OBSERVER: Smokescreen
Set some 50 years ago, Smokescreen is actually a contemporary play written by Christopher Samuel Carroll about the dissonance between human capacity for rationalisation and the resulting destructive outcomes.
Oil executive, Glen (Carroll) and advertising guru, Bud (Damon Baudin) meet in an airport lounge to discuss ways around the impending crisis facing the oil industry – global warming.
Bud’s experience in the tobacco industry makes him the perfect foil justifying, as he has, the continued marketing of what can only be described as a symbol of success, the cigarette, given it serves no other purpose but remains cancerous.
Can the oil industry justify its own existence given the cataclysmic potential of climate change?
The work is dialectic in nature pursuing arguments rather than following the arc of a character’s development or the narrative of a story.
Set with the two at either end of a table, the emphasis is on substance and the reasoning behind the justification of their respective industries. Both performers sustain their characters amidst the weight of the dialogue, there being little relief dramatically but for the changing of positions by the end of the play. The power dynamic has altered.
Whilst Carroll has identified the fatal flaw in both industries and within the human condition that leads to denial, the play’s initial overture in addressing the tobacco industry is familiar.
The sense that the oil industry knew of the impending crisis correlates well with how tobacco executives behaved.
There is, perhaps, a coda possible, however. The emphasis placed on individual freedoms and choice speaks to a crisis in current day politics where short term decisions compromise the collective good.
One only has to think of the threat Covid posed and how selfishly many behaved because it was their individual right – an attitude that Carroll identified in how the tobacco and oil industries have justified themselves.
The Kraken of their logic has been lost on the world.
Performed at fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane.
Review by David McLean
Pictured: Damon Baudin and Christopher Samuel Carroll in Smokescreen. Photo: Nicholas Robertson