A fiery new play, on now at Dunedin's Fortune Theatre, spotlights today's media challenges.
The Truth Game
As Frank, acting editor of the Advocate, says on the phone to Irate Reader, “If the newspaper offends you, there are options.” That’s the trouble: blogs, tweets and twitters from any number of hitherto unknown animals in the media jungle. Where, in this cacophony of opinions, is the news?
Journalist Simon Cunliffe is familiar with the question, and with old-style newspapermen who assumed they knew the reply. He has put two of them in this, his first play: Frank-on-the-phone, still battling for that near-extinct creature The Public Interest, perfectly armed and embodied by Greg Johnson; and Ralph-pronounced-Rafe, the chief editorial writer who is not the editor, positively and negatively realised by a beaming, bibulous Peter Hayden. Dinosaurs both: the former still – if ambivalently – attractive to acting-acting-editor Sam (Anna Henare, impressive in the part), the latter not so old as to have forgotten how to feel pain.
The irony is that if our print media had not embraced a wide range of new technologies to extend their paper publications, Cunliffe would not have his current job as Otago Daily Times’ deputy editor (news) – and I wouldn’t be writing these 400 words. The news is that news isn’t dead, but it comes to us now in different ways.
How different? People are still people, says Cunliffe, but with corporatisation, the game has changed. News is a commodity like everything else and people have to compete – with gloves off – for the “privilege” not of service but of sales. The face of newness in the workforce may be a shiny-cheeked male (Phil Vaughan as Bill) seduced by talk of “synergies” into acts of manipulation and betrayal; or it may be female. The most ruthless of the new corporate leaders may be a woman called Belinda (Michelle Amas in a roaring red dress with pencil-skirt), the smartest news-spotter a girl called Jo (a lively Kathleen Burns on roller-blades).
There is much talk – conniving, contradictory, considered and unconsidered talk – with jokes about grammar and punctuation, very funny if you catch them as they pass. Cunliffe’s extensively workshopped script is the basis for a Lara Macgregor multimedia show, with music, lighting, projections and a well-sculpted set adding value to well-crafted dialogue. Fiery and complex – if sometimes too fast – this is a great production of an excellent new play.
THE TRUTH GAME, by Simon Cunliffe, directed by Lara Macgregor, Fortune Theatre, Dunedin, until October 29.