What does it mean to forgive, and does moral ambiguity have a place within forgiveness?

Thisis the key concept explored in Griffin Theatre Company’s As We Forgive.

“It’s very grey and it’s very dark,” says legendary Tasmanian actor Robert Jarman. “Without giving away too much of the plot, you get introduced to three men throughout the course of the evening. They’re very consciously there with you in the theatre telling you their stories.”

These stories won’t merely be outside of the norm – audiences will find them to be confronting and challenging in a way that will make them question their own moral compasses.

“The first is an elderly man who has been through a traumatic experience in his home and decides to seek revenge,” Jarman explains. “It’s interesting because it goes into territory where you think that someone shouldn’t do that, forgive and forget. But this guy goes, ‘Nup, that won’t make me happy, I want to go for the throat.’ And in the end you totally understand why.

“The second man involves a really hard and difficult story. He’s a man who has been abused in his youth and he talks about how he has coped with that. Again, it’s not as simple as shaking it off and moving on – he has a completely other approach to dealing with it in his life. It’s very painful and not something that one would encourage necessarily, but it works for him.

“The third man is someone who really questions the whole notion of forgiveness itself: what does it actually mean to forgive or be forgiven? How do you live with forgiveness? So by having the three stories and giving a whole range of perspectives, it means that you leave the theatre with really rich material around the idea of forgiveness.”

This is certainly an interesting thought experiment, particularly because many stories that centre on revenge or someone being wronged focus on the retribution. It isn’t often that we are presented with different perspectives on forgiveness itself and what that concept even means. The more you think about it, the more you realise that it isn’t one-dimensional.

“I think what this play does in the popular conversation that’s going on around these questions is that it does open up the potential for grey areas,” says Jarman. “It also makes it very clear that these are utterly personal and individual decisions. The choices we have to make about whether to forgive or not forgive – to accept forgiveness and to find other ways to deal with issues – hold true for individuals but not necessarily society as a whole.”

This is what makes the Tom Holloway text so fascinating – nothing is black-and-white. These characters may act in a way that is contrary to what the law and morality dictate is right, but does that mean they are wrong? Can there be exceptions to the rules, and if so, how do we justify them?

“Obviously people are going to walk out saying, ‘Well, I understand that argument but I still don’t agree,’ and that’s fine,” says Jarman. “I don’t necessarily agree with these people’s decisions either, but I can totally understand how they have arrived at them because of what has happened in their lives. I hope, if nothing else, that audiences will walk away thinking that it was interesting to spend an evening in a theatre with a person telling stories that have these enormous moral dimensions. For an hour and a half you can take part in and examine – in a very humane way, not an academic way – questions that have an enormous impact on each and every one of our lives.”

As We ForgiverunsWednesday May 11 – Saturday May 21 at SBW Stables Theatre.

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