On Stage: Smokescreen

Much of the content of the Australian play Smokescreen is alarming.

Even more concerning – according to playwright and star of the two-hander play, Christopher Samuel Carroll – it’s partly based on personal experience.

Set in America in 1977, Smokescreen is a Mad Men-style drama about a pair of marketing executives who meet to swap trade secrets.

Glen (Carroll) is in crisis mode. He’s had a successful career working for a major oil company, but now realises the damage to the climate oil is causing.

He’s hoping Bud (Damon Baudin), a young talented tobacco industry marketer, can share his success in selling cigarettes despite knowledge of their disastrous health consequences.

More importantly Glen is hoping Bud can help him understand how to live with himself knowing the damage the product he sells is causing.

In a media interview in Theatre Matters Carroll explains his insight into the impact of covert marketing techniques began while he was living in Paris where he met and spoke with individuals working for big tobacco companies and a scientist who worked for a major American petroleum company.

“What stuck with me from those conversations in Paris was the moral indifference of a very rational, practical outlook on the world; like, `that’s just how it is’, and it would be rather foolish to see it otherwise,” he said.

“I remember asking the engineer from the oil company about their initiatives to shift to renewables and he was upfront about it being just window dressing, a PR exercise, that “nothing was going to change until it was more profitable to do so. His attitude, and that of the people I talked to in the tobacco industry, was stoicism with a shrug.”

In Smokescreen Bud’s explanations of his industry’s covert marketing techniques are disturbing, unnerving and – even more worrying – familiar.

While both men give excellent performances much of the success of the play’s apt description as psychological drama goes to Baudin. Without giving too much away, his character’s transformation during the play is at first unexpected and then rather scary.

At the same time Carroll is totally believable as a man who is at times confident and at other times vulnerable, doubtful and confused.

On opening night of the show’s run at fortyfivedownstairs neither actor missed a beat which was remarkable given their requirement to deliver 90 minutes of often complex and sometimes disturbing dialogue and portray changing interpersonal dynamics with few props.

This dialogue also requires great audience concentration which, given the reaction of those attending opening night, wasn’t  a problem thanks to the show’s subject matter and the skills of Carroll and Baudin.

Smokescreen is playing at fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, until July 13. Visit the fortyfivedownstairs website for more information and tickets.

Jenny Burns attended the opening night of Smokescreen as a guest of the production company.

*Photo credit: Nicholas Robertson