Frank Stone (Alan Lov­ell) is act­ing edit­or of a daily news­pa­per. He’s been away and is back in the office and on the job again much soon­er than his col­leagues expec­ted. There’s Ral­ph Jones (Bri­an Ser­gent),  long-serving journ­al­ist, Sam Hunter (Jes­sica Robin­son), well-regarded journ­al­ist, Jo Point­er (Acushla-Tara Sut­ton), new­bie journ­al­ist (who has come from blog­ging  OMG), and Bill Sing­er (Paul McLaugh­lin), Gen­er­al Man­ager. Arriv­ing in the office on the same day is Belinda Barnes (Jan­ine Burchett ), a mar­ket­ing and pub­lic rela­tions expert sent over by the Aus­trali­an head office. There are also four silent interns, played by stu­dents from Whitireia, who walk around with bits of paper, lean over each oth­er­’s shoulders, and point at com­puter screens.

Everything is acted with great energy on a nat­ur­al­ist­ic news­room set. (Designed by Den­nis Hear­field, there’s a reas­on for the large con­struc­tion team cred­ited in the pro­gramme. It looks fant­ast­ic.)  The script includes lots of inter­est­ing inform­a­tion about how a daily news­pa­per is put togeth­er – from gath­er­ing the stor­ies, decid­ing on the lead, reveal­ing who gets inter­viewed and why. There are a num­ber of fun inter­ac­tions scattered through­out the play that I ima­gine have been dis­cus­sions in news­rooms. (Should this phrase have a hyphen? Will there be a New Zeal­ander close to the story that we can inter­view?) The drama is all about the news­pa­per. There isn’t much left for the char­ac­ters. The sub-plots are either eas­ily spot­ted or incom­pre­hens­ible giv­en the lack of chem­istry between the act­ors. It was­n’t helped by Lov­ell muffing his lines and mak­ing at least one glar­ing fac­tu­al mis­take the night I saw the play. (If a char­ac­ter is known for his accur­acy then the act­or bet­ter be up to the task.) I hope he improves over the sea­son.

Curi­ously unful­filling yet still inter­est­ing to watch.

  • The truth game by Simon Cun­liffe on at Circa One until10 Novem­ber 2012.