The Goulburn Film Group will present something entirely different for local cinemagoers: an Australian National Theatre Live production. This is the first time such a production has been screened in Goulburn.
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Liberty Equality Fraternity is a witty play captured by the Australian National Theatre Live at Sydney's Ensemble Theatre. Created by playwright Geoffrey Atherden (writer of Mother and Son) this production is a laugh-out-loud parody of our surveillance society.
'Is big brother watching you' has become an everyday term in our society, ever since George Orwell's novel 1984.
Big brother has been watching Orlagh O'Connor, a feisty, left-leaning young mother played to perfection by Caroline Brazier (Rake). She has never considered herself to be a threat to national security. She is an 'ordinary' suburban housewife and academic. Why then is she under surveillance? Why is she 'voluntarily' detained by the Intelligence Services for interrogation?
Atherden ingeniously places Australian politics and social media under intense scrutiny, using his unique comedic approach. He deftly explores the fine line between our complacency towards government intelligence gathering, our uninhibited desire to share personal information on social media and our right to privacy.
"We're after something else, something secret, something you're not telling anyone,"says one of her inquisitors.
Her interrogators Arky, played by Andrew Ryan (INXS) and Arky's boss Helmut Bakaitis (The Matrix), are delightfully inept but somewhat worryingly sinister. They act the 'good cop/bad cop' routine to perfection.
Arky and his boss embody bureaucratic blandness, officiousness and bumbling ineptitude which combine to deliver biting humour. They're the quintessential Yes-Minister bureaucrats. And of course the indispensable mountains of invasive government paperwork festoons the stage.
In the three-walled stage of the Ensemble Theatre, the audience members voyeuristically become the 'fourth wall' of the interrogation office taking on the role of anonymous observers. We are slowly but surely drawn into the proceedings of the interrogation.
Eventually O'Connor becomes an embodiment of us all, gaining the audience's admiration with her verbal jousting in response to Arky's inane, relentless questioning. What eventually wears her down is not any form of torture but the bumbling ineptness of Arky.
Liberty Equality Fraternity questions what power a hapless individual has when confronted with accusations from a faceless government department. This thought-provoking Kafka-esque comedy is a salient warning for the Facebook generation.
