The Wages of Spin
With David Williams, Stephen Klinder & Deborah Pollard
Performance Space, Sydney, until June 5
$25/$20/$15. Bookings (02) 9698 7235
The Street Theatre, Canberra, July 20-30
$29/$24. Bookings (02) 6247 1223.
REVIEW BY SARAH STEPHEN & PIP HINMAN
The Wages of Spin is political theatre at its best. It's entertaining, well-researched and takes pro-war politicians and big media to task. The performance text is based on a string of carefully selected passages from parliamentary debates, from Senate committees, from public speeches made by PM John Howard and from right-wing media commentators like Miranda Devine.
According to performer David Williams, the aim was to find text which may be familiar, but present it in a context where we reflect on it and ask: "Did they really say that?"
As the audience enters the theatre, the play has already begun as Senator John Faulkner (Williams), grills Senator Robert Hill (Stephen Klinder), about the difference between an interview and an interrogation. The delightful twist is that Hill is blindfolded with a balaclava, and negotiates walking along a bed of nails — definitely an interrogation.
The performance is playful and unpredictable. Moving cameras beam images from the stage onto a massive screen to heighten the drama at given moments. Howard (Williams), dressed in army greens he borrowed from his father, delivers a powerful speech that begins with "My fellow Australians" — that all-too-familiar reference to shared nationhood.
The characters — including Major-General Peter Cosgrove, Howard, Hill and Delta Goodrem — are annoyingly convincing. But what has Goodrem got to do with the Iraq war? The Wages of Spin takes a swipe at the big media — and their celebrated "analysts" — and reminds us how easy it is for us to be switched on, and off, the big political issues.
Goodrem is used as a symbol of the "cacophonous backdrop of chatter about the real issues", which always threatens to drown out news about the atrocities of war.
Interrogating the motivations and the outcomes of the Iraq war is how Williams describes The Wages of Spin. How the big media treat atrocities such the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, how they assist people like Howard in his justification for going to war, how they play up "democracy" in this country, and downplay, or ignore, the illegality and unpopularity of invading another country.
Why is it that we are so easily distracted? Is it because we are so depressed that Howard was re-elected? Is it because we don't really know enough detail about the war in Iraq? How many Iraqis have been killed? No-one knows because no-one from the "coalition of the willing" is counting. They don't want us to know so that we're not too emotionally involved. Perhaps it's a mix of all these reasons. The Wages of Spin challenges us to re-examine our "democracy" and the political institutions intent on trying to prop it up.
From Green Left Weekly, June 1, 2005.
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