Review: Is This A Room at Studio Underground
Is This A Room at Studio Underground
Saturday, February 15, 2025
Some works of art translate across time and cultures, and some don’t. That’s not to say that such works don’t have dramatic power and can have a strong impact upon an audience; they certainly can, just that they are too heavily dependent on a specific moment in a specific society to speak effectively and richly to an audience far removed from that time and place. When a work of art’s meaning relies heavily upon such precise prior knowledge of the events depicted, its relevance and effectiveness is severely diminished. Sadly, this is the case with Half Straddle’s production of Is This A Room that aired at the Studio Underground for Perth Festival last weekend.
Billed as ‘a docu-drama’ … ‘torn from the headlines,’ the play is a verbatim presentation of the redacted transcription of the initial FBI interrogation of Reality Winner, a twenty-five-year-old NSA operative, at her home in 2017. The play is intentionally restricted to the transcribed interview only. No background information is provided within the text; even the crucial information about the events leading to the interrogation has been redacted, as it was in the original transcript, because of the political sensitivity.
This would not have been a problem for a progressive American audience in 2020 when the play was first staged. They would all have known who Reality Winner was, the importance of her whistle-blowing to the American political moment, and the fact that she ultimately served time for her egregious breach of ‘national security.’ For them this was a cause célèbre; you would have to be living in a political vacuum not to know about it.
But for an Australian audience in 2025, this knowledge is by no means a given. The most politically engaged people in this country may have heard of Reality Winner—after all, it’s a memorable name—but only the most avid devotees to the minutiae and machinations of American politics will know that she leaked to the press proof of the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the implications that had for the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency. Without that information, most Australians would wonder at her relevance. Simply, going by this play’s presentation, for them she was just some chick who did something wrong and got caught.
It is one thing to be confused after a first engagement with a work of art, to need to see or read it a second or third time to piece the elements together and work out what’s going on. Some complex works demand that you seek out further information and expand your knowledge base to fully appreciate the meaning and implications.
But it is something else altogether when you need to read the program or attend a Q&A session just to understand the basics of what’s being presented. Sure, there can be a certain absurdity in not knowing these things, but that only really works as a reflection on the essential absurdity of the human condition. In this case, the withheld information was simple, and it would not have been a great stretch of the theatrical art to present it within the context of the play. After all, playwrights have been doing that for millennia; it is a fundamental element of their craft.
No doubt, twenty years hence, when this political moment has faded into obscurity and the headlines are long forgotten, if a company should decide to mount an American revival of this curious and antique work, the script will have to be rewritten to accommodate this essential problem. It’s a great shame that Half Straddle didn’t have the foresight to do so for their current tour.
All of this is not to say that the ‘play’ did not have moments of great tension. It did. It was well-acted and effectively staged in a very simple and stark open set. The redacted sections needed to be more effectively presented—the loud bleep was unsettling but ambiguous, again something that needed to be explained.
Overall, Is This A Room is at most a scene in a greater drama, perhaps the central scene, but in itself is insufficient as a stand-alone piece of theatre. Too many people left the State Theatre Centre last weekend wondering what the fuck was that all about and, worse, why should they even care? That’s a great pity, as it’s an important story that, with a little more work, has the potential to be so much more.
IAN LILBURNE
Photos by Paula Court
