STAINLESS STEEL RAT
STAINLESS STEEL RAT, Cheep with Auspicious Arts Projects and the Seymour Centre at the York Theatre, Seymour Centre, 30 June-17 July 2011. Photos: Tracey Schramm
When truth is stranger than fiction and life is more dramatic than many of the dramas enacted on stages, how to present a real-life drama as entertainment? In telling the Julian Assange-Wikileaks story, playwright Ron Elisha and producer-director Wayne Harrison have opted for a storytelling style that is, in the first half, closer to farce than documentary and, in the second – as court and the possibility of a long and dangerous jail sentence in the USA looms – the pace changes and a more serious, philosophical mood takes over.
The result is a satirical portrayal of the politics, people and events that gave us Wikileaks which, because the politics, people and events almost beggar belief, manages the acrobatic feat of fashioning something serious out of laugh-a-minute cartoonery. This is a smart idea because no matter where you sit on the political spectrum – or even if you’re on the majority cross-benches of the past caring – the main protagonists in the Wikileaks saga are almost beyond satire.
This is heralded by the happy and welcome return to the stage of Valerie Bader. She sets the bar to ridiculous and the rest of the powerfully talented cast eagerly follow. She commits daylight robbery on whichever scene or character she happens to be occupying and is a delight to watch. As “An Australian PM” with violently red hair and John Howard’s autobiography for bedtime reading, she seems to come ominously close to an inconveniently disappointing truth in a woman who is alternately pompous, flirtatious and unctuous towards “A US President” and “A Russian President”. In a cast of 29 characters and a company of 11, each actor doubles or trebles and Bader also flits in and out as “A Mother”, “Miss W” and “A Proscecutor” and delivers a masterclass in deadpan comedy throughout.
There are many delicious twists and turns in the wicked characterisations of the world’s most powerful: as the Russian president Glenn Hazeldine conjures the terrors of the Lubyanka as he stabs an angry index finger at his iPad screaming “Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!”. He’s actually playing Angry Birds and what gets him really riled is the West’s inability to properly pronounce “Medvedev”. Such trivia gets people killed and starts wars – is what you’re left thinking. Another highlight is Katrina Retallick, particularly in her star turn as “A Famous Author (chicklit)” who talks in puns and aphorisms and is married to “A Top Silk”. She looks uncannily like Kathy Lette, but that has to be a coincidence.
As “The Most Dangerous Man”, Darren Weller is spookily like Assange and it isn’t just because he’s bleached his hair silver-white. Rather, he has quietly captured the geeky yet charismatic, reasonable yet messianic and, finally, quite weird personality that is Julian Assange – hero of democracy or dangerous nut, depending on your point of view. His is the most straightforwardly realistic of the play’s characters, possibly because it’s impossible to satirise what he set out to accomplish with Wikileaks – extraordinary and without precedent; then to compound that with a basically sordid tale of broken condoms, insatiable sexual appetite and an attitude to women that makes the Swedish “rape” charge almost an irrelevance.
The other members of the cast slip in and out of wigs, costumes, accents and characters at the toss of a hanky and are excellent. There is a story-within-a-story – a film being made of the events by “A Film Producer” and his estranged wife “A Film Director” – a hoarily libidinous Peter Phelps and waspishly exasperated Caroline Craig. A camera and cameraman prowl the stage’s perimeter but it’s not filmmaking in any real sense and the device works only sporadically. Eventually it gets in the way and is an unnecessary diversion: the producer’s parallel randiness delivers occasional laughs, but the main game doesn’t need a sideshow to keep its audience engaged.
The show looks extremely good with Brian Thomson doing magic stuff with “leaked documents” in the otherwise cavernous York Theatre. A simple oversize screen on wheels depicting Big Brother type spying eyes is the set’s only decoration; lighting (Martin Kinnane) and occasional bits of wheeled on and wheeled off furniture do everything else.
Stainless Steel Rat – the pseudonym Julian Assange used for the dating website OKCupid – is a fascinating attempt to place the man and the story at the centre of one of the worst scandals world governments have ever experienced, with their unguarded, undiplomatic and just plain murderous everyday doings revealed for the world to see. How much of the play – in particular the dialogue between the main protagonists – is true is hard to say (without recourse to leaked documents!) and that’s both a strength and a weakness. Ron Elisha is a veteran writer for the stage and he loves a good one-liner; and he’s exceptionally good at coming up with them. There are actually too many in the play, however, and some of the more prolix mouthfuls of witticisms could do with a trim. The imbalance between the first and second halves needs to be addressed too. Nevertheless, what the play accomplishes is to remind us of an unprecedented sequence of events that revealed and confirmed a lot of things about our governments that we long suspected and even now can scarcely believe. It also delivers a lot of unexpected and welcome laughter at the expense of our leaders and sadly, they deserve it.
On opening night the play also generated a lot of animated discussion and argument afterwards along the lines of how the short spin cycle of the modern media means that a lot of what Stainless Steel Rat tells us has already been consigned to the “oh yes! Now I remember!” bin. And it’s really the short memories and other agendas of both the media and its consumers that governments rely on. We have been warned.
Meanwhile, Wayne Harrison must be congratulated for having the courage and fortitude to take this play from its early draft in February this year to a sparkling premiere season just four months later. The speed of producing “theatre of the now” – or whatever else you want to call it – means this is an independent production, with all the risk and uncertainty that goes with the term; and it’s a big show with first class production values so the risk is rather more than sixpence. That’s thrilling in itself; that the play and production are so entertaining and thought provoking makes it even more so. Let’s hope it’s not the last ”cheep” we hear from Cheep.
