#StainlessSteelRat: The cut and paste play

If you followed me last night you would have seen my fairly vitriolic commentary on the play Stainless Steel Rat, previewed at the Seymour Centre here in Sydney. I stand by my comments but came away feeling uncomfortable that I had not been able to place them in some sort of context, explain them further and perhaps also try to better understand myself where my reactions came from. So that's what I thought I would try to do (in more than 140 chars).

1. I am prejudiced. I didn't go to this play in a bubble of objectivity. There had been mutterings in the Twittersphere for some days about SSR, much of it pretty negative. A day before I went @Wikileaks tweeted: "New play about Assange is the worst kind of pedestrian garbage. Everyone else: create alternatives". I am a supporter of Wikileaks and of Assange and his mission. It resonates particularly for me as an archivist, interested as I am in the power of records as evidence to effect change. I happen to think that Assange is an extremely gifted and revolutionary individual (and am happy to accept the teasing of colleagues who reckon I think he's a Saint). So be under no illusion that I went in there with an open mind. Guilty.

2. I love the theatre and hugely respect working actors. Like all art forms the theatre can be a crucible for powerful ideas and can profoundly affect us, our attitudes and our actions. Big fan of actors too (some of my best friends etc etc..) - the cast of SSR did their jobs valiantly and with passion and energy.

3. But for me there was something fundamentally wrong with the play, aside from all the moments well documented in my tweets. I had to go back to stuff I learned about at school and uni to work it out. Good satire, good political satire, from Aristophanes on, is about juxtaposing the absurd with the serious to reveal something about the powerful and their relationship with the weak. Yes it can be bawdy, farcical and slapstick, but at it's core its about unpicking something meaningful and laying it bare. SSR did not do that. And this despite the work of Wikileaks being about nothing else than the relationship between the weak and the powerful. Think of what Kubrick did in Dr Strangelove. So funny, but so spot on in reflecting the paranoia and abuses by the superpowers. In SSR we instead had rehashing of salacious tabloid stories, plagiarised snippets the dehumanising and mockery of 'innocent' people like Assange's family and a complete absence of a coherent political message. For shame.

A colleague I spoke to today said to me it sounded like a 'cut and paste play'. An apt description, I think. Cut and paste straight from the trashiest headlines and from 21st century celebrity culture - without even having something useful or interesting to say about those seamy places, let alone the far more serious mission of Wikileaks.

So I would echo the plea made by @Wikileaks - make your own art using the rich trove of world changing material that Wikileaks has given us. But make it your own, make it honest and make it count.

Cassie Findlay (@CassPF)

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