The Grandmother sits beside a river day and night, waiting. What for? Corpses. 

In the rural valley this river flows through, the ‘widows’ of men who have been ‘disappeared’, the ‘desaparacedos’, survive. These men, one and all – husbands, fathers, brothers, sons – have been abducted by the soldiers serving a tyrannical, murderous military dictatorship, and all knowledge as to what has happened to them has been denied to these women.

Now and then a dead body is carried down the river, can be retrieved, and may or may or not be too decomposed or abraded by the river-stones to be identified. In any case, it could be given a proper burial, but for this permission must be obtained from these same soldiers, and even this is denied, or perverted.

Against the women are three soldiers: a Captain, a Lieutenant, an Orderly. At first the Captain, new to the valley and to his role, has every intention of behaving ‘correctly’, in terms of justice, peace, some degree of humaneness … But one of the stories of the play portrays the process of his moral corruption, as the cost of keeping his status under the evil totalitarian regime he serves. In the end he is just as rotten as his lieutenant; maybe all the more vicious because of his need to suppress evidence of his degradation.

The playwright Dorfman is a Chilean, and in 1973 a refugee when the loathsome General Pinochet’s military coup overthrew the democratically elected, moderately socialist government of Salvador Allende, which would have challenged the power of the avaricious big land-owning families, and the profiteering of US corporates.

This grim and very powerful play is about the horror of ordinary rural people’s lives in Chile, under Pinochet’s regime, but it could equally be about the widows of ‘disappeared’ men in Rios Montt’s Guatemala, or dictator-ruled El Salvador, or the vile Somosa’s Nicaragua, or the military junta’s Argentina. The details would differ in other totalitarian states yet the oppression, the suffering and the corruption would be much the same. 

This is a well-chosen play for a group such as these UCOL graduates, with a predominance of young women, in that it has given them all good acting opportunities, both in individual roles and as an ensemble. At the start, most of the women are seated at the river-bank, established by a curving double line of large flat stones. They chant, sing, dance; perform ritualized actions.

For the play’s three acts, the key role of the village matriarch, the grandmother Sofia Fuentes, is played, in succession, by Taryn Field, Chloe Kenny and Brianna Shaw. It is very creditable that they are able to maintain a sense of the coherence of the character. Otherwise all the women are good, both in cameo roles and in group work. 

Eden Mills conveys very well the shameful immoralisation of The Captain, and Regulus van Helsing the ruthless brutality and manipulativeness of The Lieutenant. One can’t go on to name everyone, but they all do well.

It’s a fine production, strongly directed by Lilicherie McGregor. Live musical support is provided by Rob Thorne and Vicki Clayton. The setting, such as it is, mainly that curving double row of stones, but with other detail added when needed elsewhere, is quite effective, as is Pierce Barber’s lighting. 

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