New South Australian Play Explores Mystery MI6 Death

New South Australian Play Explores Mystery MI6 Death

A thought-provoking new South Australian play explores the bizarre and mysterious death of MI6 officer. Lesley Reed previews the production.

Polygraph Collective is an Adelaide-based group of established and emerging artists dedicated to exploring new ways of making theatre. The collective is inspired by the notion of the polygraph or lie-detector, which measures pulse, blood-pressure and respiration to determine truth. 

It comes as no surprise, then, that Polygraph Collective’s first production is a thought-provoking docu-drama that examines identity, truth, and the power of the media to expose a private life to public scrutiny.

Man in a Bag was written by award-winning playwright Emily Steel. Steel’s accolades include the 2011 Adelaide Fringe inSPACE: development award for Rocket Town and 2012 Adelaide Fringe Tour Ready award for Sepia.

Man in a Bag is co-directed by producer Ben Roberts and Tiffany Lyndall-Knight and is inspired by the 2010 death of MI6 officer Gareth Williams, whose body was found in his bath tub in central London. Bizarrely, the body was discovered padlocked inside a closed sports bag.

Over some time, international media reported to the world every twist and turn in the investigation. Gareth Williams’ home was spotless and showed no sign of intruders, yet the mode of death was so unusual that an expert decreed it couldn’t possibly have been self-inflicted. Even so, there were musings it could have been a sexual exploit gone wrong. Williams had apparently enjoyed dressing in women’s clothes – there were women’s designer clothes and shoes at his flat, and there were reports of his shopping for those clothes in his own sizes. There were pictures and video of him wearing high leather boots, posing for the camera. His landlady said she had once found him tied to his bed, unable to get free; she said he admitted he’d done it himself. 

Says Tiffany Lyndall-Knight, “Gareth Williams is now posthumously famous worldwide because his death was so unusual and so shrouded in mystery that here on the opposite side of the planet we read the news stories like an Agatha Christie novel. We were, however, deprived of a satisfactory answer when the original inquest told us that his death was ‘unnatural and likely to have been criminally mediated’.”

More recently, a Scotland Yard re-investigation found that Williams’ death was probably accidental, which gives rise to the question: could Williams have been capable of zipping himself into the bag and padlocking it?

“Family members believed there was some kind of MI6 cover up,’” says Lyndall-Knight. “Friends argued this was not the man they knew and as involved as we all were in the intrigue, it is far too easy to forget that people close to Williams were discovering this at the same time we were. While we and the authorities were deciding what to believe, Gareth Williams’ friends and family were deciding what to change about their fundamental understanding of this man.”

Says Man in a Bag’s playwright, Emily Steel, “At the heart of the play there are questions about what is true, how we ever know what is true, and how we react to that truth — whether we accept it at all. How much do we ever know about anyone?”

Co-directors, producer Ben Roberts and Tiffany Lyndall-Knight, will also perform in this production. The two met when Lyndall-Knight directed Roberts in the initial development of Man in a Bag at Adelaide College of The Arts (AC Arts).

After graduating, Roberts was one of the producers of five.point.one’s Adelaide Fringe hit, Notoriously Yours, and was recently a performer in the State Theatre Company of South Australia’s production of Neighbourhood Watch, which starred Miriam Margolyes.

Lyndall-Knight has enjoyed a successful stage and screen career in Vancouver, Canada (Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SG-1, King Lear, The Tempest, Amadeus) and on screen in South Australia (Red Dog, ANZAC Girls, The Babadook, Sam Fox: Extreme Adventures). In Vancouver she has been nominated for four Jessie Richardson theatre awards for outstanding performances. She was a co-creator and lead actor in the feature film Mothers and Daughters which premiered in the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival and was also most popular Canadian film at the Vancouver International Film Festival that year.Man in a Bag will be her Adelaide stage debut

The cast of Man in a Bag also includes a host of Adelaide’s established and emerging talents:  Chrissie Page, Holly Myers, Charles Mayer, Sam Calleja, Sara Lange and recent Flinders graduate, Lochlin Maybury.  The production/design team showcases some of Adelaide’s up-and-coming artists: Olivia Zanchetta and Will Spartalis (Jesikah), Alexander Ramsay, Olivia Freear, Henry Arrowsmith and Callan Fleming. 

A project grant from the Helpmann Academy supporting recent graduates from AC Arts and Flinders Drama Centre has been instrumental in bringing this new team together. Funding for Man in a Bag has also been supported by a successful Pozible campaign.

Whatever your view of the facts in the Gareth Williams story, the mystery of his death endures. As such, it becomes an intriguing subject for Man in a Bag, which promises to be a memorable first production for newly-created independent theatre company, Polygraph Collective. It doesn’t require forensic analysis to see that the wealth of talent in this company is likely to put it amongst the very best on the Adelaide Theatre scene.

Bookings: http://www.venuetix.com.au

Dates: July 18-19, 7.30 pm; July 22-26, 7.30 pm; July 29-August 2, 7.30 pm; July 24 and August 2, 2pm.

Venue: The Studio, Holden Street Theatres.

Pictured: Tiffany Lyndall-Knight and Ben Roberts

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