CMI
By the Version 1.0 collective
October 13-17, Performance Space, Cleveland Street, Sydney. October 19-23, The Street Theatre, Canberra.

BY SARAH STEPHEN

CMI is set to return! The superbly written and slickly acted play about the Senate Inquiry into a Certain Maritime Incident — the children overboard affair — produced by the Version 1.0 collective, will open for a limited season in Sydney and then Canberra during October.

“We always planned to bring CMI back, not just because of its currency, but also because it went so well”, Version 1.0 producer and performer, David Williams, said. “Making theatre from a Senate inquiry sounds dry, but it’s not verbatim theatre, or a dry rendering of politician talk. This is political theatre for the 21st century — playful, surreal, absurd, gut-wrenching, tragic, all at once, and without any easy answers.”

Five of the seven inquiry senators saw CMI in its first season, along with one of the key witnesses. “It was pretty surreal looking into the audience and seeing the person whose words you’re speaking”, said Williams. “One senator ... said the show really crystallised the horrible tragedy of how we treated these people. He talked about a particular scene, where we had him questioning an admiral who was talking about ‘the moral values of these people’, meaning asylum seekers, as though they were from Mars — he said it was like hearing the full horror for the first time.

“Whatever the election outcome, the scandal of the government deliberately lying in order to demonise asylum seekers is well and truly alive”, Williams said. “Howard showed that by shutting down parliament after public servants and military people came forward to set the records straight. But it’s a bigger story than that — it goes to the heart of our political process, to our response to asylum seekers and to this climate of fear and suspicion we’re now enduring.”

From Green Left Weekly, October 6, 2004.
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