German and British theatre have a history of unresolved differences, which is regularly resurrected when a German play is produced in this country. The well-known generalising assumption at the basis of these differences is that the British like their playwrights better than they like their directors, whereas the Germans take the opposite view. This traditional appropriation of artistic priorities (changing though it might just be starting to be in the United Kingdom, at least for new plays) still results in a certain critical diffidence, which might at least partly explain why Dea Loher’s work is so seldom produced here (and when it is produced, it tends to happen at the Edinburgh Festival), whereas not only she is considered one of the most important contemporary authors in her own country, but her plays are also often part of the annual calendar of many companies and venues throughout the continent - including in a theatrically conservative country like Italy.

And yet recently the wall between Anglophone audience and experimental European-style theatre might have started to crack: Romeo Castellucci’s Dantean trilogy came to the Barbican last spring (albeit to a conflicting reaction from both critics and audience), the Royal Court staged Tim Crouch’s revolutionary The Author only a few months ago, and as a hopeful beginning of the London offer for 2010, the Arcola is offering us the first UK production of Loher’s 2003 play Innocence, in a translation by David Tushingham, and with the direction of Helena Kaut-Howson.

Innocence tells (at least) four different stories, which intertwine with various degrees of proximity. Firstly, there are two young illegal immigrants who watch a woman drowning and do not intervene for fear of being implicated and thrown out of the country;  then, there is an old woman who goes around pretending to be the mother of murderers and serial killers, to apologise for her ‘sons’‘ behaviour; thirdly, there is a young frustrated couple, the husband a recently appointed caretaker, the wife suffocating in serene sadness, sharing a small flat with her caustically diabetic mother who dreams of owning a petrol station so she could create a fantastic explosion with ‘just one cigarette’; and finally there is a woman philosopher (in this production perhaps unwittingly, but still decidedly remindful of Germaine Greer), who has become disenchanted with her old ideals and who has just written a book called The World Is Unreliable. In the course of the (long) evening, some of these characters meet, and some don’t. One of the two young illegal workers finds a bag full of money and falls in love with a blind pole-dancer called Absolute, all in the space of a few minutes while waiting for the bus, and these few minutes represent a pivotal union of several destinies, but a lot is also left to chance - a constant reminder of the arbitrariness of narrative conventions.

The world depicted by Loher is dark, unfriendly, and governed by randomness - occasionally even the characters look at each other as if they were not completely sure they should be sharing the same space. But it is also deeply funny, in a grotesque and disquieting way that rounds the corners of the harsh messages below the surface. Loher touches upon a cornucopia of eternal human questions and philosophical concepts, the wide range of which might be the weakest point of her play - from the most obvious two, sex and death, to motherhood and the female connection with water. There are many long monologues - in fact, at least one character talks with no one else but herself - proving that text-based work is not the exclusive to Anglophone theatre, and that experimental is not equal to silent.

Yet for all its recognisable characteristics, the play still defies naturalism, not out of a manifesto, but as a formal complement to its central idea: namely, that there is no such a thing as control or consequentiality, we cannot foresee or even, in fact, influence the future; cause and effect are artificial categories that can only be applied to events retrospectively, as Loher’s philosopher explains in her book. Strangely, Kaut-Howson has decided to soften this refusal of naturalism by ignoring Loher’s indication that the two black illegal immigrants should be played by white actors.

In the Arcola production, energetic performances from some, but not all, of the cast, keep the central, less effective parts of the play from folding upon themselves, with the three older women outshining all the others: Ann Mitchell is almost frightening in her cynicism, hilarious as Frau Zucker dying of diabetes and surrendering increasing portions of her left leg to it; Maggie Steed lends the philosopher a tremulous and booming voice that brings to mind Carmelo Bene’s transformations of characters; and Ellen Sheean, in an old-fashioned smocked dress and a formless green coat, lets us imagine a psychopathic veneer as a fake mother of killers, before revealing all her vulnerable solitude - and, then again, her detachment when she is finally offered a chance to be a mother to someone, because nothing is as you would expect it to be.

As a bunch of final scenes bring together strands of content which during the second part had seemed to be getting lost, Innocence ends on a high note - perhaps not successfully managing to get to any specific place, but making, mostly, for an interesting ride.

Till 30 January 2010