The Inner Lining of Political Discourse: Presenting the Version 1.0 Remix of the Senate Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident

'Hello, Ministry for the Arts? Yeah, I've got a great idea for a show. 2,200 pages of Hansard. Absolutely no dramatic climax, absolutely no children overboard, well, maybe one. Alright. Alright. Alright, I'll phone the Australia Council. ' Stephen, Act 3, CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident) Somewhat to our surprise, the Australia Council funded it. Of course the proposal was slightly more sophisticated than the imaginary pitch made by performer Stephen Klinder during the middle of version 1.0's theatrical treatment of proceedings from the Australian Federal Parliament's 2002 Senate Select Committee on a Certain Maritime Incident but it was highly speculative nonetheless. Members of the version 1.0 ensemble as devisor/performers, I as dramaturg and other collaborators had some vaguely shared notions about the kind of show we hoped to make, yet the actual devising process involved enough haggling, backtracking, inspiration, boredom, despair, perspiration and fear that it is something of a shock to see the textual residue ofthat labour published now, in this issue of Australasian Drama Studies, as a playscript.1 What kind of performance could be shaped out of all those pages of Hansard? What was left to be said that the senators themselves had not already covered? So much ink and so much angst had already been spilt over an incident which would have been over in a matter of seconds except for the fact that it hadn't actually occurred at all. This was no ordinary (non-) incident. Among other matters, the Senate Committee inquiring into the so-called 'children overboard affair' was given the job of determining whether Prime Minister John Howard and several senior government ministers were deliberately lying when, in October 2001, they announced that asylum seekers aboard a leaky Indonesian fishing boat, having been intercepted by HMAS Adelaide, had proceeded to throw their children overboard with the aim of coercing Navy personnel into picking them up inside Australian territorial waters, thus allowing the asylum seekers to make their claim for being accorded refugee status. Of course, the rushed and clamorous announcement of this sensational 'news' was made in the context of a Federal election campaign where the government was running very hard on the issues of 'border protection' and 'the war on terror'. So successful was their campaign strategy that even when the 'children overboard' story was revealed to be false, just before polling day, the government's standing in opinion polls did not suffer. In politics, as in theatre, fiction often plays more powerfully than truth. Thus, at least one dramaturgical principle for version 1.0's CMl (A Certain Maritime Incident) became clear: we would make a piece of performance based on verbatim transcripts from the Senate's CMI Committee - the acronym itself came from Hansard - but this would not be a straightforward piece of documentary drama. The performers would act as themselves, in whatever heightened mode they might affect in performance, but they would also refer to one another by character names such as 'Senator Brandis', 'Senator Faulkner', 'Ms Halton'. The words of these non-fictional characters would also be interpreted in a variety of ways - described by performer/producer David Williams at an early work-in-progress showing as 'somewhere between a throw-away and spirit-possession' - and there would be no consistent effort to embody characteristic postures, gestures and movements of the senators and witnesses. In performance, this disjunction was acknowledged in a series of metatextual 'asides' to the audience, printed on transparencies and displayed via a rusty old overhead projector: 'We know that you know we are not really the senators who took part in the CMI Senate Inquiry. Stephen is a lot shorter than Senator Cook and Deborah who plays Senator Faulkner is actually a woman. We found that out after the audition' (Act 1). On one level, this kind of joke can be read simply as 'Brecht 10A or, slightly more elaborately, as a nod to the strategies of post-Brechtian, postmodern performance works such as those of Forced Entertainment or the Wooster Group. …