The narrator-protagonist of Osman Baig’s first play is identified only as the Journalist, employed at an online provider called Millennium Times. Ticket-buyers play unpaid interns to whom the character, now a senior editor, delivers an induction lecture on “journalistic integrity”. We are invited to learn from his catastrophic fact-checking error over a piece of breaking news that almost broke the internet.
That so appalling a reporter should have achieved such lucrative seniority is a paradox explained by Baig’s punchy and provocative monologue.
As the title Fake News indicates, the current US president is the inspirational daemon of the piece. But what makes the work more interesting than numerous other Trump-thumping theatre pieces is Baig’s understanding, as a former TV journalist, that Hillary Clinton’s nemesis was the beneficiary rather than inventor of factual fluidity in public life – from Fox News to clickbait posting by publications that were once organs of record. In a media where credibility had become relative, falsity was difficult to expose or correct.
Baig and director Sam Raffal could usefully do more work on the section in which our lecturer recalls uncovering and distributing his “scoop”. Even a fame hunter would perhaps subject to a little more due diligence what he seems to have discovered. The script also withholds until the close a key previous exchange in the office, which might more effectively be shared with the audience earlier, disguised but in plain sight.
A promising writer, Baig is indubitably good news as a performer. Such is his energetic intensity that he often seems to be delivering the entire 50 minutes in a single breath, while keeping every word clear. He has hugely expressive eyes and impressive verbal flexibility, sharply ventriloquising the narrator’s unseen colleagues, including a smoothly manipulative boss, and two rival interns: one ambitious and oddly Bambi-obsessed, the other a posh, patronising vegan.
The fringe-friendly combination of hot topic, solo form and compact length make this a perfect prospect for Edinburgh 2019.
