Apache Tomcat/5.5.25 – Error report HTTP Status 503 – Too many incoming HTTP requeststype Status reportmessage Too many incoming HTTP requestsdescription The requested service (Too many incoming HTTP requests) is not currently available.Apache Tomcat/5.5.25. ARIEL DORFMAN is feeling the pressures of his righteous celebrity. In Edinburgh to promote a new polemic about political oppression, the Chilean playwright is standing in a hot queue. By accident he has bought a cheap stalls ticket for a concert; his conscience forbids him from using his clout to demand better; so he edges forward, lanky and sneakered and fretting as any American tourist, while the good seats disappear to those ahead of him Finally, he gets to the front Someone barges in.

“Excuse me, there is a queue here,” Dorfman says, harsh as a New Yorker. The man retreats; in softer Chilean tones, Dorfman finds a lesson: “Life is full of queue jumpers – many of them in more serious ways than this.”

Across the city at the Traverse Theatre, queue jumping is the only way to get into Dorfman’s new play. And Reader is no crowd pleaser, but a two-hour labyrinth of fictions within fictions, melting identities, and archly Post-Modern authorial interventions. At its centre is a relatively simple story about a censor who, one day, finds a novel about himself landing on his desk; around this Dorfman spins enough dramatic devices to dizzy even the Traverse’s traditionally adventurous audience But they thrill to it. “I reject the idea that complex plays, structurally, and experimental theatre are only for an elite,” says Dorfman.
Yet his appeal, and thus to a large extent Reader’s too, derives from an earlier, much plainer work.

Death And The Maiden was first performed at the ICA five years ago; since then its claustrophobic chamber drama has been re-enacted on stages from Poland to South America. In it Dorfman reconstructed Pinochet-era Chile’s architecture of fears and repressions – the tiny, everyday betrayals, the heart’s leap at a knock on the door – then made them universal, by embodying them in a trio of characters: an ex-torturer, his vengeful ex-victim and her mediating husband. “It had three star parts and a political content that appealed across the political spectrum,” says Lindsay Posner, who directed Death And The Maiden at the Royal Court. “And it read like a Hollywood thriller.”The play went from the Royal Court, where it starred Juliet Stevenson and won an Olivier Award, to Broadway, where it won a Tony Award Earlier this year it became a Roman Polanski film. And at some point in its rising trajectory it became something rather ambiguous: everybody’s favourite play about torture.”Death And The Maiden works at a very easy level,” admits Dorfman. Gradually, this has made some people uneasy: first with the Broadway production’s smoothing out of the play’s awkward questions about revenge and relative evils, then with the whole notion of such a subject being made into such pleasing drama.

“We who are outside [Chile] are living off this vicariously,” says Richard Gott, a South American correspondent of the old left. “We say, ‘Was it really like that?’ – and you’re left with a very human drama.”And Dorfman benefits too. He has international theatrical fame, and a professorship at the prestigious and liberal Duke University in North Carolina, where he spends half the year. “I’ve rejected three Hollywood script offers in the last year and a half,” he says. With his gravitas born of experience (“I myself have lived this”), his dramatist’s flair, his charm and his handsome aquiline features – people crowd round him to take his picture – Dorfman has become the liberal literary hero.THE truth of Dorfman’s life and intentions is more complex than the theatre programme version. Chilean by adopted nationality only, he was in fact born in Argentina into a family of Jewish immigrants from Odessa in 1942.