INNOCENCE To 30 January.
London.
INNOCENCE
by Dea Loher translated by David Tushingham.
Arcola Theatre 27 Arcola Street E8 2DJ To 30 January 2010.
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat 23, 30 Jan 3pm.
Runs 2hr 40min One interval.
TICKETS: 020 7503 1646.
www.arcolatheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 9 January.
Life on trial in fascinating patchwork drama.
Director Helena Kaut-Howson makes a keen case for Bavarian-born Dea Loher in a programme note. And Loher’s 2003 drama is challenging, sharply depicting the angst of modern living, and refusing to allow audiences the comfort of a sustained realistic story.
Yet, even leaving Bertolt Brecht’s political dramas aside, haven’t German dramatists being doing this for several decades past? There’s a distinct air of Botho Strauss in this patchwork of lonely lives and existences where life and death clash – a blind woman pole-dancer called Absolute, an undertaker who obsessively takes his work home.
Loher certainly identifies a restless moodiness in her characters, a swaying in the wind of existence. But don’t most people, actually, manage to get on, even, sometimes, enjoy life? Is it really so bad?
Perhaps; and Loher’s revealing the skull beneath the social skin. Yet, if that's so generally the case, wouldn’t the suicide rate shoot up even higher? It’s just in this matter the playwright moves into fantasy. There is a suicide by drowning at either end of the play. The final one, underlined by Alex Wardle’s video of a rolling sea turning to an idealised palm-tree island with Loher’s closing instruction that the drowning woman “walks into the future”.
She doesn’t. She walks into a non-future, where a cold-looking sea would fill her lungs until they burst. No metaphor or theatrical image can overcome that reality and it’s sentimental to think it can. Yet, until then the various characters’ lives are presented with vigour, by both script and performances.
Two illegal immigrants hold-back from rescuing the first drowning woman in case they come to the authorities’ notice. Okezie Morro’s Elisio and Nathaniel Martello-White’s Fadoul catch the nervousness of unlawful migrants, Fadoul particularly developing the will to do well when he meets Meredith MacNeill’s physically and vocally restless Absolute.
Strong work too from the mature women: Ann Mitchell’s insistent diabetic Frau Zucker, Ellen Sheean as a woman seeking to insinuate herself into the lives of others, and Maggie Steed’s Ella, fraught and solo between her preoccupied jeweller husband and the prime minister speakibng on regardless on TV.
Mother/Suicide 2: Miranda Cook.
Helmut/Father: Michael Fitzgerald.
Young Doctor/Suicide 1: Alexander Gilmour.
Franz: Chris Hannon.
Rosa: Caroline Kilpatrick.
Absolute: Meredith MacNeill.
Fadoul: Nathaniel Martello-White.
Frau Zucker: Ann Mitchell.
Elisio: Okezie Morro.
Frau Habersatt: Ellen Sheean.
Ella: Maggie Steed.
Corpses: Sumit Chakravarti, Emma Habbeshon, Kimberly Peuling, Madeleine Shenai, Dushka Wertenbaker-Man, Rebecca Wieland.
Director: Helena Kaut-Howson.
Designer/Costume: Lara Booth.
Lighting/Video: Alex Wardle.
Sound: Mark Thurston, Emma Laxton.
Choreographer: Lorna Stuart.
Fight arranger: Rachel C Bown-Williams.
Assistant director: Alexander Gilmour.
2010-01-12 09:43:32