Theatre - An unsettling play gives evidence against Pinochet, writes Michael Portillo Tejas Verdes Gate Theatre, London W11

Tejas Verdes was the name of an old resort hotel in San Antonio on Chile's Pacific coast, a short distance from the capital, Santiago. Prisoners were taken there for torture following the 1973 coup that overthrew and killed the then president, Salvador Allende. FermIn Cabal's play about those horrific interrogations was first performed in his native Spain a couple of years ago, but its arrival on the London stage coincides with dramatic developments in Chile's quest for closure.

On 5 January, the country's supreme court upheld the indictment and house arrest of General Augusto Pinochet, the former president, for nine kidnappings and one murder.

Tejas Verdes closes with lines spoken from beyond the grave by one of the regime's victims. She looks forward to "the time when tyrants will weep tears of blood . . . God will have awoken and in one final majestic peal, He will sound the hour of the Last Judgement". Whatever the Almighty's verdict, the Chilean courts are on course to pronounce.

The events in Chile this month remind us that Cabal's play is part of a campaign to bring the former dictator to justice. Chile has embarked, to an unusual extent, on a national process of truth and reconciliation. Victims and perpetrators have given evidence at public hearings. At the end of last year, the Valech Commission reported that it had received credible accounts of torture from 28,000 victims, to whom the government will now pay a pension. There have been prosecutions, too. In 1995, for example, the former commanding officer of the Tejas Verdes barracks, Manuel Contreras, was sentenced to seven years in prison for his part in killing Orlando Letelier, a former minister in Allende's cabinet. Contreras faces further charges, but campaigners have been frustrated in their attempts to have Pinochet convicted. He is 89, so they may yet be denied satisfaction.

Cabal wrote his play as a dramatised reading, a series of soliloquies for five women, without any interaction between the characters. The director, Dick Bird, has converted the piece into a "promenade". The audience members stand and the actors appear in their midst unexpectedly, moving among them, sometimes jostling them for space, and addressing them eyeball to eyeball.

Bird has stripped out the interior of the Gate Theatre and covered the floor with earth and broken fragments of paving. Tree trunks rise between ground and ceiling, creating the impression of a forest or mine. Theatre staff issue torches so the audience can find its way through dark passages into the lightless and foggy performance space. Full marks for originality, but is it appropriate? Our progress had the feeling of a theme-park ride, which set the theatregoers jabbering excitedly, even though everyone must have known the grim nature of the play's subject.

The five actors represent a doomed prisoner, her cellmate who turns collaborator, a military doctor who, years later, testifies at a public hearing, a Spanish lawyer representing Pinochet and a gravedigger. The latter, played by Gemma Jones, steals the show. The gravedigger has to deal with the surge in corpses, some children and many in a pitiful state. She is banned from saying anything to the desperate parents who flock to the cemetery hoping to learn about loved ones who have disappeared. But she takes pity on a mother and gives her the body she believes to be her daughter. The regime's department of national security takes an awful revenge on her. Sitting on a stool among us, her gaze directed to each spectator in turn, Jones wonderfully weaves together disgust, compassion and terror as she tells her harrowing story.

Diana Hardcastle does well in the play's most difficult role. She must explain how she buckled when interrogators started to hurt her six-year-old son, and how she ended up denouncing everyone she had ever known and loved.

These testimonies and confessions are almost unbearable in the inti- macy of the promenade setting, fully justifying Bird's courageous staging of the piece. Shereen Martineau gives a moving interpretation of the prisoner who is murdered. Her dark eyes and hair fit the playwright's description of this pretty young girl from a well-off Chilean family who refuses to betray her political activist boyfriend. Her descriptions of the brutality she suffers are not for the faint-hearted.

If I felt uneasy about the evening, it was because the performance in a British theatre of a Spaniard's political polemic about Chile smacked of a sort of imperialism. Cabal could have gone on writing about human rights issues in Spain, as he has before. In 1994, I attended the inauguration of a democratically elected Chilean president, where both Pinochet and Allende's widow were present. I figured it was for Chileans alone to work out how to achieve national reconciliation. And yet the world claims the right to pontificate.

Booking on 020 7229 0706 until 5 February

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website