Bare Witness Theatre Company’s latest offering, Smokescreen, is described as a razor-sharp power play about the dark arts of marketing behind climate denial. For writer and director, Christopher Samuel Carroll, this horrifying insight into the impact of covert marketing techniques began for him while he was living in Paris where he met and spoke with individuals working for big tobacco companies and a scientist who worked for a major American petroleum company.
“What stuck with me from those conversations in Paris was the moral indifference of a very rational, practical outlook on the world; like, “that’s just how it is,” and it would be rather foolish to see it otherwise,” he says “I remember asking the engineer from the oil company about their initiatives to shift to renewables and he was upfront about it being just window dressing, a PR exercise, that “nothing was going to change until it was more profitable to do so.” His attitude, and that of the people I talked to in the tobacco industry, was stoicism with a shrug. I think we’re all culpable of that amoral complacency – if you’re a small part in a big machine, and that machine is supported by powerful structures that are embedded in the world we live in… is it really my fault? And if I quit, and they replace me with some other guy, is that really going to make a difference? Of course there are plenty of people who, on moral grounds, refuse to work for the tobacco or the fossil fuel industry – which means they pay really well…”
While writing the work has offered Carroll no catharsis, he acknowledges that “perhaps it’s allowed me to reclaim a sense of agency through staring the thing square in the eye and engaging with it at a deeper level, instead of just being a passive consumer bombarded by the onslaught of the newsfeed. I seem to feel closer to the truth when I experience a shudder of horror.”
The first idea for the piece sparked around 2015 so, in Carroll’s words, it’s taken a while. Thankfully, says Carroll, Smokescreen is set in 1977, so it can’t go out of date.
“Since I first had the idea the climate crisis, and that land of hope and glory, America, has only become more fucked up. Which continues to make the play even more relevant.”
Carroll has a folder of ideas for plays, most of which, he says, he’ll never get around to writing. “Sometimes there will be a theme or issue or story that lodges in my consciousness, and then, in an unrelated moment, years later, I’ll think of the form it can take. Others go stale and have to be mulched.”
For Carroll, the writing itself isn’t hard, the challenge is always making the time for it. “My creativity doesn’t seem to function in any kind of little-by-little ‘sustainable’ process. I need to be immersed in it; I need to be living the imaginative world of the play every day to find a flow. I ought to write more but my bread-and-butter is acting, which helps to pay the bills and offers more instant gratification than writing, so that continues to take up most of my time.”
Carroll (originally from Ireland) first staged the play in Canberra in 2022, but despite efforts since it’s been a hard sell to Sydney and Melbourne venues. “I think it probably doesn’t fit with current trends in Australian theatre: it doesn’t affirm anything, it doesn’t celebrate anything, it doesn’t make some cheap statement that validates the audience’s moral position. There’s no bells and whistles, no interdisciplinary hook, no audiovisual pizzazz to jazz up an instagram reel.
It’s a play about a man in crisis, facing difficult decisions with serious consequences. But it is a fiction — who he is is of no interest to me. What matters is what he does, what part he plays in the bigger structures that shape our world.”
A massive undertaking, Carroll acknowledges that there was a lot of research but adds, it’s Hemingway’s iceberg (the theory of omission.)
“All of that is beneath the surface and, with each draft, you cut more and more information so that hopefully the experience is really focussed on the human drama playing out between the two characters. But there’s plenty in there to keep you up at night.”
One of the more shocking revelations for Carroll was realising the consequences of the tobacco industry’s ‘dark arts’ for wider society. “In order to defend their product from increasing regulation, they began funding a wide network of interest groups, representing different issues, but with common values — like individual liberty,” explains Carroll. ” In the process, they completely distorted American politics, fuelling the rise of the pro-gun lobby, Christian fundamentalism and the far right, and fostering an anti-government, anti-science culture. Which, y’know, has had consequences…”
When asked what he is trying to say with the piece, Carroll responds, “I suppose it’s about truth and denial, on a scale from the personal to the industrial. We avoid the dentist. We drink and smoke and doom scroll and exercise and do a hundred other things every day to distract ourselves and invest our energy in bullshit problems that give us some sense of control. The difference between being God and being an ant is really one of perspective, how big your world is. An ant lives in a big world, over which he has very little control. But then, God doesn’t exist. So, take your pick.”
Carroll says the work is about power and manipulation: the manipulation of another human being, the manipulation of the message, and thereby, the manipulation of reality. “There’s great vulnerability in caring enough to give a damn. There are no medals for sticking your head above the parapet. But anyone who’s ever made a difference by standing up for something has been a hypocrite; not a hero, not a good person, but a bad, flawed, selfish, fearful, confused, bullshitting, conflicted, compromised, vulnerable person, who at certain moments, has tried to do something decent, maybe even for a greater good. I’m not trying to “say something” with this play, because I don’t pretend to know any better than anyone in the audience. But the absurd, venal history of our response to the climate crisis eats away at me; I think there’s value in giving it some attention.”
The voyeurism experienced by the audience is a big part of the play. They are privy to insidious, secret discussions held 50 years ago that have direct and real consequences in the world around them in 2025. Carroll hopes to inspire both meaningful conversation and deep thought.
“Looking back at past events, even in this case, a fictional event that distills bigger, more complex forces, presents us with the luxury of cause and effect: because of this, then this. Which is what we expect from a story. And which is why, as my fellow Canberran David Finnigan has written, stories can be limited, maybe even useless, or even dangerous, when they’re the only tool we’ve got to relate to big, complex problems with a lot of uncertainties.
