Woodcourt Art Theatre in association with Merrigong Theatre Company presents TOM WILLIAM MITCHELL, by local playwright and director and UoW alumni, Mark Rogers.
Tom William Mitchell works for a broadcast news company. Employed for his idealistic ‘truth-saying’, ex-Survivor contestant Tom William Mitchell works his way up from the copy room to the interview couch in a matter of weeks. But will climbing the ladder in a post-truth world force him to lose touch with his true convictions? TOM WILLIAM MITCHELL is a razor-sharp satire about our hyper-mediatised society. The play examines the rise of contemporary populism and the ever-changing media landscape via a slick aesthetic which mashes up TV news and contemporary theatre practice. TOM WILLIAM MITCHELL is a cutting-edge piece of theatre for the here and now.
We spoke to writer/ director Mark Rogers when he had a rare morning off.
SAG: You Must be right in the middle of it now.
MARK: Yeah. We’re taking as much time as we can to dive back into the play. We’ve been carving out nights and weekends to make it work as best we can. Yeah pretty in the thick of it.
SAG: So this started as a PhD project?
MARK: Yes mid last year and the people involved are basically the people who were around for the PhD version of it. It was nice to get the gang back together. And to see what worked then and what didn’t.
SAG: That’s a big cast you have there.
MARK: Yes, there’s nine of them. Massive, it’s a big group of people!
SAG: Whenever I get to talk to a writer I always ask how their play changes when the cast and director take over.
MARK: Even though I’m directing it changes massively when my director version of me gets hold of it. I don’t always write for myself to direct but I think there is a different kind of writing whenever I am going to direct myself.
You are sort of serving up balls that you know you can direct out of the park and there is also an aspect where if there’s a problem in the writing, I can fix it in the mix.
The other cool thing, when you are writing and directing you can change stuff in the room a lot more and I find that kind of invigorating. I get a lot of energy from that as a writer to change. And the good thing about working with these people so long on the project, we started about 2013, there’s a real kind of community about it. They know they can tell me if their line sucks and we can fix things in the room. It feels more like a theatre making process than a writer/director situation.
SAG: As to the story itself, is it about one man?
MARK: It’s fun thing to do to name the play after the title character, like Hedda Gabler. It centres on this Tom William Mitchell character. I was inspired by several films, A Face in the Crowd and Network where they are both about a person within a media organization who starts breaking the rules of that organization, not behaving as the sponsors want him to behave. To speak truth.
The great thing about those two films is that they show the disruptive power of what it is to just suddenly speak truth on air, to break the format. But, beautifully, they also show what how the big corporate powers capitalise and use the dissent and the rebelling to sell more product. The rebellion gets co-opted, it just blew me away. I wanted to find the contemporary equivalent, to write the next bit of the trilogy.
SAG: From the images, media plays a bit part in the staging of the work. Is it theatre-in-the-round?
MARK: Yeah, so in-the-round or rather, in-the-square. Inside which is another square, sort of a diamond which is encircled by four tellies. So pretty multi-media because it stages TV News, TV News set-pieces. It’s got interviews with politicians, that sort of thing as part of the narrative.
The thing that was exciting for me about involving and using cameras and giving the audience multiple perspectives on the action is that they see the theatre of it at the same time as they see the filmed product of it. So, they get to feel the dissonance between the two. The perfect media image but in the theatre you can see the construction of it.
And for me that was part of the logic of doing the show … wanting to show the fakery, the construction of media imagery.
SAG: This character is a Survivor survivor.
MARK: That just appealed to be as what sort of person that person must be. What sort of attention seeking, fame seeking person might want to go on Survivor. It’s a small part of the narrative, he goes for a job interview for this news thing and one of his qualifications is that he was on Survivor. It strikes a chord, something about it felt right to me because there a relentless quality in Tom William Mitchell that the play is trying to critique.
SAG: Is there an anti-media element to the play or are there positives considering how much pressure our media is under in the current environment?
MARK: I think it walks the line. It’s important to me not to just say corrupt. It was important to me to point out problems and to indict systemic issues but to defend the principles of it. To defend the importance of speaking truth and to critique power. Although the media world of the play, the kind of world it exists in, is a satirical one, I still hope the play champions what journalist integrity means. We don’t applaud Tom William Mitchell for his actions.
SAG: I better let you have some of you morning back. It opens on the 9th so you must be getting into the very busy time.
MARK: So, we get into the theatre, um, not too far away, then install it and make it happen!
SAG: Best of luck for the season and thanks again for speaking with our readers.
Woodcourt Art Theatre in association with Merrigong Theatre Company [Facebook] presents TOM WILLIAM MITCHELL from Thursday 9th – Saturday 11th August, 2018.
