Giving a good review to a play about
journalists may look self-satisfied, but so far from experiencing pride
at being engaged in the same line of work as those portrayed here, I
felt ashamed even to consider claiming such an association and to have
done so little in comparison. Christine Bacon and Noah Birksted-Breen
here present portraits of several named investigative journalists from
around the world: Lydia Cacho, author of a book uncovering
highly-placed child abusers in Mexico; Amira Hass, who reports on
Palestinian affairs for the Israeli paper
Ha’aretz; Elena Kostyuchenko of Russia’s
Novaya Gazeta; American photojournalist Zoriah Miller; and Lal and Lasantha Wickrematunge, founders of Sri Lanka’s
Sunday Leader.
The
90-minute play begins in a verbatim style, with the cast of six
delivering the journalist-interviewees’ words more or less straight;
the only major deviation from this is Kostyuchenko conducting her
(invisible) interviewer around
Novaya’s
internal “museum”, which includes memorials to those of its staff who
have been murdered. The approach then switches to a more dramatic mode.
We see Cacho’s abduction by police in the abusers’ pay and Miller’s
experience of being disembedded from the U.S. military in Iraq for
taking pictures of American dead and wounded after a bombing, together
with an account of Lasantha Wickrematunge’s murder and extracts from
both the testimony of Hass regarding her experiences and her
impassioned speech on being presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award
by the International Women's Media Foundation in 2009. Individual lines
ring out: Hass remarks on her position as an Israeli sharing in the
benefits of the Palestinian occupation on which she reports that “The
taste of privilege is disgusting”, and later we are given the salutary
reminder that “Being fair and being objective are not the same thing.”
Michael
Longhurst’s production adopts a spare style common to verbatim theatre:
a desk or two, a few microphones used occasionally, but reliant
principally on the words and the performances. In the latter he is
blessed to have amongst his cast Paul Bhattacharjee as Lal
Wickrematunge and the ever-dignified, ever-committed Kika Markham as
Hass. At a time when so much of British journalism may appear to have
been involved in crimes and corruption rather than uncovering them,
this is a sobering and heartening reminder of why such work also
matters in a positive way.
Written for the Financial
Times.