‘I want mirrors to stop’, howls young immigrant Elisio, as he, too, finally succumbs to the madness that grips everything in German playwright Dea Loher’s extraordinary 2003 drama. As with much of ‘Innocence’, a clear meaning to his words is never established. But this piece has a mirrorlike quality, reflecting Western decay without judging it, no more accusing than a pane of polished glass.

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‘I want mirrors to stop’, howls young immigrant Elisio, as he, too, finally succumbs to the madness that grips everything in German playwright Dea Loher’s extraordinary 2003 drama. As with much of ‘Innocence’, a clear meaning to his words is never established. But this piece has a mirrorlike quality, reflecting Western decay without judging it, no more accusing than a pane of polished glass.

It begins as the streetsmart Elisio and his friend Fadoul witness a woman silently drowning herself in the ocean. As Elisio tries to grasp what happened, a chance encounter leads Fadoul into a relationship with Absolute, a blind, brittle stripper. In a clean, poetic translation from David Tushingham, Loher’s drama proceeds to embark upon a blackly comic ramble through dark places. The plot splinters into myriad parallel stories: a spinster is compelled to pose as the mother of murderers; a crazed philosopher shrieks wisdom and idiocy; a malign mother-in-law forces herself upon her family like a fat, poisonous parasite; an undertaker who takes corpses home.

For more than two hours Loher barrages us with these images, and yet ‘Innocence’ resolutely remains a pleasure. Helena Kaut-Howson’s production is playful and well played, often laugh out loud funny and wearing the fourth wall lightly indeed. It avoids portentousness because Loher’s script gives us credit enough not to need to explain everything: there’s no sense of the playwright pointing her finger and saying ‘this is why things became so bad’. ‘Innocence’ is the worst of our society reflected in a cracked mirror, a society riddled with death and insanity, false gods and entropy, blindness of every kind. But Loher doesn’t grumble, just cocks an ironic grin: it’s our chaos – we might as well enjoy it