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The Compromised Maiden
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20238 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
2,097 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Somerset Maugham once said that the flair for writing plays is not a literary talent; a playwright, in the proper sense of the word, is a man who maps a game, making a play as a cartwright makes a cart. Good writing is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition of such work. Sometimes the craftsman is severely limited in other respects (say in his supply of moral or political common sense); nevertheless, he is able to wright a stage work that can be made exciting, moving, funny, frightening, or just entertaining.
One obvious example of such an ambiguously talented artist is Harold Pinter at his best (though not in his later work, which ranges form shallow to cheap and pathetic). Another is the Chilean academic-writer Ariel Dorfman, whose play Death and the Maiden (dedicated to Pinter) is currently running in London and New York.
Dorfman fled his country after Salvador Allende was ousted, arriving in America via Amsterdam. An unrepentant Castroite and fiercely anti-Yanqui, he is nevertheless happy to work for the Yankee dollar as research professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University. Among his more notable works is the book How to Read Donald Duck, a hate-America rhapsody on the theme of Yankee "cultural penetration" in Latin America. The term and the book are described with what looks like a shaking head and a wry smile by the distinguished Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa:
[The purpose of] "cultural penetration" . . . was to pervert native cultures and deprive Latin American countries not merely of their raw materials but also of their "souls." A richly documented book, by the Chilean Ariel Dorfman . . . purports to show how Donald Duck, yes, Walt Disney's Donald Duck, was the cornerstone of this evil cultural conspiracy.
It is easy to see why Dorfman feels a spiritual kinship with Pinter, whose anti-Americanism amounts almost to a species of psychosis.
Death and the Maiden was a flop in Chile. Thanks to an inspired and brilliant performance by one of the best actresses in the United Kingdom, London's West End production of the play has acquired an interest and strength that the text by itself barely sustains. The plot's premise rests on strained coincidence, but if you can accept this, then (given the central performance) what follows is engaging enough to fill an evening of theater--and perhaps an hour or so of liberal argument in the bar
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