Salvador Allende, but he swapped his shift with a colleague who ended up arrested, tortured, murdered and disappeared. His name was also removed from the list of the Government's collaborators.

Although it draws on Chile's recent history, the text goes beyond that context. The plot presents a victim of repression who believes she recognises the man who tortured her years earlier, and raises a conflict between justice, truth and reconciliation. Dorfman offers no definitive answers: it is the characters who express the contradictions and the pain, and the audience is left facing ethical dilemmas about forgiveness. The production is staged in the Sala Guirau of the Teatro Fernán Gómez.