A bite out of the Apple

Actor Grant O’Rourke isn’t a devotee of electronics giant Apple. “I had an iPod about five years after everyone else. I don’t have any [other] Apple products, I just can’t afford them.” Later, he adds: “I bought my first phone in 14 years just last year.” It was a Blackberry.

He’s a rare breed. These days most of us upgrade our phone once a year at least. Thousands queue outside Apple stores to buy the latest product the day it’s released. According to a March 2012 report by CNBC, half of American households own at least one Apple product: that’s a staggering 55 million homes.

Mike Daisey was one of the obsessed: a tech geek who worshipped at the altar of Apple, until the American actor and writer took a trip to the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where Apple and many other major electronic brands make their products. His resultant monologue, The Agony & Ecstasy of Steve Jobs—which premiered in the US in 2010—told of frequent suicides, punishing working hours and cramped dorms in the estimated 430,000-worker factory.

After performing it himself to much acclaim and no small amount of controversy, Daisey has now made his play available for anyone to stage. This production at the Gilded Balloon was initially adapted by Andy Arnold, Artistic Director of Glasgow’s Tron theatre, for O’Rourke and director Marcus Roche, who further cut the original two-hour monologue to fit an hour-long festival slot. It's shaped around a dual premise, says O’Rourke: “It’s a guy who has a crisis of faith, almost, about these products that he loves and all the things that he does as a result, like going to China, and then…about [late Apple boss] Steve Jobs being a genius of design and vision. Those were the two contrasting angles we wanted to play.”

It’s a hard-hitting hour, and an “uncomfortable truth,” says O’Rourke, for anyone who owns an Apple product – or indeed, any other brand manufactured by Foxconn: “The play isn’t about Steve Jobs being responsible for all this stuff happening,” says O’Rourke. “It’s the entire industry. Almost all the electronics are being made in one city, and it’s because of the pressure from the markets, our desire to have these new products all the time, as well as these margins they have to push.”

But Daisey’s claims about Foxconn’s working conditions came under fire when, following a retracted broadcast of the monologue on US radio show This American Life, it emerged that some of what Daisey said he experienced first-hand in Shenzhen were actually stories borrowed from others. The subsequent media storm led New York’s Public Theater, where the show was then playing, to issue a statement reading: “Mike is an artist, not a journalist. Nevertheless, we wish he had been more precise with us and our audiences about what was and wasn’t his personal experience in the piece.”

Daisey admitted this blurred line between reportage and theatre, and excised the material in question, while his claims about Foxconn have since been corroborated by news outlets including The Guardian and The New York Times. “At the end of the day all the things that are in our production are true, they have happened,” says O’Rourke. “If you research the subject of Foxconn, there are some awful, harrowing reports that we found. A lot of cynical people have just researched the play and it’s led them down this alley way of all this controversy that surrounded it in America. But nobody’s actually researched the subject itself. What’s incredibly vindicating for the play is if Amnesty have noticed that this is a story worth telling.”

Though they stress they’re no activists and were “hired for the job,” it’s clear the play has become important to O’Rourke and Roche. “It’s very rewarding to be able to do something where it does actually make a difference to some people,” says O’Rourke. “If everyone came to see it and just went ‘well that’s a bunch of bollocks and I’m not going to do anything,’ I’d be disappointed.”

A handout distributed at the end of the show details some of the ways you can act on what you’ve heard – by emailing Apple, for example, or not upgrading your phone every year. “It’s a call for people not just to accept everything,” says Roche. “It sows the seeds. If you know your computer is handmade then you start to question what else is handmade.”

Strangely though, both say working on the play has given them a “massive respect” for Jobs, for his vision and genius. “He cared so passionately about design,” says O’Rourke. “He created these incredible products but he blinded himself to the fact that the way in which a thing is made is part of the design itself.”

 

The Amnesty nominees

Five other productions have made the Freedom of Expression Award shortlist.

All That Is Wrong

Performing in near-silence, 18-year-old Koba Ryckewaert creates a mind-map on the floor, writing words in chalk on a blackboard which is gradually enlarged to contain the complexities of the teenager’s personal and societal anxieties. Whether those concern familial relationships, physical insecurities or fears on a more global scale, this unusual production shows the teenage mind to be crammed with worries, large and small.

Theatre Uncut

Theatre Uncut returns—and makes its Edinburgh debut—with a second series of short plays by well-known writers, this time with a global perspective. The Eurozone crisis, the Occupy movement and the state of global capitalism are addressed by international writers including Neil LaBute, David Greig, Anders Lustgarten, Mohammad Al Attar and Lena Kitsopoulou. 

The Two Worlds of Charlie F

Devised by Masterclass, an educational initiative of London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket, this production was born out of a desire to help rehabilitate and inspire injured soldiers returning from Afghanistan. Derived from interviews conducted with service personnel, and starring wounded soldiers themselves, Charlie F addresses, in unambiguous terms, both the physical and mental fallout suffered by men and women returning from war.

Why do you Stand There in the Rain?

Peter Arnott’s new play tells the story of the Bonus Army, a group of US WWI veterans who marched on Washington during the Great Depression to demand work and the payment of promised bonuses. They remained for three months, until they were forcefully, violently removed. The young student cast illuminates this powerful story exploring the consequences of financial crisis on individuals and the strength it takes to affect political change.

Mies Julie

Mies Julie is director Yael Farber’s reimagining of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, set in a contemporary South Africa where violence and injustice remain 20 years after the end of apartheid. Fully making Strindberg’s work her own, Farber has created a powerful, intensely sexual production simmering with erotic tension. Deeply affecting, and at times brutal, Farber’s production ingeniously makes a classic play pertinent for our times.