Directed by Jane Angharad, Ross Mueller’s The Ghost Writer is a tight, clever thriller. It’s a meditation on Truth, not so much what it is, but what we do with it.
Brihanna’s daughter has been murdered. She wants to write a book about it.
To make that happen, publisher Robert employs a ghost writer.
Whether the pun in the title is provocative or naff depends on … taste.
The danger haunting all work that borrows from the thriller genre is that their representations of the horrible can appear heartless. Are these representations there to mourn the bewildering misery of existence, or merely to sharpen the story?
A lot of people love this type of sharpness and, with some good performances and an evocative set (by James Smithers), this story has real bite.
But it’s not a bite to my taste.
Brihanna (Emma Dalton) claims she knows who killed her daughter. Since the murder remains unsolved, you might think this a point of interest … and Brihanna’s claim is considered, briefly, and then disappears into the background until the conclusion of the play. Stories that withhold information foster curiosity not empathy. There’s been a lot of these type of stories since the invention of crime fiction. They invite us to guess, not to grow. They humanise us as much as a crossword puzzle might. They are the sudokus of the soul.
You might counter that thrillers are not about feelings, but thought.
But thrillers have abstract ideas in the way superheroes have capes: they’re obvious, they flap around a lot, but you’re not really sure why they’re there. (Answer: They provide the illusion of flight.)
Here the abstract idea is Truth, and that cape flaps around in quite an eye-catching manner.
There’s a sexual relationship between the writer (Mel Day) and an employee of the public prosecutor (Shan-Ree Tan). Apart from being extraordinarily coincidental, the relationship is also oddly anonymous. The couple have been sharing a bed but not personal information, not even their names.
The prosecutor has eschewed truth in another way. He has knowingly charged an innocent man with murder, giving in to pressure from a government keen to assert its credentials on crime before an election. Tan gives a fine performance as the man who knows he could have done better. The scenario itself has a whiff of the American about it, where district attorneys are elected. I won’t be so naïve as to suggest that our public servants don’t cop pressure from elected representatives, but how many Australians would alter their vote according to the arrest of a single murder suspect? (In our wide, flat land, justice is a chimera, and only the hip pocket is real. Recently, 240 years of injustice towards our indigenous people failed to impact a vote. But, it could be argued, my example only further supports the premise of the scenario.)
Other characters are also presented as having scant regard for the truth. Robert the publisher is driven by sales. Mark Langham excels in the satirical portrait of the ruthless businessman, allowing it to grow subtly, until it overshadows the more gentle humour which introduced the character as a playful rogue and confused father.
And the motif of truth returns again with Brihanna’s remarkable claim that she saw Jesus take her child to the afterlife. One character asks Do you believe Brihanna saw Jesus take the child? It’s an odd way of putting it. Perhaps if it were Do you believe Jesus took the child? it might be more to the point. Or, better still, Do you believe Brihanna believes she saw Jesus take the child? None of this is unpacked, perhaps for the best. Unless you lived in Galilee in the first century of the Common Era, seeing Jesus would surely be an experience of the inner life, and the play believes in external facts. Perhaps all plays must, even when those facts are bizarre, and the last line of this play certainly is a conversation starter, or stopper, depending on…taste.
But taste is not Truth. (In every production, the least convincing performance is always the one by the critic attempting the role of Teller-of-the-Truth.)
See this taut, taunting, teasing piece for yourself.
Paul Gilchrist
The Ghost Writer by Ross Mueller
produced by Crying Chair Theatre in association with Secret House
at Flight Path Theatre until 16 March
Image by Braiden Toko
Theatre Red 