I have been reading The Age since I was a kid and it used to come every day to our breakfast table. So how strange to see my name in it, in the place where others have been thousands of times. Here is the review and then I talk about it after.
The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs
Elly Varrenti
May 29, 2012
La Mama, June 3,10,17 & 24
(3 stars)
AMERICAN writer-performer Mike Daisey - a kind of Mike Moore meets Spalding Gray - created a furore recently when it was discovered he'd taken poetic licence in his investigative expose of substandard working conditions at the factory in China where 50 per cent of the world's electronics are manufactured - in particular, a large chunk of Apple products. Sprung bad, Daisey delivered a retraction on American Public Radio's This American Life: presenter Ira Glass calling Daisey to account for his major ethical stuff-up made for seriously compelling radio.
Agony & Ecstasy is not really about the ''techno libertarian hippie'' and Apple founder Steve Jobs, but rather a first-person monologue-cum-call-to-arms charting Daisey's obsession with Apple technology: ''I am a worshipper at the cult of Mac''. Daisey goes on a pilgrimage to Shenzhen, where he witnesses Apple's underbelly and interviews traumatised Foxconn factory workers (some made up, it turns out).
Melburnian Richard Pettifer delivers Daisey's intermittently fascinating monologue with a tokenistic nod to the recent scandal: we hear an excerpt from the now-famous on-air retraction and Pettifer sports a T-shirt emblazoned with LIAR. He does a decent enough job imparting the text, although reliance on notes interrupts the flow and overall, the presentation could have done with a bit more sculpting. Pettifer's take on Daisey's story, given its controversy, is underdeveloped. As theatre, it lacks coherence, but if you're not familiar with Daisey's brand of theatre-as-weapon, it's well worth a look.
(3 stars)
AMERICAN writer-performer Mike Daisey - a kind of Mike Moore meets Spalding Gray - created a furore recently when it was discovered he'd taken poetic licence in his investigative expose of substandard working conditions at the factory in China where 50 per cent of the world's electronics are manufactured - in particular, a large chunk of Apple products. Sprung bad, Daisey delivered a retraction on American Public Radio's This American Life: presenter Ira Glass calling Daisey to account for his major ethical stuff-up made for seriously compelling radio.
Agony & Ecstasy is not really about the ''techno libertarian hippie'' and Apple founder Steve Jobs, but rather a first-person monologue-cum-call-to-arms charting Daisey's obsession with Apple technology: ''I am a worshipper at the cult of Mac''. Daisey goes on a pilgrimage to Shenzhen, where he witnesses Apple's underbelly and interviews traumatised Foxconn factory workers (some made up, it turns out).
Melburnian Richard Pettifer delivers Daisey's intermittently fascinating monologue with a tokenistic nod to the recent scandal: we hear an excerpt from the now-famous on-air retraction and Pettifer sports a T-shirt emblazoned with LIAR. He does a decent enough job imparting the text, although reliance on notes interrupts the flow and overall, the presentation could have done with a bit more sculpting. Pettifer's take on Daisey's story, given its controversy, is underdeveloped. As theatre, it lacks coherence, but if you're not familiar with Daisey's brand of theatre-as-weapon, it's well worth a look.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/theatre/the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs-20120528-1zf3w.html#ixzz1wFEwPbAg
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I was disappointed about some things in Elly's review. Initially they were the usual feelings artists have when their work is criticised. The reviewer did not understand my intention. They misrepresented me. They did not research properly. They have been careless in the words they have chosen.
Art is fragile, often it involves people in a vulnerable state, and this is why passions can run high when you get reviewed. Likewise, criticism is often a lonely and painful art. You only have to look at Cameron Woodhead standing alone by himself outside of a foyer to understand how isolating it can be. But actually my concern reading Elly's review is that the criticism she has created doesn't try to say great things. I would really like to be spurring criticism that tries to say great things. I consider criticism as separate to my work, in some ways it's nothing to do with me at all. But on this occasion I take the chance to respond, with the motive of an improved conversation. I do not see this (and hope this is not seen) as arrogance or interfering with the critic's work - I see it as being accountable.
To me, the review frames everything I attempt within the rules of entertainment and treats its success or failure as either confirming or denying this idea. For example, the use of the LIAR t-shirt and the excerpts of the Retraction are tokensitic only in terms of their stage-time - they lift this version of the monologue from the pre-scandal context, and they also create a crucial distance. Likewise, the idea that the presentation could have done with more sculpting belies its ambition to present the monologue to the community a.s.a.p as an artifact for consideration, one which draws its relevance from the context and timeliness. It could equally be argued that, if anything, the performance has too much sculpting, as has been suggested to me: the neutrality of the performance - it's "blankness" - could be integral to its providing a canvas for conversation. However I made a decision that it more honest (and, I admit, less boring) to try and replicate as best I could Mike's performance style. This brassy American style is part of the text, and necessary information for evaluating it. Therefore the fact that it is controversial has no link with its lack of development, or possibly points to the lack of development being a positive. Making a 'bad copy' as I have specified as an objective previously, is one way of allowing the audience to consider it from a distance (as is running a blog). Within this new framework, the idea that as theatre it lacks coherence is also untrue - it can't help but be coherent within the logic that I have set up for it. The only way it could be incoherent is if I modified any of the monologue to achieve fluidity or deliver the text in a more digestible fashion, with an idea to create something more entertaining. If I had used an actor, for example. That would have been false, and so as a theatrical arguement, incoherent.
Rather than treat this crisis as performance failure, I prefer to see it as generating opportunities for 'other' thought. As I think wearing a big LIAR t-shirt suggests, it is the conversation the work raises which interests me - not its theatrical power to affect (except in as much as this is part of that conversation). All of the arguments the review makes Against this work are actually arguments For - I did refer to my notes, but that's because I am not an actor and I am simply a bloke who felt moved to go on stage. (Besides, Mike uses notes!! In fact, he uses exactly the same A4 yellow paper). This work is not about sitting back, relaxing and being entertained. In fact, if anyone is going to review my work simply within this frame it is always going to fail them - particularly so here. If the work is attended with this expectation, it will disappoint.
With this in mind, it is possible that I have presented this work too much as an attempt at entertainment. It does not fail hard enough. It is not "shit" enough. I think this is too simple an explanation, but it does give me something else to ponder and I will take into my next performance on Sunday.
And of course, perhaps above all that I have said here, thanks to Elly for taking the time to attend and give attention to this work.
For what it's worth, here is what I thought of your performance Richard. :)
ReplyDeletehttp://robertmarkbram.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/richard-pettifer-is-awesome-in-agony.html