Is This a Room by Tina Satter, presented by Half Straddle and Perth Festival, takes the publicly available transcript of US whistle-blower Reality Winner’s interrogation by FBI agents and transforms it into a piece of theatre. If Satter’s original question when reading that transcript was, “Is this a play?” then Is This a Room‘s answer is a resounding “YES.”
Through her oftentimes curious, destabilising, and subtly unnerving directorial choices, Satter has presented a surreal piece of gripping drama through tautly choreographed movement, beautifully orchestrated dialogue, sparse visuals, and provocative sound.
In less daring and deft hands, this script could easily have a numbing effect on viewers, but at no point did this real-life conversational dance lose its grip on our senses. Bold choices from each of the performers (Susannah Perkins, Pete Simpson, Will Cobbs, and Becca Blackwell), who all showed extraordinary skill and laser focus in delivering the lines exactly as transcribed (dysfluencies, coughs and all), adhered to the ethos of living truthfully while also adding pops of colour and hints of weirdness that served to gradually heighten their collective reality.
They orbited each other, their patterns expanding and contracting, quickening in crescendo or carefully crawling towards the truth as their prey, with any hint of a ‘good cop/bad cop’ trope completely constrained by the FBI agents’ actual words. An unseen elastic band tethered them together, with only Unknown Male (Becca Blackwell) seemingly having the ability to break away into the wings. In reality, Unknown Male is a collective identifier for the 9 or so different men that were present at the scene in Winner’s house whose words float in and out of the conversation at random, providing strange non sequitur interjections along the dramatic trajectory.
The piece moves in a spiral towards an inevitable revelation, keeping us ever in edge-of-your-seat suspense as to how Winner (Susannah Perkins) would ‘handle the truth’. Winner is steadfast in her manner of responding, barely showing a sign of cracking under the immense pressure of being a young woman (with a perfectly legal cache of firearms) surrounded by a house full of men with a single-minded agenda. Perkins releases some of that pressure through quiet tears and the faintest effort at humour, which shows us so much more about Winner’s fragile vulnerability and resolute strength than a meltdown would.
The transcript’s redacted material is expressed through ‘blackout-and-boom’, which is theatre shorthand that risks cliché; but here, I don’t know if there is any better way to get the omissions across. The sensory jolt may be uncomfortable for some viewers, but for myself, after the initial shock to the system, I was better prepared to weather the rest, which came ever more frequently as the piece came to an end.
For many viewers here in Boorloo/Perth, the overlapping dialogue was also something of a shock to the senses; we’re not used to actors stepping on each others’ lines here, talking in dynamic clusters filled with throwaway utterances, dysfluencies, and broken thoughts that more closely resemble natural human conversation. This ensemble’s ability to recreate that style of dialogue with near-perfect fidelity is quite a wonder to behold.
Aside from the impressive performance, this true story still has compelling societal and political implications and as much frightening relevance today as we enter the dark wilderness of Trump 2.0. For those who missed this exclusive theatre experience, they may be able to find a way to see Reality, Satter’s film adaptation of Is This a Room.
CICELY BINFORD
Is This a Room by Tina Satter was presented by Half Straddle for Perth Festival at the Studio Underground from 14 – 17 Feb 2025. For more information on this past event, click here.
Images courtesy of Tristan McKenzie.
