Tejas Verdes

As Colorina tells us at the start of this shuddering play, to survive we must forget. To comprehend the full awfulness of what she went through would swallow us whole. And yet, here we are, being reminded of her disappearance, her torture, her death, her mother’s search for her remains, the moral bleakness of her country’s darkest period. Like some terrible truth, Tejas Verdes is both compelling and objectionable.

'Tejas Verdes' means Green Gables in Spanish. It is the name of a former seaside resort in Chile where hundreds of political prisoners were tortured following Pinochet’s coup in 1973. Colorina is one of Chile’s 3000 ‘disappeared’, taken from her home, imprisoned for her Marxist sympathies, and whose remains were never found.

The remarkable Madeline Potter tells Colorina’s true story, that of her friend, the doctor who treated her horrific wounds, the gravedigger who secretly interred the executed, the woman who betrayed Colorina, and the lawyer who defended Pinochet.

Potter’s beseeching performance summons tears to her bloodshot eyes with such regularity it is almost exhausting to watch. Which is only right. Translated from Fermin Cabal’s Spanish script, Tejas Verdes does not avert its gaze from the terror. And yet this is finely balanced with moments of poetry, avian imagery and church bells.

Tejas Verdes is Chile’s past and unmarked graves tapping us firmly on the shoulder. Don’t forget, but don’t let history take you captive, it seems to say. Cabal’s play skilfully treads a similarly tightrope. It stuns like a great work of art, but also like an abattoir gun.