Shanty Town Theatre

Abstract

‘The critics awarded us the prize for the “Best play of the year” … but the main thing was that that year in the shanty town enabled us to attract an audience among trade-unionists and slum dwellers, who later followed us into the playhouses …’ Though many Chilean intellectuals and writers were forced into exile by the repression which followed the 1973 coup, others stayed to fight the restrictions and harassment as best they could from inside the country. One notable example of this is the playwright Juan Radrigán. To survive, writers have developed a kind of self-censorship which means that their message is there to be understood if the public knows what to look for, but is never overtly expressed. The author situates his work not on the level of everyday reality, but couches it in the most general terms possible. It is left to the audience to work back from this universal level to a discovery of the relevance of the work to the reality surrounding them. Many of those writing poetry and for the theatre in Chile since 1973 have adopted religious themes and language since these lent themselves best to this kind of approach, and also because the Catholic Church was the only source of criticism which could not be suppressed by the authorities. Radrigán, however, has remained outside this current, perhaps unable to accept the message of hope which underpins the Christian tradition. He came to writing plays late in life, after working in a textile factory and elsewhere, and since 1979 has been one of the most significant voices in Chilean theatre. His characters are drawn from the poorest groups in Chilean society, but are projected on to the level of universal archetypes. In the main, they have abandoned hope about their own situation, and are worn out, old, defeated, or mentally disturbed. They are the end result of a brutal process which has left them at the bottom of the social scale stripped of all hope. In Radrigán's best-known work Unalterable Facts, death is the only exit. This message of despair in Radrigán's work has been criticised both inside Chile and abroad by opponents of the military regime as not emphasising enough the possibilities for social and political change, but his plays do give a convincing psychological portrait of how more than a decade of repression can work on the minds and expectations of a people. Juan Radrigán was interviewed recently by the Chilean writer Tito Valenzuela.