The Comedy Theatre’s rep hasn’t really changed with its name. Yes, ‘Death and the Maiden’ writer Ariel Dorfman is an apt inaugural choice: Dorfman wrote his doctorate on Pinter before the British writer championed the Chilean’s work. But this small-cast revival with its big-star name Thandie Newton (following Keira Knightley’s footsteps on these boards) looks bland and familiar in its swish little West End niche.
Dorfman’s drama electrified Royal Court audiences when it premiered there in 1990, with its tense debates about justice and torture, stretched to breaking point in a scenario in which the wife of a prominent lawyer, imprisons her husband’s house-guest because she thinks he tortured and raped her under their country’s old regime.
There are plenty of thrills in Jeremy Herrin’s glossy production, which is defined by an elegant but lightweight performance from Newton as the gun-toting Paulina. Newton makes a graceful avenging angel in Armani – though you won’t believe your eyes when this immaculate twiglet coshes her victim on the head and heaves his zonked-out bulk onto the kitchen chair to which he is tied for most of the evening.
But there’s not enough depth, damage, or vocal range under the gloss: Newton makes Dorfman’s dark and relevant moral thriller look like James Bond for liberals.
Herrin’s production is slick and gripping and Tom Goodman-Hill is increasingly subtle and anguished as Paulina’s husband. Newton and co deliver the arguments with passionate clarity and the recent death of Gaddafi adds an edge to the perennial question of whether or not we should kill killers or torture torturers.
But there’s something imbalanced in the axis of evil in this three-handed production: Newton doesn’t plumb the depths but neither does Anthony Calf, as the man who she believes was once her Schubert-loving interrogator. Dorfman’s play leaves the question of his guilt just about open. But his relatively cuddly performance enlarges the moral vacuum in this production, where bad things happen and worse things have happened, but no-one seems to be responsible for them.