Dea Loher is much feted and admired as
a dramatist in her native Germany. I’m not sure I entirely understand
why. She has intelligence, ambition and playwriting skill, but the
traits do not always coincide. On last year’s Edinburgh Fringe her solo
piece
Land Without Words
received, it seemed to me, a production and performance of a far higher
calibre than the self-regarding – even self-defeating – text deserved.
Her 2003 play
Innocence (
Unschuld) is less off-putting, but
scarcely more compelling in itself.
Essentially, it is a discrete series of scenes in several interwoven
strands about people being unhappy, alone or together, whether
connected by links which are real (the book which blind pole-dancer
Absolute – yes, really – has lost,
The
World is Unreliable, is written by intellectual Ella, who never
interacts with any other character) or artificial (Frau Habersatt has a
compulsion for claiming to be the mother of various criminals and
thereby eliciting sympathy from the victims’ families). Several strands
are gradually drawn together, but not to any great effect; the play
ends where it began, with Caroline Kilpatrick stripping off and walking
into a video-projection of the ocean, or as the script now designates
it, “the future”.
Helena Kaut-Howson’s production is thoughtful, to the extent of
deliberately disobeying one of the playwright’s instructions and using
black actors to portray the two black illegal immigrants, rather than
the white ones Loher requests: “No need for pretence of authenticity,”
notes the stage direction, which is rather less true in a country whose
discourse of race and multiculturalism is more complex than that in
which the play was written and is set. I do not think a British writer
would be allowed to deploy such figures so baldly as emblems of
otherness.
Kaut-Howson and her cast – which includes Maggie Steed as Ella and the
estimable Meredith MacNeill as Absolute – also foreground the
theatricality, discouraging us from getting lost in the story (such as
it is): in this respect Loher is a child of Brecht. But this is the
flabbier, triter Brecht. What does the play
say? That we don’t connect, with
each other or with the bigger economic and social pictures? That we
avoid responsibility – are “innocent” in that sense? Hardly
ground-breaking. Earnestness is not enough.
Written for the Financial
Times.