Fire and Tears

Yesterday I went to see On the Record in the new(ish) Arcola Theatre space on Ashwin Street in Dalston. The play was created by Ice and Fire, an amazing company committed to exploring human rights stories through performance. The play was a part-verbatim, part-dramatic re-enaction performance piece about a number of iconic independent investigative journalists from different parts of the globe including an American photojournalist specialising in war photography, an Israeli woman, a Mexican woman, a young Russian woman, and two men from Sri Lanka. Again, the piece has a huge relevance and contemporary edge as it comments on the mainstream press, the way in which so little is reported with integrity and honesty, and the battles that these particular journalists focused upon in the play have to fight simply to be allowed to report with integrity and honesty. Unfortunately, I think that this run is now completely finished, it was certainly the last night at the Arcola, but do check out their website, at http://iceandfire.co.uk/ to find out more about this excellent company. I am certainly going to be following their work very closely from now on.

Also, as a result of watching the show, I was alerted to some interesting sounding books and websites to check out. There is a news channel called Democracy Now which provides a far less biased and less PR-spun news programme daily, and is available to watch online at: http://www.democracynow.org/ .

Having learnt from attending the post-show discussion with the Ice and Fire artistic director just how much of our current media, even the so-called "proper" papers, our beloved broadsheets, are just churnalism, it has made me want to seek out alternative news sources.

This isn't supposed to be an indictment on current journalists, though of course the buck has to stop somewhere, as from what I learned yesterday journalists working on broadsheet dailies are under enormous pressure to produce, produce, produce, which means that unchecked and poorly researched press is released and printed as fact. But it is good to be aware of this.

As my friend said, if you are an intelligent person, you do know, somewhere in the back of your mind, that what you read even in the broadsheets is not necessarily the truth of the matter, but it is easy to get lazy, to just accept what is printed without questioning because it takes time and mental effort to really question and interrogate what you read.

Also, mentioned in the Ice and Fire programme, is the book Flat Earth News by Nick Davies (http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=flat+earth+news&x=7&y=22), which is apparently an excellent account of the truth behind broadsheet reportage in the UK. I only saw the play yesterday but this is a book I intend to buy and read so thought I would share it on here.

I spent a lot of this play in tears and was left in my seat crying at the end it was so powerful. I sometimes feel ashamed of my ability to cry at the power of a theatrical piece with real and heartfelt tears, and then continue to be relatively unaffected by it a few days later. But, that said, we all do have to live our lives, we can't save the world single-handedly, and it does little good to anyone to wallow in a mire of middle-class self-loathing. So what I believe watching this play will do, for me, is encourage me to question what I read in the media more deeply, and to seek out news sources that do not rely on commercial funding, from advertising, because they have the freedom to be more objective and take more time over their journalism as a result. So I think raising this bar of media awareness in my mind is a great positive and something that the theatre company should be proud of and that I feel is something active I can carry with me, rather than just dissolving into tears and misery about how unfair everything is.

Thanks for reading, over and out.