Judge who hounded Pinochet inspires show on Broadway

The Spanish judge who sprang to fame when he tried to extradite the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet from Britain has become the inspiration for a new Broadway play.

Baltasar Garzón's campaigning work for human rights from the benches of Madrid's top court has pitted him against an exotic array of characters from Pinochet to George Bush and Osama bin Laden.

Now this crusading work has inspired a new version of a classic Spanish play.

La Vida es Sueño, or Life is a Dream, by one of Spain's greatest playwrights, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, has been adapted by two Spaniards for the New York stage.

Francisco Reyes and Puy Navarro, an actor and a producer, got their inspiration by attending some of the lectures given by Judge Garzón last year when he took a year off from hunting down human rights abusers to lecture on human rights law at Hudson University, near New York.

Judge Garzón became the muse for a modern-day version of this 17th-century classic, whose theme is the battle between free will and fate. The play ran for three nights to full houses, in a performance which has been backed by Amnesty International.

In the original play, written by one of the masters of Spain's Golden Age theatre, the king of Poland imprisons his son and lies about his existence, only later revealing he is still alive and letting him free.

But once he is allowed freedom, Prince Segismundo abuses his power.

The new version depicts a thinly-veiled version of Judge Garzón, who is portrayed as an inspiring hero.

The play deals with the experience of the immigrant and, with half an eye on the American audience, the struggle to attain the American dream.

The play also depicts prisoners held against their will and makes hints at Judge Garzón's criticism of the American President over the treatment of suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

It mixes modern-day touches, like news broadcasts from CNN, with references to the original play.

Instead of a King Lear figure, the play brings in a version of the Rev Al Sharpton, the radical black civil rights campaigner. Navarro said: "Judge Garzón has congratulated us about the play. He was going to come and see it, but in the end he couldn't.

"We are hoping to do a performance at the United Nations and we hope he can come. For many Americans it will be the first time they see the work of Calderón in which the play deals with a Spanish Hamlet."

Judge Garzón, 51, issued an international arrest warrant against Pinochet in 1998 accusing him of genocide while the former dictator was in Britain for health treatment.

After a legal stand-off during which Pinochet stayed with his former ally, Margaret Thatcher, the British government ruled he could not be extradited to Spain because he was unfit to stand trial.

Judge Garzón has also issued similar warrants against Osama bin Laden, allies of other South American dictators and has brought money laundering cases against Spain's second biggest bank, BBVA.

He first came to prominence in Spain when he started to unravel political scandals involving the previous socialist regime of Felipe Gonzalez.