Opens in London on May 2.
The truth is out there, in that mulch of media-relayed current events, but we’re not privy to it. Do any of us believe what we see on television, or really know what sort of world we live in? With luck, we’ll soon be given a good idea, when Reader opens in London.
The work of Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, Reader is a politically charged but personal play about what happens to a society when it suppresses important truths in the name of higher ideals. Although it is set in a futuristic society, it is nevertheless a patent reflection our own. The main character is a professional censor, known sinisterly as The Pope, at whose hands the texts of the day are hacked into a language palatable to the controlled, 1984-like society he lives in.
That continues until one day, when he begins work on a book that reflects his own life and forces him into a self-awakening. Dorfman says that the play was “a way of asking what would happen to a man who has spent his life suppressing the works of others if a book he was about to ban suddenly began to reveal secrets from his past and predict an anguishing future which was coming alive in front of his eyes”.
Reader sprang directly from the author’s experience; it began life as a short story, written in vengeance against a dictatorial approach to art and literature in Chile at the time. “It was a sort of semi-tragic joke I was playing on those who had been censoring me and other writers all through the 20th century,” Dorfman says. But the story soon expanded to address wider contemporary issues. The US government’s attack on Iraq has unmistakable echoes of the violent, CIA-backed end to Allende’s Chile in 1973. “The play continues to be sadly relevant. The governments portrayed in it smother, manipulate and control information in the name of the highest ideals, using the fear of the populace in an ongoing ‘war on terror’. Sound familiar?”
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