Notoriously Yours

Information is important. One of the first statements of Van Badham’s new play turns out to be one of the most central. Her modern noir thriller plays out in a world, like our own, where everything is watched and our data is not our own. Information is both power and weakness.

Badham’s twist on Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious swaps Nazi spies for Croatian war criminals, sending the daughter of one to infiltrate a circle of his associates. The unnamed woman has fallen foul of an anonymous Tinder hook-up with an Edward Snowden-esque whistleblower, giving the Australian secret service a threat to hang over her head. Recruited by blackmail, she is brought in to supplement a covert surveillance mission, watched all the while by her employers.

On one level, noir is an apt genre for the subject matter. The modern world is shadowy and unknowable, a place where anyone might be watching at any time. The taut atmosphere of the thriller thus becomes a metaphor for the constant paranoia of the observed. There are also gestures to this in the staging, as smartphones capture video footage and intimate scenes are projected onto a large screen.

Smart as this reappropriation of Hitchcock’s film may be, however, it is not necessarily the best vehicle for all of the points that Badham and theatre company five.point.one are attempting to make. Drama has a tendency to overtake critique, until the overly blunt conclusion hammers home the message. It’s chilling, certainly, but not as powerful as it sets out to be.