Smokescreen by Christopher Samuel Carroll. Bare Witness Theatre Co. at The Q, Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre, February 2-5, 2022.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
Opening Night February 3
Writer/Director – Christopher Samuel Carroll
Cast: Christopher Samuel Carroll as Glenn; Damon Baudin as Bud
Lighting Designer: Antony Hateley
In
a war-crimes trial under way as I write, a witness’s veracity has been
challenged because he did not report the murder he saw happen when it
happened. The accused was his commanding officer. Though the witness
felt guilty at the time for saying nothing, he knew his own career and
even safety was at risk. In court years later, no longer on duty or
even in the army, “I know what I saw,” he said.
This is the human dilemma presented for an oil industry ad-man, Glenn, in Carroll’s 90-minute two-hander Smokescreen.
Bud, working for tobacco companies, already under threat as, literally,
a dying industry even 45 years ago when this play is set, in capitalist
USA, offers Glenn a new direction away from standard advertising in
competition for sales between companies to a much more subtle and
effective approach to support investment and profit-taking for whole
industries. Regardless of the truth of the destruction of Glenn’s lungs
from his need to keep smoking; and regardless of the truth Glenn has
only just discovered that burning fossil fuels will destroy agriculture
in “ten or twenty years”, he thinks.
Bud’s ploy is simple. Keep
it quiet; support social action by any kind of government or
non-government group campaigning for “freedom” – that is freedom of
choice (to smoke or drive and fly on holiday); keep making money while
you can. And that means keep your job and maintain your family.
Carroll’s writing in Smokescreen is simple in its plot – will Bud succeed in persuading Glenn?
The
characterisation is anything but simple, as each man reveals – or
doesn’t reveal – their true position. The argument is not academic, but
has real personal consequences for each of them. The worst thing about
the play is that as we watch and listen carefully, we find ourselves
being caught out accepting and appreciating Bud’s unethical position and
feeling sorry for Glenn’s moral confusion.
The significance of
the play, it’s importance today in Canberra (and I would hope in, say,
New York, at least off-Broadway) is that we face in reality Glenn’s
dilemma and the results of Bud’s ploy of emphasising fake “freedom”. Do
we really have any choice but to keep our lives going in the short-term
despite the science clearly predicting what Jared Diamond called Collapse
in the not very long-term. “My 13- and 16-year-old daughters”, says
fictional Glenn 45 years ago, “will still be here in 40 years” when Bud
suggests to stop worrying, take a relaxing break and have a cigarette.
Just as my 16-year-old grandson will still be here, I hope, in 2050.
The
best thing about the play is that it shows a writer, director and actor
of depth of understanding in Christopher Samuel Carroll, thoroughly
supported by Damon Baudin, Antony Hateley on lights – and by the device
of giving pauses significance by the interrupting sound of a jet
aircraft overhead. So much fossil fuel for our consideration.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
