Theatre review: Villa and Discurso, The Hub, Edinburgh

IT’S almost four decades since the coup d’état that removed the elected left-wing government of Chile from office, and condemned many of its supporters to torture, imprisonment and “disappearance” at the hands of the Chilean military.

Villa and Discurso

The Hub

Star rating: * * * *

Yet in the fabric of Chilean society, the divisions between Left and Right remains almost as bitter as ever; and the young writer and theatre director Guillermo Calderon has now emerged as one of the leading creative forces in exposing that wound to the light, and seeking to understand it.

In this impassioned diptych of plays for three female actors, Calderon first imagines a conversation among three children of the tortured, 30 years on, who have been asked to decide what to do with the Villa, the notorious building where dissidents were tortured during the Pinochet regime. It’s a simple question, reconstruction or museum; but over 75 intense minutes, Francisca Lewin, Carla Romero and Macarena Zamudio use it explore every dimension of the legacy of torture.

The second and shorter piece, Discurso, imagines a searingly honest farewell speech that might have been given by Chile’s first left-wing president in a generation, Michele Bachelet, on the day in 2010 when she stepped down from office. Speaking through the voices of three and eventually four different actors, Calderon’s imagined Bachelet abandons the language of diplomacy to make clear her horror of the political Right, their attitudes and ideology.

She is, though, also a nice woman, who does not seek vengeance and wants to stand as a symbol of love, and of the possibility of a better way.

In a sense, Calderon seems to find her efforts comic, as well as tragic; but his superb poem for three voices captures something of the profound contradictions facing a good person in politics, in an age when the ideal of socialism once embraced by Bachelet and her generation is all but dead.