Whitenoise: 12 Ghosts

WHITENOISE: 12 GHOSTS is a collection of three apparently different performance pieces.  The thread which joins them is perception – that is, how things are seen – or how we are led to see them – by the media, by our own prejudices, by our own fear and paranoia.  Kathleen Mary Fallon is alone on stage.  There’s a lectern.  In one piece, there’s a chair.  Some key props are illuminated on the upstage wall, but lighting changes are minimal.  There are costume changes, but otherwise this is text and performance unenhanced and unadorned.  Each piece is delivered forcefully if not angrily, with more than a note of accusation – that is, that we were and continue to be taken in by spin, by the more convenient version of events, and thus our anger is safely misdirected.

The first piece is ‘Lindy Chamberlain: Been There, Done That’; it’s set in Berrima Gaol.  Ms Fallon is the Narrator, she is the imprisoned Lindy Chamberlain, and she is an unnamed fellow inmate, an Old Lag who angrily tries to explain the media game to Lindy and how Lindy does not know how to play it.  Throughout, Lindy is imperturbable, calmly sewing yet more provocative black and red baby clothes and asserting her innocence and her faith.  All the things, says the Old Lag, that ensure that the media – and thus the public – hate her.  The ‘facts’, even when true, don’t matter.  If only Lindy would play along, she would be forgiven…

In the second piece, which is virtually verbatim theatre as monologue, Mamdough Habib tells the story of his capture in Pakistan, his redaction, torture, and finally his release from Guantanamo Bay.  Four years in limbo, in hell.  Here Ms Fallon wears the now familiar orange jump suit, but she does not attempt to impersonate Habib.  His account is chillingly matter of fact, with just a hint of subtextual anger.  Ms Fallon adds – and this is where we are accused - the near knee-jerk, supine, and indifferent responses of Australian politicians to the fate of Habib, an Australian citizen.  I.e., there may be no evidence, there may be a great and cruel injustice, but if the Americans say Habib is a terrorist, well, he is.  (During this piece, one is inevitably – or perhaps not – reminded of Julian Assange.)

The third, ‘First Gulf War: Seen it all before’, is the most theatrical or confrontational of the three pieces – and the closest to agit-prop.  Ms Fallon, in camouflage uniform and aviator glasses, plays a square-jawed, implacable US Army four-star general – a cartoon caricature of Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf – and the compliant and complicit cutie-pie television ‘journalist’ who interviews him.  He has hand grenades for balls.  She has a tiny hand grenade for her microphone.  In her awed, admiring, girlish way, she accepts any and every lie he wants to tell.  And yet again, an eager Australian politician is added…

Kathleen Mary Fallon – award-winning novelist, playwright, screenwriter, librettist and academic – also has that Brechtian ability in her performances here both to play and comment on her characters at the same time.  This is most evident – and pointed – in the Lindy Chamberlain piece, which is also the most original, ironic, and insightful, if cynical, of the three pieces.  It goes under and behind the simple ‘she really was innocent’ case to say that Lindy was convicted by prejudice so strong, so unshakeable, no matter how irrational, that the only way to beat it… was to weep and confess.

Nevertheless, valid as Ms Fallon’s underlying arguments are, one wonders why she has mounted these pieces set so far – already so far – in the past.  As I looked around the theatre, most of the audience looked about old enough to remember the bases of the pieces, but there was a feeling of the dusted-off for the sake of the show.  With her undoubted literary and dramatic skills, why not a piece on Assange?  Why not Witness K?  Why not Iraq, or Afghanistan?  But perhaps Ms Fallon’s point, in dramatizing these past incidents, is to say, ‘It was ever thus’. 

Michael Brindley