Innocence Lost: Theatre of High Calibre.

Photo: Barbara Gray. 

NAC English Theatre/Centaur Theatre Company (Montreal) co-production

For the Ottawa Citizen.

Innocence has to yield, eventually, to experience. Innocence violated is a whole other matter.

In the case of Steven Truscott, the 14-year-old sentenced to hang in 1959 after being wrongfully accused of raping and murdering 12-year-old Lynne Harper near Clinton, Ont., innocence was violated on so many levels it’s almost beyond comprehension.

Harper, Truscott, the community in which they lived, Canadians’ view of both ourselves and our legal system as just and trustworthy: this commanding production of Beverley Cooper’s play reveals just how much was lost the night that someone – the murderer was never found – took Lynne Harper’s life.

Truscott’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, he was paroled from prison after a decade behind bars, and he was eventually acquitted. But there’s little consolation in any of this, and his story, told with both objectivity and compassion by Cooper, continues to resonate as a real-life cautionary tale asking, in our own era, such unspoken questions as, “Just where does a ‘tough-on-crime’ philosophy take us?”

– See more at: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Theatre+Review+Innocence+Lost/8038661/story.html#sthash.wY9GrOtG.dpuf

Innocence has to yield, eventually, to experience. Innocence violated is a whole other matter.

In the case of Steven Truscott, the 14-year-old sentenced to hang in 1959 after being wrongfully accused of raping and murdering 12-year-old Lynne Harper near Clinton, Ont., innocence was violated on so many levels it’s almost beyond comprehension.

Harper, Truscott, the community in which they lived, Canadians’ view of both ourselves and our legal system as just and trustworthy: this commanding production of Beverley Cooper’s play reveals just how much was lost the night that someone – the murderer was never found – took Lynne Harper’s life.

Truscott’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, he was paroled from prison after a decade behind bars, and he was eventually acquitted. But there’s little consolation in any of this, and his story, told with both objectivity and compassion by Cooper, continues to resonate as a real-life cautionary tale asking, in our own era, such unspoken questions as, “Just where does a ‘tough-on-crime’ philosophy take us?”

– See more at: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Theatre+Review+Innocence+Lost/8038661/story.html#sthash.wY9GrOtG.dpuf