The Lady of the Andes

Photo (c) Ricardo General

Winner of the Chilean national literature award for playwriting, 2017

With their leader and founder afflicted by cruel dementia, the few remaining volunteers from one of Chile’s noblest hospital volunteer groups, the Ladies in Red, assemble at her house to care for her.  With no new volunteers joining, and their president frail, the future looks uncertain.  But as the ladies wonder how best to handle the present – there’s a parade to organise and patients to be cared for – it is the past that is about to come shockingly into focus.  While most of the Ladies in Red have sought as best they could to care for the needy, a few members haven’t behaved quite so well.  Adultery is only just the start:  complicity in a dictatorship’s cruellest practices is another thing entirely.

Three months she’s gone without saying anything. I’ve been visiting her all this time; she’s never said a word. The assistants looking after her before said she kept getting worked up and screaming like an animal. She scared them off; she struck some of them. At least she’s been calmer since we’ve been coming. Something special happens to her with us. Whole afternoons with her, not a peep. Silent. Silent. That’s why: there’s nothing better than friendship to make her speak again. There’s no one better than you, her friend, to make her come back. The filth in her fingernail.

This play has been translated as part of a British Council Santiago project, which aims to translate a number of modern Chilean plays into English for the first time. Other plays in the selection include The Recommendation by Egon Wolff, and The Desolate Prince by Juan Radrigán, two of Chile’s most renowned and prolific playwrights.

Images from the Chilean production, produced by Teatro sin Dominio.  Photos (c) Ricardo General

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