What occurs when innocence begins to fracture, when justice becomes murky and when guilt is buried beneath silence?
The unsettling play "Suçlular Çağı Suçsuzlar Çağı" ("Time of the Innocent"), directed by Özgür Yanım for the Turkish State Theater, poses these questions with chilling precision. Loosely adapted from German author Siegfried Lenz’s work, the production draws the audience into a claustrophobic psychological landscape where the lines between victim, perpetrator and bystander blur until they’re indistinguishable. It transforms philosophical inquiry into gripping stagecraft.
The play begins with a stark, terrifying premise: an assassin has attempted to kill a high-ranking governor. Set in a vaguely dystopian, authoritarian regime where truth has long since slipped out of legal reach, the authorities respond by locking the wounded assassin in a cell with nine seemingly innocent civilians. Since a confession or accomplices cannot be extracted by conventional means, none of the men will be released until the truth emerges, by any means.
What follows is not a traditional interrogation but a slow-burning moral experiment. The nine cellmates begin with persuasion, empathy and reason. But the assassin remains unmoved, immune to threats of death or promises of freedom. He continues defending his cause. Even the doctor – gentle, measured, perhaps the last humane voice in the room – gradually collapses under the pressure of confinement and despair. By the end of the first act, the assassin is dead. Whether he was murdered or allowed to die is deliberately left unresolved.
The second act leaps forward in time. One of the nine, once a student, is now a prosecutor. Another man has committed suicide. The rest are summoned back, but this time as suspects rather than witnesses. The balance of power has shifted, but the central question remains: who killed the assassin and, more disturbingly, why?
One of the most chilling lines comes from the Consul, a character who first appears reasonable – even charismatic – until his beliefs unravel:
"Those who kill for an ideal are never seen as criminals by those who share that ideal."
To which the hotelier responds, with unnerving clarity:
"Then, by that logic, every murder can be justified."
This exchange anchors the play’s philosophical core. At what point does idealism mutate into a justification for violence? Does loyalty to a cause free one from moral responsibility?
Ironically, it is the assassin – despite his violent cause – who holds the firmest moral stance. He refuses to betray his comrades, even as his life ebbs away. His silence becomes a position of conviction, more coherent than the excuses offered by the so-called "innocent" men, whose desperation eventually curdles into cruelty. What drives them is not belief, but fear – and that makes them far more unsettling.
This moral unraveling echoes Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” – that ordinary people, under ordinary circumstances, can commit horrific acts not out of malice but through passive compliance, when critical thought is abandoned. None of the nine are monsters when they first enter the cell. But the system slowly shapes them into something they can no longer recognize.
The second act, structured like a courtroom drama without a clear prosecutor or judge, leans into Kafkaesque absurdity – a feeling of oppressive, irrational confusion, where the system devours logic and justice alike. The assassin’s former allies now wield authority, interrogating the man who once protected them with his silence. Justice turns inward, cannibalizing itself. Guilt passes from one to another like a hot stone – no one confesses, yet no one is innocent, perhaps not of murder, but of secretly wishing for it.
The audience, too, is drawn into this moral fog. I found myself wondering: what would I have done in that cell? Would I have preserved my humanity – or surrendered it to escape? The power of the play lies in its refusal to offer easy answers. It paints a suffocating moral world where everyone is guilty of something – even if that something is merely the desperate desire to be free.
The final twist – that the Consul was the killer – feels both shocking and inevitable. All along, he has rationalized sacrifice in the name of ideology. Killing the assassin, in his mind, wasn’t betrayal but necessity. His suicide is the collapse of that logic, a tragic implosion of the very ideals he upheld.
By the end, the nine men – once presented as innocents – have become something else entirely. Not villains, perhaps, but no longer blameless. The question that lingers is both haunting and unanswerable: is it worse to kill for a cause – or to become a killer just to escape one?
"Time of the Innocent" is far more than a political allegory or social critique. It is a deeply philosophical work that dares each viewer to examine the limits of their morality. In an era where the line between right and wrong is easily bent by circumstance, it leaves us with the question we least want to face: What if innocence isn’t enough?
