As Canberra enters a new ethical frontier with the introduction of voluntary assisted dying on November 3, The Mill Theatre is staging German lawyer and writer Ferdinand von Schirach’s play GOD.

Directed and designed by The Mill’s director Lexi Sekuless, the play invites audiences into a live moral debate.

GOD is a kind of companion piece to von Schirach’s 2015 play Terror, staged at The Mill last year by Kim Beamish, in which a fighter pilot who shoots down a hijacked plane to save 70,000 people stands trial for murder. Sekuless didn’t think people would like Terror, but it became so popular they had to add an extra show.

In Terror, the audience voted “guilty” or “not guilty,” but in GOD they’ll be voting for or against the right to die. A key to the success of plays like this, Sekuless says, is their participatory nature – audiences become part of the story, and the outcome changes nightly.

The format works, she says, because “people can understand anything about true crime law – juries, courtrooms – they’re very familiar with that. Think of all the different NCIS shows: NCIS: Los Angeles, NCIS: New Orleans, NCIS: Hawaiʻi, NCIS: Sydney, and so on.”

GOD takes us into Germany’s Ethics Council to decide whether a perfectly healthy woman should be granted the means to end her own life. The audience listens to expert testimony and, at the end, casts a vote. 

The questions posed are stark: how far does freedom go? Should doctors be permitted to assist someone who is not terminally ill? And when the legal question is settled, what remains unresolved?

The characters sound utterly convincing – Heidi Silberman plays Rachel Gärtner, the woman requesting the right to die; Alana Denham Preston plays counsel Ms Biegler; and Jay James Moody is chair of the Ethics Council. They’re joined by Helen McFarlane as Professor Litten, Maxine Beaumont as Dr Keller, Timmy Sekuless as Dr Sperling, Richard Manning as Bishop Thiel, and Sarah Hartley as the Council associate.

But von Schirach made them all up, though Sekuless says that when she asked a doctor and an Anglican priest what they thought, their answers could have come straight out of the script. And in 2020, the German Constitutional Court did indeed bring down a major decision on the right to die.

GOD places moral choice squarely in the hands of its audience – who get to play God, as it were.

As Sekuless and I pause to reflect on our reactions to the recent voluntary death of an actor friend, she notes that for anyone involved, the subject is intensely emotional. The play canvasses just a few arguments – through a lawyer, a medical expert, and a Catholic priest – but she believes the emotional impact could be overwhelming.

Nonetheless, she praises von Schirach’s ability to keep audiences on edge, constantly changing their minds. “This writer makes us constantly re-assess the questions,” she says.

Entirely unrelated to the moral arguments is the matter of the newly-installed pillars in the tiny 67-seat Mill Theatre in Fyshwick. When Sekuless asked a tradesman working on her brother Timmy’s flat if she could borrow a saw, he got curious, came on board, and built several beautiful pillars – so tall they make The Mill seem larger than life.

A stickler for a good-looking production, she says: “We can’t have enough set builders and costume designers.”

GOD, The Mill Theatre, Fyshwick, November 26 (in preview), then December 3-18.