I wonder if German playwright Dea Loher would ever have graced a Wellington stage if Sebastian Sommer had not chosen her Innocence for his major Master of Theatre Arts in Directing (MTA)* production.  

According to a programme note, Berlin-based Loher sees only hope in there being people who cannot endure her plays, given they seem to be able to endure things she cannot, viz: “nearly everything on TV, the privatisation of water, the new government debt of 80 billions, and announcements in the supermarket like ‘…today we offer you new worlds of salads that are absolutely en vogue.’ The actual reality is utterly crazy; and the majority of people watch it without jumping off the planet or smashing it into pieces.”

There are multiple deaths in the ironically titled Innocence. Before it begins a young man has indiscriminately shot a number of people. In the opening scene two illegal immigrants – Fadoul (Twanda Manyimo) and Elisio (Tony Hopkins) – watch a naked young woman (Kate Clarkin) go swimming and realise too late she is not waving but is in distress. As Elisio attempts to go her aid, Fadoul is wary of alerting authorities. She drowns.

Elisio remains racked with guilt while Fadoul befriends Absolute (Helen Grant), a blind exotic dancer, and when he ‘finds God in a bag’ he attempts to use his good fortune to cure her blindness.

Mrs Hadenough (Fiona Jagose), mother of Eric the mass murderer, torments the parents (Emma Smith and Thomas Taptiklis) of one of his innocent victims with her guilt-driven desire for forgiveness, not least because she had made the left-handed Eric write with his right hand; but he held the gun with his left hand. The parents too, feel guilty (if that’s the word) because they brought up their daughter to be a compliant victim of society, not a perpetrator of violence against it, in the hope that would keep her safe.

In another household – well, one-room apartment – Franz (Ralph Upton) gives up studying and finds work with an undertaker, washing and preparing bodies for cremation. The plan is for his young wife, Rosa (Jackie Shaw), to give up working for a mail order company when they start a family, except her diabetic mother, Mrs Sugar (Kassie McLuskie), a smoker, moves in with her gangrenous leg, declaring Rosa must take responsibility for her wellbeing now. In the end, however, Rosa identifies – and identifies with – a different option.

A goldsmith, Helmut (Ray Goldstein), works silently at his trade as his wife Ella (Dalise Rawlings) drinks wine, rants at political demonstrators on TV, feels intimidated by people who speak without doubt and tries to enunciate her thesis, that The World is Unreliable (which is the title of a book beloved by the blind woman, Absolute). Eventually Ella takes it all out on Helmut.

Meanwhile two young men (Gareth Hobbs and Aidan Weeks) discuss metaphysics high up on ‘the suicide tower’ (within which Fadoul and Elisio have found a place to doss) before stripping and leaping off.

The actors seem well aligned to their characters but on opening night many performances were still in the rehearsal room, I felt, and not re-pitched for the large acting space they inhabit at Te Whaea, sometimes accompanied by Rowan Pierce’s often unnerving sound design.

Set designer Richard Larsen has created a deep tapering space walled in with loosely hanging white gauze that variously moves, hides, screens and exposes, thanks to Rachel Bakers lighting, which also provides the pools of light that contain each group’s actions.

As director, Sebastian Sommer has made what could be a depressing or bewildering work compelling. Even when the translation and/or acoustics render fine details elusive, these disparate-cum-desperate lives draw us in. The living and dead merge as the naked bodies find repose on the table which becomes the bed and then the slab Franz works on …

While most of the characters are quite isolated, the actors unite well as a behind-the-scrim chorus. On stage they coagulate to goad another would-be suicide atop the tower (a scene that echoes the opening of Thomas Sainsbury’s Loser).

Described in the media release as “an investigation into the existential questions of our life: morality, choice, guilt,” I can’t say the play finally makes me question my own guilt or innocence in socio-political terms.  Nor does it make me better understand murder or suicide. Yet it does ring true as an evocation of aspects of modern life most of us would prefer to ignore, in order, perhaps, to create the illusion – delusion? – of innocence.
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*Taught jointly by Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School and the Theatre Programme of Victoria University if Wellington.
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