By Helen Musa

“Definitely not authorised by Scott Morrison,” says The Street Theatre of a new play inspired by the former prime minister.

In brief: Deborah has her own podcast. On the day of Morrison’s valedictory speech, she plans to interview him and make sure he doesn’t get away with anything. An enigmatic young man helps her search for the one defining question, but each has an agenda.

The action is set mostly in Deborah’s podcasting studio rather than in Parliament House.

Playback (or, a Play About But Not Starring A Famous Politician) is by Tom Glassey, a working journalist and on-and-off Press Gallery member, who has been developing the play through the Resident Street program, with dramaturg Ross Mueller assigned to the development process.

Glassey, who now works as a video lead for Schwartz Media and was a podcast producer for political journalist Michelle Grattan during Morrison’s reign, is something of a technology whizkid. 

It is therefore no surprise that he uses multimedia techniques in a show partly inspired by Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon, which examined the 1977 interviews that forever changed public perceptions of former US president Richard Nixon.

When I catch up with Glassey and director Craig Alexander at The Street, I discover that sheer anger was one of the driving forces behind the writing.

“I was in the Press Gallery when Morrison was serving,” Glassey says, “and I was angry the whole time. Then I came back and it was the same. But after he left, a shadow lifted and everyone seemed happier.”

Glassey is nothing if not qualified to comment on the world of politics. He was once media adviser to ACT senate aspirant Kim Rubenstein, though he admits he was not particularly happy working on what journalists call “the dark side”, describing it as “a bad fit for the soul”. 

He also has form in theatre, having seen plenty of productions at the Empire Theatre while studying at University of Southern Queensland.

In 2014, he won Queensland Theatre Company’s Young Playwright Award and later participated in the Playlab Theatre Incubator program, where he wrote the one-act play Incubator. 

“Playwriting is my favourite way to write,” he says. “As a kid, I thought of it as being akin to becoming an astronaut. Dialogue is so much fun, even though in this play I push past the fun to make it really good.”

Unpicking Morrison wasn’t all that hard, he says.

“The way I felt about him, he was almost already a character in a play. There are several personas there, like the daggy dad and ‘Scotty from Marketing’. I felt quite comfortable interrogating these.”

He started out with just one character, but by making it a two-hander, one actor could become the devil’s advocate. “The tussle between them is the essence of the play,” he says. Then he added a couple more.

Glassey also had in mind David Foster Wallace’s definition of “Lynchian irony” and Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase “the banality of evil”, since Morrison’s claim to be “ordinary” could not disguise the hurt he caused. The play zooms in particularly on Robodebt and asylum-seeker policy.

He has nothing but praise for The Street, having initially undertaken six dramaturgical sessions with Mueller, who has remained involved through to what Glassey estimates is now draft 17 or 18.

Alexander joined the production earlier this year and points out that, as a videographer and filmmaker, he has much in common with Glassey, whose script contains a strong multimedia element.

Alexander says casting Andrea Close as Deborah was a “no-brainer”. Not only had she been involved in the development process, but the respected actor is also well known to Canberra audiences as a former local ABC broadcaster.

Tyler Jenkins in the younger role, by contrast, is relatively new to the Canberra theatre scene, and comes from a comedy background, well-suited to the duplicitous nature of certain politicians, Glassey thinks.

He frames elements of the story through a young man retelling events, with live video projected on to surfaces within the set. The character speaks directly to the audience throughout, somewhat like Tom in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, Glassey’s favourite play.

And Glassey is quick to point out the caveat that the work is subtitled A Play About But Not Starring A Famous Politician.

Playback, at The Street Theatre, May 23-31.