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Privacy – Donmar Warehouse, booking until 31 May 2014
Privacy or, according to the Donmar’s listing, PRIVACY. Pri-vacy or Priv-acy. In James Graham’s latest play, which follows the unexpectedly huge success of this This House at the National, everything is up for debate. Indeed the amount of audience interaction and feedback means far more democracy is on display in Privacy than in This House’s exploration of parliamentary backchannel deal-making.
It does Privacy a disservice to think of it as a ‘play’; judging against these criteria one has to acknowledge that the fictional narrative is rather slight. The idea of a playwright writing a play about the subject and entering 
Socratic dialogue with those he encounters is lazy for a playwright at this level. We have been living in post-modern culture for over a quarter of a century and this is approach is pretty much meta-101. From a purely textual perspective Privacy is also hindered by the fact that this fictional plot is far less interesting than the people he talks to and the subjects discussed.
Privacy may be sold as a play but in truth it is less play and more a fascinatingly structured lecture that has been fictionalised. It is not dissimilar to the most entertaining TED Talks and the purpose of the evening is more edutainment than anything else. In this environment the characters of writer, director and psychiatrist are entirely secondary to, and at the service of, the relying of information from source to audience.
The structure is familiar to Black Watch; it interweaves verbatim dialogue with dramatized situations. It is unclear how much, if any, of Graham’s work comes from first hand interviews and what has been lifted from other sources, for instance much of the detailing of the Guardian’s involvement in the Snowdon affair and in the destruction of the hard drives felt as if it had been previously recorded elsewhere.
This weaving of sources is an entirely appropriate academic technique for synthesising information but without the accompanying intellectual rigour it leaves the production open to criticism over how it represents its material. Theatre does, and should, present partial viewpoints; it is not the role of theatre to present unbiased reportage. Indeed the best verbatim theatre – the tribunal plays produced at the Tricycle under Nicolas Kent – used unbiased reportage to create a clearly partial view.
However Graham’s play sits in a grey area where we are invited to take a view on how shocking it is what the government and big business get up to, and we are meant to feel it is strengthened by including ‘real experts’ speaking ‘real dialogue’. It is a fast-paced and highly enjoyable journey but on reflection doubts over whether it is a substantial whole begin to creep in.
It is a rather superficial gaze on the issues – perhaps reflected in the fact that many of the accounts are given by politicians, journalists and the omni-present Shami Charkrabarti, pretty much the epitome of the liberal media darling. These are all people used to speaking in sound bites, regurgitating complex issues into digestible chunks.
Civilian Theatre 