IS THIS A ROOM / 12 LAST SONGS

By VICTORIA LAURIE

February 19 2025

IS THIS A ROOM, Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre, Perth Festival, 14-17 February 2025. Photography - Tristan McKenzie

FOLLOWED BY 

12 LAST SONGS, Quarantine at the Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre, Perth Festival, 15 February 2025

BY VICTORIA LAURIE

Perth Festival presented two Australian exclusives during its second week and while one packed a punch, the other suggests the rest of the nation didn’t miss out on much.

The first exclusive, Is This A Room, (3.5 stars) is a US play based on the transcript of a real FBI interrogation conducted in 2017, an account so detailed it documents even the nervous coughs of the lead interrogator.

A jarring electronic soundscape and a sparse platform space resembling the carpeted outline of a cell block hints at the sinister encounter that 25-year-old Air Force linguist Reality Winner (her actual name) walks into when she returns home after power-lifting gym.

The three special agents show her their badges and start by rounding up Winner’s pet dog and cat in a semi-comical faux display of concern for their welfare. The control techniques are subtle but practiced. Does she need a glass of water? Is she clear they are simply investigating a leak? This is just a voluntary conversation, right? And then it becomes an interrogation, which only dawns on Winner as the men press forward, right up to her face, in tightly choreographed moves in her back room. She’s whip-smart but visibly wilts as she realises that smuggling classified material out of the National Security Agency brings a reality that renders her no winner.  

This production is impeccably performed by a quartet of US actors, starting with Susannah Perkins’ perky depiction of the yoga and cat-loving post-adolescent whose military training has predisposed her to comply in the face of authority. The fact that the 25-year-old habitually keeps three guns in her closet may seem less shocking to US audiences than to Australians.   

Pete Simpson as Special Agent Justin Garrick leads the folksy overtures, punctuated by jokes and that nervous cough. More menacing is his sidekick, R Wallace Taylor (Will Cobbs), while a third unnamed agent-cum-muscleman (Becca Blackwell) circles intrusively.  

US writer-director Tina Satter stumbled on the online transcript of Reality Winner’s downfall (who knew FBI interrogations were open access?) and couldn’t get it out of her mind.

In a Q&A session in Perth, Satter explained that Winner, who ended up serving several years in prison, actually had a higher security clearance than her inquisitors. Satter also described how the three FBI roles were an amalgam of eleven male agents who descended on Winner’s home – a female officer was curiously absent.

Is This a Room is taut, gripping but slightly unsatisfying due to the constraints of sticking to the FBI script. Several pink-light “freezes’” indicate where a section of transcript has been redacted, and it’s not stated that Winner leaked a classified document about Russian interference in the 2016 US election to the media (a detail divulged in the Q&A and in media articles). It leaves one with little understanding of Winner’s motives and moral stance.

12 Last Songs (2 stars) purported to offer a portrait of Perth and its working people, in a one-off show that lasted from midday to midnight. The format is a loose unscripted “performance” involving live interviews with 32 disparate workers. Audience members can choose to sit watching on stage or in the theatre auditorium; they can come and go as many times as they wish.  

The staging is formulaic – the State Theatre Centre’s main stage is crowded with tables, cameras, chairs, and large screens on which is projected live footage of activity onstage – a florist arranging flowers, a nude model posing for an artist, a wallpaper hanger, a chef preparing dinner. Each worker is interviewed, and some 600 questions are asked throughout this 12-hour marathon.   

Directed by Richard Gregory, 12 Last Songs is by Manchester-based ensemble Quarantine, which describes these events – held in several cities over the past 27 years – as “a long and wide form of mass portraiture.”

Despite three visits over nearly four hours, I was left with the impression of a worthy but cumbersome attempt to bring total strangers together to make something interesting happen. Perth Festival spent several months lining up interesting candidates – like a heart surgeon, a fly-in fly-out mine worker, a straw-haired life guard-cum-shark spotter, an expert on turtle frogs – the ugliest-cutest frog in the world.  They took turns answering question after question with curiously lowkey, often boring responses. Uninteresting video sunsets and park scenes are beamed live, dinner is served onstage, patrons still come and go. It all amounted to an elaborate, tedious, and dauntingly long event that shed little light on the nature of Perth city or the state.

If it culminated at midnight in a glorious finale – like the elusive twelve last songs of the show’s title, perhaps? – then most of us had already left to catch our trains or go back to real work.