/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/THEATRE: Uruguayan Playwright Awarded for Three-Act Farce on Pinochet

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, Feb 6 2001 (IPS) - Uruguayan playwright Walter Acosta’s, ‘The Scorpion and the Opossum’, which won Cuba’s House of the Americas theatre prize last week, was inspired by the 503 days former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet spent under house arrest in London.

The play, however, does not merely depict Pinochet’s legal troubles, but is aimed at “becoming a parable of universal value”, according to its author, who has been living in Geneva since 1991. The play is not about Pinochet, but about all dictators, he added.

‘The Scorpion and the Opossum’, which was awarded the Cuban prize earlier this month, is a “three-act farce and upstage exit” set in a London hospital where a team of doctors is examining Pinochet’s mental condition, and in a residency where he is wined and dined by former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

In an overblown and absurd manner, Acosta depicts the mental ailments of the two main characters as a case of political madness.

Acosta explained that this specific form of madness escapes any attempt at medical classification, because it has nothing to do with disorders of the human mind or with the deterioration of an individual’s mental functions.

When the Uruguayan playwright refers to “political madness” he is talking about the perverse, lucid madness that characterised not just Pinochet but all of the world’s dictators in all eras.

One specific characteristic of the madness reflected in the play is that it seriously affects the social fabric at every level, the playwright stressed.

The same mental alteration that dominates Pinochet and Thatcher in the play exercises a kind of morbid, but powerful fascination over many people, who discover they have a hidden vocation of inquisitor and tormentor, said Acosta.

For that reason, Acosta decided that the play should have not one but two central characters, because the presence of a character inspired by Thatcher would add an important angle – the relationship between dictators and one part of society at large.

The general in the play has the blessing of others of his kind – as occurred in both the southern and northern portions of the American continent during the 1970s and 1980s – while he also enjoys the complicity and sympathy of dictators masquerading as democratic leaders, said the playwright.

For that reason, Thatcher appears, thus giving the play a dimension greater than the mere Pinochet affair. It could even apply to times closer to our own, such as the case of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia, said Acosta.

Pinochet was under house arrest in London from October 1998 to March 2000 while undergoing an extradition trial. He was wanted by Judge Baltasar Garzón in Spain for crimes against humanity committed by his regime in Chile (1973-90).

Acosta first became active in the theatre in Montevideo in the 1950s, in El Galpón, the famous Uruguayan drama troupe that toured Latin America with Atahualpa del Cioppo.

Acosta, who was born in 1935 in Las Piedras, 20 kms from the Uruguayan capital, later founded and directed his own troupe, Los Comediantes, in Montevideo.

The rest of his career developed in London, where he also worked with the BBC radio and television services. Today he continues to work in Geneva.

‘The Scorpion and the Opossum’ is the sixth play written by Acosta, a playwright who is identified by the strong social cast of his plays. His works are invariably set in the 1940s and 1950s rural conflicts in Uruguay, as well as the 1970s, when his country, like the rest of the Southern Cone of the Americas, was living under a military dictatorship.