[In the following review, Nash compliments Dorfman's “chilling” portrayal of political oppression in Reader, drawing parallels to the plot of Death and the Maiden.]

Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean citizen living in exile in the U.S., is best known for his play Death and the Maiden, which was made into a major motion picture directed by Roman Polanski. In Reader he has written a chilling, utterly riveting play which was performed at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. Here the issue of political repression comes to the forefront, and the characters wrestle with moral choices and the consequences of questionable decisions made in the past. All takes place in an unnamed South American country where political oppression creates a special and hideous form of terror, pitting family members against one another and toxifying the atmosphere with suspicion and scarcely veiled rage.

Death and the Maiden involved a woman who is put in the unusual position of being able to exercise power and control over a person who committed hideous wrongs. There the crimes committed were those of torture and sexual assault against political adversaries. Not surprisingly, the practices were sanctioned by the government. Social control is viewed (by the government) as more important than individual self-expression, because if the antigovernment forces were to prevail, it could lead to chaos, destruction, and anarchy. Ironically, that is precisely what happened, but instead of the student protesters functioning as anarchists, it is the influential members of government and the police who bring about true anarchy.

This is precisely the case in Reader. The social controllers do not succeed in stabilizing the government, and neither do they preserve law and order. In Reader the agent of social control is the government's censor, who tries to exercise Orwellian thought control by not allowing people to read what could be damaging. Instead of stabilizing law and order and ensuring that the government has a reign of equanimity and accord, the censor contributes to an environment of terror, which is ultimately nihilistic. According to Nietzsche, the next stage is “radical nihilism,” which is characterized by the widespread belief that what are promulgated as truth and values are simply constructs enforced by the dominant ideology for its own ends.

Reader involves family secrets which are also government secrets, and they illustrate how repression never stays on the level of citizens' interaction with government but also extends into individual families. Duplicity, betrayal, death, and denial are always part of this situation. In Reader the scene is made even more poignant by the fact that the action involves a husband's willingness to commit his wife to a mental institution when she expresses views that contradict those of the government. The intensity of the play also has to do with the existential despair that the father's behavior engenders in the son, who slowly begins to realize the truth. Dorfman's method of unveiling truth has to do with mirrorings and doubles. However, his approach is quite different than that of other playwrights: he has one actor play two parts, so that the same person is seen to embody two extremes of perception, values, and conduct.

In Reader the censor (Don Alfonso), more than anyone else, is aware that he himself is a part of such radical nihilism, claiming that he “won't allow a tree to expire” to publish what he deems to be without value or social utility. Of course, this has an eerie echo here in the United States, where funding for the arts has been withdrawn with the claim that the expenditure does not contribute to society. In a totalitarian society the implications are more frightening, because the same standards that hold for written production are applied to human beings. Thus, if a person is deemed subversive or devoid of social utility, the government believes it has the right not to “waste” natural resources in keeping that person “extant.” Dorfman's play is a chilling reminder that the issues of social control and utilitarianism which typified novels and plays of the midtwentieth century are equally valid today.