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 |  | Review by Pete Playdon and Molly Rogers
Death and the Maiden, for which Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman won the Laurence Olivier Award in 1992, was the latest production of the Warwick University Drama Society, who continue to bring adventurous and high-profile drama to the Arts Centre.
Dorfman's play is set in an isolated beach-house, where Paulina, the wife of a human rights lawyer, confronts the doctor who tortured her 15 years earlier and, in the process, orchestrates a remorselessly cathartic episode of personal and national trauma.
Although rooted in the Pinochet regime, Death and the Maiden explores wider questions of justice, revenge and the consequences of repression for both the victims and perpetrators of torture.
| 听 |  | Warwick University Student Union
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But this is more than a revenge fantasy of the oppressed. Far from being a didactic work, the political drama is subtly grafted onto the intensely intimate relationships of husband and wife, torturer and victim.
And not far beneath the surface is a feminist argument about how women's voices and experiences are silenced or ignored within both family relationships.
Wider socio-political contexts, with Gerrado's patronising inability to acknowledge his wife's experience act as a microcosmic reflection of the sadistic misogyny of Roberto and his torturers.
Given its subject matter, Death and the Maiden makes great emotional demands on its cast and Kate Kordel, James Rigby and Simon Lucas rose to the challenge with impressive and intense performances.
Yet despite strong performances, this production occasionally verged on the melodramatic, and some confusing stage direction spoiled the final scenes.
What should have been a sublime coda was instead a weak conclusion that undermined the impact of an otherwise impressive production.
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