Even granted the wife’s emotional instability, it’s quite unnatural that Gerardo should leap to the conclusion that she is deluded in her suspicions.In the original production, Juliet Stevenson and Bill Paterson ensured that you remained ambivalent in your responses to these characters. Fate throws the supposed torturer into Paulina’s clutches on the very day that her husband, Gerardo, is appointed to a commission investigating human rights abuses. If it gets out, her alarming do-it-yourself trial of a man she is convinced she can recognise from his voice and smell will be a gift to the right-wingers who are waiting to jump on the commission’s activities.Yes, it’s a powerful conceit but, as the casting in Alexander’s production serves to emphasise, Dorfman can only develop it by portraying an unbelievable marriage. In a society emerging from dictatorship, those who were persecuted under the old regime have to mingle with their persecutors. You can never know whether the hand you are now shaking might not be the one that attached electrodes to your genitals Nor have the questions Dorfman asks become less relevant. Can there be reconciliation without retribution? Is it selfish to seek for personal justice if it risks jeopardising the delicate work of the democratic movement?But, while absorbing, Paul Alexander’s revival can’t disguise the fact that the play depends upon a series of contrivances.

Disturbing shades of Abu Ghraib?

A bound and hooded male prisoner is hauled around on a dog leash by a young woman. Disturbing shades of Abu Ghraib? It’s more complicated here, for in Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden, the woman is the principal victim. Set in an unnamed post-totalitarian state (akin to the author’s native Chile after the fall of Pinochet), the piece created a tremendous stir in 1991 with its shocking and provocative scenario: a woman who has at her gun-waving mercy the doctor who allegedly raped and tortured her 15 years earlier.
The subject has lost none of its urgency. A bound and hooded male prisoner is hauled around on a dog leash by a young woman. “We think firemen and servicemen will love this movie most of all.”We don’t want people thinking we are in on the Fahrenheit 9/11 bandwagon. Everyone should be afraid of this movie.”That said, the initial impression is that the Bush White House has more to fear from audiences streaming to see Team America before the election than from the Democratic candidate John Kerry.President Bush has repeatedly appealed for support by saying a vulnerable America needs him. If his War on Terror rhetoric is ridiculed and unmasked as moronic fear-mongering – as his political enemies charge – it could undermine his political message just when he needs it most..

“People are gonna leave this film wondering which political side we are on,” they said in a radio appearance. Even the nineties are scarcely represented.The Nice Jazz Festival runs for eight days, which doesn’t make it ideal for visitors seeking a compressed experience. The concerts only take place in the evenings, but seven artists are divided between three stages and there is no compromise on volume levels, given its proximity to the upmarket Cimiez district. Nevertheless, it’s still puzzling why they call it a jazz festival…. Imagine the Thunderbirds fighting the War on Terror. Or, if you prefer, a Jerry Bruckheimer action spectacular recast as a musical

Imagine the Thunderbirds fighting the War on Terror. Maintaining suavity even in this balmy glade, Ferry chooses to play a hit-infested set, although most of the Roxy Music material comes from the band’s second wind in their Manifesto period.