IRISH-Australian actor and Canberra theatre identity Christopher Samuel Carroll is at it again with his Bare Witness Theatre Company, this time bearing witness to the increasing dangers of surveillance in our community.

Take the poster image for his new play “I Have No Enemies”, for instance. It’s not actors wearing weird make-up just to be theatrical, but “anti-facial-recognition make-up”.

“Pop it into Google”, Carroll advises, and I do, finding is that by obstructing your face with over-the-top, borderline nonsensical make-up techniques, you may be able confuse facial recognition software.

“The idea for the show was strong and clear from the start,” Carroll says.

While working for a transcription company – one of the strange day-jobs actors always find themselves doing – he found himself unexpectedly privy to information perhaps he shouldn’t have been.

Normally the work involved transcribing files of a mundane workaday nature, but suddenly one popped up that was more intimate, which in a seven-minute voicemail that included bizarre rambling showed that the speaker was going through an emotional breakdown.

His curiosity piqued, Carroll found that he could even piece together a profile, Google the speaker’s street and house.

Naturally, he observed the confidentiality agreement, but asked himself: “Who am I as a sub-contractor? I am no better than anyone else.”

The title “I Have No Enemies” is a reworking of the naïve notion that if you haven’t done anything wrong, you’re not worth looking at. I tell him lots of people back in the ’60s who had had ASIO files on them thought they hadn’t done anything much, either.

But he’s not so much talking about Orwellian surveillance as the hand-in-glove complicity of governments who overlook social media outlets because of the useful information they gather. “We normalise it both personally and publicly,” he says.

“I’m a terrible show-off,” Carroll says, “but I’m really quite reserved and rarely post much information about myself – but these days everybody’s online.”

That raise the question of context.

“You can say and send anything online and while you might argue that the counter-effect is homogenisation, so long as we’re under constant surveillance, we are less free.”

Theatre, of course, is about human beings and the central thread of the play is the above mentioned voicemail.

“We carried out a thought experiment to see how much information we could dig up… the play became like a kind of detective manhunt, with  the thrill of crossing boundaries in surveillance as it crosses into real life.”

The tight cost of four ensemble cast of four actors, including Carroll, are “apart from the thread of hunting down this dishevelled man, more or less playing versions of ourselves.”

Together they aim to set up a feeling of chaos and destruction as they open up a Pandora’s box, while local film company SilverSun Pictures has created digital predictions to enhance the live theatre experience.

“This is not a run-of-the-mill narrative,“ he says. “It’s a play full of humour about a big confronting subject – bringing it down to a human level.”

“I Have No Enemies,” Ralph Wilson Theatre, Gorman Arts Centre, March 1-11. Panel talk on surveillance 3pm, March 4. “Listening Back” a related immersive audio-visual installation by Jasmine Guffond, Gorman Arts Centre, March 2-5.