I hope Smokescreen, in spite of its darkness, can ignite that sense of cause and effect, without oversimplifying or sugar-coating the truth: that the consequences of our actions are complex, uncertain, often unintended, and part of much larger systems that we’re rarely able to influence.”
Carroll is quick to clarify that the play is not so much about the banality of evil as the evil of banality. The characters in Smokescreen aren’t motivated to do harm. But the consequences of their choices, cumulatively, change the tide of history. “It’s no easy thing to hold onto a sense of agency in the improvised, chaotic, unrelenting now. But to quote the playwright Sean O’Casey, “Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.” You might look back on your life and, seeing it all laid out in the ledger, dismiss that statement as a lie. But there’s more at stake than your ego, those of us that can owe it to the rest of humanity to believe in something and risk being disappointed, rather than succumb to pessimism, and be proved right.
A play about ‘Ad Men’, set in the 1970s, is of course, rather quaint when compared to this digital age, where our attention is completely saturated by advertising. As Bo Burnham said, “They’re coming for every second of your lives.” We’ve sleepwalked into this transactional relationship to the world around us and unwittingly traded in our rights as citizens for the serfdom of consumers. It’s worth examining.”
Carroll is all things in the work – writer, director and performer. A triad that most would find challenging but, he says, there’s another level of vulnerability in it.
“As an actor, I don’t want to be preoccupied by my own concerns, but those of the character — as much as possible, I want to be living the character’s circumstances, and what’s at stake for him, which, in a good play, will be much more important than an actor having a crisis over his mediocre acting. But when I’ve also written the work, I feel another kind of responsibility for it.
As a performer, there’s a strange alchemy between the mask that both protects you and allows you to reveal yourself, in ways that are most intimate, and yet, impersonal. When my name is credited as the playwright, there’s a little fear that someone could be sitting there thinking, “Oh, this really isn’t all that good. And he wrote it. That guy, right there, in the costume, doing the funny accent. What a shame.”
As an actor, I hold a healthy contempt for the script — it’s only ever a blueprint. It has to be tested in rehearsal, then again in front of an audience, and you discover through doing what’s working and what’s not. That said, you have to maintain a certain discipline, to resist the thrill of novelty and not keep tugging at the stitching. It’s a fine balance. As an actor I believe in the necessity of repetition, to get the words in your bones and discover the detail, the structure, and the freedom of having total command of the material. I’ve devised a lot of works in the past where big sweeping changes are made night to night, but I prefer artistic rigour over the white-knuckle adrenaline of stepping on stage and not really knowing what you’re doing.”
Carroll trained at Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, where the idea of the actor as a creative artist, with the wherewithal to write, direct, and act in a piece, is more accepted than it is here. “I’ve created and performed several solo shows (I’ll be touring my latest, The Cadaver Palaver, to the Edinburgh Fringe in August), so acting in Smokescreen, where I have the smaller part in a two-hander, is no big thing. It can get more complicated to direct when there’s a greater number of performers, but on the other hand, when I’m ‘just’ directing a piece, I do miss having the ‘feel’ of it from on-stage to inform my choices.”
A two-hander, the role of Bud was specifically written for actor Damon Baudin – a relationship going back some 7 years.
“I’m based in Canberra, which is where Damon grew up, so I would have seen him in student shows going as far back as 2018. He took part in the physical actor training I led with my ensemble when everything shut down in 2020, and the same year, I wrote the first draft of Smokescreen, with Damon in mind for the part of Bud.
Since then, he’s trained at VCA and built a name for himself in Melbourne, so now I’m just riding on his coat-tails… Ironically, if I am any kind of mentor to Damon, that relationship is completely subverted in the play: my character, Glenn, thinks of himself as the more cunning operator, holding court and dispensing advice; underestimating the hungry young arch-manipulator who’s about to bring his world crashing down.”
Based in the nation’s capital, Bare Witness Theatre Company has earned a reputation for challenging, intelligent theatre with a political conscience.
“The name is drawn from T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral: “Some presage of an act which our eyes are compelled to witness, has forced our feet towards the cathedral. We are forced to bear witness.” The idea of bearing witness is important in much of what we do, positioning the audience as more than passive observers, and inviting them into an active relationship with the events of the play. Theatre is a crucible of ideas, and though the audience are silent onlookers, the questions raised in a work like Smokescreen become theirs to weigh in the balance of justice, morality, and personal responsibility.
Being based in Canberra since 2016 has only reinforced my conviction for creating work with a political conscience: ‘theatre that matters’. But then, I don’t let it stop me from doing a buddy-comedy (as in Ciara Elizabeth Smyth’s SAUCE), or an exhilarating adventure (like The Cadaver Palaver) when the fancy takes me. I trust our audiences to take each project on its own merits, and in return, they can trust in the quality of the work, which will always be up-close, stripped-back, and draw on the full potential of the actor’s craft.”
Smokescreen will be the fourth Bare Witness Theatre Company production to tour to Melbourne following Have No Enemies (Explosives Factory, April 2024), SAUCE (The Butterfly Club, December 2024), and The Cadaver Palaver (The Butterfly Club, March 2025).
Compelling, unnerving, and piercingly relevant, Smokescreen is a psychologically charged battle of wits that reveals how the climate crisis we face today was shaped by the invisible hands of Ad men.
Says Carroll,
“You’ll be surprised how good theatre can be.
Give us 90 minutes of your time and we’ll give you an experience that will get under your skin and jolt your perspective for days, maybe weeks, maybe for the rest of your life — maybe not in ways that make you feel any better about yourself or the world around you, but it’s a better problem to have than living, and dying, in denial.”
July 8 – 13
www.fortyfivedownstairs.com/event/smokescreen
Images: Cathy Breen
