Eccentric characters, constant deadlines, lust, envy, loyalty and betrayal, all in the sealed environment of a newspaper newsroom. Charmian Smith talks to Simon Cunliffe about his new play, The Truth Game which opens at the Fortune Theatre next week.
The playwright, who is also one of the ODT's deputy editors, is intrigued by the newspaper industry and the many issues facing it, the eccentric characters who work in it, and how the truth can appear different depending on the angle from which you are looking at it.
His play is set in a newspaper newsroom, a world of its own with its own morality, its own rules and its own relationships, he says.
"I've been fascinated by that and also fascinated by what makes journalists tick, I suspect in part because I came into it quite a bit later. I'd actually done quite a few things by the time I became a journalist."
Cunliffe came to the newspaper industry after having studied food technology at Massey University and film studies in London, driven aid lorries in Africa and worked at several other jobs. He started writing about film for various British publications, then moved into subediting and learnt his trade in quality journalism at the Independent in London in the mid-1980s, when he was in his early 30s.
Returning to Christchurch with his family at the end of 1992, he worked at the Press, becoming deputy editor there before moving to Dunedin at the end of 2002. He freelanced and explored other forms of writing for about four years while looking after children, as his wife was busy with her career. He joined the ODT late in 2007.
"Basically my subject matter was never a problem - write about what you know. In certain respects, that was a disadvantage because I knew too much, but I didn't know much about finding the dramatic high points.
That was something I had to learn - dramatic structure, how you create and sustain a dramatic story and how your characters respond within that environment," he says.
Despite the crash course in dramaturgy and the play's initial flaws, he was constantly encouraged because people told him they liked the fact it was about something and that it felt real.
"Also I knew I had really good characters because the characters you find in a newsroom are quite eccentric - there's a wonderful collection of people we work with here.
"I won't go into that because people might think it's about them, but I do have the perfect excuse that the play and characters were written before I arrived at the ODT. I was just mightily reassured that when I did arrive that I wasn't so far off the mark!.
"There's something that appeals to me about the way grown men might come to blows over the placement of a comma or a semicolon. It's something extraordinary."
The play is set in the newsroom of a fictional paper, the Advocate, and he has borrowed, mixed and matched, fictionalised and embellished - all the things you do as a fiction writer, he says.
As a workplace drama, there's ambition, loyalty, envy, betrayal, love/lust - and always a looming deadline. Wind up that pressure, and add the pressure of the whole newspaper world being turned upside down by digital media and other forces, and you have the scope for dramatic things to occur. That's really the heart of the drama, he says.
"It's a warts-and-all drama. It has coarse language; it has adult content in it, so it's not any kind of a whimsical documentary. It's a full-blown, in-your-face drama," he warns. Yet he also describes it as "an affectionate valediction to a fast-disappearing world".
The newspaper industry is in a state of flux that some would describe as a crisis.
The introduction of digital media, a generation of younger people who get their information from the internet, the downturn in advertising with the global financial situation and changing patterns of ownership, are all affecting print journalism, he says.
In New Zealand, indicators of industry change include the closure of NZPA and the loss of subeditors' desks in most of the major publications as they contract the work out or create a central subediting hub.
Overseas, the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal raises the question, how did it come to this? he says.
"Some of those sorts of questions are at the heart of The Truth Game. When you have a corporate culture in which news becomes simply another commodity, how do you carry the moral and ethical impulse of the traditional fourth estate forward?
"How do you do that in a splintered media environment, where blog sites are seemingly given as much weight in the information they process as a traditional newspaper that operates by ethical considerations and boundaries?" he asks.
"We take for granted that information is freely available, but how on earth do we keep on paying to have court reporters and council reporters and police reporters and everyone else, when the business model for the new media, the online sites and so on, is not yet fully functional.
"If you have to drop off all those things, which is happening in certain places, what are you left with? You are left with the fluff and the candyfloss, and that other stuff that really helps us to function as a democratic society stands to be lost or lose some of its impact."
A well-functioning democracy requires an almost untrammelled passage of "the truth" through the media to the people, but that is being increasingly assailed, including how we know what "the truth" is, he says.
"Once upon a time, we were certain because the truth was written in black and white, and of course we've come to learn that wasn't always right, either.
"I think one is more aware, and certainly the characters in The Truth Game become aware that they have their own versions of the truth, or they are seeking their own versions of the truth, and it can appear very different depending on the angle you are looking at it from," he says.
"I'm not saying I've got any more answers to this than anyone else. These are just some of the questions the play raises. I think if the truth was a simple concept and the characters knew what the truth was, and I knew what the truth was, there would be no play called The Truth Game."
Catch it
The Truth Game by Simon Cunliffe has its world-premiere opening at the Fortune Theatre on Friday, October 7.
Directed by Lara Macgregor, it features Michele Amas, Kathleen Burns, Peter Hayden, Anna Henare, Phil Vaughan and Greg Johnson as the "last great snorting warhorse of print journalism".
For more information go to www.odt.co.nz/advert/fortune-theatre/truth-game/167271. Trailer to be posted there soon.
